chriswareham

Good joke. You are joking aren't you? Actually it seems like you're not. Well f*ck me. Microsoft are utterly incapable of making secure software. They've made a rod for their own back by having to be backwards compatible with the horrendous APIs they've put out since the 1980s. APIs that are absolutely so full of holes that they simply can't be fixed without breaking the legacy software that are the sole reason they still exist.

Ah, Manic Street Preachers. The band that have been releasing the same one f*cking song their entire f*cking career. I remember when the NME and Melody Maker journos first started claiming they were the next big thing, and saying they were the "new Clash". If the band member who used to mime on guitar hadn't disappeared, making said journos guilty about starting their "we built them up, we'll knock them down" ego w*nk, than they'd have been consigned to history a long time ago.

We've had people known for other endeavours than bass playing, but how about bass players that use fretless bass in unexpected settings? I recently discovered that James McGearty, bass player of seminal death rock band Christian Death, used a fretless bass. Not something I'd expect in that genre... There again, he might have taken a cue from David J of Bauhaus, who also prefers a fretless bass: And Stuart Morrow of New Model Army was also a fan of fretless basses, having defretted a cheap Precision copy of some sort:

Wow, just checked out a few of their other songs and they're brilliant. Kind of what Royal Blood could be if they actually tried to be original rather than just recycling tired hard rock cliches. Which brings me back on topic, as I loathe anything by Royal Blood, since everyone assumes that as a bass player I must like their neanderthal plodding.

Got confused and thought this thread was going to be about a terrible "Oi!" band. Turns out I was thinking of C(o)ck Sparrer.

"Yellow" by Coldplay. It's a terrible song to begin with, but my wife is a piano teacher and several of her students are learning it for grade exams. Even played as an instrumental version it's utterly irritating. Anything by George Ezra. Before the virus I worked in an office where I had to endure the musical tastes of the boss, which extended to the fag ends of Britpop like Oasis and contemporary "singer songwriters". Ezra's "Budapest" with that grating "ooh" brought me close to quitting at one point. My plan was to initially try and get signed off work for as long as possible with mental health issues by running around the office with nothing on below the waist, while urinating and shouting "it won't stop". Thankfully the whole office complained that we should take turns at putting music on. My turn started with the entirety of Einstürzende Neubauten's "Kollaps" album:

And playing with a pick as god Lemmy intended.

I think it was still open as a pub up to the fire. There was a covers band called something like "Metalworks" who played there every Sunday evening. Unfortunately the fire was an opportunity for more gentrification of the area - Camden council don't seem to have a clue when it comes to what makes the area special, which is the non-chain store shops and the market.

The Hawley Arms burned down in 2008 along with a bunch of other nearby buildings - not sure how similar the rebuilt place is to the one that Amy Winehouse hung out in. I've not been near The Good Mixer since the late 1990s, but glad to hear it's got a decent crowd in it now as the regulars back then had a very seedy vibe to them.

She would most often be in the Hawley Arms, Camden. Which reminds me of another Camden pub, The Good Mixer. For a large part of the 1990s it was a popular haunt for bands from the NME and Melody Maker invented genres such as the "scene that celebrated itself", "new wave of new wave" and "Britpop". A lot of the bands that finally made it big with Britpop, such as Blur and Elastica, were part of that mileu. On the occasions I was dragged there by mates I could never understand the appeal of the place, since it was a grotty dive with toilets most often ankle deep in overflow from the urinal. Then I discovered it was where a lot of people from those bands could easily score smack. Why the police never raided it I don't know, but I spotted a fair few people there from bands that were feted by the music press.

Never had a problem with Dell equipment, either servers or laptops. However, Vista was a complete fustercluck by MicroSoft. They released the minimum and recommended specs for the upcoming release of Vista, but the specs turned out to be completely inadequate to run it in a reasonably productive manner. There were lawsuits over that, as well as the claim that any machine made since 2005 would run it well.

What I value about the local music shop (Kingfisher Music, Fleet, Hants) of my youth is that the World Wide Web killed them off. No more having to put up with the smug, sneering staff who would belittle me every time I went there to buy something. Regardless of whether it was picks, strings or an actual big ticket item like a bass cabinet they'd always find some way to have a dig, such as: "Oh, you play with a pick, so you're not a real bass player then". "I wondered who was still using crap like Rotosound strings". "Well it's not much of a bass cabinet, doesn't even have a Speakon connector". That last one about a behemoth Peavey 1820 cabinet I had special ordered from the US, which I then "accidentally" dropped on the twerp of a shop assistant's foot.

Careful, if you say that three times while looking at your computer something bad happens.

It's Spungen's Fifth Law of the Internet - any forum discussion that goes on long enough will eventually descend into a flame war about the finer points of networking.

Some people think the scams are deliberately bad - using poor grammar in phishing emails or technobabble in call scripts for example - because it means only the most likely marks will engage with the scammer. Personally I think it's just a reflection of the kind of people involved in these scams being unable to find anything more lucrative to do legally. I did have a more professional sounding than normal scam call last week though. It was from a "personal investment company", on behalf of a "hedge fund in Mayfair, London". The quality of the spoken English was a cut above average, and the script was quite well put together. I was on my lunch break, so happily wasted half an hour of the caller's time when they could be scamming someone more gullible. When asked if I made investments, I said I work in importation and put some of my money back into stocks and shares. As the call went on I started dropping more and more obvious hints that my importation involved chemicals of a "recreational pharmaceutical" nature, and that I had to be careful how I "washed, sorry invested" my profits. The penny finally dropped when I asked the caller if he was based in northern India, and if so whether he wanted to make some extra income bringing certain items from Myanmar into the UK via his back passage.