nuzzaci - an online journal

Between Saturday 17th of February until Monday the 5th of March I will be on holiday in New Zealand. HA, in your face!

Kludda i marginalen. Ni vet det är en liten bit på varje sida där man inte behöver skiva det som står på svarta tavlan. Där kan man rita gubbar och skriva saker man själv har hittat på. Glöm inte det.

/From the song Cockroaches by David Sandström

I have, for about two years, been a proud owner of the Grado Labs SR60 headphones. They have served me well. But as the POKE office has grown in size - as in population and as in sq. ft per person - it also automatically updated to a new version of Dolby Office Surround Sound.

So I needed to change headphones. And this time the change is called Bose QuietComfort 3.

Now, of cause, it is a bit unfair to compare a £60 to a £275 headphone. But the difference here is not value for money, it’s the different types of headphones. The SR60 is a ‘Open’ type of headphone while the Bose QuietComfort 3 is a Noise Canceling headphone.

The Grado Labs SR60 works perfectly if you are in a quieter environment. It’s an ‘Open’ headphone. So it has an open grille on the back and allows the sound-waves to propagate away from the ear freely. This mean a lot of sound “leaks” in and out. Quite often I have forgotten I have had them on and just left the desk with a small bang.

The Bose QuietComfort 3 are Noise Canceling headphones. You put them on and it’s quiet. It might leak out a bit of sound, but the biggest different is that nothing leaks in. Basically the headphones are equipped with small microphones that absorb the sound around you, and then a speaker sends a sound that cancels out that sound the microphone caught.

And it works. It works beautifully.

But, £275…? No, $350. And $350 is about £180. If it wasn’t for that fact that the dollar was so weak when I was over in Florida, America, the Bose QuietComfort 3 would still have been on my “wish list”. Now, instead, I will have a very pleasant flight to New Zealand.

The last of the three monster projects I was involved in during 2006, has been launched, so I thought I would present all three under the same post.

So in chronological order:

1. topshop.com A huge e-commerce website. POKE designed and built the html templates that then was incorporated into a huge system build by IBM that goes under the name ‘webasphere’. The difficulties were to get the web page to feel fresh and still keep within all the heavy restrictions the system came with.
   Read more about the website at Tom Hostler’s blog

2. bbcgoodfood.com A website for an already existing magazine. This was a very intense project with almost no speed bumps along the road. All wireframes had been done. All content existed.
   Read more about the website at Tom Hostler’s blog

3. travel.dk.com Last but not least. A web site for the travel books published by Dorling Kindersley (DK).
   Aside from the normal travel website stuff - browsing your chosen destination and viewing/reading about attractions - you can create your own attractions, print, download and share your own compilation or personalised travel guide.

   This website is massive and includes a lot of good features. So, visit it, sign up and explore.
   Read more about the website at Tom Hostler’s blog

I’d just like to alert all search engines and their mighty crawling robots to register a small warning to anyone who’s searching for a dentist in east London.

Subject: Wanda Lissowska at Dentessential 75 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, Borough of Hackney, London, EC2A 3BS.

Outline: The warning is based on a visit I took last week to the clinic to sort out severe (se·vere: very great, intense) tooth pain. She x-rayed and did a regular check without finding anything out of the ordinary. She thought it could be that the filling was too big, so every time I bit, the filling aggravated the nerve (the tooth’s pulp tissue). She polished a bit on the filling and told me to give it three days.

A few days later I visited an emergency dental clinic.

The pain was caused by the fact that the old filling had managed to infect the tooth’s pulp tissue and had killed the tooth. The dentist at the emergency clinic didn’t even need to x-ray me to determine that. What I needed was a root canal treatment and not three more days of pain.

I’m no professional ‘dentist critic’ - so forgive me if I’m being harsh and out of line in my judgment - but I do live under/with the impression that a dentist - good or bad - should be able to determent if a tooth is dead or alive. Especially if the client directs them to the exact tooth that seem to cause the sever pain.

NOTE: The warning doesn’t include all dentists at Dentessential. I have many colleges and friends who are very pleased with other dentists at this clinic.

Since the beginning of last week I have been in heavy tooth pain, which has resulted in low enthusiasm about most events and an inability to sleep well.

So even before Fionn got on stage, I wanted to go home. The warm up acts had killed the small amount of joy I had left in my body for the day.

You could say that everything about the evening worked against the odds of me appreciating Fionn Regan’s performance.
If I had left the venue last Tuesday being very disappointed, I wouldn’t have written this post. It would have been unfair against Fionn: he was swimming upstream against my toothache.

So the only reason I am writing this is because Fionn pulled it off. He was amazing. He has the special thing a singer/songwriter needs that most singer/songwriters lack. I don’t know what The Thing is, but he has it. The songs also grew when they were preformed live. The meaning behind the lyrics came through in a way they don’t on his album.

So, if you’re anything like me, view the amazing video Be Good or Be Gone on YouTube, buy the album The End of History on iTunes Music Store or order it from Amazon and stay tuned on Official website for Fionn Regan for upcomming gigs.

How can I have missed this genius? I actually managed to not know anything about Bill Hicks until 2006 (12 years after his death) when I, for no apparent reason, felt like renting a stand-up DVD from my local film shop, and ended up with Relentless.

I have for a few years been a huge fan of Denis Leary, I liked No Cure for Cancer and loved Lock ‘n Load… but… it only took a few minutes of Relentless to understand where alot of Denis’ ideas came from… The day I saw Relentless, Denis fell quite a few steps on the ‘Ladder of Respect’.

Willow bought me the book ‘Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution‘ for christmas. It’s written (or more like put together) by Bill Hick’s lifelong friend Kevin Booth.

Even though the book made me cry toward the end, I wouldn’t advise anyone to read this book. Most parts of the book are very badly written, a lot feels very repetitive and most of the stories tell you more about the people who wrote them than Bill himself.

No. Don’t read the book. Buy the movies.

It’s in the teens that it normally happens: we develop spots, we hate our parents, we try to fit in by being special and unique and, among all the other things, some of us shape and form a love and passion for music.

Being born in 1978, I hit the teens and this era at the beginning of the 90’s.

I think most of us have a few albums we like to call “my” album. Since last year I decided to let go of my analog music collection (I gave away roughly 400 CDs to Marcus Burman), and maintain only a digital music library, I actually don’t have any albums I theoretically can call “my” album, but I mean “my” as in personal and spiritual terms, not as in “ownership” or “written by”.

Here below I have pasted together a montage of my first albums. Not my absolute favorite albums - my first. These are the ones that made me passionate about music… the ones that made me sit in my room playing guitar 6 hours straight. The albums I sometimes call “my” albums even if I don’t get any royalties.

In alphabetical order (by artist):

1. Against the Grain, by Bad Religion
2. Danzig II: Lucifuge, by Danzig
3. Spectral Sorrows, by Edge of Sanity
4. Angel Dust, by Faith No More
5. Kerplunk!, by Green Day
6. Use Your Illusion 1, by Guns n Roses
7. Keeper of the Seven Keys part 2, by Helloween
8. Fear of the Dark, by Iron Maiden
9. Countdown to Extinction, by Megadeth
10. Mental Hippie Blood, by Mental Hippie Blood
11. Metallica, by Metallica
12. Nevermind, by Nirvana
13. Daily Grind, by No Use for a Name
14. White Trash Two Heebs and a Bean, by NOFX
15. Ten, by Pearl Jam
16. Smash, by Offspring
17. How to Clean Everything, by Propagandhi
18. Rage Against the Machine, by Rage Against the Machine
19. No Carrots for the Rehabilitated, by Randy
20. Art of Rebellion, by Suicidal Tendencies

This journal currently has four different tracking/stats/analytics programs covering the behaviour of visitors to this site. Everything from browser type, window size, referrers, search etc is all stored and every once in a while analysed.

Do you need four different programs? No. Most probably not. I started with one, and then new ones have found their way past my attention so I have tried them and ended up with four.

1. Server Log

   First I have the server log and it’s stats package Analog. I hardly ever check this one. The Pros about the server log package is that it’s not dependent on javascript being enabled. The Cons are the raw format and non-existing visualisation of the data. The “behind the scene” basically looks like the Analog webpage.

2. Mint

   Mint is designed, maintained and built by Shaun Inman. It’s a beautiful piece of work and I just updated to V2. The Cons are that the application cost $30 per domain and that you have to check the stats for the different sites on different locations (e.g nuzzaci.co.uk/mint, nuzzaci.com/mint). The Pros are that you download the whole thing and store everything on your server and your database. So it might be that you pay for it - but it is all yours - no license agreement and no-one can use the data that you store.

3. Google Analytics

   Google’s option. It’s free and all that but I don’t know if I like it. Getting a bit paranoid with Google, and in this case I’d rather support an independent developer and designer than jumping on the large free train. Unlike Mint, with Google Analytics you can have multiple sites on the same account and check them all at one place.

4. Reinvigorate

   Last but not least. A few days ago I got invited to join the beta testing of Reinvigorate.net. It is pretty much a combination of Google Analytics and Mint — multiple site on one place and really nice presentation. I really like it. If this invitation had arrived 2 days earlier I doubt I would have been so quick on updating my Mint account.