What a crappy 24 hours the last day (March 7th) has been. For those of you who have had problems getting to this site (or many other WordPress blogs), there has been an issue with the Bell Sympatico ISP routing for Canadian customers. To whit, quoting a support forum post by “foolwisdom” of the WordPress staff:

“The issue came to a head last night when we finally identified a routing issue between Bell Canada and one of the IP blocks assigned to us in one of our datacenters in Texas. We have currently routed traffic around the problem area and are working with our provider and Bell Canada to resolve the routing issue.”

And further in the same thread by “barry”, WordPress Key Master:

“Based on the traceroutes we have received from various users and the information we have received from our upstream provider, Bell Cananda is routing traffic destined to one of our IP blocks in a loop. The traffic is not being correctly routed out of the Bell network. This is likely a simple configuration error on their end and may or may not affect their routing of traffic to other IP blocks/websites. Our upstream provider has contacted their Network Operations Center and informed them of the problem, but as Bell Canada customers, it would also probably be helpful if you contact them as well. Unfortunately, since the configuration error is not within our network, there is nothing we can do to fix the problem. As a temporary workaround, I have routed the majority of blog traffic around the problem area for the time being.”

My sincerest gratitude to the WordPress users and Admins who worked so hard to identify the cause of this issue and who did not relent on proving to Bell Sympatico that the problem was with their system and not WordPress, and who proactively created a workaround.

Hello, Matt. I got word while I was working that you had entered the League of Parenthood today. Mom said that you had endured 36 sleepless hours culminating with the safe appearance of little Samantha. I know what you felt and saw.

The fear for your woman’s safety, the lurking guilt that somehow you had caused her discomfort.

The adrenaline, the feeling of being helpless to lessen her pain and fear.

The awareness that you stood upon the edge of no return, about to be thrust into a new reality unknown to you.

The exhaustion, the relentless waiting out the hours, where the clock seems to stand cruelly still in defiance of your wanting the labour to be mercifully quick.

The compulsion to not leave her side even for a second, despite suggestions from nurses and Mom to go eat, take a walking break, perhaps even to nap.

Trying to keep her spirits buoyed and focused on positives.

The brief moments of tenderness and love expressed between you and your woman between contractions, between her small lapses into sleep, giving focus and light like the sun shining momentarily through breaks in the clouds on a stormy afternoon, reminding you that beyond the turbulence is a greater and permanent strength.

Amniotic fluid. Blood.

The appearance of your baby’s head, the first glimpse of her wet hair and face, shock of wonder as she emerged, making three out of what was formerly only two; seeing for the first time the real little person, who for so long had been kept secret from you safely nestled within Erica’s tummy.

The sudden and total nullification of your importance by a small, pink, wet newborn, the joyous, soul-cutting sound of her first cry, proclaiming her being and protesting her having been hurled from her familiar warm, dark abode into this realm of sharp sounds, smells, bright light, alien colours and chilly air.

The crash of emotions. Your breath arresting in your chest as your eyes begin to fill with tears of relief, of amazement, of being blown totally away from what has happened, of feeling the former You sliding away into memory, because you are now irrevocably changed, both of you, and bound together more tightly from this wondrous thing.

The strangeness of now being Dad. A greater appreciation of your own dad. Wondering if your wife still loves you after all that. (She does, and needs you now more than ever.)

Then later, sitting next to your sleeping wife, holding Samantha, talking quietly to her in adoration, taking in the magic of her soft breathing, her eyes, her tiny hands and feet… wondering about the future – feeling hopes and dreams begin to coalesce, seeing fleeting images of times to come and the years ahead. The mantle of responsibility. Wondering how on earth a schmuck like yourself can raise her, see her through it all safely.

You will, dear brother, you and Erica together. The first few months are the hardest for both of you, but you’ll get through it. The ride has just begun.

A kiss to Erica and little Samantha; to you a hug, a handshake and a cigar.

Welcome to the fold of Parenthood.

Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament – Game Of The Year (“GOTY”), UT’99, or just plain UT, call it what you will. Now an older game and eclipsed by the current attention garnered by the new Unreal Tournament 3, this version still has great gameplay and a strong following of devotees. I was asked by a fellow PCLinuxOS’er how to get this working, so here is a quick summary for anyone else interested or having trouble. I tried previously to run UT using Wine but after a while, something broke and I couldn’t run the game anymore. This method has proven to be solid.

1. Go to http://www.princessleia.com/UT.php and download the custom-made Debian installer file, ut-install-436-goty.run. Make sure the file properties has “Is Executable” checked.

2. Make sure your game CD 1 is in the CD drive (or DVD drive, as I have) before you run the script. Some installer instructions say you need to mount the CD-ROM media first, but I didn’t find this necessary. [EDIT:  Depending on individual configurations, some users will not have their preferences set to automount removable media.  Thus if the installer does ask you to mount the CD-ROM, simply open Konqueror, click on the Storage Media in the sidebar, and you'll see the CD in the main window.  Right click on it and select 'Mount', then return to the installer and hit retry.]

3. Open a terminal in the directory where you saved the installer file. You need to be root to run it. Type “su root” and enter the password, then enter “./ut-install-436-goty.run” (or use the sudo method – “sudo ./ut-install-436-goty.run”). The installer will spin the files off the CD and unpack them to /usr/local/games/ut, and prompt for the second CD.

4. When you insert CD 2, wait for PCLinuxOS to auto-open either the Konqueror window with the disc contents or the ‘what do you want to do with this media’ dialog. Close it, then hit the installer’s ‘retry’ button when ready. [EDIT:  When the installer is almost finished, it will appear to hang.  If you look in the terminal window you will see that it is in fact unpacking the maps during this time and is still working.  Don't interrupt it.]

5. When the installer is finished, do NOT hit the button to play the game as this will create a player file in the root directory which will not be available to you as regular user. Quit the installer.

6. (Optional) Create a desktop icon for the game: Right-click on the desktop, select to Create New –> Link to Application. Name it ‘Unreal Tournament GOTY’ or whatever you wish. Under the Application tab, simply put ‘ut‘ in the “Command:” text box. You can also grab an Unreal Tournament logo off the web and use it as the image for the icon if you want. Clicking this new applink will open a desktop terminal and execute the game launcher. Alternatively, if after installation, Unreal Tournament appears in your K menu, you can drag from there to your desktop to create a shortcut.

7. If for whatever reason you need to remove or uninstall UT99 from your system, simply navigate to the /usr/local/games/ut folder and delete it. You will also have to delete the .loki/ut folder in your home partition.

8. Tweak your /usr/local/games/ut/System/UnrealTournament.ini file in the [Core.System] section, change the value of “PurgeCacheDays=30” to a larger value. Essentially, this is the cache that stores maps pulled from the servers. You will have to re-download the maps you previously retrieved if they are wiped from this cache. Not a serious thing for most, but it does waste valuable time, especially for those with slower net connections.

There is no need run a patch after this since the installer script is already patched to bring UT to the latest 436 version.

At this time I am unclear as to how one can add extra maps and mods. Simply dragging them to /usr/local/games/ut/Maps, etc. doesn’t work, and doing so will break the install. I’ll post further on a solution when found.

As of the beginning of November, there are a huge number of updates for PCLinuxOS 2007 available in the repositories. Many of the packages are upgrades to core system files. PCLinuxOS 2007 is a totally different build than its previous versions, with the intention to be a continually upgradeable distro rather than one with limited life, the advantage being that the user will not have to completely reinstall their OS to upgrade to the next and near-future version releases. This first massive batch of updates/upgrades appears to be the first implementation of that functionality (there were 355 upgrades installed in my system).

While it is recommended to upgrade all available packages, doing so will install newer X11 video drivers (ati, vesa, fglrx, fbdev) which will bork the 3D acceleration etc. once again by changing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Sadly, I couldn’t get proper operation with any of the new video drivers.

The solution is: firstly, DON’T PANIC. The new updates greatly simplify installing the proprietary ATI driver package, and the solution is this:

1. Uninstall the previous proprietary ATI driver package as described for removing old drivers at the beginning of the post “How-To: ATI Radeon X1600 With PCLinuxOS 2007″.
2. Download and install the latest X1600 series installer package from ATI here. (ati-driver-installer-8.42.3-x_86.x86_64.run). Do NOT bother with rebooting between steps, just run the installer as root in the same terminal window you used to uninstall the old ATI software.
3. Remember to run ‘aticonfig –initial’ immediately after the install completes.
4. Power the machine right off and then boot up again.

That’s it, no other config needed. It just works. Run the ‘glxgears’ command to make sure. [Edit: if you run glxgears and your frame rate is low (60 fps or so), your config was not run properly. Type "aticonfig --inital -f" in a terminal as root to force the config. Reboot. Run glxgears again and the fps should be around 3000.]

Note: I removed the new ‘radeontools’ package with Synaptic because according to the version notes, it is still a work in progress.

Once again it is the time of year when we remember the ultimate sacrifice paid by the men and women of our armed forces in securing freedom not only for ourselves but also those of distant nations, by wearing a red poppy on our attire, symbolic firstly of those who served, died and were buried in WWII in Flanders Fields and elsewhere, but secondly of the deeds of those who survived, and by extension, all those who have similarly sacrificed and served in the decades since that hellish chapter of history in various other conflicts.

Inevitably each year in advance of Remembrance Day, the problem of how to securely fasten the poppy to a garment with its straight pin arises. I have heard and read of numerous ideas to prevent it from slipping loose, with some solutions being temporary at best, others a waste of effort.

The method I will describe is ridiculously simple, requires no extra materials and is guaranteed to fix the poppy resolutely in place, while remaining easy to remove if so desired. A considerable bit of force would be required to tear it off.

It is this: attach the poppy as usual, passing the pin through the fabric of the garment, but then back the pin up a bit and push it through the curled edge of the poppy so it effectively acts like a brooch.

I don’t believe this method is new, but I have yet to see anyone else employ it, not even service personnel or veterans. I’m hoping it will catch on and end the annual poppy-pin conundrum. This needless little aggravation should no longer mar the wearing of such an important symbol.

I’m sure that a percentage of poppy sales are actually replacement purchases for lost pins. This method will make certain you won’t lose yours – but might result in a decline in poppy sales if adopted by enough people! I certainly won’t advocate something that will reduce the revenues collected by veterans, so I make this suggestion: when you see a poppy box, regardless of the fact that you won’t require another pin, make a donation anyhow. It will be appreciated.

And by the way, to some of you: the proper place to wear the poppy is over the heart, not on the brim of a hat like fishing tackle, or other demeaning places. The difference actually means something to the people around you.

So it’s Hallowe’en. What does that mean?

Sure, the night everybody dresses up and trick-or-treats. We all know that. But why should that be? What precursor to our tradition of putting on superstitions and glutting on candy gathered door-to-door?

Modern society seems to have largely lost any recollection of why it is that we (well, mostly just our kids anymore) should engage in actions that would appear to an uninformed outsider as mass insanity featuring an untoward preoccupation with devilish themes.

Well, here is the explanation, which is as fascinating and entertaining as it is also disturbing.

What we now call Hallowe’en, October 31^st, is in the Celtic calendar Nos Calan Gaeaf – the end of the year; November 1^st is their New Year’s Day, and has been so since the time of the druids. Calan Gaeaf is the night straddling a magical moment – the gap between the old year and the new. And this is when the trouble arises.

I quote Nikolai Tolstoy in The Coming Of The King, a novel woven from fact and lore of the British Isles:

Kalan Gaeaf is the name borne by that unchancy day, but in truth it could be called “No-day.” For it belongs not to the year or the seasons, or to the ageing of the world. It is the allotted time of Him they call the Black Pig, and so it stands beside time. It is said that when the gods first divided up the mounds of the Fair Folk [faeries] and the inhabited places of the earth among themselves, that deceitful Horned One came to where Bran the Blessed and the company of the gods were gathered about the dark-blue Cauldron of Inspiration, demanding that he, too, receive his portion from that cauldron from which no one may depart unsatisfied.

“I have nothing for thee,” replied the Fisher King, his brow darkening. “The division is completed.”

“Then give me,” pleaded the Trickster, “a day and a night in your own dwelling.”

“That I will do willingly,” replied Bran smiling.

Next day the Trickster was ordered to depart to his own people, for his time was up. The nine maidens blew upon the fires that heat the cauldron, and the gods looked mockingly upon the enemy of mankind. But it was he that laughed scornfully as he left their company; for, as he said, “I see now that Night and Day are the whole world, and it is that which you have given me.”

Then Bran and his company saw how they were deceived, for there is Time and No-time, and Space and No-space, and in each case it is the latter that the horned maleficent one has appropriated to himself. So it is that from that day forward it is he who rules over the Wasteland, and the gap between the years when there is no time and the frontiers of kingdoms and the rule of kings are annulled.

So the eve of the New Year is in fact a ‘thin place’ as the Celts termed it, a unique mix of time and location where the barrier between the real and spirit worlds evaporates, and passage can be made from one to the other. Tolstoy then describes the coming of the Wild Hunt which Cernun the Horned God leads on this his given night:

The Wild Hunt is passing overhead, the host of fiends and goblins that ranges the earth each Kalan Gaeaf, coursing through a storm-laden, livid sky behind their master, Gwyn mab Nud. Fiends and goblins, swart and hairy, extinguishing fires, ripping slats from roofs, and plucking babies from their cradles, they course in reckless exultation over the lonely homesteads of abandoned men. One night of lawless rule was Bran the Blessed deceived into granting the Trickster, and on it he exacts his toll of terror. Before the Wild Hunt flies the baying pack of the Hounds of Hell; glittering bright white is their colour, their ears red; the redness of their ears glitters as brightly as does the whiteness of their bodies. Behind skims a shadowy flock of copper-red birds, wide of wing and crooked of beak, blighting crops and slaughtering cattle with their poisoned breath.

So all night long the Wild Hunt battered the world, with people cowering within their dwellings in fear of the madness at their doors.

So it also makes sense that I remember being told as a boy that masks and costumes originated as a defence against the hordes – that by disguising themselves as devils and fiends, people would be perceived by the evil hosts as one of their own – and thus could be overlooked and escape unmolested. Pumpkins and gourds were carved into Jack-O’-Lanterns – effectively gargoyles – to further ward off the evil, carried about or set to guard property.

The knocking at the doors and the offering of treats is symbolic of attempts to appease the devils who come rattling the thresholds to do mischief. Picture demons threatening to toss eggs and soap windows.

By morning, the Hordes flee back to the halls of Annufn, or the Underworld, to bide their time until the next Calan Gaeaf. My kids will retreat to feast on carbohydrates, gum and chocolate for a whole month.

And the partying? That part is the Celtic New Year festivities. The sigh of relief after the storm and the celebration of the harvest.

So that, in a nutshell, is the substance behind the 31^st of October in its modern form.

The name Hallowe’en? All Hallows’ Evening. As in the night before All Hallows’ Day, or All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1^st which was instituted by Pope Boniface IV in the seventh century in what historians suspect was an attempt “to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday” (yet another example of the Church’s historic efforts to compete with and render irrelevant the traditions and beliefs of nonchristian peoples).

You want the ultimate Hallowe’en costume? Here’s Tolstoy’s depiction of the Black Pig (brace yourself):

Out of the heart of this satanic brood a huge black horse appeared, from whose saddle sprang the colossal figure of the Master of the Wild Hunt. Over the recumbent form of the stricken saint he limped, a dreadful figure, naked save for a golden torque about his neck, green and hirsute, towering far above the height of mortal men. Forth from his bony forehead branched antlers broad as those of a roebuck in his prime, sprouting amidst upswept, spikey, flamelike hair – [...] His gaze was fierce and smoldering, his saturnine features furred by a reddish-coloured beard, and his full-spread scarlet lips twisted in a malevolent grin. His hands were long and clawed, his belly buttoned by parallel rows of naked udders, while a great hairy phallus swung between his sinewy goat’s thighs. About his left arm was coiled a broad-backed, writhing, ram-headed serpent, and in his right hand he bore an ebony-handled trident. This, then, was Gwyn mab Nud, in whom God has put the ferocity of the fiends of Annufn.

Yikes. Luckily, my kids are going out dressed as Darth Vader, Princess Leia and a Unicorn.

Happy Celtic New Year – er, Hallowe’en.

Earlier this month, the band Radiohead set up a single, enigmatic website disclosing very little information – other than the invitation to preorder a copy, in one of two formats (mp3 download or shipped CD set), of their latest album In Rainbows which was released on October 10th. Regardless of which choice was made, you were then sent to a featureless purchase page confirming your selection with an empty text box for the price, and a question mark next to that which linked to a page stating simply to name your price.

The cost was to be whatever you thought it was worth. $10? $40? $0? It was up to you. Having such a choice was startling, coming from a for-profit band, even for persons like myself who are accustomed to legally filesharing free music from websites like Jamendo.

As the story unfolded, about 30% of the takers paid nothing, with most others paying varying amounts up to the $1000 which one enthusiastic buyer unloaded for it, and a company that supposedly dropped $10,000 – although whether they were buying the CD set or the album rights was unclear.

It was obvious then that regardless of not having actually asked for any money at all for their work, Radiohead were making good coin. Their ingenious marketing strategy was like a fundraising campaign, but without the publicity. That was supplied automatically as the news spread rapidly through social content sites like Digg and Reddit, and then as news in the mainstream media. Radiohead eliminated the huge expenses normally incurred for advertising and promotion of a new album in this way, and you begin to see how they could come out on top – when there are enough curious takers from a worldwide base of this novel approach who find themselves willing – or perhaps feeling compelled – to pay even a minimal price. People didn’t even have to be fans of the band to be drawn by the mystery, the prospect of a free album, or both.

So why did I pay nothing to download the album? For the simple reason that I had no information on the product. Although the mere presence of the payment amount box on the page nags for you to enter a value greater than zero (and hence perhaps the psychological reason why many did pay at least something), there was no way for me to ascertain a value for the album, given that there were no reviews, song lists, or even a faint indication of the genre of the music. I know next to nothing of the band or their works, and so when presented with the opportunity to take an unknown for free, I did the obvious.

I can say that having listened to it, the downloaded album is a .ZIP file of 10 songs in mp3 format, has a total play time of 42m 38s, and is hard to pin down with a single description of style. It’s rather moody and trancey soft rock, peppy in some tracks and slow and pensive in others, a touch jazzy and very sentimental, and would probably fetch about $20 without objections from a store shelf. Remember, though, that’s for the download – I would undoubtedly rate the CD set with its extra material at a higher value, and just might purchase it soon.

+=

No, seriously. Putting these two together really can end in love and happiness! I figured out by trial and error how to get this to work, and the magic seems to be with rebooting between steps. No more tearing hair out and embarassing bald patches.

These instructions will get an ATI X1600Pro 256Mb PCI Express video card working with full 3D acceleration in PCLinuxOS 2007. At least, it did on my AMD Sempron 3 Ghz, 768 Mb RAM + ECS 761GX-M754 mobo. I’m hoping the many who ran into difficulty using ATI cards in PCLinuxOS will find this useful.

1. Download the Radeon X1600 driver package from ATI Driver Downloads. Save it to the /home folder. The filename is
   ati-driver-installer-8.38.6-x86.x86_64.run.
   I use this one because I found it worked best for me.

2. Open Synaptic and uninstall any and all ATI and fglrx driver related packages – this includes the ati and ati_legacy packages.

3. Make sure the bootloader is set to clear /tmp at boot. I did this just to make sure there was nothing of previous steps left floating around after each boot.

4. Restart the system. Enter the BIOS and check to make sure the Aperture setting is at 128Mb. Exit the BIOS and continue the PCLinuxOS bootup.

5. The X server should fail to initialize for the login screen, and you should see a text login prompt. (If not, reboot into Failsafe mode.) Log in as Root.

6. If any ATI graphics drivers from ati.amd.com were previously installed, remove them now by typing the command

   sh ./fglrx-uninstall.sh

   The uninstaller will indicate that the system environment has been restored. Reboot again after removal and log in again as Root.

7. Navigate to the /home directory containing the downloaded ATI package, e.g. type the path “cd /home/[your username]” and run the installer script by typing the command

   sh ./ati-driver-installer-8.38.6-x86.x86_64.run

   The driver installer dialog box will appear. Agree to the license, etc.

8. Select the Automatic option, not Custom or the Generate Distribution Specific Driver Package options. Let the installer run its course.

9. When finished, type the command

   aticonfig –initial  -f

   and reboot again, logging in again as Root.

10. Type the command

    video

    and in the video settings dialog box, select the ati-fglrx driver (reply ‘Yes’ when asked to use the proprietary driver), and if possible, select a screen resolution with a refresh rate greater than 60Hz but still within your monitor’s range (I had to set mine to 1280×1024 @ 16bpp, 60Hz since the other rates were out of range for my monitor). Select to test the settings. At this point the screen will go dark for a moment as the X server is initialized. If you do not see colour bars with the “Are these the correct settings Y/N?” box, just wait until the screen returns to the video config dialog and try new settings. Once you have these set right, reboot again. [EDIT Jan '08: Recent updates to PCLinuxOS 2007 have altered the way the ATI driver options are listed both using the "video" setup and in the PCLinuxOS Control Centre: the card is now only identified as "Radeon X1300 and higher". The fglrx option has been removed.]

11. Log in as your usual user. Open a terminal and type the command

    glxgears

    If all is well, a small window will pop up with an animation of spinning gears, and the terminal window will start listing timed frames per second (FPS) rates.

12. If you check your video card settings in the PCLinuxOS Control Centre, it will show ‘ATI Radeon (fbdev)’, but the Xorg driver will still be fglrx, so don’t worry about that.

    I have also seen it recommended on the PCLinuxOS forums to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to include the following:

Section “DRI”
Mode 0666
EndSection

You can adjust the gamma of the screen by opening the ATI Catalyst Control Centre which is now in your start menu and adjusting the locked color sliders to the right.

Enjoy your working graphics.

See also my post, “Update: Radeon X1600 and PCLinuxOS 2007″.

If anyone has any comments or finds any errors in my method, speak up! Leave a comment.

On Sunday the 16^th of September, a passenger plane bearing 123 passengers and 5 crew crashed due to windshear and heavy rain on the island of Phuket, Thailand.

The initial death count was 66 with 19 missing. As I write this, the dead have risen to 89.

Before I begin to comment, although I am no person of significance, I want to offer the families and friends of the victims, both deceased and yet suffering, my most sincere respects for their loss and earnest wishes for inner peace in the immediate shadow of this tragedy and in their progress through and beyond their dark time.

For so many lives to have been lost and others to have been so dramatically and painfully changed in such a circumstance is certainly an injustice. In the news coverage that poured forth from this, something I read, mentioned briefly, brought me to a full stop and then filled me with such loathing that I felt I must not remain silent about it. I want to address yet another injustice suffered by the dead, dying, and injured, secondary only to being hurled to obliteration from the sky.

This consists of words uttered by a certain Millie Furlong, a Canadian vacationing on the island, who survived the crash: “My boyfriend is all right. When we both got out – he’s Buddhist and I’m Christian – and we both said, ‘Our gods are looking after us.’” Her sister here at home was quoted as saying “God was definitely watching out for her.” To be fair, Ms. Furlong is probably not the only one thanking her god. But therein lies the rub.

It is truly a good thing that Ms. Furlong emerged from the crash so unscathed, as did her companion. I would not like to see her receive any other outcome. But the implication of her words is that no gods chose to help those who did not emerge whole from that carnage; the others can only have been forsaken, being of lesser or no worth. The fact that where she sat – “in the 23^rd row in the back” of the plane – is regarded as being in the area in which one is most likely to survive a crash, is just as or more likely relevant to the survival of herself and the few others as any involvement of the supernatural.

The celebrated oncologist Dr. Robert Buckman, M.D., Ph.D., in his wonderful book Can We Be Good Without God?, discusses this very phenomenon of survivors and faith, and it was his intelligent insight that came immediately to mind. I quote, with some paraphrasing:

We have all read stories like that. For example, in September 1999 there was a horrendous traffic accident involving about eighty vehicles on a highway near Windsor, Ontario. A great deal of fuel was spilled and several vehicles caught fire, resulting in the deaths of seven people. Among the survivors, one woman said that God had been looking after her in there. “God was with me”, she said. “He had to be.” [...] In the same story it was reported that a fourteen-year-old girl had died in that same accident, and that people had tried to rescue her but were beaten back by the flames. She had cried out to them, “Help me, I’m only fourteen!”

…Did the survivor genuinely mean that there was a God who looked over that accident and chose to preserve the life of the woman and to end the life of the girl? I doubt it. It is highly unlikely that if the survivor had been asked the question directly she would have said, “Yes, I am sure that God intended that poor young girl to die” Of course she would not have said that – yet that is the inescapable implication of the story.

There are two ways of seeing this kind of selectivity in catastrophes. One way is to accept that there genuinely is a divine plan and that yes, God did intend the young girl to die, and that we humans are unworthy to understand the final and perfect objective of that plan. [...] The opposing view is just as simple and intelligible. It is this: the survivor’s claim of divine protection is no more than – and no less than – a perfectly normal reaction to horror. It is socially acceptable (which is why stories like these are on the news all the time) and it is a natural, innate coping strategy that we all use in the face of overwhelming catastrophe. It gives us all, when we survive a tragedy, a sense of meaning. [...] The point is that when confronted with a disaster, most people seek an explanation that involves a plan or design for the universe…

Dr. Buckman’s career certainly qualifies him to speak on human nature in meaninglessly tragic and grave circumstances. His practise involves counselling and caring for patients who are terminally ill with cancer.

So the suggestion that the survivors of the Phuket crash had God with them may at least be explained, if not excused.

Bethan Jones, 22, of the U.K. also survived the crash, and at this time languishes in agony in hospital with burns to 80% of her body, and is not expected to live. I somehow doubt that she shares the same view of Divine Providence as Ms. Furlong. There are others like Ms. Jones, and most likely Christians and Buddhists like Ms. Furlong and her boyfriend, living their final hours in undeserved suffering; who along with their grieving families and friends may also be counted as being outside God’s grace according to this shallow, egocentric logic.

May the gods, if there are any, forgive the assertion of worth by those fortunate enough to still speak.

Info sources:

The Telegraph

Reuters

The Globe And Mail

And it’s all LEGAL.

Jamendo is a community website of musicians who have made their albums free for listening and download under the Creative Commons license. The site is based in France and boasts (currently – the numbers are growing) over 59,000 album tracks in over 4,800 albums of just about every style of music, including many kinds this uncultured boy has never heard of. I think its really interesting and addictive, so here’s a writeup for anyone interested.

Cost: $0, or voluntary donation to the artist(s)

Requirements: filesharing software to handle torrent files (uTorrent, aMule, Azureus, BitTorrent, etc)

At the main page, you are presented with three choice boxes – 1 is a sort of FAQ, 2 is titled “Listen” and is filled with a shortlist of style tags, and the third box lets you register. There is no registration required, and is only necessary if you want to create your own on-site playlists or if you are a musician wanting to join the action. So, skipping right to ‘how it works’, let’s select the “Rock” tag.

You now are on a page of albums with the Rock tag, and clicking on each album will give you a page summarizing the album and showing tracks. However, I found that clicking on the track doesn’t open the ‘Jamendo Player’ and play the song, perhaps due to my setup – I get a dialog box that asks how I want to export an M3U playlist. (Maybe because I’m using Firefox?) Back on the Albums page, you will notice that as you mouse over each album, a small tooltip sidebar opens with the options to Download, Listen, Star, Review/Blog or Tell A Friend. I found Listen doesn’t go for me here either. So, this is how I got around it for those having the same issue:

At the top of any Jamendo page, click on ‘Open the Jamendo Player’. You’ll get a tidy popup box with play controls at the top and a left column of options – choose “Jamendo Library”. This will list every available artist in the database on the left, and selecting one displays their albums on the right and songs below. Now you can click on the little speaker beside each song and listen away. Peruse the main browser page of albums, then when you see one that you like, switch over to the Jamendo Player, scroll down to that artist and select the album from there. If you like what you hear, go back to the album page and select to download it.

The browser page will go dim and a popup will appear giving the options to download on BitTorrent or eMule (just click on BitTorrent if you have any torrent program). But before you click it, be sure to select below that whether you want .mp3 or .ogg file format. Next, your torrent program kicks in to handle the rest, and soon the music is all yours. Download speeds from Jamendo are usually lightning fast, too – on average over 400 kbps I’ve found.

Since the music is from a variety of countries and in a variety of languages, it can get confusing if you’re searching for English-language songs. In general, I found that if the album name is in English as well as the description, regardless of country of origin, it’s probably sung in English or a mix. But a lot of the material is also instrumental, so this doesn’t matter.

There’s some damn good music to be had from here. Check it out and enjoy.

www.jamendo.com