if it's owən | it's probably awesome

awesome

Oct 1st, 2009

What’s wrong with Australian television?

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with Australian television: HEY HEY IT’S SATURDAY IS NOT PERMANENTLY ON AIR!

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.

Feb 10th, 2009

Media Centre Musings (Part 1 – The Theory)

This post is part one of a five-part series. Skip to related posts:

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:

it’s fast. With my older hardware, this is important, especially when considering playback of HD content
I know how to use it.
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!

Oct 19th, 2008

Epic weekends for the win

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.

Sep 27th, 2008

My Week in Review

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.

Sep 21st, 2008

TripleJ Impossible Music Festival

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!

May 6th, 2008

Nine Inch Nails – The Slip

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!

Apr 30th, 2008

Ghosts I-IV has landed!

I received my copy of Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV today! All the way from the US of A, it came in a padded package, in excellent condition.

The accompanying booklet, to my surprise, has different artwork than the provided online PDF download, and some may notice a spiffy iMac keyboard in one of the shots.

Unfortunately I couldn’t justify the cost of the $300USD super deluxe limited edition signed package, though I don’t envy Trent for having made the decision to make it available.

The video is titled: “Spend a day with us: play this 2500 times”

Apr 15th, 2008

Apocalypso signed copy

My copy of The Presets – Apocalypso has just arrived, and it’s awesome. Despite the fact that I’ve already listened to the album a fair bit, this is special because it’s a signed copy. Check it out.

Woo! If you haven’t already, buy it. It’s awesome.

Apr 10th, 2008

Muscles @ The Met

It was fucking epic! Last night the gang and I went to The Met in the Valley to see one of my favourite artists, Muscles. It was every bit as awesome as I expected it to be; there wasn’t a moment that I didn’t enjoy!

Upon arrival, I grabbed myself a few bourbons and checked out the place. The Met was such an appropriate venue! Probably one of the best-themed clubs I’ve been in, they had so many different rooms and levels, it was an intricate maze of open-space dance floors and intimate, quiet areas for chilling. Couches and arm chairs could be found scattered almost randomly throughout the venue, and there were many bars, each with a different theme. The place has three or four levels, it’s immense!

The stage itself is modest, but the lighting setup is perfectly suited to the size of the space, and the stage is backed by a wall of widescreen LCDs, all linked together and displaying imagery to accompany the music.

The support act, The E.L.F warmed us up with some cute remixes of classic tunes, including Fleetwood Mac and the Beach Boys; but the best part was when he played “My People” — HOLY. FUCK. I absolutely fucking love this track, and to hear it played at The Met through the sound system there was simply epic.

After that, we warmed down a bit with a few more drinks and waited patiently for Muscles. He teased us a little by having his album symbol put up on the big screens while the interlude music went quiet — everyone started screaming and jumping, yet he wasn’t to show himself for another twenty minutes! Nevertheless, it caught most people off-guard when he did come out, which I think was his intention from the start.

Let me just say that if you haven’t heard anything by Muscles before, then I’d recommend checking out his MySpace. His songs seem to pop and fizzle and buzz with the energy and excitement of a childhood science experiment; if you let them, they completely envelop you in a sense of endless fun. It’s dance music with a twist. In an interview I read, Muscles said one of his influences is the techno-pop, energetic theme music he used to hear when playing his Super Nintendo as a child; games especially like Super Mario Bros whose musical accompanyments were designed to create an environment of surrealism. These kind of influences are evident in Muscles’ songs.

In addition, the lyrics to his songs are plain, obvious and easy to sing-along to: as opposed to the majority of dance tracks which are either too much techno, too much R&B, or too much of both, Muscles’ music and lyrics are not about head-banging or gang-banging, they’re about simple things like a love of ice-cream, having your friends over, and meeting people on public transport.

Listening to Muscles is a regular thing for me. I don’t get tired of the innocence and the energy in his songs. I did not stop jumping and throwing my fists into the air for the entire set. It was fucking awesome!

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