Hi everyone,

A headsup for some of you: there are a bunch of sweet gigs on over the coming months, and I’m inviting you to attend them with me.

First up is Birds of Tokyo, whom I don’t know much about, other than their frontman is the very same who leads the very entertaining and very awesome Karnivool. Although I haven’t seen either live, the latter’s full-length release, Themata, is a favourite in my collection. Anyway, check out The Birds’ MySpace for more on them. Date is September 5th, cost is $27.75., venue is The Arena.

Next up is heavy-metal favourites, and awkwardly-pronounced, Meshuggah. While I’m not particularly fanatic about their style of music, I can appreciate it in small doses. Let’s hope their performance on October 12th at The Arena isn’t too large a dose! (at a cost of $53.50 + booking fee)

Next up in the metal section (although arguably with less throat-destroying lyrical talent) we have Disturbed. I’ve listened to a lot of their stuff over and over and over, with their album 10,000 Fists taking a special place in my collection. They’re touring with old favourites P.O.D., the up-and-coming Behind Crimson Eyes, and Alterbridge. We can catch them at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on the 2nd of September at a cost of $89.65.

Changing genre completely, let’s think about Dukes of Windsor. They scored well with their hit The Others showing up in a remix on a recent Ministry of Sound album. You’ve heard it, and you liked it. Trust me. Anyway, they’re touring with the awesome Sneaky Sound System, and I reckon we’d be stupid not to miss their show at The Tivoli, on the August 16th, especially for a cost $53.50 (plus booking fee).

Keeping the electro/dance theme, though moving down in the popularity ranks, we’ve got a relatively unknown group by the name of Grafton Primary. They reached realtively huge popularity on TripleJ last year with the slightly nerdy but ultimately funny (and fun!) Relativity; and they’ve also created many awesome remixes of other popular artists, including remixing the tired and overplayed This Heart Attack by none other than Faker, which in my opinion is as good as the original, if not better. They’re supported by The E.L.F, who are busy doing lots of wierd things on their MySpace, and the first group I ever saw play live: Christopher Robin, whom are not the same you will find on MySpace. They’re a small two-piece electro pair who seem to occupy themselves more with drinking than playing music, but they’re oh so good at it! For a cost of $12 and a trip to the Valley, what more can you ask for? (at Rosie’s)

Second last on this by-no-means-ordered list, we have Canadian crackpots, haters of vowels and all-round funky dudes, MSTRKRFT. They’ve a few releases and a lot of remixes, and they’re all hella-sweet. Accompanied by Ajax and a few other DJs I’ve never heard of, we can catch them at The Arena on the 2nd of August for a cost of $35-$45 (plus booking fee).

Finally, we have two bands actually: PNAU and Operator Please; both huge on the Australian charts, with the former being a veteran of the dance scene and the latter barely out of highschool, you’ve no doubt heard tracks from both, with PNAU’s “Baby” featured on recent advertisements for milk, and Operator Please having many of their songs played on mainstream radio. We can indulge in their alternately funky and rocking sounds (quite a contrast) for only $44 (plus booking fee) at The Tivoli on the 7th of August.

So, if you’re interested in seeing any of these gigs with me, please let me know. Some of them have been on sale a while, and are due to sell out soon, so we need to get in quick! A comment, SMS, e-mail, phone call or face-to-face conversation are all good ways of engaging my attention.

If you want to find out more information about any of the gigs, you can check out the bands’ respective MySpace/websites, or you can visit the awesome Triple J gig guide, which helped me to compile this post.

Yeah yeah, you know it. The World of Warcraft servers are down for scheduled maintenance which means I haven’t much to do. Sad really, isn’t it? Still, I’m not addicted. I don’t think about WoW while I’m supposed to be doing other things. I don’t talk about WoW all the time to people. I certainly don’t dream about WoW.

Yeah, I post a lot about WoW, but that’s only because I know you expect me to, and I couldn’t go letting down my avid readers now, could I?

The next post is going to be about something interesting. As soon as I figure out what that is, I’ll let you know.

This post isn’t about WoW.

My life basically consists of playing WoW, going to work, and hanging out on weekends. Except, on weekends where I don’t see much of Carly due to her own commitments, I tend to also do a lot of WoW playing on those occasions.

Seriously, I do play a lot of WoW, and I think I would say that I am highly interested in WoW, but not quite to the point of addiction. I play it mainly because I’ve finished all my exams, forever, and now I’m just being rebellious and doing ‘irresponsible’ things in my spare time for a change of pace from the work-study-work-study-work … et cetera rigmorole that has been my life for the last three or four years.

So last night I stayed up until about 4AM playing WoW; though that’s because I was helping others. You see, in WoW, unlike other online games, there is more of a real sense of community and so much more “niceness” between players. Unlike other, more openly competitive games, where the mixture of high-speed violence and young teens makes for a complete lack of intelligent conversation at any point during the game. At best, it’s people trashtalking. At worst, it’s people trashtalking with added racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and grossly inappropriate sexual content.

In WoW, players help each other because that’s what the game environment encourages people to do. Through the length of the game experience, the co-operative nature of many of the quests, raids and dungeons, and the fact that, like real life, players of different skill-sets rely on each other in order to get ahead, the community behind WoW is generally a lot more friendly than the highly-strung, trigger-finger aggro children that hang out playing shooters.

That’s not to say that all shooter-players are morons (I still play occassionaly, and I’m definitely not :D) or that all WoW players are saints (sometimes high-level characters will draw high-level enemies onto low-level characters just for laughs), but generally speaking the communities are vastly in contrast to one another in terms of their attitudes towards others playing the same game.

So if you’re sick of being called a fucking dickhead bitch slut hacker poof in CS over the microphone by a 13-year-old boy whose voice hasn’t dropped and can count the number of pubes he has on one hand, and would like to see some nice things coming from the players you game with, then give WoW a try, and see if I’m wrong.

Today Carly and I, being flooded in, decided to muck around a bit more with the GIMP. Though this time we took some random photos specifically for the purpose (well, kind of).

As you can see, my level of skill hasn’t increased at all. I’m still using the same elements I learnt yesterday, but I’ve combined them into some photographs to make… something. I’ll let you be the judge.

Carly’s photos:

My photos:

I decided to GIMP it up today. Combined with the shithouse weather of the weekend and my lack of money, there wasn’t much else for me to do. So, in an artistic (esque) vain, Carly and I have been mucking about with the GIMP and seeing what creative things we could create.

Unfortunately for you all, my creativeness is somewhat limited. However, Carly’s isn’t. She’s quite a good artist (although she doesn’t readily admit that); her house, and her grandparents houses who live close by, are all filled with her various paintings. The problem Carly has is that she doesn’t know how to use the GIMP. I don’t really know either, but I do know how to use Google. So, through a crazy communication and information transportation and transformation system that resembles a line of firefighters trying to extinguish the Great Fire of London with a line of water buckets, Carly’s slowly learning the ins and outs of the GIMP.

I haven’t created anything worth posting, though I did think that my blue fire was rather cool. Oh, and I love the posturize tool.

Today I made a purchase which has seen people laughing, crying, and shouting at me.

Well, not really. Just a few people making jokes at my expense and others being perhaps slightly annoyed by my spectacular display of ignorance and apparent stupidity. I bought myself a copy of World of Warcraft. My sister thinks my social life is down the drain. My brother’s anticipating many more dumb questions. Some of my friends are saying their good-byes, others are quietly removing me from their MySpace friends as I write this.

No, not really. Though, with the cult following and associated media coverage that this game has, you’d expect people to react strangely to the news that someone close to them has taken up the hobby.

Often referred to as simply “WoW” by its fans and “World of Warcrack” by its detractors, the game is an MMORPG which currently boasts over 10 million subscribers worldwide.

Why have I decided to join them? Well, over the years I’ve disregarded the MMO+RPG genre simply because I didn’t enjoy the typical universes they were set in. Medievil times lend themselves all too easily it seems to be the base subject for the majority of RPG titles. Previously I’ve never been particularly interested in this type of fiction; specifically fantasy. However, I cannot deny that over the years I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all the Harry Potter novels (and seeing the movies). More recently however I’ve taken to reading a few fantasy novels, specifically, the Sword of Truth series and Sarah Ash’s Tears of Artamon series.

This newfound interest in fantasy, combined with my waning interest in online FPS games led me to the thought that I should give something new a try. Even though in the past I would’ve referred to the MMORPG acronym more sardonicaly as “Massively Mundane Online Really Poor Game”, I decided to stop being a closed-minded fool and give it a go.

And what do you know? I enjoyed playing the free 10-day trial of WoW so much that I decided to buy it. Perhaps too early, as I’ve still two exams to pass before I finish uni forever, but I believe I can manage my time…

Today was an alright day at work. I think the dynamic there has changed, but I don’t yet know what to make of it.

The first thing to set this change of dynamic in motion was my meeting with one of the guys who previously worked there; the guy whose stuff I was now supporting. He was nice enough, a little nerdy, but not conceited. He admitted that he didn’t really have the programming skills required to pull off the project he’d started some time ago, the project that he was now trying to explain to me in detail. He didn’t understand my questions about documentation, but he did understand my desire to see and understand the big picture, which, in addition to some other resources he showed me which I was previously unaware of, was enough to enlighten me as to the direction I needed to take.

Finally, some pieces of the puzzle that was given to me months ago had finally come into play.

Secondly, the dynamic changed because I’ve been given a rather unexpected and hefty responsbility: I’m the decision-maker on everything IT-related. Although the guy whom I replaced pretty much ran everything IT, it was never mentioned to me that I would be assuming the same responsibility. Well, today it was made clear, and part of that responsbility includes making sure the new guy, whom works Wednesday when I’m unavailable, is pulling his weight.

In order to do that, I’m expected to write him up a task sheet of sorts, and I’m to receive a report from him on his progress, and check that progress to ensure he’s not just making shit up. If he is just making shit up, or otherwise not doing what he’s meant to be doing, I have the power to decide that he’s asked not to come back to work the following Wednesday.

I totally wasn’t expecting this kind of responsibility, but now that I’ve thought it over, I’m glad that I have it. I don’t want to have an unmotivated, lazy or incompetent person filling in for me on Wednesdays. I want someone whom I can trust to get work done, not only because they have the motivation to do a good job but also because they have the skills to see their motiviation put to good use.

So, now I’m faced with a few new things: the big project I’ve heard everyone talking about is finally going to be underway as of tomorrow, as I’ve dispatched some instructions to my underling which will hopefully set wheels in motion. This project is bigger than anything I’ve contemplated before, not technically or even architectually (the game project I worked on at uni was probably of similar size, codewise) — simply because it’s an important thing for my boss, who I’m wanting to impress.

Let’s see how I go, eh?

At work, I’ve been developing an a semi-automated spreadsheet to help make life easier for the guys who need to manipulate a lot of data easily. I’ve been using a lot of VBA and some built-in Excel functions, and I’ve been working on the project for about six weeks now, on and off.

Over that time period, I’ve come to appreciate the level of understanding that the people I’m developing for have of what I’m doing: very little. But, the little understanding they do have has enabled me to build a sturdy communique with them.

At uni, we’re taught one of the major problems that face software developers is properly understanding what it is they’re being asked to develop. To that end, we’ve been told a few horror stories, where the developers meet with the clients, the clients say “we want an X, and we want it to do Y, Z and B”. Then, the developers go away for a long time and they come back with what they think X looks like, doing what they think Y, Z and B should look like. Usually they get it completely wrong and the clients are furious.

So, we are taught that one of the most important parts of software development is having an almost always open dialogue between the developers and the clients in order to ensure that what the developers are developing matches up with what the clients think they’re developing. Initially, the guys at work didn’t really understand that. I don’t blame them, because I even asked, “have you ever had anyone develop software for you before?” to which they replied simply, “no.”

So, my task was to try to educate them on how to properly interact with me when it came to developing software. I explained that they couldn’t simply say “we want a PQR”, leave me alone for two weeks, and have me come back with exactly what they were after. As they’re quite receptive people, they understood.

But, how do you deal with people who aren’t receptive? More specifically, how can you convince your boss, a non-technical person, that you need to allow for certain timeframes and certain communications when you are trying to create something new for someone? So far I’ve not had much luck with my boss. I explain to him the same things I explained to the others, but I don’t know if he gets it or not. He usually responds with a nod, says “OK”, and changes the subject. He’s a solutions-oriented man; he talks about solutions, final products, and results like they’re simply a matter of moving from A to B. I need to find some way of leveraging this type of thought process to my advantage, so I may communicate with him more effectively.

A few rumours have popped up over the interwebs over the last few days indicating that Valve, the forward-thinking software development company headed by Gabe Newell, are going to be doing something quite extroadinary.

A few years ago they released the Steam platform: it’s essentially a content distribution system tailored for selling games direct from the creators to the public. Initially there were problems with bandwidth availability and some other issues, but Valve worked dilligently to solve them. Today, Steam is not just a game-selling platform, it also delivers news, comics, movies and other types of entertaiment media directly to consumers from the publishers. It cuts out a few middle-men and makes software cheaper to buy, which is only a good thing.

Again, Valve may be showing themselves to be forward-thinking. Apparently they’ve been hiring Linux software developers to port Windows games to Linux.

Also, a few other big-name games that are coming to Steam soon have been noted as making available a Linux-compatible version. Namely, the Penny Arcade comic game, On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. Penny Arcade has been closely affiliated with Valve since a few years ago when the comic was featured on the main page of Sources’ Steam application; obviously, the new Penny Arcade game is going to be distributed by Steam.

More notoriously, the upcoming Postal III is also being released on Steam, and will also have a Linux client, according to an interview conducted with Vince Desi, CEO of Running With Scissors, the development company behind the Postal series of games.

The piece de resistance however is this gem which states quite clearly

Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.

What can we make of that?

We can only hope these rumours, which are apparently bolstered by facts, come to light as truths. I personally only play games available on the Steam platform, and if I could chuck away my Windows installation altogether, it’d be most welcome!

Head over to this thread on the Phoronix forums for the discussion that started it all.

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but the latest announcement from nin.com is of a new album entitled The Slip.

There’s a neat twist here that may surprise: it’s been released free to download. Yep, all you have to do is surrender an e-mail address and they’ll give you a download link, where you can choose from any or all of high-quality mp3 (LAME -V0 encoded), high-quality FLAC or m4a lossless, and high-quality 24-kbit/96Hz WAV download format.

As with the previous Ghosts release, all the downloads come with artwork in the form of a pdf file. The artwork for this release is minimal, but it definitely suits the music. It’s free because it is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike licence, which in plain English means you can share it with anyone you like, but if you make a derivative work (a remix) you must attribute the original work to Nine Inch Nails, and you may only do so if you are not a commercial entity.

As for the music itself? It’s moody; through some tracks, dark and brooding. Others are punchy and energetic, while others still are almost poppy in nature. For me personally, I’m reminded of the first time I listened to The Downward Spiral; sitting on a mates deck outside, with a bourbon in hand, whiling away the evening with conversation. In other words: to me, it’s true to the sound of Trent’s previous work. If music can conjure memories of good times past, it gets my thumbs up.

Trent has this to say about the album:

thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one’s on me

So head over to http://theslip.nin.com/ and grab yourself a copy!