What: An open-source jukebox.
How: Read on!
Recently I was tasked with creating a jukebox for a party. You can read all about my thoughts on the matter at the link; this article is to provide with the specifics on what software I used, and why.

• The Hardware

  The hardware I chose to use was rather limited in performance, which I think illustrates the efficiency of the software and solution which I designed. Components were as follows:

  • CPU: Pentium II 300Mhz
  • RAM: 384Mb SDRAM
  • Motherboard: Intel i440BX-based
  • Video: S3 Virge DX/3D
  • Storage: 4Gb, 5400RPM ATA HDD
  • Sound: Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

  Obviously, I chose the software based on the known limitations of this hardware. Luckily I had a spare SoundBlaster Live! card, because I don’t think the system would’ve been able to reliably handle the music playback and the overheads of the user interface without it. Of course, whatever hardware you plan on using will probably be much faster. I really did pull this box right out of the stone age.

• The Operating System

  The operating system I chose in order to optimise performance was of course my favourite Linux operating system: Arch Linux. With the kernel, modules and all packages being i686-optimized, it was a good starting point for a “from scratch” jukebox system. More importantly though is that after installation of the base system, I had a basic, but fully working, command line Linux system at my disposal. This meant there were no unnecessary startup services, configurations and other settings which would have been useless, redundant or otherwise a hinderence to performance on this slow system.

• The Desktop Environment

  I chose to install XFCE as the desktop environment because it is the most lightweight of the ‘fully-featured’ environments. I would have liked to use an even lighter option, but of all the specialty and niche options available, I had never used any before, and this build was to be completed in a few hours. So, I chose XFCE which I found behaved no differently to GNOME, but was still relatively responsive despite limited system resources.

  To make the GUI look decent, I had to install a few additional packages that are not explicit dependencies of XFCE. They are listed below.

  • ttf-ms-fonts - the easiest way to make websites look nice is by installing this font package
  • midori - a lightweight, Webkit based browser for GTK+ environments. I chose this over Firefox due to the AJAX-heavy nature of the relaxx player. Webkit is supposedly superior in performance compared to alternatives

• The Webserver

  Now, you may be wondering why, with such a limited system, I was bothering with so many layers of abstraction between music, player and control. The reason is that none of the music playing applications I investigated (and there were quite a few) offered any functionality near that of a simple party jukebox. So, I had to use a web-based front end for mpd called relaxx, both of which I’ll talk about soon.

  The webserver of choice is lighttpd; a light weight simple web server, with all the features (and a lot more) required for what I had in mind.

• The Music Daemon

  Simply put: mpd. Or, Music Player Daemon, as it is less commonly known. I chose this system for multiple reasons: first and foremost, its awesome efficiency. With my 80Gb music collection catalogued and at my immediate disposal, mpd uses approximately three megabytes of system memory. Yes, you read that correctly: three. megabytes. If I go ahead and do something silly like, say, add my entire music collection into a single playlist, that number jumps to a staggering (!!!) eight megabytes. Yeah, I know. It’s ridiculous.

  Secondly, due to the daemon nature of mpd, you can use any frontend you like. You can use a text-based terminal application, you can use a GTK+, Qt or other, or you can use a web-based application, like relaxx player.

• The Music Frontend

  This is the party piece — the piece of the system that everyone gets to see. I chose relaxx player because it had some of the functionality that provides jukebox-like behaviour. Well, kind of. It essentially only had one major feature that made it stand out from a variety of other mpd front-ends: multi-user capability. Essentially, you could lock down certain features of the interface for anonymous users, and require a login for those functions. So, essentially that meant I could specify that anonymous users were only allowed to add songs to the playlist and press play. Meaning you had to log in to delete tracks, stop, pause or rewind, etc.

  The installation of relaxx was straightforward, but I had to install a few extra packages under Arch to make it work properly:

  • Arch wiki: Getting relaxx to work with Arch

  This was the only part of the system which didn’t quite work out so well. Its functionality was great, but due to the fact that it’s programmed entirely in AJAX, the old Pentium II powering the computer couldn’t quite keep up. It was slow to respond and not very nice to use, but it was usable. The music itself never skipped a beat (literally), but the performance of this frontend left something to be desired.

Ashley has already posted about it, and now that I’ve finally read up on the topic a little, I’m totally flabbergasted at the sheer ignorance on display from Senator Conroy and the other MPs concerning this initiative — not to mention that of Australians in general, but I suppose like all such things, the mainstream news hasn’t exactly been clamouring all over it for a story.

You can find everything you need to combat this proposal at NoCleanFeed.com. Click on the ‘Take Action’ link to get started.

I wrote a letter to Senator Conroy, which went a little something like this:

Dear Minister,

As an Australian and an internet user, I have serious concerns about your
mandatory Internet filtering initiative.

Given the importance your Government has attached to modernising
Australia’s broadband network, pursuing a policy that can only slow down
and increase the costs of home internet access seems misguided at best.
Australian households are diverse, and most do not have young children, so
mandating a one-size-fits-all clean feed approach will not serve the
public well. I don’t think it is the Government’s role to decide what’s
appropriate for me, and neither do most Australians.

Given the amount of Internet content available, the Government will never
be able to classify it all and filters will always result in an
unacceptable level of over-blocking. I feel that the time and money could
be spent in better ways both to protect children and improve Australia’s
digital infrastructure. Australian parents need better education about the
risks their children face online. Trying to rid the Internet of adult
content is futile, and can only distract from that mission.

Aside from that even is the near-impossible technological problems that
this system will inevitably face. By design, this system is destined to
fail.

- limited to 12Mbit throughput right from inception. This is a diametrical
difference to all of the Governments promises of “faster broadband” for
Australia. Many Australians already have access to, and are happily using,
up to 24Mbit connections.
- based on blacklisting technology. This is the big one: by design,
blacklists will never be comprehensive. The proposal is that this system
will somehow protect Australians from “unwanted material” - yet how can it
possibly protect from all “unwanted material” unless it has a
comprehensive knowledge of said material?
- impossible to maintain. According to domaintools.com, the number of new
domains registered within the last 24 hours (at time of writing) was
95000. This gives an indication of the number of new websites created
every day which will not be on the blacklist.
- impossible to scale. With the introduction of IPv6 over the coming
years, it is feasible that *every single electronic device* could
potentially have internet access. The sheer amount of processing time and
power required to accurately filter internet for tens of millions of
internet access devices is astronomical.
- as raised by Senator Ludlum in the Senate recently, there has been no
documentation detailing exactly what would be considered “unwanted
material”. As mentioned previously, as a responsible adult, I can make my
own decisions about what I consider appropriate and wanted material.

I look forward to the results of the trials that the ISP iiNet is
performing which will provide hard numbers — facts — confirming in full
the criticisms of this proposal. As a result, I sincerely hope that
whatever political agenda has led you down this erroneous train of thought
can be corrected.

Sincerely,

me

I took the boilerplate from NoCleanFeed.com and added my own bits and pieces to it. I feel as though I should have added more now that I read it back to myself. There are a few things I missed, like:

• This filter does nothing to address P2P traffic. BitTorrent material will not be filtered.
• Does nothing to address encrypted traffic, such as VPN technologies, which are freely available.
• Apparently does include specifications for SSL/HTTPS inspection — an extreme violation of privacy. All of the secure websites you use (banking, online purchases etc) use these technologies to ensure the safety and confidentiality of your financial details.

The best way we can turn this thing around is by contacting the people who are able to do something about it: members of parliament, both state and federal. Write to your local MP, write to the state leaders, write to everyone in the Federal Labor Party. Using the boilerplate above is good, but writing something directly related your intended recipient is better.

The fastest way to get in contact with Senator Conroy himself? Call him: (03) 9650 1188. That’s his office number. I’ll be making a phone call today.

This morning I left the hospital after staying overnight; a requirement of the procedure I had received yesterday. It’s nothing serious, so I apologise if you weren’t informed previously and are now worried about my well-being.

Now that we have that out of the way, I can continue my little story. Many people are complaining about the state of the public health system in Queensland at the moment. While I would say I agree to a certain extent that it could be better, from my experiences it wasn’t too bad at all. There were some hiccups along the way, and I’ll get to those, but in the meantime I would simply like to say that I have a great respect and admiration for the people working in the public health system. Despite the seemingly lacklustre equipment and apparent poor state of some of the facilities, the fact remains that the staff are able to get the job done, and get the job done well. I’m very pleased with the treatment I received and the way things were handled, but that’s not to say that things were perfect.

I was due to have my operation starting early morning on Tuesday just gone. However, after arriving at the hospital at 7AM, going through all the pre-checks and donning my lovely hospital attire, I was told that I would have to go home because three anaethisatists and two doctors were off sick. It was Melbourne Cup day, though …

I’ll be honest, it was very annoying. I had plans and they were upset. It wasn’t really anyones fault (unless you’re cynical, which I can sometimes be), but it was still annoying.

My procedure was resheduled for 8AM Wednesday, and at around 11AM I actually went into the preparation theatre. It was at this point, while I was laying in bed, hooked up to the saline drip and wearing my ECG tags, that the fire alarm went off. For 15 minutes. I was informed that the procedure wouldn’t start until they were sure it was a false alarm, and it turned out that it was. But that didn’t stop the alarm, mounted in the roof not two metres from my head, from pounding electronic thumps through my already stressed mind.

After that though, I was given the anaesthetic and went to sleep pretty much immediately. I remember the doctor injecting it into my drip, and then a nurse infront pushed through the door, another started pushing my bed from behind me, and I don’t remember anything after that.

I woke up in the recovery room, and surprised myself by not being surprised. They had warned me that when I woke up I might think that I was still waiting to have the procedure and be very disorientated. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t. I woke up and I remember thinking that I was in hospital; I could see a nurse checking my vitals, and then I remembered that I’d had an operation. I fell in and out of sleep for the next few hours while we all waited for a bed to become available in a ward.

Eventually I was placed up on the fifth floor in a ladies ward because there weren’t any spaces in a mens ward. It didn’t really matter that much; in fact it was quite amusing as I was put next to the cutest (yes I just used that word in this context) old lady who so innocently peeled away her bandages “just to see what the doctor had done”.

Mum came to visit me and sat with me all afternoon while I continued to drift in and out of sleep. The painkillers they were giving me made me quite drowsy. Dad and my sister came to visit in the evening, shortly before Annie and Kate. Everyone stayed for a while, but it was a little crowded, so the girls all went to get food while I hung out with mum and dad for a bit. Then Kirsten came back, took herself and my parents home, so I was left to enjoy the company of Kate and Annie for the rest of visiting hours, until 8PM. Actually, they left at about quarter past eight when the nurse informed them to say their “final farewells” — busted! I’m glad everyone came to visit though. I would have been bored shitless otherwise.

After everyone left I had a choice of television (which I paid $10 for the privelidge of using), radio, mp3, book or laptop to keep me entertained. I ended up watching TV for a while, then listening to music, and then at about 10.30PM I went to sleep. I slept quite poorly because I only had one pillow, and the night lights kept me awake as well.

This morning was the most eventful part of the visit — after my surgeon came to check I was OK, I was told to have a shower and then the dressings on my wound would be replaced. I wasn’t too sure how to go about this because I knew the wound was a hole. You see, the operation required leaving an open wound in the small of my back. I knew roughly how large it was going to be, but after the operation, during sleep, and during the checking, it hadn’t pained me one bit. I made the mistake of removing the bandages, and then the packing (bandages placed inside the wound) and checking it out in the mirror in the shower.

Although I knew what to expect, the reality of it hit me at this point. I started feeling ill and I began hyperventilating. Thankfully I was able to ask one of the other patients outside to fetch me a nurse. I tried to control my breathing, and I tried to assure myself I was OK, but I believe I was in some kind of shock situation, and I lost control of rationality while waiting. It got so bad that I felt light-headed, and in turn ill. My arms and legs were trembling with pins and needles because I wasn’t breathing properly. The nurse finally came in, sat me down and calmed me down, while washing the area of the operation, which surprisingly did not hurt at all.

After she settled me down and washed me off, I tenderly dried myself and got back into bed for another nurse to redress my wound. She was cute as a button, softly-spoken and very nice, which helped a lot. Maybe they sent me a cute one on purpose after my little episode. Anyway, the most painful part of the redressing was not when she physically cleaned out the hole in my back, but when she had to remove some sticky residue from around it which was caught on my hair. Sigh.

So, I went home, and I’m alright now. The wound is a little painful when I sit the wrong way on it, but I have pain killers. Though they do make me a little drowsy.

Despite my thinking that some of the equipment looked a little old, that some of the facilities looked a little dilapidated, these are both gross overstatements. The staff at the hospital were lovely and helped me out as much as they could. I greatly appreciate everything they did for me, and I think, even though it’s highly impersonal, I will send a ‘thank-you’ card to the hospital addressed to all the staff. Though it’s probably the best I can do as I think I would’ve come into contact with no less than twenty or so people, not even a quarter of whom I can remember their names.

Thank-you, staff of the hospital. Thank-you very much for your time and care and helpful attitudes!

So this weekend, we had a party. We needed music, obviously. But we didn’t want to use CDs, or an iPod or anything like that. Those things are too easy to change. People go and hit ‘next track’ when they don’t want to listen to something, and it annoys everybody who was actually trying to listen to it. You know who I mean. There’s always one person, sometimes a few people, who think their music is ‘better’ and they always see fit to make everyone else listen to whatever it is they’re wanting us to.

So I wanted to set up something to solve this problem. It obviously had to be a little bit more complicated. It needed to have some kind of vague access control. So I did.

I pulled an old system (PII 300Mhz, 384Mb RAM, S3 Virge DX/3D, and a new addition: SoundBlaster Live! PCI) out from storage and put my favourite operating system on it. The install didn’t work out the first time because I stupidly let the automatic partitioner partition the drive; having only 3Gb in total, this left about 1.5Gb for each of / and /home, which unfortunately isn’t big enough to fit all the software I wanted to install. Round two, I manually created a /swap equal to RAM size and the rest for /.

Installed Arch fine. Installed XFCE4 — for speed. When running it was using an entire 80-ish Mb of RAM. As for how I planned on playing music, well… I installed my favourite audio player and a frontend for it: relaxx player which is a nice AJAXy web client for controlling mpd. This was the only part of the system which was slow: even running it in Midori, the slowness of the interpreted Java/script environment made the UI very molasses-like in response. It wasn’t too bad; maybe a quarter to half second of lag between operations.

The music playback itself never skipped a beat (literally); as mpd itself uses pretty much zero resources. The audio (mp3 mostly, but some FLAC) was streamed over our 100Mbit network from my desktop PC just fine.

What’s good about relaxx is that it has an admin login and a guest (non-authenticated users) operating mode, and you can specify what rights the non-admin user has by simply selecting their permissible operations from a list while logged in as admin. Essentially that meant I was able to specify the guest to only allow add to playlist and play. They could not stop, skip track, delete from the playlist, etc. Which worked out quite well because as I mentioned earlier: there’s always at least one clown who wants to play their favourite tracks from “Greatest Country Hits of the 60s” while everyone else is enjoying something a little less … shit.

The only feature I think is missing from a jukebox-like application such as relaxx is the ability to have multiple playlists as some kind of intelligent queuing system. As an example: before the party started I manually created a large list of desirable songs and set the play mode to shuffle. However, this isn’t the most ideal solution when it comes to allowing others to add their own music. The other extreme would have been to start with a blank playlist and let people add their own songs all night. I think this isn’t ideal because then you may run out of music, or one person who is particularly attentive might see fit to add many songs of their own liking in a row.

So, I think that an intelligent system whereby you may start out with a large playlist of your favourite tracks, but allowing others to add songs they like, is best. However, there would need to be something involved where you could configure the player to, for example, play a recently added track at least once every x minutes. So you know that when you add your favourite song, it will be played in amongst the existing playlist at least once within the next x minutes.

Another idea I had was the use of multiple playlists, each with their own weight. So you could have all your really fav songs in a series of weighted lists, and the chance that a song is played depends upon how much weight its containing playlist has. This way you could only allow people to add to the medium or low weight playlist which ensures their tracks are not played more often than those in the highest weight playlist, which you have setup yourself beforehand.

I imagine there could be many other uses for these kinds of intelligent playlist systems, and I don’t doubt that I am not the first one who has thought of this. Leave a comment to let me know what you think.

It’s been more than three years since I upgraded my PC. Yeah, I know, hey?

I’m still running an AGP video card, DDR memory, and a Socket 754 Athlon 64 CPU. I bought this system way back when in preparation for the launch of Half-Life 2; and since that time, that game (and its derivatives) are pretty much the only games I’ve ever played. I mean, recently I’ve started playing WoW, but it was released back in 2004, which was before Half-Life 2.

Over the years I have played other games every now and then, but they never really held my interest for very long. I don’t spend a lot of money on games much these days. Consequently, my old system suits me just fine for what I use it for.

Recently though I’ve been getting an itch. An urge. An unmistakable desire. To spend money on a new computer. Why? I don’t know. I still don’t play any new games. While there are a few good ones coming out (Left 4 Dead, and the new co-op shooter whose name I forget at this time), there’s always been “a few good games” coming out, and that’s never piqued my interest.

So in effect, I’ve just neutered my desire to buy anything. I was going to talk about the cool system I had priced for myself which was going to exponentially increase my computing power, but I don’t think I will now. I’ll wait it out a few more months before I do anything rash.

This weekend has been hilolerous (hilarious, but with more lol) — Friday night, out in the Valley with Annie and Kate, who both gothed up for the occasion of visiting Club Blink in 299. I’ll admit that I wore some eyeliner. Apparently it made me look hot. But I’m not so sure. At any rate, Annie and Kate were way hotter. Too bad I didn’t get any pictures. Not that I’d share them with the general internet, anyway.

Saturday night, Carly, Brett, Jamie, Dave and my brother saw The Butterfly Effect at the Caloundra RSL. I have been there previously and the place was pretty dead. I mean, in terms of providing entertainment for young people. The only interesting thing there are the large displays of cool WWII memorabilia including all sorts of guns, scale models of ships and other paraphernalia. Anyway, aside from that the place sucks. Except for the venue to the side where we saw The Butterfly Effect. It’s large and high-tech; the lighting systems aren’t the best I’ve seen (that would be The Met) but they were still pretty good.

The Butterfly Effect were awesome. The support acts were really good too. Sleep Parade who remind me a little of Tool were the first act up, and they put on a good show, even though the crowd turnout at this point was rather poor. Next up were Trial Kennedy and they were even better. Their music had more of a punk/rock sound to it, but it was still pretty good.

Though, after all that, The Butterfly Effect simply blew me away. Even though at the time I had a severe headache and was tired from the night before, I was able to let myself go and get into the sounds. What I really appreciated about their act was that they sound live like they do on CD — ie, they can actually perform the music they create. Which is quite a feat if you have heard anything they’ve recently released. The vocalist really can hit those high notes — consistently. Plus the lightshow and their stage presence was just awesome.

Tonight, I’m sitting at a a friends place having beef stir-fry cooked for me, sipping my bourbon and Coke, and having a good old lol.

I have work tomorrow but that’s OK! It’s not shit work.

Normally, I don’t really like change. Change is unpredictable and can make comfortable things turn into uncomfortable things.

I started looking around for another job. I was starting to feel a change coming on; it’s been building up over the past few weeks. At work, things were different. My boss hasn’t been as critically dependent upon me, which has been great stress relief and allowed me to do my job the way I thought it was meant to be done, but I could see why: he was now critically dependent upon the consultant he’d hired. Fair enough.

As I’ve ranted in previous posts, I’m not all that happy in my current job. It’s been said before, so I won’t repeat why. But, I do have something to add: I was being limited intellectually, I think. My degree had nothing to do with my position, and it showed often. However, I kept on keeping on, because I had to.

So, with a sense of small relief, I started looking for other jobs over the weekend. Not just talking about it, but actively seeking them, taking notes and writing cover letters to send with my resume. I hadn’t actually submitted any over the weekend, though. So I rock up to work on Tuesday as normal, and things are pretty normal. Our typical afternoon meeting isn’t on, but that’s normal too. My boss swings by and pulls me into an empty office, and he says: “I wanted to talk to you … basically, Stuart [the aforementioned consultant] is going to work here full time. And you’re leaving.” I would have been flabbergasted if (a) he wasn’t usually this straightforward (b) I hadn’t seen this coming and (c) I actually cared.

So now I’m looking for a job. A systems administrator position at UQ has caught my eye and luckily through some friends I have been able to make contact on the ‘inside’. Whether it helps my cause or not I’m not too sure, but I put my best effort into the cover letter anyway. It’s full time and the pay is a shitload more than what I’m earning now. The position itself seems promising, and although it’s entirely Microsoft, I think my hopes and dreams of working exclusively with open source (at least for the time being) are going to have to wait until I have more experience under my belt. Unfortunately there just isn’t an employment market for people like me.

I might even end up back at my old job at Nokia, which is pretty ‘lol’ but not really what I want to do with my life. No harm working there while I find something else, though!

My week’s been alright this week. I saw Carly and my friends a lot which was good, but unfortunately for some reason, I haven’t had the mental agility recently to do the required thought acrobatics which allow for the override of bad experiences with good experiences.

In other words, I’m focusing on the negative and not on the positive, and it’s getting me down a little.

I wrote a huge spiel about exactly what has been going on at work, but I’ve since deleted it, because it might be incriminating (not in an ‘I’ve done something illegal’ sense, more an ‘Someone might read this and WTF will occur’ sense) and it might make me look bad. That’s not important because it helped me come to the conclusion, and that’s what is important: I don’t get along with my boss. Not on a personal level, and not on a professional level. It’s as simple as that, and I can’t do anything to change it except get a new boss. Which I am working on.

Aside from that, I went out Tuesday night to the Down Under bar in the city with Carly and Annie, and although I don’t have a valid student ID (it’s about a month expired), they let me in anyway. Presumably because I’m really not that old and also because I had two chicks with me. It was alright for a while, until they started playing the shitty music. Vengaboys, that “Boot scootin’ baby” song, etc. Need I say more? It reminded me of highschool. It was ridiculous, and I got tired and a little grumpy. So I went and sat down while the girls danced, and some guy approached me and asked me how I was going, and we had a little chat. It came to the point where he told me he had uni at 9AM the next day, to which I replied “bad luck” — but not in an empathetical way. It was kind of malicious, and although I don’t know your name, I apologise for venting a little on you, dude. I’m sorry. Hopefully next time I see you I won’t be in such a sour mood.

Which brings me onto my next point which is that club Blink is awesome. It’s on Friday nights at 299 in the Valley and it rules. It’s like someone went to my Last.fm and just copied and pasted all my favourite metal and rock into the playlist. With some nice extras added to break up the mix. Plus they have happy hour $3 basic spirits from 9PM until 10PM; $3 bourbons! What more can you ask for? So I was there last night with Annie; I had hoped Bruce could come but apparently he was stuck at work. On his holidays. Yeah, you read that right.

So now as I sit by myself in the girls’ loungeroom, recovering from my hangover, while everyone else is at work, I bring this post to you. I think later I’ll play some WoW and see what Bruce is up to.

It’s awesome!

I’m pleasantly surprised by just how much I’ve enjoyed listening to Triple J’s Impossible Music Festival over the past weekend. You can check the line-up for all of the details about what bands have been playing.

Highlights for me would be The Presets (playing as I write this), Nirvana, Silverchair, Hilltop Hoods, Fatboy Slim, Radiohead, Muse, Yeah Yeah Yeahs … and that’s just so far.

While I sit here listening to the sheer epic awesome that is “My People”, I wonder just how many people are missing out on the experience. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the gig where this recording was taken, nor was I at any of the other gigs they’ve played this weekend. And not without reason, too: some of the live recordings are taken from the late seventies (Cold Chisel), through the eighties and nineties (Nirvana etc), and as recently as a few years ago.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Nirvana, for example, but I think I’ll listen to more of their stuff now. They don’t exist anymore, but hearing their live set was a great experience. It took their music, which I previously thought of as overplayed radio junk, and it made it something special. Something that had a certain level of commercialism, but, something that was also intimate at the same time.

I really can’t understand why people listen to the commercial radio stations. Maybe they like listening to the hilarious radio ads (got erection problems?). Or maybe they like listening to the ridiculously over the top “DJs”, who realistically are more like talking heads. I won’t draw any conclusions I can’t back up with fact, but I do get the vibe that people on TripleJ actually know stuff about music because they love music and they’ve made it their life goal to work supporting the music industry. I also get the vibe they work to support the artists more than the labels. But that’s just me.

I really appreciate the effort put into these kind of events that TripleJ broadcasts. It’s one part of my tax-paying dollar I’m not sorry to see go. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t listened to TripleJ for a while. Once you start though, you generally can’t stop. That’s a totally good thing.

So, in its last few hours, jump onto the TripleJ site and have a listen or just turn your radio on — however you access the music, nobody cares, just make sure you’re tuned in!

I did some grocery shopping today. I needed a few things; bread, milk, fruit, and some cold meat. The usual things. So, I headed down to my local grocery shop, and as it happens, the place was entirely empty. Bearing in mind that 1.30PM on a Wednesday typically isn’t the most busy time for grocery shopping, I was still a little surprised to see that I was perhaps the only customer in the entire building.

So, I thought to myself, this is going to be easy. You see, I don’t dwell in shops. Especially grocery shops. It’s food. You buy it, you cook it, you eat it. There’s no aspect of grocery shopping that I would consider to be … enjoyable. On occasion, when I’m feeling particularly inventive, I do take an interest in reading the labels of products which I’ve not purchased previously to see what kind of dish I can create. That’s about the extent of interest I have in grocery shopping. It’s mundane. Which is why I prefer to spend as little time as possible doing it. I can shop for myself for a week, week and a half, depending on the rotation, in about 30 minutes — or less. What I mean by that is: I can leave my house, drive to the shop, find a park, do my shopping, carry it to the car, leave the shopping centre, drive home, and be back before my washing finishes, for example. That takes about half an hour. On a normal day.

So, you can imagine why I was somewhat excited to be the only customer in the entire store. I was going to try and break my record. Oh, how wrong I was.

You see, after I’d done my shopping, collecting almost everything into a hand basket and the milk in my other hand, I walked quickly and efficiently to the checkout, where I came upon someone else just finishing putting up their groceries onto the conveyor belt. Oh well I thought, at least she’s nearly finished.

Nope. Oh, sure, she’d put all her groceries up onto the conveyor belt. They’d nearly all been scanned through. She was preparing to pay for them after the total was announced to her. But no, it couldn’t be that simple. She took out her purse and grabbed for her card. It wasn’t there. She unfolded every fold, zipped open every zip, and flipped every flap. There was no EFTPOS card. She put down her purse, muttering to herself, and proceeded to rummage in her giant handbag. She rummaged a little more, performing the same ritual as before: unfolding every fold, unzipping every zip, and flipping every flap. There was no card. At this point, about two or three minutes had passed. Fair enough. I can’t say I’ve never lost anything.

So, she decides the best course of action is to pull things out of her handbag. Out come tissues, painkillers, lipsticks, lip balms, hair clips, hair ties, combs, brushes, a random assortment of papers and plastic slips and other miscellaneous items. There is no card. She mutters more loudly now, talking about how she had it this morning, and is so worried she might have lost it. Yeah, well, that seems pretty obvious now, doesn’t it? But, what does she do next? She doesn’t give up. She unfolds every piece of paper, opens everything that can be opened, unzipped, unflapped, and undone. She does this three or four times, each time with more haste and less sense.

Now, I’m normally pretty patient, but by this point in time, I’ve probably been waiting about seven or eight minutes. This isn’t good. The entire store is empty, remember. I just happened to get the only checkout just after this crazy woman got it. I’m thinking nasty things about her in my head; thinking she’s an old fuddy-duddy, stresses out way too much, and should just get out of the way while she’s searching so I can pay for my measly portion of products and get the fuck home.

My thoughts are interrupted when she says, finally, after about ten minutes or so: “Oh, I guess I’ll just pay in cash. But I really wanted to use my card.”

What the fuck?!