My Own Biggest Fan

It’s a compulsion.

Next week, it will be (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66.

Richard Stevens 3 has a new blog to catch all the odds and ends that don’t make it into or fit with Diesel Sweeties, his very kick ass comic. So far it is a little hit and miss, but I have faith it will be a good read.

There, he pointed his readers towards the program Pixen, that looks quite promising. Sort of a Microsoft Paint for Mac OS X. (which I have been wanting for quite awhile) It is donationware and open source, two things that I approve of and support.

Myownbiggestfan has pledged their support to ‘pledge to never purchase a CD contaning any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM),’ and wants you to do the same! Simply by clicking http://www.pledgebank.com/boycottdrm/ you can show the world that you’re ready to start making a difference, alongside other like-minded people.

Myownbiggestfan’s pledge will close on 6th February 2006 and they only need the support of 500 people before their pledge goes into action.

Thank you for your support!

– the PledgeBank.com team

Yes, that also means I will not be buying music from the iTunes Music Store. No, it isn’t binding in any way or petitioning anyone, but this is still something I support.

Our Public Airwaves
A new vision for Canadian broadcasting
www.PublicAirwaves.ca

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Please visit our campaign website to send a message to all the party leaders.  Tell them you want a firm commitment to increased funding for Canada’s most important cultural institution.

But there’s more. The campaign website has a full page of important information about CBC and the financial problems it faces.  There is also a page with questions you can ask at election meetings or when candidates arrive at your door.  You’ll find it all at: www.SupportCBC.ca

To make CBC an election issue click HERE.

Thanks for your support!

Arthur Lewis
Executive Director
Our Public Airwaves
arthur@publicairwaves.ca

If you are interested in Linux in any way, you probably can figure out how to install a distribution. Picking one can be the tough part. Sometimes one has special needs that they might not know how to deal with when picking the correct one. Basic needs like installing on an old computer, or technical ones like needing a specific type of app installer can send you scurrying around the internet, ready to pull your hair out. The Linux Distribution Chooser asks simple questions steering you in the right direction, and offer information to the beginner when the questions may get a little to technical. It is a great resource.

The distro it pointed me to was Kubuntu.

Blonde jokes usually suck, but this is pretty funny.

Bleep, Warp’s online mp3 store is offering a special compilation for download. The email states that I can forward this to my friends, so why not post it here?

Happy 2006!

As a New Years gift to all Bleep subscribers we have put together a FREE 9 track compilation featuring some artists to watch this year. This is not available to anyone else.

To download the release, click this link – http://www.bleep.com/bleeps06

Contributing artists and labels incude Dexter (Clone), Jimmy Edgar (Warp), Mara Carlyle (Accidental), The National Trust (Thrill Jockey) Kero (Detroit Underground), Wisp (Sublight), Battles (Warp), Nectarine No9 (Creeping Bent) and Skeletons & The Girl Faced Boys (Ghostly).

The release is priced at zero: click “Buy Mp3 Release 0.00″ to add to basket and hit ‘Checkout’ on the bottom right. No payment details are needed, just an email address and password from new users, existing users login as normal.

Feel free to forward this to friends – they can subscribe to the newsletter themselves and recieve similar regular updates from Bleep throughout this year at http://www.bleep.com/newsletter or by sending an email to news-on@bleep.com

Have a prosperous and fulfilling year,
Bleep x

Bleep is amazing. They offer legal, DRM free, high quality mp3 downloads of Warp releases and affiliated labels, much of it out of print or hard to find.

From a BBC News article titled “100 things we didn’t know this time last year”:

4. An average record shop needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth stocking, according to Wired magazine.

There is no link to a qualifying story from there but it begs the question, why don’t we see more of these low selling albums in the stores? I refer mainly to local acts and newer albums by international artists and independents. I understand that many older albums by well known artists may fall into that sales bracket as well, (eg: Roxy Music’s first album, while great, isn’t that popular anymore) but how about offering more room to new music?

The always interesting Things Magazine has a good little blurb on King Kong, the Empire State Building and Modernism.

Oh, and by the way I loved Peter’s remake. If you didn’t then you just don’t get it.

For Christmas this year I was the lucky recipient of a Rival CrockPot. My main motive for wanting one of these was to make Congee. After looking around for some recipes it became pretty evident that you really can’t screw Congee up. Add enough water, throw in a few tasty bits. You’re there. The only problem I ran across was that most of the websites that offered Congee recipes had the rice:water ratio wrong. (Say THAT five times fast!) Most said you needed a 1:6 or so ratio, I found a 1:8 is probably more like it. So here is what I ended up doing tonight, and it made a pretty tasty soup. These ingredients are not what I had put in at the beginning, but it is what I ended up with, it was sort of a trial and error thing to arrive at this.

First I put this in the slow cooker:
1 cup rice
8 cup water
1 teaspoon fresh ginger – diced
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 a block of vegetable bouillon
5 tablespoons soy sauce
a half cup leftover turkey from xmas dinner

I let this cook for two hours on high, then I put in some Bok Choy and some snow peas. Then I let that cook for another hour.

It could probably cook longer, and I will let it go for awhile yet, but I was impatient to try it out.

Some sites that helped me:

Chinese Congee at inmamaskitchen.com

Congee@Everything2.com

Congee for Survivalists