RIP, Alex Chilton

I hate the way that magazines like Mojo write eulogies about recently deceased "stars". One of thie phrases is "they also served" - how crappy does that sound? That you never really made it to tier 1 celebrity status, so that in death we write about your career as a footnote to the big star that died last month? It is done in a fawning and obsequious manner, suggesting that (insert star here) couldn't have possibly risen to the levels he did without the help of (poor hapless 2nd rate muso). Really, in the language of transatlantica, it sucks. Possibly as much as being dead...

Take this month's issue of Mojo's "Real Gone" page - Lena Horne. Now I'm fine with having her in the obituary pages of a serious paper - as a singer, she was the first black superstar, as the headline notes. But really, it isn't for the pages of Mojo. Ronnie James Dio, Steve New, and Stuart Cable all bought the farm this month. Steve New did some brilliant and often overlooked work with the Rich Kids (the first "punk/New Wave" supergroup?). My opinion is that he was probably more deserving and relevant recipient of the full page with the 'headline'.

This brings me to my point, and the title of this entry - the untimely death of Alex Chilton in March. Very few people in the UK really understood or had ever heard of Big Star - I'd have never sought them out if I hadn't spent valuable homework time listening to Radio Caroline in my youth - and in the UK, the most recognisable piece of work he ever did was arguably "In the streets", the theme tune to "That 70's show". Yet, in the mid 70's Alex and Big Star produced a body of work in their three/four albums that still brim over with ideas and creativity that makes them sound apart from their contemporaries and, (cliche alert) ahead of their time.

I was upset when I heard he had died, as he was down on my list of people to see before I died. My friend Ed sent me a soundboard recording of a live gig from the late 80's which I listened to by way of a tribute, but all it did was crystallise the "what a waste" feeling I had into something approaching real loss. I don't often get that from a dead "rock star" (sorry Ronnie James Dio, but I'm not about to track down your finest work, even in death), and I feel like I do when I know that a favourite author is no longer producing work - for example, I have three unread John Steinbeck works to read that I have been saving because once I've read them, I'll never be able to enjoy the delight of discovering another "Doc" or "Jeb".

Thank you Alex, for the music you created that was thoughtful, tuneful, and inspiring. I can't admit that you featured on every mixtape I ever put together, but songs like "September Gurls" or "Thirteen" will always remind me of a time past - and I don't think I can think of a higher accolade than that.

I think Robyn Hitchcock (another Alex Chilton afficionado) put it quite well, when he said "Myriad musical roads met in Alex, and he diverted their course to his own artistic purposes with much grace and few illusions."

Mac on a shoestring.

It was the last time I lost all my data to a virus in 1999 that made me wonder if there was a better way of improving the lot of the average computer user. Windows, whatever version, is a large target for any malware author, so I began with a brief switch to linux/aix and solaris - which worked to an extent for me, in that it stopped me doing real paid work and let me waste my time with incessant fiddling with init.d and assorted shell scripts. An education, sure, but it didn't put food on the table. And then Lotus/IBM dropped the unix client for Lotus Notes and I was forced back into the misery of windows.

Guess what - more viruses, more BSODs and generally more misery - plus reduced battery life that meant I had a laptop that wouldn't last the hour and a half commute to work. During this brief sojourn I was still keeping one eye on OS X - an OS that I had known, loved and used as NextStep for many years. I even had a black NeXT cube at one point, but I digress. In 2002 then, I bought my first mac for many years, a cube. I maxed it out to 1.5gb, I upgraded it left right and centre to run the fastest processor going, and set about seeing what the delta was between XP and OS X. Well, I was pleased at the time that MS Office presented no issues, all the Adobe products I might use were there, and wow, there was a Lotus Notes client....sadly though, it didn't work. Well, it did, but it didn't understand fonts at all, and rendered most of my work as unintelligable gibberish. Nevermind, I thought, Virtual PC should solve this. It didn't. I ended up with an inane mix of a small PC running on my network that I remotely ran via VNC. This wasn't ideal, but OK. So - I became a mac user. I especially loved the fact that the terminal program would do a delightful green on black to make me feel child-like again...

Then in 2005/6 Apple announced it was going to move to the intel platform, and since then I have followed the antics of a community of people that are committed (or they should be) to running

OS X on non-apple hardware. I've tried it several times - and actually lived with one for a year or so, but nothing seemed to quite match the Apple hardware....until last year. Quite by chance, I bought a Dell 490 for a client and noticed that it's spec was identical to the then current Mac Pro. So I had a go at installing OS X on it. Well, I'm still using it. I can't let go of it. It has 32gb ram and two quad core xeons. I'm sure you'll agree that is overkill for most things, but for the first time in - oh, 10 years, I have a proper workstation that runs like stink, does everything I want it to do, and is still unthreatened by viruses and malware. But the best thing of all is that I can run VMWare Fusion on it, and I have copies of every OS I have ever used, right from dos 3.3 through to Windows 7 - all available to me at the click of a mouse. I can even run - count them - eight VMs simultaneously with it barely registering an increase in fan speed. I don't need a separate W2K3 server, it is a VM. I don't need a separate domino server - it is a VM. In fact, I've managed to replicate almost every hosting environment I could ever need to, from solaris to linux, all in one box. Hmm. Loads to fiddle with, but how much productivity is there in that?

Well, the answer to that is that when things "Just Work" TM, you don't need to fiddle with stuff incessantly. A new project using wordpress? Fire up an appliance, configure wordpress and go. Joomla? Start the Joomla environment. It is too easy, really, when I look back on the days when if I needed a new "server" of any description, it would take a day to install and configure. It has set me wondering if this is the IT equivalent of the disposable consumer society that I have come to despise (throwing a toaster out? Did you check the fuse?) - that "environments" that were created and maintained as a result of time and effort can just be disposed of without a second thought? One day, and it may come soon, we'll have lost the skills that allowed us to create a centos 4.0 domino server on linux, and OS/2 LAN server or a version of netBSD that allows Nintendo 64 development tools to run. Think back to running DOS. Could you edit a config.sys file with edlin, still?I know I'm an old fart, and that I am a packrat when it comes to knowledge about old IT skills, but I really worry that I am turning into the old nerd in the corner of the pub that suggests that a twin disk setup for your cpm/80 might solve all your problems...

My "hackintosh" does need me to keep those skills I acquired with NextSTEP to keep it running, but only if I upgrade the OS or add hardware that doesn't fit the apple envelope,but guess what? I bought a Mac Pro anyway....