Spotify playlist: Relaxed

Spotify is a great service for people that love music, normally download it for free… and decide they want to try a legal variety. It is also a great tool for discovering new music, I have found lots of new acts through my few weeks on Spotify, and will use this blog to talk about some of the playlists I am putting together.This is apt because Spotify allows you to share playlists with other people, so if you want the playlist I describe here, you can click on this link (after installing Spotify) and this playlist will be added to your Spotify automatically!

This is the first list I made, based on music I like. I called it relaxed as all songs have the ability to calm me down. Feel free to give me feedback!

The Fun Loving Criminals

First up the Fun Loving Criminals. These guys from New York are well known in the Festival scene for producing some of the most distinctive and soulful Blues/Rock whatever you want to call it. Smoke em’ was their key-song on Dutch festivals, wonder why…, and is still great after all these years.

Fleetwood Mac: Albatross

I never really knew Fleetwood Mac, they were from well before my time, but when I heard the Chain on the radio I knew I had to find out what else they made. Although the Chain is my favourite FM song, Albatross is the one making it onto this list. When I hear it I can just see tropical beaches!

Jamiroquai: Seven days in Sunny June

What better follow up to tropical beaches than a song about Sunny June. Although Jamiroquai is by no means an artist I would consider part of my “favourites”, this particular song is both uplifting and soothing.

Iam: Sans Issue

Iam

Iam is hardly known at all outside of France, which is odd as he is a great hip hop artist. Recent collaborations with Beyonce and other American commercial drab proof this, but in my opinion this guy doesn’t do himself justice by collaborating with ’superstars’. Sans Issue is one of his masterpieces and it is both soothing and impressive. Not a clue what he sings about though

Blof & Heather Nova: Mooie Dag

Blof are definitely in my favourite bands top ten. This Dutch band has been changing the Dutch pop-scene since the mid nineties and are going from strength to strength. This song is about the day their drummer died in a car accident. It is beautifully written and composed, and in this version Heather Nova actually contributes to the strength of the song.

Pearl Jam: Gone

Another band with a knack for writing great songs. Their album Ten, which triggered their breakthrough, is one of my favourite albums, but this song from the album Pearl Jam is up there with Alive and Jeremy in terms of strength and lyrics. Oh, and it is relaxing in a weird way.

U2: With or without you

I doubted this song should be on this list, but the underlying guitar riffs and the pace of the song warrant a spot anyway. I don’t think I need to say a lot about U2 do I?

Lenny Kravitz: I belong to you

Spotify does have a quirk in that it only plays what the record labels allow it to play. That means that a classic Lenny album with some great songs is missing. Fortunately this track has made it to the Greatest hits album and is well worth listening to.

Mellon Colly and the infinite sadness.

Smashing Pumpkins: Tonight Tonight

One of the best bands of the nineties, which fortunately have decided to reform some years ago, publishing the great Zeitgeist album. Tonight Tonight is a massive song, with brilliant composition and strength.

Nirvana: Something in the way

My musical taste is revealing itself rapidly in this list I suppose… Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins… Bush is missing of Spotify but would have made it otherwise. Grunge really got me going in the nineties! But it is still music that stands out from the rock-crowd. Eventhough over the past decade we have been blessed with a raft of great bands coming through to the top of the charts.

Roykssop: Eple

Another festival favourite, although I don’t like all of their work, Eple (with the famous melody that keeps floating in and out) is a classic and manages to free my mind from any thought.

Prince: Sexy Motherfucker

Prince is an icon, unfortunately he sank away into oblivion but to me his music is still ten times better than anything ever produced by that other eighties icon, Michael Jackson. This song brings lots of different influences together into an orgy of gorgeousness.

The Prodigy: 3 Kilos

At the end of the album, Music for the Jilted Generation, tucked away from the rougher and tougher side of the album, are three electro tunes that never interested me earlier. But the more I listened to the album, the more I fell in love with these jewels. I could have picked any of them, but 3 Kilos is great.

Wax Tailor: Positively Inclined

This guy I discovered through Spotify and boy am I pleased I did! French trip-hop producer Wax Tailor is a gem, one of many to be uncovered by me using Spotify I hope!

Tribalwars: Running a forum

Introduction

Tribalwars Forums. Useful interaction platform for people with a common goal: To discuss the game they love. This post is all about the behind-the-scenes of the forums at Tribalwars with an aim to give regular posters a bit more insight into the dealing and wheeling that happens behind the scene.

My background

I come into my latest role as the forum moderator for Worlds 17 and 18 with a long Tribalwars history, I started playing when W2 was relatively new, by now that makes me one of the longest-playing people in Tribalwars (although I just deleted my W35 account!) I joined the TW team shortly after starting to play, Hoodoo liked my application and pulled me in from a large group of applicants. I started on the forum but soon moved into the role of multihunter and have had various positions on the TW team since.

Spirit of the forum

I have witnessed many changes to the game, but one thing remains stable throughout, the problems of making sure the forum is a level playing field for everybody, from newbie to noobie to decorated war-veteran. To ensure a standard the code of practice, or rules, for posting on the forum has evolved over the years, but in the end it is the moderators’ responsibility to ensure that his/her forum is operating in the spirit of the rule and the game.

Some mods prefer to do this by infracting everything that goes into the rule, sometimes taking the written word a bit too strict and upsetting people which results in regular posters abandoning the forum and a reduced activity overall. Other mods, like me, interpret the rules for specific situations. Sometimes resulting in swift banning, but frequently ending in a warning for poor understanding of the rules, warnings that usually end up in a “thank you for not infracting” message from the recipient.

This result is possible because regular posters know that the other category of mods (the strict ones) exist as well, together we form a team that ensures optimal performance of the moderating. Balancing this is down to Wim, aka Lord-Haste, who does a great job in supporting and managing a large group of mods, compared to when I started the team of mods is now at least ten times larger!

The forum-moderators now operate in a hierarchy, a so called elder-mod ensures that when I am not able to fulfil my role, it still gets done, the elder-mods in turn are managed by Lord-Haste. The elder-mods are experienced hands, guys and girls that have been around TW for a long time and know the game inside out.

Things to do and not to do…

The things I look out for when modding are numerous:

Language

The forum is frequented by children, this is something that should be in the back of minds when posting at all times. Unfortunately it frequently is the case that the children we aim to protect are the ones that think swearing makes them look tough. It doesn’t and when I spot it I will infract. Thinking that hiding swearing by using alternative characters is OK, is daft.

Spamming

Spamming comes in different categories, I don’t object to the occassional off-topic remark in a thread, it adds to the liveliness of the forum and I will only warn if it is out of context entirely. Usually, when a thread derails, I will notify the posters in that thread that I expect it to get back on track, when that fails I will lock it. The sort of spamming I detest, and for which I will ban without exception, is when two or more people think it is fun to derail topics on purpose and go off on a so called spam-fest. As four people in the last week will testify, a two month ban is on offer for those that think they can get away with it.

trolling

People that make it a hobby to haunt other posters, to wind up other posters and to be derogatory to other posters. This is an image that builds up over time, as a mod it is impossible to read all posts, but certain names will keep coming up and this results in building reputations with mods. A mod can easily see all posts by one poster, a useful tool to find out what the overall tone of the poster is. If and when I identify trolls, I will warn them to alter their attitude, if that does not work they will get banned.

Flaming

Two types of flaming: one is when one tribe is at war with another and tries to get the moral upperhand by fiery posts that trick the other tribe into losing their cool, fine. The other type is when a single player is continuously singled out by one or more posters, not fine. There are different ways to deal with this, but frequently this will end in a warning with a follow-up ban.

learn to speak English!

I thoroughly detest people telling other people that their English is not good enough. Frequently this is done by people with a superiority complex that fail to see that other posters can have a variety of backgrounds which cause them to not speak English well, dyslexia, poor education, or most often, not being a native-speaker. I will warn for this as it is unsavoury, however there is no rule against it, merely a moral etiquette. Please adhere to it!

Reporting

Our most effective way of finding posts that have gone bad, is by other posters reporting them, please do! It helps us keep control and it helps you keep a forum that is worth visiting! There is always a group of ‘core-reporters’ these are the names that will end up being nominated for functions as mods.

Appealing

If you do not agree with an infraction or a warning and you want to appeal, please feel free to do so. Contact the infracting mod, if the answer is not satisfactory, contact the elder mod and if that is not conclusive contact Lord-Haste.  But remember to keep your argument clear and fair. Appeals from people that reduce themselves to a swearing and insulting heap of pity will get ignored.

I hope you gained some insight in the way modding the TW-forums works, feel free to PM me on the forum with questions or ask them in reply to this blogpost.

Responsible data policies in Universities

Now that Google is getting a foot in the door at British Universities, offering far superior mail-systems than Universities are able to offer, the question of data policies is becoming a real one. Universities have a tradition of care and diligence when it comes to research data, but that tradition does not necessarily extent to the way e-mail is managed and governed. Not only e-mail, but data released through Virtual Learning Environments is increasingly hosted on servers that are outside the property-domain of Universities (and colleges, schools etc.).

Squeeze on data security?

This move is understandable, external parties can offer specific advantages unatainable by the University. Each student an e-mail box with gigabytes of storage? It is only possible through using a service like Google which has petabytes of storage available all over the world.

But it does beg the question: What happens with potentially confidential data? Google will scan the Gmail account to build a profile of the account-holder so they can target their ads specifically. But what else do they do? Do they ensure a bulletproof safety from hackers?

The simple answer is no, it is impossible, therefore Universities will have to educate their students and staff to understand the risks involved with online storage. A new age of responsible information literacy is dawning and Universities better make sure that they embrace the challenge.

I am in favour of outsourcing services like e-mail and hosting of low-grade sensitivity. But when it comes to research data, grades and personal details there has to be a significant red line between internal and external hosting.

Furthermore, Universities will have to start thinking how this material (whether it is of high or low sensitivity) is protected under intellectual property laws. Are we signing off part of that responsibility? How about a Creative Commons model where the end-users decide?

Plenty of questions, few answers (yet).