Due to a steady degradation in my attention span (something to do with dying brain cells, no doubt) I have decided that I will be updating my tumblr  more so than this here wordpress blog. So if you are so inclined please give this a loving click.

For most people there is absolutely no need for a DIY install DVD for the “world’s most advanced system”. However paranoia does run roughshod over some people’s psyche (not forgetting people who obtained the OS through more clandestine methods) and hence this howto :

1. After upgrading /installing Snow Leopard (optional as you can also follow the same procedure within Leopard), fire up Disk Utility

2. With the original DVD still in the tray, select it from the list on the left

3. Go to File > New > Disk Image From “Mac OSX Install DVD”

4. Under “Image Format” select “DVD/CD master”. For encryption select “None”

5. Click on save and go for a jog

6. You should end up with a file ending with “.cdr” in which ever folder you saved it in. (by default “Documents”)

7. I then used Toast Titanium version 10 to burn it as a Disc Image.

8. The end product is a shiny cloned install disk. The most important thing is that it is bootable.

NB – I initially chose the option “read/write” under “Image Format” but ended up with a non-bootable DVD which is pretty much a coaster.

Exactly how and why Radiohead’s Kid A has come to stand as the definitive artistic statement for rock consumers born after 1975 is almost ridiculously difficult to discern. People believed (and continue to believe) in the metaphysical heft of Kid A : in its aesthetic worth, its innovation, its meaning. In 2000, Kid A felt true and inscrutable; five years later, it somehow still does: From its chilling opening organ figure to its closing silence, Kid A is enormous– a huge, sweeping testament to Radiohead’s ever-swelling worldview.

Kid A was an obvious departure from its predecessor, the guitar-swollen OK Computer , and it alternately challenged and confounded Radiohead’s core audience. Regardless, the record’s supposed difficulty also lent it a certain sense of gravity: Kid A is confrontational and insistent, mysteriously capable of convincing some of the most stridently anti-electro guitarheads that inorganic flourishes can feel bloody and real. Consequently, in the months following its release, Kid A transformed into an intellectual symbol of sorts, a surprisingly ubiquitous signifier of self. Owning it became “getting it”; getting it became “annointing it.” The record’s significance as a litmus test was stupid and instant and undeniable: In certain circles, you were only as credible as your relationship to this album. And that kind of intense, unilateral, with-us-or-against-us fandom felt oddly, uncomfortably apropos in the face of all that sound.

It is in this weird sense that Kid A was (and continues to be) the perfect record for its time: Ominous, surreal, and impossibly millennial, its revolutionary tangle of yelpy, apocalyptic vocals, glitchy synths, and beautiful drones is uncertain about both its past and present– and, accordingly, timeless. –Amanda Petrusich

I love this review by Amanda Petrusich on Pitchfork for one album that held a lot of bad memories for me. It inevitably became the soundtrack to a very bad personal patch.

Recommendations from the health authorities in China for would be astronauts. More here.

Great photos of boys gone wild

More from the photographer Clark Little.

Some time between noon and the end of the working day, this blog registered its 100, 000th hit. In the grand scheme of things, this is probably a piss in the ocean. Fittingly so, I feel absolutely nothing at all.

Vertical traction kit with door strap assembly and head halter

Any wonder why this thing is discontinued?