Happy New Year to everyone and all the best for 2013
Archive for Personal
Robert Moog’s 78th birthday celebrated in Google doodle
Google has marked the birthday of music pioneer Robert Moog by creating a ‘Doodle’ in the form of an interactive electronic synthesiser which can be played by clicking on its keys using a cursor.
Although musical synthesisers already existed, Moog transformed pop music during the 1960s by producing and marketing a small keyboard synth which could be used with relative ease.
Bands including the Beatles and the Doors used the Moog synthesiser, while others later became fans of the Minimoog, a stripped-down version which followed it in the 1970s.
The New Yorker, who would have turned 78 on Wednesday, had been encouraged to dabble in electronics from an early age by his father and built his first electronic instrument, a theremin, at the age of 14
The pair started their own company in 1954 to sell theremin kits by mail order. After studying at the Bronx High School of Science, Moog attended Queens College before graduating in electrical engineering at Columbia University and earning a doctorate in engineering physics at Cornell.
Of the Moog synthesiser, which appeared in 1964, the inventor was to later recall: “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I was doing this thing to have a good time, then all of a sudden someone’s saying to me, ‘I’ll take one of those and two of that.’ That’s how I got into business.”
Moog died in 2005 at the age of 71, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour four months previously. However, the Moog sound has lived on, with musicians such as Fat Boy Slim choosing to continue to use it even in the digital era.
Electric Monk?
Why Electric Monk?
The Electric Monk can be found in one of my favourite books – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The Book is a humorous fantasy detective novel by Douglas Adams, first published in 1987. It is described by “the author” on its cover as a “thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic”.
The central motif of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things which is in part how much of IT works. You can’t have virtualisation without networking and storage, you get the gist
Dirk Gently‘s plot is non-linear, partly because time travel is one of the main elements of the story
Electric monks are coincidentally humanoid robots designed to practice religion in their owners’ stead. This particular monk had accidentally been connected to a video recorder and, in attempting to believe everything on the TV, had malfunctioned and begun to believe “all kinds of things, more or less at random”, including things like tables being hermaphrodites and God wanting a lot of money sent to a certain address. Since it was cheaper to replace the Monk than to repair it, the Monk was cast out in the wilderness to believe whatever it liked. The Monk also owns a somewhat cynical horse, which he was allowed to keep because “horses were so cheap to make”. Upon his arrival on Earth, the Monk has several humorous misadventures.
Four billion years in Earth’s past, a group of Salaxalans attempts to populate the earth; however, a mistake caused by their engineer – who used an Electric Monk to irrationally believe the proposed fix would work – causes their landing craft to explode, killing the Salaxalans and generating the spark of energy needed to start the process of life on Earth. The ghost of the Salaxalan engineer roams the earth waiting to undo his mistake, watching human life develop and waiting to find a soul that it can possess. The ghost finds it can only possess individuals that fundamentally want to do the same task it is trying to accomplish itself. Otherwise, it is only able to influence the individual in subtle ways
Welcome
Welcome to www.electricmonk.org.uk, a new Information Technology Blog targeted mainly at VMware and Microsoft alongside reviews of new and upcoming technology
