Personally, I am not much of a ballad-liker, no fan of over romantic tunes. But there certainly are some exceptions. Ben Fold Five’s “Evaporated” can make me quiver, Nick Drake’s “Fruit Tree” tightens my throat a tad and Cerys Matthew’s “Open Road” does things as well. That said, it is seldom that a ballad drives me to a band or introduces me to a songwriter. Typically, the ballads are the ones that sink in last, long after my interest was solidified by some proper other song. Well, it happens nonetheless. I recently stumbled across (credits to aurgasm) a man by the name of Ferraby Lionheart who’s meat, I might add, is not writing ballads but who does just that pretty well. Dunno if it’s the voice, the pretty string arrangements or whatnots but I must say the first song on his latest album Catch The Brass Ring that got to me is the one I present to you here, today,…read more

Someone may have noticed that my FQDN was not available for the last couple of days. I was down with the flu and my original webspace was finally removed (that is, the old webpack with which the domain was originally ordered). For some yet unknown reason that messed up the DNS… actually, the reason is not really unknown. The AUTODNS from hosteurope was effected by the final changes in my contract (last month both the VPS and the webpack were running parallel). The AUTODNS was obviously reset or something when the webpack was removed. Anyways… I configured bind9 and then read up on the AUTODNS; I decided to de-activate bind and only use the AUTODNS system offered by my host (PDNS and SDNS) as I only have a single domain anyways and don’t need anything fancy. Just in case someone wondered.

Have you ever been caught by a moment in a movie; sat up straight after loosely hanging in the armchair for an hour… put all eating and drinking to a halt in order to entirely devote your focus to a scene? It could be within the last minutes of a good movie, the grand finale, a monologue to some special tune. It could be at the beginning of a movie, some quiet scene, that simply grabs your attention. In most cases such gripping scenes are made by the music: add some Snoop Dog to the final farewell and it goes unnoticed. I find that most of the times the music can be enjoyed after the movie, without the moving images, because it helps recall what that moment was like. I find that the pieces that stick are the ones tainted with melancholia, the ones that make you feel lonely and sad or, less often, the ones that have a satisfying climax, a burst in to the main theme. What I suggest here are no tunes from seedy, second class B-films w…read more