Sunny Breaks

Heard the kling-klang of church bells while walking through town this morning. Don’t know how regularly they do that, maybe something special was going down. But I do know that the oldest church in geelong, and therefore one of the oldest in victoria doesn’t have bells—it has a PA system bolted onto the tower and they stick on a tape of bells klanging. Can’t decide if it’s a terrible thing or a funny thing.
Since I hadn’t heard these bells it sounded pretty cool. If they’re pulling ropes then they’ve got good timing because there was about six or seven notes in decending order.
I was wondering why I hadn’t heard a whole bunch of bells inserted into some electronic music. Maybe bells are way more common an event in other parts a la that monty python sketch where they’re getting closer and louder.
What, with the history I bet they got some kick-arse boomin’ bass bells over in Europe. And paradoxically, while they church would probably never be into lending their bell assets to modern composers (or even phillip glass probably) — it’s the one thing that might draw new people toward it.
Some strains of buddhists have bells too. Only modestly sized, but they hit them with railway sleepers thus going super-bassy.
But I don’t know how well those really deep notes would translate to recorded media. Probably not very well – live gigs would work though. I think the most accurately reproduced sounds I’ve heard are ‘narrow’ ones like air liquide stick a digital watch “cheep-cheep, cheep-cheep” sound in one of their tracks. The first time I heard It I was looking around for appliances or whatever the hell was going off.

I got dropline-gnome working and what I can see of it is very neat. The mouse cursor has come up anti-aliased and with a drop shadow. Slackware is continuing to shape up nicely. Had a go at installing Vector Linux 3.2 (which is based on Slack) today, but its installer was crap and wouldn’t detect the DVD.

Jon’s mentioned streaming radio a few times lately. It’s something I’ve never had a proper look at. I do remember that OS X has streaming as part of iTunes very nicely integrated. I’m sure there’s something here, but nothing obvious in the way of streaming apps on Linux. Xmms’l probably do it even, I just haven’t tried it.

Feeling a bit like the spikey half of velcro except colder.