Residents Of A Blank Planet ‘Ilosaarirock’ Ships

The long-awaited (or at least long-anticipated (or at the very least long-thought-about-even-though-you-aren’t-a-member-of-ROABP)) Porcupine Tree live album, Ilosaarirock, has shipped! Porcupine Tree posted the news on their site today, as well as the track listing, reprinted here for the lazy:

1. Intro
2. Fear Of A Blank Planet
3. Lightbulb Sun
4. Open Car
5. Anesthetize
6. Blackest Eyes
7. Way Out Of Here
8. Sleep Together
9. Trains
10. Halo

I guess that’s cool. The entire FOABP album makes an appearance, which is great, but the rest of it… Lightbulb Sun, Open Car, Blackest Eyes, Trains, Halo — really? I know they played them for the FOABP tour, but that’s not all they played. It’s not like I need another live recording of Trains. I already have four: XMII, Rockpalast, Arriving Somewhere…, We Lost The Skyline.

In fact, ignoring FOABP tracks, the song on Ilosaarirock that I have the least live copies of is Lightbulb Sun. I have just one, from Warszawa.

I shouldn’t complain though, it’s free and it has all of FOABP.

iTunes DJ

In case you’ve missed the hubbub about iTunes 8.1: Apple has released the new ‘iTunes DJ’ feature for iTunes. What is it? It’s sorta like the old party shuffle, where you queue songs for your party and groove to the rhythm (or whatever), but with a couple things added:

• Sync with Genius (la-de-freakin’-da)
• Request songs with your iPhone/iPod touch

The latter feature is, of course, more impressive, and also completely useless. Like “Woohoo! Let’s make sure our DJ uses iTunes because wouldn’t it be cooler to request a song with my PHONE rather than speak to the guy in person? Alright!”

But it is my opinion that this is simply a marketing ploy by Apple — and a good one to boot. This article, for example, suggests you should only party with people who use Apple products:

Invite your friends over (though only if they have an iPhone or touch, naturally) and let the guests choose the songs.

Clearly you’re not cool unless you have an iPhone. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

Passive Aggression

For one of my final papers, I have the privilege of writing about Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Each core humanities class, such as the one I’m taking, comes equipped with a graduate student “writing intern” who reads and sometimes grades our papers.

My writing intern always insists that we send her digital copies of our papers formatted as “.doc” What she doesn’t understand is that there are quite a few different formats that use the .doc extension. Clearly what she wants is something with MIME type application/msword, but that’s not what she asked for. Furthermore, I resent the idea that she is restricting me to a proprietary format.

Therefore I am not writing my paper in MS Word. I instead am writing it in LaTeX, typsetting it with TeX, and will use the no-longer proprietary application/pdf format. Of course, I don’t want to disobey her request, so I will copy and paste the LaTeX into an MS Word file and send her that. Here’s part of one of the paragraphs she (a divinity school graduate student — not a techie) will have to read:

“All our intuition,” he says, happens only by means of the senses.”\footnote{\S 13 Note II} The basic intuitions we possess are all concepts which relate to the appearances of objects. Kant mentions “extension, place, and more generally space”\footnote{\S 13 Note II} as examples. In fact, he says that representations of space and time exist \emph{only} in intuition,\footnote{\S 12} and this intuition of appearances, or \emph{intuitive sensibility} is the only way through which we can understand or know about an object.

Hopefully in the future she’ll be less of a bitch.