Asian Rap. This is not a race issue and I'm not a racist person (there's a lot of Asian music that I really like, especially some of the stuff that's put out by Talvin Singh's "The Sounds of the Asian Underground" label - although a couple of the artists, Talvin included, aren't Asian); I've just been browsing Shoutcast and I stumbled across the Asian music section. I decided to have a listen, figuring it would mostly be JPop (which it was). I flicked through a few on the list and found a station called "Asian Rap" streaming music from a band called 524. Curious, I clicked the "Tune in!" button and found the funniest interpretation of rap that I've ever been witness to. I'm not a fan of rap, but this, I like: it's hilarious, beyond belief.

It could be that Asian Rap is actually a reasonable form of expression and the band 524 is just very bad, but I fear the reality is that Asian Rap just sounds ridiculous to people that have heard the more well-known flavour.

The reaction I had was similar to when I heard an Australian try to rap.

So I urge you to head to Shoutcast and tune in while it lasts, that way you can make up your own mind. Just select the Asian category and you'll see the "Asian Rap" station on the list, it's the one with less than 4 listeners.

"Keep chopsticks people real!" (their words, not mine)

Two weeks and no update! *scorns*

As you've probably guessed the last few weeks have been busy. Mum is doing quite well now but she still has to take it easy for a while longer (a fact that it's increasingly difficult to convince her of). Hopefully now they'll take notice of all the nagging I've been doing about eating habits and exercise! :P

The last month has been crazy for me... a friend kills himself, my mum has a heart attack, I've got three concurrent coding contracts and quotations going on (throw in a bunch of server hassles) as well as my side projects, in addition to my own health problems (which although chronic are minor in comparison). For the first time in a while I feel stressed, but I've convinced myself that coping with it is a simple matter of attacking each issue as it appears, rather than trying to do too much planning.

On a lighter note, before all the craziness started, I placed an order for my all-time favourite pinball machine, High Speed II: The Getaway, one of the first digital pinballs with a DMD (Dot Matrix Display). It's something that I've always wanted, ever since first playing it in Haddow's Fun Parlour, which has long-since closed. To me it's like a tribute to the golden era of "The Game Arcade", before home game systems swallowed the market and obliterated most of the pinball and arcade video game machine manufacturers. For example, Williams, the manufacturer of The Getaway (as well as other classics like Terminator II), closed its doors on pinball production in 1999, leaving Stern as the sole remaining pinball company. Stern have really made a name for themselves recently, releasing pinballs like Austin Powers, Simpsons Party, Monopoly, Playboy, and shortly they'll release Terminator III. It's great to see that at least one manufacturer is surviving and producing great games, so next time you go to an arcade, play the pinballs instead of the video games!

I've never been fascinated by video game machines the way I've always been by pinballs. There's something about the interactivity and physicality that make it more appealing. It seems this element has been lost over the years with the move being towards video games (which are cheaper to manufacture and require less maintenance) - a crying shame. However there may be hope yet, with the latest video game machines requiring physical interaction (Dance Dance Revolution is a classic example) and usually with some kind of physical feedback, perhaps hope remains for the pinball machine to make a revival in a new era of more hands-on entertainment.

Back to The Getaway! It should arrive at the importer in the next couple of weeks, then if it's in good enough condition it'll be sent up here and I'll be able to finally own the pinball of my dreams :D I'll post some photos once it arrives :) It will be great to relieve stress!

I've also just finished bidding on eBay for the colorimeter I wanted. With luck it will find its way safely to Australia in one piece.

The internet is an interesting beast. At one time or another most long-time net users have been vain enough to Google their own name. For example, Google reveals I'm one of the following: a POV-Ray user who is known for "hacking" NetMD and writing reviews of DVDs for a while, a Queensland former Squash player who's a 5th Degree in Taekwon-Do, a member of the "Phi Sigma Kappa - Alpha Deuteron Chapter" at the University of Illinois, or a music reviewer from California. In case you haven't guessed, the first is correct, but it's strange that there's another person with the same name in the same state. Research on the USENET archives would soon show that we're nothing alike though, as apparently he's a student of QUT who likes flaming people and making rude comments in alt.flame/tasteless. You can also find other useless things, such as the fact that my name in a short sentence is an anagram of "Eric Chamberlain". USENET also shows that I could be a person in Fremont, California, who does C++ programming for an Internet Services company.

The internet preserves so much about people that recently I decided it was best to remove myself as much as possible from USENET. I wasn't comfortable with the notion that all previous posts I'd made to USENET and other private servers that had their newgroups illegally mirrored to USENET, could be archived for eternity. To avoid my name being jumbled in with other less-desirable people that have the same name as me (and thus possibly mistaken for being me), as well as to avoid spam, I had Google remove about 250 archived posts. Luckily Google Groups provides an easy way of doing this, as long as you can prove you were the original author of the message or you still have the e-mail address that was used to make the post.

If you know what to look for and where to look, you'd be surprised just what you can find about people. Last night I searched for some material an old friend of mine put online over four years ago and I quickly found part of his old temporary website, a few programs he'd written for stealing Dial-Up Networking passwords (that he'd tested on me, the cheeky monkey!) and some questions he'd posted to a Yahoo Group about Delphi sound programming. All of this material is out there waiting for anyone who knows what to look for.

The harsh reality that the internet inherently has no privacy always makes me wonder what things will be like 20 years from now.

I'll leave that thought with you, frightening as it may be, as the sun is rising outside and I need to correct my wetware-clock.