I’ve heard the first sound of spring. Birds, you think? No, Sumpy the sump pump kicked in last night, sparing us a tragedy like the one that Denro suffered a year ago.
K3-D
Let’s see what’s been doing lately in tiny Belgium, home to the owners of giant Budweiser, and where there hasn’t been a government in nearly a year. Hmm… it seems the political protests there are a bit different than they are in, say, Wisconsin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVagUPDeNgo
One thing’s the same, however, and that’s consumer frustration over getting the runaround when calling customer service. A group of Belgian pranksters on TV calling itself Basta dishes out some payback.
[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/media.theworld.org/audio/030220114.mp3|titles=The World on PRI: Basta protests]The Flemish half of Belgium is, of course, the land of K3, the Europop girl group. The ladies have a new musical coming up, and it’ll be a first for Josje, who joined Karen Damen and Kristel Verbeke after Kathleen Aerts left the group.
WHY, KATHLEEN? WHY??
I don’t know why Studio 100 doesn’t call the new K3 musical “Alices in Wonderland,” but with three Alices on stage it makes sense to have 3-D effects on stage.
LONDON – Josie makes her musical debut soon for K3 in Alice in Wonderland. “It is the first time I’m going to do a full musical with K3, indeed,” said Karen about the musical, which will contain 3-D elements. In Alice in Wonderland 3-D scenery is used, which is a first. “It’s really the first time this has happened,” said Karen to Show News. “Probably there will be many to follow after us, but we can always say later: we were first.” The musical will play next summer at the World Forum Theater in The Hague.
Here’s one of K3’s more ambitious stage productions, with the girls combining a gospel church theme with 50’s “Happy Days” nostalgia. With so many little kids in the audience it doesn’t get as big a reaction as I think it deserved. Check out the wild backdrop.
[media id=235 width=512 height=308]
Silver surfing machine
I don’t know much about the UK band called Hawkwind, but in 1972 they were staying true to the psychedelic sound of ’67-’68. Silver Machine almost sounds as if it could have been an outtake from the Moody Blues LP In Search of the Lost Chord. This is an interesting contrast to what Black Sabbath and Deep Purple were doing at the same time.
Dilbert is too physical
I’m a week late with this post. Reading Dilbert in last Sunday’s comics, it’s apparent to me that either Scott Adams has been away from high tech work too long, or he decided to avoid mentioning virtual servers.
Today, if a server’s operating system has a problem that’s bad enough you’ve given up on it, you simply blow away the virtual machine it’s running on, and assign its database drive(s) to another virtual server. Recovering the data isn’t necessary unless the problem on the server corrupted or damaged the database, in which case you restore it from a backup copy. Redeploying an old server doesn’t apply, because it was on a virtual machine. But maybe Dilbert’s company is out of date and still runs only physical servers, in which case there’s all the more reason to wonder how it stays in business.
Eisner on the prize
Comics fans will immediately recognize what Google has for its logo today.
If you don’t know who the logo tributes, click the image and you’ll find out. (We’ll ignore the movie that Frank Miller directed a couple of years ago.)
Safe room
I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 — the latest and greatest desktop/laptop OS from Microsoft. All security updates are in place, and I use Microsoft Security Essentials. Yesterday I was reading a Google blog and, as I sometimes do for fun, I was giving the “Next Blog” link a few spins. And what happened? I landed on a page that made McAfee Site Advisor go crazy with warnings. Firefox was obviously being redirected to a bad place and then, before I could do anything, Security Essentials chimed in with warnings. I killed Firefox, then immediately rolled the system back to the last restore point. After restarting Windows I ran a scan and it came up clean.
This is where I get off the train. I’m giving up on Windows ever being secure, and I have no confidence that sticking with legitimate sites offers any assurance of safety (yes, I know Google can’t police every blog it hosts). So I’m typing this using Firefox, on Ubuntu Linux 10.10, that’s running inside of a VMware Player virtual machine. If anything bad happens in my comfort zone here, I’ll blow away the virtual machine and create new one from the Ubuntu ISO file.
By the way, I registered my little site with McAfee, and to the extent that WordPress and the plugins I use are safe, and if Bluehost isn’t harboring anything bad, the site is clean, and you won’t find any ads here either, of course.
Follow-up: And now I’m running Jolicloud, a custom version of Linux 2.6 in another virtual machine. Cool beans, to borrow an expression used by a friend of mine.