Musings @musicandmeaning.com

See, I've only had a photograph to drag around.
"He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood." – E. M. Forster

Archive for February, 2005


Tuesday, 15 February 2005

WordPress 1.5 released

In case you missed it…WordPress "Strayhorn" is now available for download. Like all WP users, I’ve anxiously waited for version 1.5 and it’s finally here!

At the end of last year, I announced that I’d switch this blog from MT to WP. I purposely waited for 1.5 before starting the conversion of musings. I’ll install 1.5 here later this week and play around with all of the settings and permalinks before making the switch official.

While waiting for 1.5’s release, I’ve stayed with Movable Type 3.1x and recently opted to render the archives dynamically. I really should have done that sooner — it’s pretty nifty. MT-Blacklist running in the background is also very cool. I’ve been getting a lot more spam hits in the past month, so it’ll be interesting to see how WP fares with comment and trackback spam. (In the WP blogs I have set up, I disabled comments, so I’m not familiar with WP’s anti-spam arsenal.)

Posted at 1:39 am | Filed under Tech/geek | 3 replies »

Friday, 11 February 2005

London calling

Think you know your accents? The BBC has a nifty language lab where you can listen to people’s speech and try to identify their regional accents or the language they’re speaking. (This being the Beeb, "regional" refers to the UK.)

In three attempts (ten questions each), I scored 70%, 80%, and 70%. I apparently have an ear for the Swansea accent, since I got it right both times it came up (and I’ve not been to Wales). Actually, I’d never heard a lot of accents that came up as a choice…e.g. I’d never heard a Bradford accent before (not that I know of, anyway), so I missed that one. And, like The Fat Man of Criticise.me (from whom I found out about this quiz — cheers), I apparently found it difficult to identify Turkish.

I love British accents, and always enjoy learning more of their characteristics. So it was a treat listening to the sound clips and answering the questions. It was also cool listening to people speak in Irish (Gaeilge) and Welsh. One of the choices I saw was Gaelic (which I’m guessing was Scottish Gaelic). I was curious to see how I might do if it came up as a sound clip (I’m more familiar with the Irish Gaelic)…alas, it didn’t.

On a side note, it was also interesting to listen to the content of the speeches. My favorite one was a boy discussing poetry (I won’t mention his accent, in case you take the quiz and get the same sound clip).

Posted at 1:18 am | Filed under Musings & everything else |