When I was in junior high, we had a class called Music. This was a two year run. First year classical music (a little dry, but mostly fun), second year "the history of rock" (snore). Now I'm not saying this was an important class or a particularly exciting one, it was just a run of the mill "it's in the syllabus so we're doing it" class. The classical music part was appreciated by pretty much only me, whereas year two found greater support in our class, although I thought it was a snoozefest (Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Doors, The Sex Pistols, how fascinating, it's the 90s, jackass!).

Now, I know that sounds like a generic "when I was young" rant, but stay with me here. The point is that we covered a bit of classical music in some detail. Why does this matter? It's a bit like asking "why do we have to learn math, I'm never gonna use this for anything". Until you decide to buy a car, and get a financing plan on that. And the interest is screwing you, because you never learnt to calculate compound interest. Now, math has a lot more applicability than music education. But if you only take one thing from Music, let it be this. It's not called a friggin' "song".

Let's say you're at da mall with dem homies and for a strange, unexplained reason, they're playing classical music in the clothing store, just as you're picking out a suit for your imminent court appearance. Now, aside from looking like a douche for not having a clue what you're talking about, you want to express your dissatisfaction with the music, so you remark to your boy (let's call him Homeboy #1) "yo dis fruity song is wack, yo" (do ghangstaz use commas?). IT'S NOT. "A SONG". !.

Do you hear someone singing? No? Then it's not a song. Let's look it up, shall we?

song  /sɔŋ, sɒŋ/ – noun
1. a short metrical composition intended or adapted for singing, esp. one in rhymed stanzas; a lyric; a ballad.
2. a musical piece adapted for singing or simulating a piece to be sung: Mendelssohn's “Songs without Words.”
3. poetical composition; poetry.
4. the art or act of singing; vocal music.
6. an elaborate vocal signal produced by an animal, as the distinctive sounds produced by certain birds, frogs, etc., in a courtship or territorial display.

Aside from definition number three, which doesn't seem applicable, every single definition is very clear on the singing part. Definition number six is a little far fetched to our context, but even that clearly states that it's a vocal sound. I've left out definition number five for emphasis, as I think it captures this whole thing most clearly and succinctly.

5. something that is sung.

Clear? The reason people call it a song, is

1. They don't know that there is such a thing as music that is "not a song".
2. Or even if they do, they don't know what to call "that".

Let's start with the most hip and least descriptive word: tune. If you don't know what to call it, you can always call it a tune. I can't think of a case where that would be incorrect. For the more demanding customer, there are words like piece, composition, work, and depending on the context, theme. Finally, if you want to appear smart and cultured to people you just met, call it an opus. Beyond the generics, there's a vast nomenclature for works of music specific to the work's form.

Don't be a douche, don't call it "a song". [Can we get t-shirts printed?]

Here's the thing. I like tuna. It's pretty much the only fish I eat casually without "making it a point of eating fish" (except for smoked salmon, but that's way overpriced). But the best kind of tuna comes in a can with jello. Yes, I know it sounds a little strange, but trust me - it's good.

There's only one problem. The Dutch tuna cartel does not authorize the sell of tuna in jello. All they have is tuna in oil, and about six brands of it too. While that may be alright-ish, I want the real thing. Tuna in jello, with lemon juice, now there's a making of a good sandwich. You can even toast the bread for added effect.

UPDATE: I found a picture of the product. This isn't the one I prefer, it doesn't taste as good as the other brand I rather get. But it's decent, certainly better than the other tuna products.

Jerry is absolutely right. It terrifies me. I was gonna have some cereal today and for some reason or another it's been a while since I had milk. I still had a carton in there, pretty full. But when I saw the date on it, it was two days past the expiration date. I actually glanced at the container, saw the date, put it back in the fridge, went back to my room to check the date on the computer and decided "no way". I've seen bad milk in the past, it curdles, awful stuff. For added drama, the brand I usually get was actually sold out, so this carton was another brand I hadn't tried before. It tasted remarkably..... alike. But that doesn't mean I was going to take a chance on it past the date. I poured it out into the sink, it actually looked perfectly fine. But two days is way past the accepted standard, even when I have milk on the day I'm sort of thinking "did they mean noon or 8pm?", it already makes me uneasy.

I may be liberal on some things, but on milk past the date I'm definitely conservative.

It is so damn annoying to spend hours trying to fix something which appears to be so simple (and which happens to work perfectly on that other OS) without even getting anywhere. Software suspend has been problematic in linux for years, and that's really why I've never insisted on fixing it on my laptop. But enough is enough, and today I decided I was going to fix it once and for all. Easier said that done.

Like I said, it has been years since people started trying to get this working and there's now tons of howtos and personal stories about what they did and what worked. Of course, just about everything that people say is model specific and what works for one laptop is not sure to work for any other etc. The number of options alone underlines that problem. But it seems that the most widely used (or should I assume the method that has the widest catchment area) is suspend2. So I started out with that, suspend2-sources, setting up the kernel etc. Of course, the more refined your setup is, the more pain you are about to receive. I have a nice framebuffer with a boot screen, which I dumped along the way just to simplify things.

suspend2 in my case was incredibly flaky. Hibernating would work once, the next time it would freeze at "Doing atomic copy" and I'd have to hard boot. I experimented a lot in the console with this, not being able to find any combination of settings that worked reliably. There is a log file for the application, but even setting the logging verbosity to the maximum would only print what it was doing before actually suspending (and then nothing about why the suspending itself failed). Adding fglrx to the equation, as I had feared, was a definite suicide move. Attempting to hibernate with fglrx loaded would consistently kernel panic (is that a verb yet? let's make it one!) and there's no way (that I'm aware of) to keep X running while unloading fglrx.

So much for suspend2. Then there's still Software Suspend. I don't recall having tried this before, somehow it was always described as obsolete and not recommended. The thing is that suspend2 comes with scripts and a bunch of config files, suspend[1] doesn't, so it wasn't too clear how to actually suspend the system. Trying to hibernate with suspend[1] was not a great deal more successful, hibernation seemed to work, but resuming was not always blissful. Again lots of hard boots and I was getting really sick of it. Reading what people had said about my particular video card didn't seem to help at all.

Then I came across suspend to ram in /sys/power/state (which is actually what I wanted, rather than hibernation which requires you to go through grub and all). It turns out this method actually resembles the Windows suspend, you suspend, screen goes blank, power is cut. Then you press the power button, desktop appears right away. Perfect. This isn't software suspend at all (which seems to focus on hibernation), this is acpi sleep. I still need the suspend2-sources, but I can disable everything called 'software suspend'.

At last, after hours of trial and error, scrambling for information on google and reading outdated documentation, I had found the answer. This suspend-to-ram works beautifully even with fglrx (unlike suspend2's 'to-ram' function which never worked for me once). So now I wanted to map this function to a spare button I have on my keyboard and mapping aside, this was a lot harder than expected.

The suspend function is a simple echo mem > /sys/power/state, but, of course, it takes root privileges. This works fine on the command line, but putting that line into a script just didn't work, the screen would go blank, but power wasn't cut, it was as if it waited for the command to terminate first. How ridiculous! So while people had just put that line into a suspend script, it wasn't working in my case. I finally landed on using

sudo bash -c "echo -n mem > /sys/power/state" &

in combining sudo with & to make sure it wouldn't wait for termination. And this put into /usr/local/bin/suspend.sh, mapped to my spare keyboard key actually works now, I finally have software suspend (or sleep, or whatever you call it) working as it should. There's no hibernation, which doesn't bother me as I don't need it.

There's still a small hitch when running suspend.sh in the console. When resuming, the screen is just blank. I can start X and this will make the video card start drawing, which brings the display back to life. Then if I kill X, I have my console visible again. I don't know if this has to do with using a framebuffer or something else, but I can live with it, suspending in X is the whole point of this anyway.

So if you have a Dell Inspiron 6400, here's a suspend-to-ram method that works-for-me (and will probably be outdated by the time you find it, making it useless to you). Enjoy!

UPDATE: No, it's definitely broken. I don't think my soundcard handles suspend very well (or at least the driver doesn't seem to), so I can't suspend if I want my sound working after resuming. Of course, in Windows it works without a hitch. :lazy: Meanwhile, I still have no software suspend..

I used to be a huge Michael Jackson fan as a kid, my room was plastered with his posters, I had all the albums, I listened to his music _all the time_. In 1993, he was on tour and I badly wanted to go to the concert in Oslo. One Saturday morning, at about 8am, my friend and I had just left Oslo S and we were heading for a record store. The line from the entrance almost encircled the entire block and finally we arrived at the end of the line. We were an hour early, quite a few people had gotten there ahead of us. Literally minutes later we witnessed the line grow incredibly fast, we couldn't even see the end anymore as it was wrapped around the last corner of the block. At 9am, the doors opened and the tickets went on sale. We got ours and it felt pretty amazing knowing we would be going to a live performance.

The problem with these concerts, of course, is that there are way too many people, and when you're 12 years old and pretty damn short, it's pretty much a given you're not going to get much out of pushing your way to the front of the pack. We actually grabbed our seats at the very back, the stadium where the concert was had this grassy hill on one side and we sat there quite comfortably. (Seeing wasn't a problem either with huge screens on either side of the stage showing what was happening.)

I haven't been to anything like that concert. Michael Jackson had a reputation for amazing live shows, people who didn't even like his music would go just to see it. Years later I would meet people who had been there and who still remembered it. Of course, for me it was just unbelievable. Not all of the concerts had the same format, but in Oslo he performed quite a lot of old and new songs, and the music, the scenography, the atmosphere - indescribable. Best concert I've ever seen by a mile.

So with my background, I'd say I know Michael Jackson pretty well (even though it has been over a decade since I listened to his music). And among all the things that are said about the guy, the one thing I don't understand is how some people say "he looks like a woman". (This is more of a throwback to the past, after the last surgeon butchered his face I haven't heard people say it anymore.) It's just hard to imagine women would take a look at him and say "yeap, he's one of us". How exactly does he look like a woman? :confused: Is it the long hair? Is long hair the only thing you need to have to be a woman? I mean he doesn't dress like a woman, does he?

Since when is that women's fashion? Do you see a pink blouse? Red bows in his hair? A tank top? Purple sunglasses? Lipstick? I don't get it. Is it the hair then? Do women think anyone with long hair is a woman? How can that conviction not have backfired at least once in life? I can just see it now, working out at the gym, you spot another woman working on some machine.

"How you doin' girlfriend, haven't seen you around here before.. "
*guy turns around*
"Whoa! Sorry, sir."

So do all men with long hair look like women? Does Yanni? Well, the moustache may be a tip off, it nothing else. Who else looks like a woman? Oh, I know.

Check out the long hair!! That's a woman if I ever saw one.