Ok so I was inspired after reading two posts over at the Steve Hoffman boards the last couple of days:
To sequence Sgt. Pepper, MMT, and Yellow Submarine, to attempt to make them even better albums. For the most part I took the baseline set in those two posts and made a couple of tweaks that seem to make the albums flow just a little better.
Now granted I will admit that my track-listing doesn’t follow the order they where recorded date wise. This was because I was focusing on flow, and attempting to keep a loose story structure, to fit with the progressive styles of these albums, to hopefully keep ones interest, by telling a story. The other thing I paid attention to was the limit of vinyl’s maximum playing length per side, which from what I understand is between 22-26 minutes, and yet still keep them as 2 single LP releases.
Another way to put this can be summed up in this question:
If the Beatles really did create two complete concept albums with a strong narrative story (as found in The Wall and Tommy) in each album, how would you do the track listing, keeping in mind that you are limited to 22-26 minutes per side?
With these limitations I was able to fit every song recorded during this time period except for Across the Universe, which I didn’t see as a lost as it does show up later on Let it Be.
So first off SGT Pepper:
Side A (24:53)
- Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
- With a Little Help from My Friends
- Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
- Getting Better
- Fixing a Hole
- She’s Leaving Home
- Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
- Within You Without You
Side B (23:25)
- Strawberry Fields Forever
- Penny Lane
- Lovely Rita
- Blue Jay Way
- Good Morning Good Morning
- Sgt. Pepper’s [reprise]
- A Day in the Life
Even though George Martin would have left Lovely Rita off in place for Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane. I think Thematically/Music style wise, Lovely Rita really fits SGT thematically. The other deviation is that I bounced Blue Jay Way from MMT to SGT Pepper to come after Lovely Rita but before Good Morning Good Morning. I did this because I felt from a lyrical standpoint it sets up the Good Morning Good Morning lyrics nicely due to the line in Blue Jay Way:
Soon will be the break of day
Sitting here in Blue Jay Way.
Now granted, I will admit that this wasn’t the original intent of the Beatles for Good Morning Good Morning to follow Blue Jay Way, but if you knew nothing about their intent or when things where written, you could re-interpret the lyrics to be seen as a story, that starts side B off with strawberry fields forever. This Story is about a person describing a trip through their town on their way to strawberry fields. While the following songs are about the places/people they meet along the way to strawberry fields.
Now for MMT+YS Track Listing:
Side A (24:35):
- “Magical Mystery Tour”
- “Baby You’re A Rich Man”
- “The Fool on the Hill”
- “Flying”
- “Your Mother Should Know”
- “I Am the Walrus”
- “When I’m Sixty-Four”
- “Hello Goodbye”
Side B (24:06):
- “Only A Northern Song”
- “Lady Madonna”
- “Hey Bulldog”
- “The Inner Light”
- “It’s All Too Much”
- “Altogether Now”
- “All You Need Is Love”
For the most part I really liked the track listing found in the post above but I feel that the album works better with MMT starting the album and ending with All you need is love. I feel that it sort of gives a thread in which to interpret the other songs found on this what if album. I see MMT as being the intro to a morality tale, sort of the World’s sales pitch of supposed greatness of the world, the pursuit of fame/money/etc. But in the end we find that all that the world offers is meaningless without love (All You Need is Love).
Now, some may ask why I moved When I’m Sixty-Four to MMT, well the reason I did was because I was having a hard time putting that track anywhere that would make since as the Song just sounded so out of place on SGT. Pepper due to song sounding like a song from the past, I almost didn’t even place it on MMT+YS for the same reasons, until I realized that it works really great as a mini suite between Your Mother Should Know, and I Am The Walrus.
I see the song Your Mother Should Know, as the character’s inner conscience saying hey don’t buy what the world is selling you listen to what your mother taught you. I am the walrus can be interpreted as though the character is being scowled by their inner conscience, which continues the theme from Your Mother should know. Plus, at the end of I am the Walrus something interesting happens as it fades out, you hear what sounds like someone changing a radio station, which fits nicely with this line from Your Mother Should Know
Let’s all get up and dance to a song
That was a hit before your mother was born.
When I’m Sixty-Four, song wise sounds like an old song that could have been a hit from before the character was born, which the character found as they where changing the radio station as heard at the end of I am the Walrus. At this point the Character is at a crossroads and starts to lean towards what their mother taught them, and they try to say goodbye to the world, but the world pulls them right back in again (Hello Goodbye).
Which brings us to Side B that starts off at the lowest point in the Character’s life. They have come to realize that even though they have gained fame and fortune, they have done it at the cost of others (Lady Madonna), and lost their since of passion they once had (Only a Nothern Song), as it doesn’t matter what they do, people still buy their products just because the character’s name is attached to it. Which the character finally realize that despite his/her Success they are now completely alone. This is when the character finally hears their conscience yelling at them “hey don’t forget about me I have the answers to your since of lost, listen to me!” (Hey Bulldog). So the character finally listens and learns what they are missing (The Inner Light). The the whole of life is meaningless without love. The character then finds true love (It’s all too much), and celebrates their finding of true love (All Togther Now), and then later in life passes the lessons they learned in life on to their children (all you need is love).
So what does everyone think? Any places where I could improve the order? or am I completely off my rocker?
I want to welcome all the IE 8 users that can finally see the site as it was designed. Since this site was launched I’ve had to hide the style sheets from IE users as the CSS engine just wasn’t able to render the design at all, even though it could be rendered 98% perfect by Netscape 6 (released November of 2000. The 2% of rendering issues, were that the fonts look bigger in Netscape 6 and the drop down menus are finicky. Netscape/Mozilla fixed the out standing issues in their CSS engine by Netscape 7.1 [aka Mozilla 1.4], and thus rendered this site 100% perfect since June of 2003). Hey at least you can say your browser of choice finally joined the party of being able to view our site as it was designed, even if it took Microsoft about 9 years to catch up with it’s CSS 2 support?
So last year was the 10 year anniversary of the film Gattaca. It’s an interesting film that questions whether science really has all the answers when it comes out smarting Nature. It puts us in a world where if you where not genetically enhanced you are a second class citizen divorced of all the rights we enjoy now, all because you are a health risk, since science can supposedly predict before birth exactly what you will die from. Have you ever sat back and thought about what if the technology shown in that film was available to us today, whether we should use it or it not?
I tend think about these things any time I watch a great Sci-fi film like Gattaca, and then find my self wondering if and when any of the films’ predictions will come true. Take blade runner for example, it predicted that by 2015 that we would have flying cars and so over run in pollution in LA that we would have Acid rain all of the time. Well we have the acid rain but still no flying cars, and LA is cleaner than it has been in years, mainly due to advances in energy efficient cars and machinery, granted we still have a ways to go, to really clean the City up for good, but it’s in a better position then what Blade Runner assumed we would be at by now.
Which brings me back to Gattaca…
- Do you think in our life time we will be able to genetically enhance our children during conception?
- When do you think we will have such technology available to us, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years or more?
- If do end up creating that technology do you think that our society will fall into the same traps as Gattaca depicted in the film? If so why?
As I’ve been pondering these questions lately, I found it weird that, today I happened to stumble upon something that excited me as much as it frightened me, at how close we really are to having a world just as Gattaca predicted it could be.
About 2 1/2 years ago my CRT monitor died (went up in a puff of smoke), and so I decided it was time to finally upgrade to a nice 19 inch LCD. Unfortunately, my video editing machine would no longer boot into windows 2000 (except safe mode), because the last g550 matrox driver release, for windows 2000, doesn’t support LCD monitors. Thus, my only option to get support was to upgrade to windows XP which I didn’t have the money to do.
So I figured I would research to see if GNU/Linux could be a viable video editing platform. But everything I read at the time said no. So I just let the machine sit there for the last two years. About a couple of weeks ago I finally decided to take the plunge and installed Ubuntu on it, so I could at least backup the data that was there and then start clean. Luckily in this time frame GNU/Linux has gain the ability to mount NTFS drives, so I didn’t have to reformat my drives and thus was able to use GNU/Linux to backup the data that was there.
While I was backing up my data I discovered a folder on one of the NTFS drives I had never seen before called “RECYLER”. So I started poking around in the newly discovered folder to see what was in there. And low and behold I found a gold mine. I found the master print of my Camp Attitude video (ogg) I did 5 years ago, which I thought I had forever lost due to me accidentally deleting the wrong file, and not noticing until a year later. I can’t tell you how jubilated I am, this is the find of the century, as I thought I would never be able to make a DVD of this video, so I can show the video to friends and family on a TV instead of a poorly encoded postage stamp QuickTime video on my computer. Which, up to this point was my last remaining copy. So in celebration I’ve made a copy of the master in ogg theora, so you can view the Camp Attitude video (in ogg), here on the website.
While debugging some code on a site I work on. I discovered a new double class bug in IE7. The weird thing about it is the code that causes the double class bug to appear is not even related to it. Sample Test case:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>IE7 Uncle Double Class Selector Bug</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
p {
color: red;
}
.class1.class2 p {
color: green;
}
.foo + p { }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="class1 class2">
<p>I’m Green</p>
<p>I’m Green Too</p>
</div>
<p>I’m red</p>
</body>
</html>
I’ve set all paragraphs to default to the color red. However, due to the double class selector changing its children’s paragraphs to green, and also creating a select any element that has the class foo, whose siblings are paragraphs (doesn’t matter if you set styles or not in that selector, or if the .foo is changed to * or to an element selector that is the same element as the parent with the double class selector [e.g. * + p {}, or div + {}]) it will cause IE7 to create a symbiotic relationship between “.class1.class2 p:last-child” and “.class1.class2 + p:first-of-type”. Thus, if you set styles on “.class1.class2 + p:first-of-type” it will cause “.class1.class2 p:last-child” to get those same styles (and visa versa). Luckily there are a couple work a rounds (ordered by effectiveness).
- Don’t use any sibling selectors in your styles
- Add any type of DOM node between .class1.class2 and it’s sibling p, so long as it’s not a plain text node (e.g. you can use a comment tag or empty element node with style set to display: none;).
- Add an inline style declaration on the effected element that overrides the style set on the “.class1.class2 p” selector.
- Change the “.class3 + p” selector to be an element + p selector, so long as the element to the left of the + is not the same element type that would get selected by the double class selector. In other words with the test case above you can use any element + p combination except for div + p
- Change the “.foo + p” selector to ” #foo + p” selector
- Change the double class selector to a single class selector (e.g. change “.class1.class2 p” to “.class2 p” or “.class1 p” (this solution only works so long as you don’t have any * + p selectors).
The question remains can the technique I showed in Fix for IE’s lack of application/xhtml+xml mean we can now embed other XML based formats inside the XHTML, as XML promises? The answer is, absolutely!
Here is a XHTML, SVG, MathML example page, that shows MathML and SVG embedded right along side an XHTML document. To properly view the page you will need to download these MathML Fonts, and these SVG and MathML plugins if viewing in IE.
What do we need to change to make this work?
- Modify the doctype to the XHTML file
- Modify the html tag to add the additional name-spaces
- Add object tags to head to inform IE to use plugins to render SVG/MathML
- Modify the xsl:stylesheet tag to include the additional name-spaces
Example of doctype, html and head tag modifcations
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="svgMathMlXhtml.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/2002/04/xhtml-math-svg/xhtml-math-svg.dtd"[
<!ENTITY % MATHML.prefixed "INCLUDE" >
<!ENTITY % MATHML.prefix "math" >
<!ENTITY % SVG.prefixed "INCLUDE" >
<!ENTITY % SVG.prefix "svg" >
]>
<html
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>Advanced Example</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
<object id="AdobeSVG" classid="clsid:78156a80-c6a1-4bbf-8e6a-3cd390eeb4e2"></object>
<?import namespace="svg" implementation="#AdobeSVG"?>
<object id="MathPlayer" classid="clsid:32F66A20-7614-11D4-BD11-00104BD3F987"></object>
<?import namespace="math" implementation="#MathPlayer"?>
</head>
Example of xsl:stylesheet modifications
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Have you ever tried sending a 100% strictly compliant xhtml to IE, so that IE would use It’s xml engine to render the page? If so, you know that IE borks on it and forces you to download the xhtml file. I’m here to tell you that I’ve found a work around, that is standards compliant and gets around that limitation and forces IE to use the XML rendering engine. Two steps are required for it to work:
- Configure web server to send xhtml files with the mime type of application/xml
- Then attach a XSL sheet to each xhtml file you serve to IE
Exmple File
Example xhtml code
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="fixMe.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Simple Example < /title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- xhtml code here -->
<body>
</html>
Required fixMe.xsl code
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Why does this work?
As far as IE is concerned you sent it a XML file, with an XSLT sheet applied to it. It’s XML rendering engine then applies the XSLT sheet which converts the XML page into an XHTML page. Without the XSLT sheet applied IE would have just showed us the source code to the page.
How did you ever figure this out?
I discovered this when I was developing this website, to teach myself XSLT. And knowing what I know about mime-types I figured it should work if I just changed the mime-type for XHTML from application/xhtml+xml to it’s alternate compliant mime-type of application/xml1, seeing as IE wasn’t having any issues displaying XML files sent as application/xml.
Additional Notes
Update: To see an example with SVG and MathML mixed in with the XHTML read So now that IE unerstands pure XHTML…
Here are a couple of links to parodies of the I’m a Mac I’m and I’m a PC Mac commercials:
- Video Parodies
- PC VS MAC VS Linux
If you haven’t yet seen the original Mac commercials, get off your lazy but and head over to the apple site and watch them.
Here’s to hoping that the music industry and Movie industry actually listen to Steve Job’s for a change:
Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
Go to Steve’s blog to read more about Steve Job’s thoughts on DRM
