I’m gothed up and I’m hitting the town.

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.

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.

For a while there, I’d lost my groove. I’ve always been seriously interested in constantly learning new things about computers, and learning new things in general. For a while there, my interest was waning somewhat. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it was, although I know many people will tell me it was my other half. Haha, yeah, that works.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that for the last 12 months or so I’ve been wallowing a little in my own self-pity. There was an interesting story on Triple J’s hack programme Friday, about how kids — well, young adults — these days are stressed out to the max when it comes to making life decisions. Australia’s quite a well-off nation, and our high-school graduates are faced with so many choices because of this. Straight into work, tertiary education, travelling the world, dole bludging even. The comparison is made to the era of our parents whose career choices were extremely limited. A good example would be my own mother who finished school at the end of year ten, whose only marketable skills at the time saw her placed into any of the following roles: secretary, typist, or administrative assistant. Yeah, you see what I’m getting at?

These days, we have so much freedom in terms of choosing our career paths … it’s quite stressful. The point is made on the programme that it sounds spoilt, but the burden of choice is extremely taxing on our young minds, and it’s not an easy decision at all.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that I’ve never really know what I wanted to do. Parents and teachers always asked during high-school, and even before, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” — which I think stemmed from their own upbringing, and the mindset that you were destined for some arbitrary role in society of your limited choosing. They asked a question which wasn’t relevant to the children whom they were asking. In my case especially, as I’ve never really had any life goals.

I want to own a sports car, and I want to own a house one day. The time frames are pretty undetermined. Though these days I’m thinking more about those two goals, if you’d asked me about those things three years ago, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you. These things do take time.

So for the last twelve months or so I’ve been doing not much with my life. Just studying and working when I have to, and in my personal time, chillaxing. Which is fine, but I think I neglected my self-learning a little. I dropped out of the loop for a while. In hindsight, I can see that it was a good thing for me to have done. I was getting bored with it all, and I needed a change of pace. So I spent time with my girlfriend a lot, and more recently started wasting time playing World of Warcraft.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to neglect my personal time now that I’ve re-energized myself. I’m going to devote more thought to my personal time so that the time I do spend on myself, and on others, is more worthwhile.

Work has picked up, though. Not my main job, that’s still pretty bland. I don’t care about finance so much. It’s remotely interesting, and I’ll pick up tidbits as I go along, but I won’t actively teach myself about it. My other job however has started off excellently. I’m my own business and I’m doing some research for a guy who does full IT system implementations for small businesses. The twist is that he does it using all open-source software. You know how much I love open-source.

So last Wednesday, my first time working for him, I spent some of the day researching ways to do unattended installations with Ubuntu Linux, and then I spent the rest of the day starting to implement our first revision of system we’re putting in place. I spent the entire day working on my laptop (Arch Linux), logged into his server (Ubuntu), using awesome open-source tools (Firefox, Tomboy Notes, vi, etc). It wasn’t restricting (licences). I didn’t have to learn to speak another language (Microsofteese). I wasn’t constantly worried about lack of documentation (third-parties).

So now even though I’m about to spend my Sunday fixing not one but two Windows PCs for friends and family, I’m not in that poor a mood. I’m going to fix one by installing Ubuntu on it and having all the Windows-only apps run in a virtual machine courtesy VirtualBox, and the other I’m charging for. So that balances out for me!

Anyway, the Ubuntu ISO has finished downloading, so I better get to it.

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.

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.

Who: Cog
What: Sharing Space

Cog’s latest album, Sharing Space, has been a while in the making. Since early 2007, Cog have been working on the album in the quaint town of Weed, California.

The album takes a slight detour from the stylings of its predecessor; it seems as though the boys wanted listeners to focus more on the lyrics of their songs. This is not without reason, with a few of the songs exploring an anti-establishment mindset, most notably “Swamp” in which ‘the government’ is criticised and blamed.

The vocals are wonderfully typical of Cogs previous work, with multi-layered chorus melodies giving them depth; a welcome multi-dimensional quality.

In aid to this, you won’t hear as many ripping guitar riffs that we’ve come to know and love from Cog’s earlier work; which isn’t to mean the guitar has taken a back seat, its role has merely been reprised somewhat, with less show-boating, and more effort put into making the guitar work together with the rest of the song.

The drumming is foreboding, powerful, with a certain finality to it, ever-present in the background, driving each song by pacing itself with the beat. It’s quality stuff.

The songs “Bird Of Feather” and “What If” have been floating around the airwaves for a while now, and they’re epic tracks. Although “What If” seems to be quite similar-sounding to work from The New Normal-era, it fits right in as the fourth track on the album, followed by the powerfully moving “Bird Of Feather”.

If any complaints, the only I have is that the mastering of the album doesn’t seem quite as good as The New Normal: overall, it’s quieter. I suppose some would say this is due to the quieter, less punchy nature of the songs, but I think they could have done a better job.

Taking everything into account, I’d say that Sharing Space is another quality release from the Sydney band. At only $20 from JB Hi-Fi, you can’t go wrong.

Cog is touring with support around Australia in May and June, check them out.

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!

Netvibes at Wikipedia
C|Net review the big four


Remember the bad old days of early internet where the tech-savvy among us would create themselves a home page filled with links to their favourite sites? Well, over the last few years this concept has begun to gain some technical accreditation, and in doing so made itself available to the masses. I’m talking about services like iGoogle, and one I recently discovered, Netvibes.

While iGoogle comes with all the news and e-mail you could possibly ask for, it doesn’t have the same comprehensive database of information offered by the more aesthetically pleasing Netvibes service. Netvibes, I’ve so far found, is quite cool. It’s fully “Web 2.0″ and allows you to add pre-built or your own widgets to your home page, while also allowing full customisation in terms of tabbed content browsing, the ability to place items almost wherever you want, and to arrange them in whatever kind of order or categories you desire.

They boast 100,000+ pre-built widgets including monitoring of all major webmail services, news, personal sites, bidding, anything you can think of really. For any site that doesn’t already have its own widget, you can create your own using an RSS feed. I personally find the MySpace and eBay widgets quite useful; without having to go to either site in-full and login, I can just go to my netvibes private page and see everything I need to see.

That’s another interesting feature, supposedly designed for sharing and collaboration (and perhaps competition with the aforementioned MySpace et al); you have yourself a private page full of things you want to keep tabs on, but you also have a “my universe” page which is a publicly viewable version of your stuff. You can add friends, join groups and all that good stuff we’ve come to love from MySpace, Facebook and Beebo.

Whether or not the netvibes portal is going to serve me with any great useful purpose I’m yet to determine, but for now I can appreciate it as a cool toy, as I’m sure many other netizens will appreciate.

You can view my public page here. Happy vibes!

Over the weekend, Carly and I visited Rasa, an Asian restaurant on Gympie Parade in Noosa Heads. It was really awesome.

After watching the sun set, we sat down and perused the menus. It was comprised of standard fare Asian dishes, notably sweet and sour chicken or pork and satay chicken or pork. In addition, they had many sides which interested me, specifically ‘Bert’s Balls’ which came in steamed or fried varieties, and were made from something that was of similar taste to dim-sims, but they had something a little extra. They were very nice.

So, Carly and I had some of Bert’s Balls as an entree, alongside some special bread which was herb-ful and delicious. I can’t quite recall the name, so I’ll have to get back to you on that one. We chose our mains; Carly decided on satay chicken, and I chose something else entirely; I do not recall the name, but it was made from chilli, onion, tomato, chicken, and various vegetables, and it was absolutely yum.

The prices were definitely agreeable; at under $20 per meal, the portions were more than considerable and the quality of the food was excellent, most definitely not the fat-soaked cholesterol-fest that Asian food is typically presented as.

We had a wonderful time. After which, we visited Hastings St where we purchased some gelati from one of the local confectionary cafes; I had chocolate and strawberry. It was beautiful. The strawberry gelati, being made from real strawberries, tasted exactly like… strawberry. Simply incredible. The chocolate had a lovely hazelnut flavour to it.