Reminds me of Mark Renton’s rant in Trainspotting.

The Racontuers released their second full length studio album, Consolers of the Lonely on vinyl, CD, MP3 and in all other formats and media on 25 Match 2008. There were no promo copies for the media, no ‘first week sales’ stats, no nothing — you and I could hear it at the same time as the reviewers, critics and cynics.

I don’t know about you, but I got the album a few weeks late, and I am absolutely digging it. I am not wild about the White Stripes but I really liked The Racontuers’ first album and I am really liking this — the first 3 tracks are on over-play mode right now on my player.

Defeat at Parkhead the other night for Celtic and they would have needed Robert Mugabe to count the points if they wanted to retain their title.

›› Football pundit Chick Young on the Old Firm clash last week

Apparently, some do.

[Via Reuben Miller]

For me, I think the Sony Foam City sank, not under 460 million litres of foam that was used, but under the weight of expectation that Balls created.

After a very long hiatus, Random Friday Music returns with Modeselektor. If I had bought the Happy Birthday! album before I did my list of top albums from 2007, I can assure you it would have ended up very high on top of the pile. Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary make great genre-defying electronic music that seems to draw a lot of its influence mainly from IDM, glitch, electro and hip hop. Brilliant, ground breaking and thoroughly entertaining, it seems the pair make their music with their own self-made software. This album makes for very good ‘work’ music and comes very highly recommended.

I recently discovered some neat (and not so neat) visual search interfaces

The most impressive (visually speaking) of the lot is Searchme.com — it does the iTunes coverflow thing pretty nicely and neatly in Flash. I love the tiltviewer interface but seeing my search results in that style at Bryns Brain felt a little out-of-place. RedZee has a cute mascot and the fluid circular drag motion for the search results is all done without flash, but it looks kinda sucky.

But at the end of the day, having said all that, the actual search results were truly lousy for all three visual search engines I just mentioned. I’m sticking to Google for now, thanks very much.

One of my favourite writers, Dean Allen, is back online after a long hiatus.

Welcome back, Dean.

My dad came to Singapore as a young boy with absolutely no money and worked incredibly hard his whole life. With a combination of sheer hard work, luck and some help from the Big Guy Upstairs, in just one generation, he managed to break out of the poverty cycle.

I will always remember his tenacity, endurance and determination and will never forget that my dad chose to suffer so that my siblings and I didn’t have to.

Rest in peace, dad. May you find peace and happiness in the life to come.

Jalaludeen Abdul Kasim
28 Jan 1946 - 21 Feb 2008
Father and friend