1. Left-click the icon and select ‘Preferences’; click the checkbox next to ‘Start applet on session login’ and close the dialogue.
2. Next, left-click the icon and select ‘Configure local sound server’; click the ‘Network Server’ tab and check the boxes next to ‘Enable network access to local sound devices’ and then ‘Don’t require authentication’. This allows applications to stream audio data direct to PulseAudio instead of through PulseAudio’s implementation of the ALSA API. This is necessary for all applications that support talking directly to PulseAudio.

Next, you’ll want to open the Volume Control from the tray icon menu and select your output device on the Configuration tab. PulseAudio should have enumerated all of the available combinations on your system, so choose the option you want. If you’re using optical output to your A/V receiver or television, choose digital, SPDIF or IEC958.

Setting up mpd for use with PulseAudio is straightforward. Open your /etc/mpd.conf file and comment out all the configuration related to alsa, then scroll down a bit and you should see a commented-out section related to PulseAudio. Make your config look like the below, and restart mpd.

# An example of an ALSA output:
#
#audio_output {
# type "alsa"
# name "My ALSA Device"
# device "hw:0,1" # optional
# format "44100:16:2" # optional
# mixer_device "default" # optional
# mixer_control "PCM" # optional
# mixer_index "0" # optional
#}
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "My Pulse Output"
# server "remote_server" # optional
# sink "remote_server_sink" # optional
}

Next, you’ll need to setup MythTV. This is pretty straightforward, all I did was go through the General settings to the audio options menu and set the following options:

Update! MythTV trunk supports PulseAudio, so all you need to do is select ‘PulseAudio:default’ as the audio output device.

• Output:ALSA:plughw:0,1 (0,1 being the card id, device id key, obtainable through the command ‘aplay -l’; you may have something different in your setup but you can freely edit this text field for the correct device)
• Passthrough output device: Default
• Max audio channels: Stereo
• Upmix: passive
• Enable AC3 to SPDIF passthrough: no (force AC3 decoding by MythTV if your receiver can’t do it)
• Enable DTS to SPDIF passthrough: yes (pass Dolby/DTS to your receiver, for DVDs)

And that’s it! All done. You should now have mpd and MythTV routable through PulseAudio which allows you to make use of the excellent projectM audio visualisation suite (basically an implementation of Milkdrop in OpenGL for Linux). Excellent for parties!

A note: This does actually output PCM 44.1Khz correctly. I was previously routing my audio through HDMI cable to the television, then from the television to the receiver. The TV was outputing a 48Khz signal; direct from the computer via optical, it’s a sweet 44.1Khz. Nice!

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

Probably the most epic assembly of consumer electronics I’ve experienced, and still not quite finished.

After I picked up the television and the PS3 on Sunday last week, I went out and bought most of the components for my HTPC on Monday. I unfortunately couldn’t assemble it that day because every local PC store had conveniently run out of stock on the case I wanted, so I had to wait for that to be sent to me. It arrived on Wednesday, and I assembled the HTPC, which was pretty straightforward because building PCs is my thing.

The Antec Micro Fusion 350 is, as with all other Antec cases, a very solidly put together affair with all of the things you’d expect and Antec case to have. Even though its name denotes it as being the smaller in Fusion class of HTPC cases, it suffers no functionality or convenience loss, even incorporating Antec’s dual chamber design.

In the above picture you can see pretty much everything: 96×16 LCD just visible on the front, 750Gb Western Digital ‘Green Power’ SATA disk in the foreground inside its own chamber, GeForce 9400GT graphics card and 2x2Gb Corsair TwinX memory in the mid-ground, and the CPU cooler and exhaust fans of the motherboard chamber in the background.

I installed the 9.10RC of Mythbuntu onto the server and was totally lost. I have never used MythTV before, so I really had no idea what I was doing. Thankfully it comes with a lot of sane defaults and most of the functionality worked with minimal setup. I copied all of my media from an external backup disk into the appropriate directories and then started configuring the remote and the LCD.

As mentioned, I’ve no experience with any of this, so I was starting from scratch in all regards. After I spent nearly a half day mucking around with the remote and the LCD, following guides designed for Mythbuntu 9.04, I had aquired enough knowledge to realise that my setup was actually fully functional but was not working because I had selected the wrong presets.

So, now the remote works, but it is a little clumsy in my mind. What buttons from the devices’ original remote do not exist on the Logitech remote are mapped via the softmenu keys which allows you to scroll through a list of functions and then choose what you want to do. The only criticism of the remote itself that I have is that it is very long and slender and the buttons are very hard to push. This means you nearly always need two hands to operate it because you can’t quite reach end-to-end and maintain a good enough grip to support the remote while pushing down the buttons at the extreme ends of the device at the same time. I will have to let loose the newbies to see if they can navigate the system without my assistance, and also to gather from them ideas on how to improve the control scheme. As of yet I have not implemented any direct control of the television from the PC and everything relies solely on the Logitech Harmony remote.

There’s little to say about the speakers and the receiver at this stage – the setup of both was very straightforward, although I did have a problem with the subwoofer not working initially. I took it back to Harvey Norman and they tested it on their demonstation system, where it worked perfectly fine. Confused, I assumed it must have been the cable, or worse, the subwoofer output of the receiver. Thankfully, the helpful sales guy at Harvey Norman gave me the high-quality cable from their demo system and told me to take it with me. “If it works with this cable,” he said as he handed it to me, “you can keep it. Just let me know.” It worked with the new cable.

There’s only been two things so far which my plan failed to account for: the S/PDIF output of the HTPC, and where to place the rear surround speakers. The latter was swimming in the back of my mind at various stages but I never put any solid thought into it. I solved the problem yesterday by going out and buying some universal satellite speaker stands which feel like they’re made from wrought iron. Thankfully though they are just perfect for mounting my speakers; the stands themselves are hollow so the speaker wiring can pass through to the bottom and leave the base unseen. As for the audio on the HTPC problem; the motherboard doesn’t have an onboard connector, only internal jumper pins. Currently I am passing the S/PDIF audio from the internal motherboard connector to the graphics card and through the HDMI cable to the television which then outputs it via optical cable to the receiver. However, in order to listen to music through the HTPC this requires the television to be turned on. Really not a great option considering the television draws about 265 watts of power when on. So I’ve ordered an S/PDIF dongle with both co-axial and optical connectors which should hopefully arrive soon, as when the XBox 360 gets here it’ll need the optical input on the receiver currently in use by the television.

This post is huge already. I think I will write up some reviews of all the components over the next few weeks to save novellising what I already have.

Here’s my working area during setup, the final setup, and the obligatory shot of me playing Team Fortress 2 on the setup. Not seen are the rear satellites just out of shot under the foreground.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

So, I’ve spent the money buying all the things I previously talked about.

First, a small rant – you may skip past this to the “what did I actually buy?” section of the post if you prefer:

I thought things were working out OK; and they will in the end, but I have come accross some caveats of operation through either my own ignorance or mistake or through clever non-mentions of information by the sales person at Harvey Norman.

The caveat I’m most interested in is this: as we all know, HDMI carries video and audio data compatible with DVI and PCM. So, alongside all the kerfuffle and marketing about how great HDMI is, I naturally assumed that the advancement and simplification of the home theatre system had come to a point where you could mostly plug everything into each other using only HDMI cables and not have to worry about anything else.

Well, I was wrong. My receiver (which I’ll talk about in more detail later on) has three HDMI inputs, and its manual proudly states it is “HDMI switching capable”; naturally I assumed I could simply plug my PS3, XBox360 and HTPC directly into the HDMI inputs with no other cables and have the receiver decode audio out to the surround speakers and pass the video onto the television. Seems pretty straight-forward, right? Not so!

Apparently the receiver I’ve purchased is capable of HDMI pass-through, but this is wholly and soully what it does. It passes it through without looking at it, at all. If I want to get my receiver to decode the audio from anything I plug in via HDMI (because this is the whole fucking point of the receiver and the surround speakers!) I have to connect both a HDMI for video and co-axial or optical audio cable from the device into the receiver.

Thankfully my receiver has three such inputs which will account for all of my devices and I can live happily ever after with the purchase of some additional cables. But fuck me! Is it just me, or is that ridiculous?

What did I actually buy?

In the end, my purchase planning worked. I ended up with everything I planned to buy at around the cost I was expecting to pay. Some things were cheaper than I expected but that was made up for by having to buy additional cabling.

• Television: Sharp LC46D77X, as planned.
• Games: I ended up buying a PS3 instead of a standalone BluRay player. I could have paid about $350-$400 for a standard player, or, what I did do in the end was pay $450 for a PS3 Slim 120Gb. I swore a few years ago never to buy anything Sony again, but what can I say? I really want to play GT5 when it comes out. I’ll also have an XBox 360 in a few weeks after my redemption with Sharp is processed. I’ve gone from owning no consoles to owning two-thirds of all the latest consoles. Great!
• Home Theatre Speakers: Onkyo TX-SR307 and JBL 5.1 “Simply Cinema” SCS-200.5 speakers. More on this later.
• HTPC: I went with the Pentium option. It was cheaper, after all.

How did I go from Yamaha to Onkyo and JBL? Well, that’s pretty much luck. I left hospital on Sunday, helped my dad with his new home theatre setup, and then headed to Harvey Norman to check out the sale that was ending that very day. Luckily for me, it was 30% off home theatre speakers. They had a few setups, none of which appeared to be particularly impressive (or if they were impressive, totally out of my price range) except two; the one I ended up buying and a Yamaha setup which was the model below what I wanted. The confusing part was the Yamaha setup with Klipsch speakers was $1500 versus the $1100 I paid for the Onkyo and JBLs – as I understand it, Onkyo and JBL are both better quality than Yamaha and Klipsch; the sales guy explained it was because the latter system had more overall power output. I am not terribly concerned with overall output as I live in a town house complex, so high volumes are a no-no anyway (as it stands, the total system output of my new system is something like 500 Watts, and previously a 125 Watt 5.1 computer speaker setup was sufficing). The marked price was $1200 but he dropped it to $1100 because he didn’t actually have them in stock on the day.

My current dilemma is trying to figure out the best way to connect them all together. Originally my plan with my new home theatre was to connect everything to everything else through the A/V receiver as explained above in my rant.

So I thought I could do all that with HDMI cables only. Apparently not: my A/V receiver will only pass-through HDMI directly without touching it. So any audio carried over HDMI will go straight to the TV stereo speakers and not to the surround sound where I want it.

OK, fine.

• First option: So, what I want to do is have all of the devices plug via HDMI into the A/V receiver and then have a seperate (S/PDIF, co-ax or optical) cable for the audio also plugging into the A/V receiver.
• Second option: Or, do I want to plug all of the HDMI cables straight into the television and only connect the audio cables from each device to the A/V receiver? Saves me buying another HDMI cable to go from A/V -> TV.
• Third option: OR! Do I want to plug all of the HDMI cables, carrying both audio and video, and ONLY the HDMI cables, into the TV, and then have a single audio cable from the TV’s optical audio out to the A/V receiver?

All three “should work”, but what’s the best way? I guess I’ll have to experiment when I actually get my receiver later in the week.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

So, on the back of my previous posts, I have finally come to some kind of a conclusion regarding my plans for an HTPC and media centre solution.

The problem previously was that I didn’t have a home theatre to plug any HTPC I built into. However, there are some deals going down at the moment that I am finding too hard to pass up. Not only that, but I feel as though I am overwhelmingly dependent upon my computer for entertainment, which is fine for me, but doesn’t accommodate my housemates and friends very well in a social context. Four things have conspired to make me consider this purchasing spree:

• Harvey Norman currently has a 23-month no repayment deal going
• Sharp are offering an XBox 360 Elite and four games with the purchase of their televisions
• My lounge is rarely used because I find I have nothing to do there
• With a HTPC, I will be able to push all of my computer geekery outside of the computer room onto other people! Muhahaha!

Me being me of course, I would not be satisfied by spending money unwisely. In my eyes, spending unwisely also includes spending “just enough” to get something “good enough” – if I’m going to outlay a large sum of money on something, I might as well make sure it does exactly what I need, how I want it to, even if that means outlaying an even larger sum than what I could “get away with”. As the old saying goes, if you aren’t going to do something properly, you might as well not do it at all.

The components I have chosen are:

• Television: Sharp LC46D77X; a standard-fare 46″ LCD television. I don’t know if having an RS-232 port is standard for LCDs, but this one has one, which is important to me because it will allow me to control the television through my HTPC.
• Games: By redemption (and payment of a small postage fee), from Sharp I will receive an XBox 360 Elite with four games. I would never spend money on an XBox or PS3 if I could get away with it, and in this case although I am indirectly supporting Microsoft, I figure Sharp has already bought the consoles and I am not actually contributing anything directly to Microsoft. In any case, a home theatre without a social gaming aspect isn’t much of a home theatre at all. In the end, I can just sell it if I don’t want it.
• BluRay: I have a few options here, but all I really want is something that reads the disc and throws the data out a HDMI cable to my A/V receiver. The cheapest option should suffice.
• Home Theatre Speakers: Yamaha YHT-692AU or similar. It has 4 HDMI inputs, 2 optical inputs, 2 co-axial audio inputs, component and standard RCA. Everything I’ll need.
• HTPC: Will cost about $800 and be based on an Intel platform; either a dual-core Pentium or Atom.

I have two options here. Basing the system on a mini-ITX Intel/nVidia ION platform will ensure very low power usage, but also ensure a very limited upgrade path. The system is designed with one purpose in mind, so the lack of an upgrade path may not be a problem. However, it isn’t much cheaper than basing the system on a standard ATX mainboard with a dual-core Pentium and discrete nVidia graphics card. It will have an upgrade path however as mentioned this may not be necessary, but the option existing is comforting.

The two systems I’ve mocked up are as follows:

Some notes: the hard disk is meant to replace the hard disk in my desktop system which is a Western Digital Green Power 750Gb. I bought the Green Power because it was cheaper without fully realizing the difference in performance between the two which is substantial. Also, I already have a USB HDTV dongle so I may only need to buy one extra in case watching one channel while recording another becomes a necessity.

So, as you can see I nearly have everything worked out. My plan is to have everything plug via HDMI and optical cable into the Yamaha receiver and make use of the excellent Logitech Harmony 525 multifunction remote to control everything. Although it probably won’t be necessary to do so with the remote, I will still be able to use an RS232 serial cable from the computer to control the television. I might end up setting that up just for coolness factor. Perhaps it will allow me to fine-tune control of the television.

So, these are my plans. Any thoughts, opinions, input?

OK, maybe that was kind of predictable, and yes, I’ll grant you that a change in the entire broadcasting system of one show probably won’t make that much difference, but you know what? Last night was the first time in probably, hmm, at least the last eight years that I have purposefully sat down to watch an entertainment programme on television.

Sometimes I will have been watching television just because I was at a friends place or to see some documentary on SBS or whatever, but I think that last night was the first time in a very long time that I purposefully sat down with the intent of watching a show on one of the commercial channels, on purpose!

Some people have been saying that last night’s show only served to highlight how Hey Hey is a very old programme and is showing its age horrendously. Well, I can only conclude that those people probably never liked Hey Hey to begin with and can’t pick anything else to criticize about it.

There are two things I really liked about the show last night. One was the overall format, and the other I will mention later.

Daryl is the host, but he isn’t always in control. Sure, he does most of the talking, and guides the flow of the programme, but that’s about it. He is a guide, not a director. All of the other characters (I can’t think of a better term for them at the moment, so this’ll do) on the show are pretty much free to cut in whenever the hell they want (an example last night; near the start of the show, Red made a joke, but the camera didn’t cut away to him from Daryl. So, he went over to where Daryl was standing, stuck his head in the shot, interrupting what Daryl was saying, and said, “What do you have to do to get a cutaway around here?!” – classic Red). Dickie, the cartoon guy, John Blackman, and even the guys in the band (Red and Wilbur) sort of just hang around and make jokes about what’s going on. None of it feels particularly scripted, and I’m typically a pretty good judge of that (but I am biased toward Hey Hey, so I could be wrong).

I could be wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure that Hey Hey was one of the first shows to use breaking the fourth wall to help with the comedy. With the characters butting in whenever they feel like it, and the camera crews taking regular visits backstage, and the audience and camera crew being frequently shown and involved in the programme, the overall feeling is more … ‘welcoming’ and I personally feel a lot more involved in a show like Hey Hey than I would any other programme where there are simply talking heads jabbering on, which accounts for oh… every other live television show, ever.

Rove Live is similar in concept (IMO Rove stole most of the ideas from Hey Hey), but it’s more compartmentalised. Rove is the director, he controls the show. The guests and comedians stay on the set off to the side, but they are rarely involved after their respective segments. They do a lot of the same gags that Hey Hey did, but once again, without the regular but unpredictable input from the other characters, most of the comedy is left to Rove, who simply can’t compete with a whole cast.

The other really important aspect of last night’s show, for me at least, was that despite Daryl being wholly and soully an “old-world media” type of guy, he has apparently fully embraced Facebook and Twitter and their usefulness. Unlike on every single other show on television where the hosts refer to Facebook and Twitter etc with ridiculous parody names and give a general sense of disdain toward the services, usually alongside an overwhelmingly dramatic sense that these things are simply beyond the viewer and they shouldn’t bother with them. The Twitter tag #heyhey was for a period last night the most popular tag on the entire website, which Daryl mentioned on the show! He actually talked about Twitter like it was an interesting and useful tool, because it is! (conspiracy theory incoming) Instead of all the other talking head idiots who are either genuinely stupid, or contractually obligated, to play down the role of these websites in order to avoid threatening the old-world media conglomerates who still haven’t figured out how to make money from the internet.

That leads me to my final point regarding Hey Hey and why it’s so great: Hey Hey makes you think. With all of the conversation threads flying around between the different characters, the various wierd and wonderful acts on the show (Red Faces!, and last night the a capella performance as well), the show actually had strange things on there that required people to step outside their lovely perfect television world and say, “Hang on, that’s different.” Current television programming is all the same, and it’s all designed to do one thing: sell crap. Whether they’re just selling the station itself, or the shows have accompanying merchandise, it’s all about selling crap. Hey Hey is the same of course, but it does it in a much more obvious way (‘Here’s a cool band, they have a CD out, buy it if you like it!’ as opposed to ‘OMG, FUCKING REALITY TELEVISION!!!! HOLY SHIT! , , etc etc of all the other shows)

… that was a bit ranty, so I will summarise by saying that Hey Hey sells shit obviously by saying “here is a thing, if you like it, buy it” whereas other shows use subversive tactics like emotional manipulation to sell shit.

I hope next week’s reunion show is just as good as this weeks. I would probably watch it if they put it on again full time, but it has been around for 28 years, and I imagine after a few months or so the novelty would wear off. But then again, the average age of television viewers is around 50 – so maybe the old-style format shows, with a few modern touches, can make a comeback? I personally think it could go either way. People my age (23) grew up watching Hey Hey, and now we’re all on Facebook and Twitter. I imagine they could modernise the show in that sense and retain a whole bunch of viewers who, like me, watching Hey Hey last night was the first time they had voluntarily watched television in years.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

Introduction

As I am now living in my own place with people of my generation who understand my desire to have “everything now” (as most other late Generation X-ers and early Generation Y-ers will understand), I have decided that it is time to build myself a media centre for use in the lounge/common room.

The popularity of digital media management solutions has steadily risen over the past few years. Solutions based around commodity PC hardware and open-source operating systems have been around since 2002 at least, with commercial options such as TiVo being available for a few years beforehand.

Although TiVo has been available in America and surrounding countries for nearly 10 years now, it has only recently become avilable in countries such as Australia, Taiwan etc more recently. Thus contributing to the popularisation (amongst geeks at least) of free/open-source solutions such as the aforementioned MythTV.

Software

It is this software system, on top of my as always favourite Linux operating system that I will build my media centre solution. I have decided that using Arch will be ideal for a few reasons:

1. it’s fast. With my older hardware, this is important, especially when considering playback of HD content
2. I know how to use it.
3. I prefer some “under the hood” access – configuring everything from scratch, for me, is not a chore. I prefer it to having everything set to defaults like with Ubuntu/Mythbuntu. With either of those distributions, I’d end up changing all the defaults anyway.

Hardware

My hardware of choice is my ex-gaming PC, a veteran system by today’s standards which is over four years old now!

• AMD Athlon64 3400+ (2400Mhz)
• DFI LANParty UT nForce 250GB
• 2x512Mb Corsair Dual-Channel RAM
• Albatron nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256Mb
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

Storage

Currently the system has about 480GB of storage spread across three seperate hard drives (the joys of incremental upgrades). However, due to the planned dual-role of this computer as media centre and secure backup/storage system, I will be buying some new drives and setting up a simple software RAID system of SATA disks. With the ridiculous cost of hard disk storage solutions these days, where off-the-shelf 1TB drives command an approximate cost of 16 cents per gigabyte, there will be no shortage of disk space.

For reasons of performance and reliability I will buy at least two identical drives (probably a pair of Western Digital 7200RPM ‘Green Power’ drives) and place them in a RAID1 configuration. Whether I will use the onboard RAID capabilities of the system board or an implementation in software (mdadm) is largely irrelevant in terms of performance as both rely on the CPU to perform RAID-related calculations. However, using the software solution will abstract the RAID functions from the hardware, which will eliminate the single point of failure. If the motherboard were to be replaced, I would effectively lose my RAID system, and all data with it. The underlying hardware is irrelevant in this scenario when using software RAID.

Video Capture

Finding the right video capture card isn’t going to be as easy as the rest of the hardware. While there is a lot of information (MythTV hardware wiki, OCAU MythTV Wiki) available about which are the best cards to buy, it is a matter of matching the exact cards which are known as fully working to those actually available for purchase.

For example, the Leadtek DTV-2000H is a well-rounded card which offers the features I require. However, there are two different revisions available, the ‘I’ revision and the ‘J’ revision. The former works flawlessly and the latter has intermittent problems and requires a lot more tweaking to get it to play nicely. Both cards use the same highly recommended chipset (Connextant 2388x) but apparently are different enough to cause problems (see the MythTV wiki entry for this card). This makes my choice a very difficult one as retailers generally aren’t too happy about having customers open boxes and inspect hardware version numbers prior to a purchase being made.

Remote Control

The only other hardware consideration I have is what remote control to use. Some of the available video capture cards come with their own, or I may buy another. It is an incidental cost in the grand scheme of things but adds so much functionality to the system. I do not want to have a keyboard and mouse hanging around in my loungeroom if I can avoid it, and indeed, I can. More to the point, though, a remote control with familiar buttons makes the system much more accessible to the non-technical people who will be using the system, and that increases the chances it’ll be used.

Conclusion

As this is only part one of my upcoming series of posts on the matter, you will have to wait a week or two until I’ve properly researched my hardware choices, made my purchases and begun the build. Rest assured though, I’ll do a full write-up!

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.

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.

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!

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!