Sutaffu

Wow it's been a while

Well after a couple of year trying to crack the mobile market we've finally come up with something new and (mostly) original.  We call it Charity Phones and the basic concept is, that instead of these "crazy" cash back deals that no one seems to get we'll donate the money to charity instead.

We have just signed up Marie Curie Cancer Care as an official beneficiary. Marie Curie does some fantastic work caring for around 25,000 terminally ill cancer patients and their families around the UK with specialist home nursing care. Their aim is to give people the right to die at home with their loved ones around them.

Our aim within this first year of partnership with them is to raise around £100,000. We donate up to £125 with every sale. I would very much appreciate it if you could visit our website Marie Curie Charity Phones when you have a minute and consider us when you are next looking for a phone. Our deals are very competitive and in many cases better than most on-line or high street retailers. You can also bring your existing mobile number to us.

3 of our best deals this month:
750 minutes (any network, any time) and 150 texts for £28 per month for the life of the contract plus free phone and blue tooth
500 minutes (any network, any time) for £15 per month for the life of the contract plus free phone and blue tooth
75 minutes (any network, any time) and 600 texts for £15 per month for the life of the contract plus free phone and blue tooth

Long Time No Speaky

It's been a while since I last posted here.  And, to be quite honest I didn't really make much of a go it in the first place.

So what have I been doing all this time, who and why?  Well, I've been helping setup a new company selling mobile phones.  You can find it at www.utel.biz.  That's taken up most of my spare time recently and as a result, I've been a bit of a sad billy-no-mates for a while.  There's some pretty good deals and even a choice of free gift (sorry no carriage clocks).  Only 3 mobile at the moment but I expect the other networks will be added later.

A nice thing is the recommend a friend bit, where you can earn hard cash for referring your mates/ family/ etc.

Admittedly there aren't the crazy deals available on some sites, but the honest truth is that those places kind of count on you not claiming the money back, and you have to claim back.  You don't get those prices straight away.  I guess it's down to whether you can remember to do all that crap 7 months later.  I know I can't.

Anyho, will try and make an effort to update again soon, although I will be spending a lot of my time working on my new site.  So keep checking back.

Headstand (Croydon Rock II - The Update)

Well I went to the Headstand gig at the comedy bar. And was reasonably impressed. Unfortunately the sound was awful and the guys responsible should be lobotomised and placed behind the counter of the nearest Dixons, but all in all, I wanted to hear more.

The band have taken a departure from their original fuck-rock format and have gone back to their ROCK roots. If you mixed The Queens of the Stone Age with the Lost Prophets and threw some Foo Fighters, Beatles and the Who in for good measure then you've kinda got the feeling they're going for. Obviously I was a little disappointed not to hear any of the old classics from "back in the day" but the change was refreshing. But, still, guys if your reading, throw in some of the old feel.

So for those of you that still care by this point here's a list of their up and coming dates:

The Shed - Leicester
Sat 8th May

The Flag - Watford
Sat 15th May
(Look for the Indian bloke drinking all the JD, that'll be me)

The Barfly - London
Sun 16th May

The Dublin Castle - London
Sun 6th Jun

The Joiners - Southampton
Sat 3rd Jul

That should keep you going. For more live dates check out the website.

Well Mash-up (Update)

So after some digging, we now have a bit more info about the mysterious Mokolo bar and the Half Inched residency. I got in contact with the organiser James Starling at fidgit and here's what he had to say about the matter:

Moloko is a new club/bar space set over two floors with a 400 capacity, I'm running weekly fridays at the venue which shall be called 'Lesson-1', its gonna be a hip hop soul funk reggae kinda jam with residents Mr Thing, First Rate & The Nextmen. Half Inched will be running on the first Saturday of every month starting in July. In June (the regular half inch slot) i'm running a special one off instead called 'Crate Love' with special guest MJ Cole..... If this goes well, maybe we'll start it somewhere regularly.

So there we are, I believe it opens on the 28th May and a website for the club will be up soon and I'll post the link as soon as I have it. I also think there will be some involvement from the mixologists but I'm not sure to what end.

In addition, the very nice Mr Starling goes on to give us a few more gems and ideas for going out over the next few months:

If you're Brixton based we run Fidgit every Friday at Plan B which features similar lines ups and a music policy to 'Lesson-1' only its got a bit of a cheesy edge where we've been known to chuck in the odd bootleg or R&B track to keep the girlies happy.

I also promote bigger concerts with XFMs All City Show and have put on Dilated People, Mr Complex, Mark Ronson, Damon Dash, Mystro etc etc. The next event is with Jurassic 5's Charlie 2una & DJ Numark and should be help on June 17 at The Carling Academy, Islington. Here's a bit of news hot off the press - I booked Maceo from De La Soul today for 12 July although I've yet to confirm a venue.

On the first Thursday of May we're hosting live rock orientated night at The Old Blue Last, this'll hopefully act as a showcase for either our artists (we do management too) or bands/groups from our extended group of friends and family. So far The Open (polydors big signing) and some guy from The Buzzcocks have volunteered to perform which should get us some press and hopefully expose some of our guitar acts - Dave Burn, The Vibrations, The Moonies. On a hip hop tip we manage First Rate (from The Scratch Perverts/Morcheeba) and do a bit of consultancy for this wicked new Australian rapper called Mike Celekt.

So thanks to Mr Starling for that, definitely gives me something to do with those "what do you wanna do?" evenings. Stay posted for details of Moloko and a bit of a review when I can get myself down there.

Well Mash-up

How's a bout a bit of "Lip-Hop?"
The Kleptones present..."Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots"

http://www.kleptones.com/yhh.html

A rather interesting mix between the Flaming Lips' latest melodic offerings to the music community and some new and old-skool hip hop.

Rather more exciting than DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album, which although fantastic, is a little limited in that it only features Jay Z.
http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html

Anyhoo let's throw in some other "mash-ups" (for good measure)
http://www.gohomeproductions.co.uk/tracks.html (Thanks Jamie)
http://www.musicalbear.com/article/?753 (Thanks again Jamie)
http://boomselection.info/ (Revisit this occasionally as it is quite a good resource)

Interestingly, Go Home Productions begin a regular night at Moloko on Pentonville Road. Now I've never heard of this bar and it doesn't google too well but as soon as I learn more I'll post it here.

The night (Half Inched) is on July 3rd, joining up with X-FM's very own James Hyman. Although, having said that, team mates Fidgit (http://www.fidgitfunk.co.uk/) seem to think it's on the 3rd June. Some investigation may be involved.

And finally, those wanting to create your own mash-ups:
http://gybo.proboards4.com/
And those generally interested in the world of mash-ups and boot legs
http://www.base58.com/bsx/

Get it RIAAght

A recent article in New Scientist says:

Internet music piracy is not responsible for declining CD sales, claim the researchers behind a major new statistical study.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee at Harvard Business School in Massachusetts and Koleman Strumpf at the University of North Carolina tracked millions of music files downloaded through the OpenNap file-trading network and compared them with CD sales of the same music.

It's seems that the reverse may be the case, sure we may see a drop in single sales, but album sales were untouched. Actually for EMI album sales went up, covering the dip in single sales.

Some see the rise in music downloads as a global stand against rising CD prices, some as a "try before you buy" approach to new music and albums and then there are those that just want free music. Wherever you stand on this, it's not going to go away is it, and it's not like it's harming the artists is it? There are no stories about some new up and coming artist being screwed out of a career by excessive music downloading. No, the record companies have had that covered since the beginning.

Links:
Net music piracy 'does not harm record sales' - Full New Scientist story
The Drop In Worldwide CD Sales: A Case of Collective Blame?

Phys Ed

Thought that I'd do a little intro about what I'm going to be putting into these categories.

- In the games section I'll talk largely about games development and will try to log my progress in learning about this subject.
- In the Physics section, well that's kinda obvious, will talk about science in general but will concentrate on physics "stuff".

Every so often I'll mix these together and talk about physics in games.

And now for something mildly different.

With the growing speed of processors and the latest GPUs it's becoming easier to perform more complex physics type calculations for games, simulations and film. Now while this might seem quite a dull statement, reserved for the geek types among us then, well you'd be right. But, having said that, being able to do complex physics calculations allows developers to mimic the real world with increasing believability. More and more films are relying on this to add near perfect visual effects. Now I'm not talking about the Matrix types that immediately come to mind, but films like Twister, Perfect Storm, Titanic and Gladiator (to name but a few), where the visual effects were designed so that we wouldn't notice them.

While the Matrix series really showed us what you can do with CG (Computer Graphics) these days it was the films that left you not even aware that there were any that really stand up for how far we've come in physics simulation.

So what I hope to do, is to show you all what's going on in that world, how you might achieve some of the effects in the comfort of your own home and just how far I'm getting along with my own experiments in this "black art."

Links:
Gamasutra - Games dev, news, art, etc
GameDev.net - bit like Gamasutra, less "industry"
Notebooks, excelent physics reference (thanks Rod, again)
Physics for Game Developers - David M. Bourg, good book for beginners with a basic knowledge of maths and programming
Advanced Engineering Mathematics - Erwin Kreyszig, I have a copy. Makes for a good door stop.

Croydon Rock

Croydon rock trio Headstand play The Comedy (near The Comedy Store) on Wednesday 7th April and the Bull and Gate (Kentish Town) on Thursday 15th April.

From humble beginnings as a small time funk rock band doing the Croydon pub circuit, Headstand (formerly The High Rollers and Mamma Jamma) have rebranded themselves as a neo-stoner (is that a real genre? just made it up) rock group who seem to continually be exciting crowds with their live performances and refreshing sound.

This is definitely a band to watch out for, especially if you're a fan of live music.

Links:
Live Dates
http://www.logo-magazine.com/newbands/display.asp?ArtistID=3499
http://www.bbc.co.uk/southerncounties/going_out/music/local_bands/a-z/who.shtml#h
http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/article/+purple/+whoareheadstand/

Deep East/Latin Funk

Venue: Bartok, 78-79 Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 map
Date: Saturday, March 27, 2004
Time: 19:00 - 02:00
Prices: Admission Free until 11pm, thereafter (£3, I think)

Description:
DJ Zahid mixes traditional Indian music with a storm of sexy Latin style
funk transporting us into an exotic and colourful world of sumptuous sounds.
Live la vida loca!

Bartok's a cool little venue in Camden, dealing in all forms of classical
music mixed up with modern influences. Drinks are a little expensive (not
for London really though and cocktails are only £3.99 from 5pm-8pm), but
starting out at one of Camden's cheaper venues may be a good option,
especially for those that would rather drink beer from a pint glass!

Grey Areas (Art vs. Copyright)

I realise that it's probably a bit slow off the mark to go on about this, but recently I've been listening to DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album, which (if you don't already know) is a brilliantly made mix between Jay Z's Black Album and The Beatles' White Album.

For those wanting to ignore EMI you can get it from here:
http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html (the BitTorrent download only occasionally works).

Now, in my opinion, being a bit of a Beatles fan and also a fan of the less commercial areas of Hip-Hop, I find the album a fantastic body of work, which EMI should try and snatch up and capitalise on. But nooo!

It's probably safe to assume that the albums huge success was probably due to the hype that EMI itself instigated in pursuing its cease-and-desist order. After all Dangermouse only produced 3,000 copies and distributed to a small base of independent outlets.

"OVER 1 MILLION SONGS IN A DAY After a survey of the sites that hosted files during Grey Tuesday, and an analysis of filesharing activity on that day, we can confidently report that the Grey Album was the number one album in the US on February 24 by a large margin. Danger Mouse moved more "units" than Norah Jones and Kanye West, with well over 100,000 copies downloaded. That's more than 1 million digital tracks. More details soon." - www.greytuesday.org

Now, in light of its success, EMI are probably now incapable of doing a u-turn and picking up the rights

"This is something we do as a matter of course," said an EMI representative, "whenever we're made aware of copyright violations."

But does this apply to samples, the world of Dance/Hip-hop, etc are full of them and I'm sure that most of the one hit wonders that have come to pass over the years, never (at least at first) got permission to use the samples they did. However, since samples are a direct usage of the original artist work the full extent of copyright law applies and not the royalty model used to record a cover version.

So where does that leave us. We kinda get stuck in this ownership of art mess. I mean does anyone get any cash when someone makes a postcard of the Mona Lisa? Or is music to be separated from art, with the advent of digital reproduction, bit of a moral grey area isn't it?

Links:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1164856,00.html
- The Guardian picks the Grey Album as its Album of the week.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/23/jayz_meets_metallica.html
- DJ Halfred has remixed Jay-Z's Balck Album with Metallica's Black Album, producing a full-length disc he calls "Black on Black." (Thanks Rod for that one)
http://www.downhillbattle.org/index.php
- Music Activism (or so the strapline says).
http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/historic.html
- Copyright and Music: A History Told in MP3's (very well presented).

My First Blog (init!)

Due to a glitch in my ability to stop myself from doing something I might:
a) regret
b) think about
c) regret

I have decided to start keeping a blog. Now when I say "decided" I actually mean that I wasn't actually listening to the the question and said "yes, that's a good idea," purely as a reflex response. So here we are, the begining, the bit just before the middle (can't miss it, just past Tesco's, on the right).

Let me begin by thanking Rod (of Rodcorp) for loaning me some space on his blog, so I didn't have to fork out the money myself. I think I should also thank him for suggesting that I write a blog, and asking me at the opportune moment i.e. when I was a bit drunk and not listening properly (see above).

So a bit about me then.
Hi, my name's Neel.

Right, glad we got that over and done with. So on to the blog and what it's about. Here I shall post general ramblings of this nature (the stuff above if you've only just joined us), also stuff about
- building games
- physics
- physics in games
- music
- stories about drinking
- places to drink
- drinking
- drinks
- towels
- small furry animals
- stuff that I find down the back of my sofa
and
- misc

So if you're still here, then read on and I'll try not to bore you rigid (unless I'm doing it on purpose).