Cogs can think.

While a lot of people seem to think that Fiona and Alanis are two apples fallen from the same tree, this is decidedly not the case. The two are like night and day, producing art with the only shared characteristic that of being music. Musically, the difference is pretty drop-dead obvious.

Lyrically, the difference might be a lot less obvious to casual listeners. I knew the difference was there, I knew they write lyrics that are really unique and not at all alike - I just never knew how to put it into words.

Well, I do now.

Alanis puts into words how everyone feels. Fiona puts into words how Fiona feels.

And, well, uhm, Fiona doesn’t really resemble ‘everyone’. You can easily identify with Alanis’ words, but you can never really identify with Fiona’s words. And that’s the major difference, and also the reason why lyrically, I prefer Fiona: she goes her own way, and she writes about how she feels, in her own unique way. Alanis writes about her own feelings too, but she writes in such a way that her listeners can identify with her - and she makes concessions in the process.

Fiona doesn’t do concessions. Fiona is all Fiona, all the time. And that’s why I love her so much.

The hard drive in my PowerBook G4 just died.

I have hard drives happily at work that pre-date the first coming of Christ, but of course, Apple had to put in a cheap, crappy drive and now I’m fcuked.

The funny thing? System Profiler sees the drive, but Disk Utility doesn’t. I’m - naturally - out of warranty, so, uhm, yeah.

Perhaps there is justice in this world after all.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

Radovan Karadžić will finally be brought to justice. One of the biggest criminals in history will finally have to answer to the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague - 15 years too late, but hey, better late than never. His victims, and the people left behind, deserve his head on a platter.

As you all know, I vehemently oppose the death penalty - but gosh I wish my principles were for bending in this case. This is a great day for justice.

Bestest best friend Renate and her boyfriend Bart spent the evening at my place, watching some films, some TV, you know. At the end of the evening, I dropped them off at Alkmaar North station.

Good, I say to the happy couple, next time, we’ll meet up at your place.

Before the words even left my mouth, I hear a sound of a suddenly braking car inside my head. Bart starts running, and hides behind a wall. Renate starts laughing.

I look at her, I try to correct myself. I mean his place… HIS place, damnit…

Sometimes, my mind is WAY ahead of things.

You know what’s a really good way to spoil Martini Bianco? Well, these crazy folk out there put wodka in it, and then stir or shake it.

Season one of Jericho is the Martini Bianco. Season two is the wodka.

Season two of Jericho is really, really, really bad. I mean, really bad. I can accept the fact that some dude forgot to fix teh c0lours. I can (teeth-grindingly) accept the EPIC FAIL fake user interface in episode 2. But what I can’t accept is the utterly, utterly crappy storyline.

The storyline does away with everything that made Jericho so darn interesting. I’m a small town boy, I’ve been living in one all the 23 years of my life. Even when everyone else started moving to the city, I stayed put. My hometown is the exact same size as Jericho - in other words, I can relate to that imaginary Kansas town. That imaginary Kansas town in season one, that is.

Season two isn’t about Jericho. It’s about bringing down this big bad new government (Allied States of America? I mean, wait, what? Someone actually thought that sounded right?), and in focussing on that, the show has now caught lostities - one big überplot, with no real subplots going on.

Sometimes, it’s better not to do something. The creators, writers, actors, producers of Jericho should not have agreed to make this mere reflection of what Jericho once was. This is absolute garbage, and I’ll see when I can find some time to finish the remaining few episodes.

Wodka is for unimaginative drunks anyway.

I’m done watching all Star Trek series now, which means I can draw up my top 3 of my favourite TV series. This list excludes my favourite comedy series, stuff like Frasier, That ’70s Show, Malcolm In The Middle, and so on - this regards more serious series.

1. Dead Like Me - No doubt, of course. Best ever, by a long shot, no doubt about it. It’s going to be impossible for anything, or anyone, to top this. I’ve tried Bryan Fuller’s next creation (Pushing Daisies), but apart form the mind-blowing visuals, each episode felt exactly the same as the previous one. Dead Like Me is more than just TV, it’s an eye-opener.
2. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Best. Character. Development. Ever. The fall of Gul Dukat, Jadzia’s death, Sisko’s struggle between his loyalty to Starfleet and his assignment as Emissary, and so on, and so forth. And of course, the epic war between the Federation and the Dominion… Nothing but brilliance. Even the usual Star Trek filler episodes were awesome - because instead of being ordinary filler, they contributed to all the character development story arches. By far the best of the Star Trek universe, and I felt truly depressed when it was over.
3. Jericho - Weird choice, maybe, but I’m in the 2nd halve of the first season, and Jericho is basically a series I’ve been waiting for all my life: the struggle of a small community dealing with a massive apocalyptic disaster. I love how, contrary to Lost, Jericho keeps the excitement going by having shorter sub-plots that only span one, maybe two episodes. This prevents it from having ‘lostities’, where there are lots of episodes that are teeth-grindingly slow. Hint to the Lost writers: introduces one/two episode long sub-plots. This keeps the excitement going. As it stands now, after each episode of Lost, all I can think of is: that’s another 45 minutes of me not getting any closer to unravelling the mystery. Jericho does this a lot better, and I also love the rapid changing of scenes in Jericho, this makes every episode feel like a roller-coaster ride, another thing that keeps the adrenaline pumping. Too bad those networks in the US don’t settle for having a show at the number 2 or 3 spot, rating-wise. Too much good stuff has been cancelled this way in the US.

Take it or leave it.

So, like, GNOME was on its way to irrelevance, simply because they had no plan for the future, no direction, no leadership, no vision, no nothing.

Then came GUADEC, and at GUADEC, they came up with a vision for GNOME 3.0. And it’s all about tabs.

This basically means no more GNOME for me. Tabs suck balls in just about every implementation except settings panels. Tabs are bad because they constrain you. Tabbing is all the shizzle in web browsers, but all it does is stop you from having differently sized windows, having websites side by side - and to make it all even worse, tabbed programs introduce a new place to manage windows: the application window itself. So, users have to think about where to switch to a certain window - do we switch using the panel, or via an application? Wait, we have to switch to the application via the panel first, and then switch to the particular window we want inside the application? And what about closing documents versus closing windows? What about having 15 scientific .pdf’s loaded in a tabbed Evince? Can I still read the tabs, or are they shortened to only the first few letters of the filename?

What do you mean, pointless clicks?

We have been trying for ages now to move away from an application-centric world, towards a document-centric world, and Mac OS X is doing really, really well in that regard (Quick Look!), and GNOME itself was not doing bad either. By focussing efforts on tabbed applications, all that work has been in vain. They are setting the clock back, I don’t know, 15 years?

I’m happy that GNOME has a vision, but sadly, it’s one step forward, three billion steps back. I mean, vertical damn tabs? Why don’t you start eating babies while you’re at it?

“I don’t know who you’re talking to with such fcuking disrespect.” That’s Alanis’ message to her ex-fiance, actor Ryan Reynolds, from the song “Straitjacket” on her new album. “Flavors Of Entanglement” has completely blown my socks off - there are no other words for it.

So-Called Chaos left me with a bitter after taste - it didn’t deliver, it wasn’t Alanis at her best. The album had its moments, but it was by far the weakest so far, which left me with the scary realisation that for all we knew, Alanis might have lost the magic touch.

But Flavors Of Entanglement, which she co-produced with Bjork and Madonna producer Guy Sigsworth, is nothing short of a rebirth. It combines all that was good about her masterpiece Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie with the musical complexity of Feast On Scraps, with a sauce of the electricity found on Madonna’s Ray Of Light - topped off with the franticness of Bjork’s Volta and Post.

The album opener, “Citizen Of The Planet” is a musical revelation, the chorus will make your heart pounding. The already mentioned Straitjacket should make Scarlet Johansson think twice about her relationship with Reynolds - “I swear you won’t be happy ’til I’m bound in a straitjacket.” It’s not all up-tempo and anger, as the soft melancholy of Not As We and Torch shows the other side of Alanis: touching, emotional, extremely clever.

But most of all, I’m happy Alanis is - again - confident enough to unleash her most powerful weapon: her unrivalled, uncontrollable voice. It weeps, it lashes out, it comforts, it unsettles. I don’t care about all the music, the instruments, the artwork - I’m just happy her voice is back, and I can again enjoy her one-of-a-kind sounds.

I was wrong to doubt her. Flavors Of Entanglement is a masterpiece, no doubt about it. It’s right up there with Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. Absolute brilliance.

Definitely recommended.

Of Avery Brooks’ performance in this episode, Jeffrey Combs comments, “Avery was spectacular. There was a scene toward the end where he falls apart with the camera right in front of his nose. It was just riveting.” According to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, everyone who worked on the episode felt that Brooks gave an Emmy award winning performance, and there was a great deal of disappointment amongst both cast and crew when he wasn’t even nominated.

Totally agreed. One of the best pieces of television ever made.

I have temporarily stepped back from OSNews due to health issues (nothing serious). I’m cutting down my computer usage to the absolute minimum, which includes this weblog. This might take a few weeks, I don’t know.

I needed a break anyway.