Canadian's Have Guts

After recently being bold enough to refuse US demands to join them in the inane and quite frankly not working missile defense shielf project (something Australia still seems to be all for - naturally), a former Canadian government minister writes an open letter to critics in both the US and Canada. And makes an incredible amount of sense:

"Dear Condi,

I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.

I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game..."

Boot Camp - Mashing for Beginners

Ah ha! Now this is what I needed to read...

Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web

As part of Yahoo's 10th birthday - a visual retrospective of 100 top "moments" of the last 10 years. Memorable stuff there, big and small.

Michael Barrier Interviews Brad Bird

An interview with "The Incredibles" writer/director Brad Bird, where he goes into his influences (or lack of), what success with "The Incredibles" has brought him, where he wants to go with things, and where he sees animation in general heading. Excellent stuff.

While I'm on the subject, my top five animation director/creators:

Brad Bird (The Incredibles)
Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)
John Lassetter (Toy Story)
Nick Park (Wallace & Grommit)
Henry Selick (The Corpse Bride)

Wired News: Scra-Scra-Scratching Thin Air

I think I want one of these...

"HP's DJammer is a prototype handheld gadget DJs can use to mimic the sound of scratching vinyl simply by moving the device around. So, if the operator makes a scratching motion in the air, arrays of internal motion sensors translate movement into music, and the DJammer "scratches" the music as though the DJ were manipulating a record."



Unfortunately: "...the DJammer has yet to be made into a product..."

Maybe one day... :)

Napster creator Fanning strikes Sony Snocap deal

Shawn Fanning always seemed like a bit of a dickheard quite frankly, but I suppose I have to admit that Napster did have some innovations... Now he's signed a deal with Sony for some kind of new music tracking system called Snocap. What is it?

"Snocap is a copyright management and filtering system that allows users to trade legitimate songs over peer to peer networks."

A great new innovation that will allow legal filesharing to thrive? Or another technique for megacorporations to try and limit the choices for legitimate users?

MythTV Build Party

Take a bunch of geeks and tech activists and put them in a room with a tonne of computers and HDTV parts - all to build their own Linux-based MythTV HDTV digital recorder boxes and thumb their noses and proposed American laws that from July will try to regulate High Definition TV technology. Supposedly to stop piracy, but really it will have the effect of stifling technological innovation and removing personal choice when it comes to this technology.

As you can tell, I'm all for open standards in this area. In fact, I plan to put together my own MythTV box when finances allow me (the software is free, but you need reasonably good hardware to run it - still cheaper than most commercial PVR's though - and infinitely more adaptable).

Some other good links:

http://www.mythtv.org - the main site for the system.

Also http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/cookbook - a good step-by-step guide to building a user-friendly version of the system with the Knoppix Linux build. Provided by EFF, who are profiled in the main article.

As for the local scene, HD standards have been pretty well screwed up by the government and regulatory bodies here, so uptake has been slow. But it should improve over time - and with Howard's insistence on following the US on nearly everything, it's likely that we will get a similar "broadcast flag" system proposed soon enough.

Word of mouth "winner for books"

This pretty much comes under "market research" for me... the BBC has a story up about a study that confirms that word of mouth is the best tool to sell a book, and help it become a best seller.

It includes examples such as "The Da Vinci Code", "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Nighttime" as examples of books that have succeeded massively with this kind of help. And I'd have to agree - regardless of what I thought of Da Vinci in the long run, I've seen it's word of mouth success up close (about 20 times now!), and I know it works. Even though I read the book way before anyone else I know as well, even I first heard about it from author Matthew Reilly and a post on his website.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boingboing for this one. He quite rightfully points out that he's used the technique himself very well, with his pioneering free online release of his books, including Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, another one I recommend without a doubt, and one I read from the free online download, entirely because it was not available in Australian bookshops at the time.

(But hey, it made a fan out of me, and led me to Boingboing as well, so it worked...)

Motivation, comic style?

In response to the news that Marvel has licenced their characters to be used in corporate motivational posters, this site has put up several featuring far more interesting comic book characters.

My personal favourite, naturally:

(Edit: Well, I've either been stopped from image linking to the site personally, or everyone has, so just click on the title link above to see them for yourself! For the record, my favourite is naturally the Spider Jerusalem poster - the third one down).

Comments are Go!

And suddenly, out of nowhere, I have comments working on the site. This was something I'd been trying to do for a little while now, and thought I had done through the blogger interface, but it didn't seem to work.

But after the originator of the sushi post below actually sent me a comment, I found they were displaying on the permalinks for each post (but there were other problems there), so I got into the whole thing, worked out the blogger XML to display everything properly, then fixed up all my relative links into absolute ones, and republished everything to make it work.

Now posting is available to all, to comment as they please. Consider this an invitation to make a comment, because I know some people are reading this thing, but the only site stats I get are too crude to tell me much more.

So give it a go people!

(Of course, this sudden success does also immediately explain why all the posts before the last one have 0 comments - the thing wasn't working until now!)

Yakuza party @ Fotopic.Net - Or, Naked Sushi Chick

A small part of me thinks this is a little odd and entirely sexist, but most of me thinks it's highly original and really quite appealing... :)

A picture gallery from an apparently Japanese old-school traditional sushi party, which involves serving sushi off the body of a lovely naked lady :) It's called "nyotaimori" in Japanese, and is apparently all the rage for Yakuza and the like... though this gallery (which only seems to partially work, probably from the boingboing factor) is only partially working.



(Linked from Boing Boing, who really do have quite the sushi fetish...)

libsyn // podcasting made easy

If you want to make a podcast or ten... this might be just the place. Libsyn costs, but for the amount of server space you need, and the rss feeds (which may or may not be easy, depending on your tech knowledge) and everything else, this is quite an interesting service.

From the looks of it US$5 a month is all I'd need to get plenty of space and the full service. Fact is, the server space is all I need that I don't already have, but this might be a good one.

The other real alternative is bit torrent downloads through blogtorrent or something else, which would be free, especially since I finally got the full bit torrent thing going here myself, but that might just depend on how easily I can convince other people to download the torrent way.

And yes, I'm looking at starting up a podcast. More on that soon... along with my collaborator(s).

Copyrights Keep TV Shows off DVD

I'd buy more of these series DVDs if I could afford them... but the details in the article could be real damaging to the "experience" for some of these series.

Cutting or changing music from various episodes might not seem like much, but for the best series, things like Northern Exposure and Homicide: Life on the Streets, the music was like another character in the show. These are the shows that taught everything since how to use music effectively.

Wired 13.03: The UnGoogle (Yes, Yahoo!)

Interesting look inside Yahoo! today, where ex-studio CEO Terry Semel is turning them into a Hollywood company as much as a tech company. How they're not really competing with Google at all anymore, and what they're looking to do after ten years in business.

Reading it, I realised that Yahoo! has not been a search engine for me for years, if it ever was, while I do use it increasingly for news, movies and media. In other words, exactly where they're going.

The Wold Newton Universe

I've barely got into this... but it looks fascinating. Taking an idea from science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer, it takes a fictional meteor strike in 1795 and uses that as a "zero hour" event that led to the creation of basically all pulp adventurers and heroes ever created (sort of a variation on the League of Extraordinary Gentleman - though I'm sure this came before).

From it, Farmer deduced that this new mutant family included all the classics - The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sherlock Homes, Tarzan, Doc Savage and many more. Since then, many fans have added all kinds of convoluted stories that have brought thousands of characters from other fiction, film, television and comics into the same mutant family.

Part shared-universe, part obsessive fanboy epic. Interesting...

Holy Shit...

James Sime tells it like it is... if you don't know the guy, he wears great suits, has mad hair, and runs one of the best comicbook stores on the planet - Isotope in San Francisco. He's talking about minicomics and running a comicshop in this article, but that doesn't matter.

Because he's really talking about motivation, and following your dreams, and all that, and while it sounds corny, he's absolutely right, and he speaks the truth, and genius truth at that.

I turn 30 in two weeks time. This is the year that everything happens.

Oscar results 2005

There's a million articles about the Oscars out there... but IMDB really is the best place for all the gossip, all the picks and all the details on who won.

Surprise - Million Dollar Baby got up over The Aviator. Not quite as surprising was the Eastwood beat Scorcese for the directors award, which now puts Martin in the company of people like Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altmann as a five times loser.

As for the rest of them, the shortest price favourite in history - Jamie Foxx for Ray, quite rightfully won. Cate Blanchett flew the Aussie flag high for The Aviator and got us another one, while Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman were kind of obvious winners.

It was great to see Charlie Kaufman finally win an Oscar for his "Eternal Sunshine" screenplay. I kind of expected him to win a few years ago, then I wasn't sure if he ever would. Good stuff.

Of course, I'm not one to judge much this year, as "Eternal Sunshine" and "The Incredibles" were the only winners this year that I've seen so far. As much as I love the movies, it's been kind of hard to get there with the little man to take care of. I can live with that, but hopefully the situation won't last forever... because I've always loved the movies.

(Just to add, I wanted to fill this entry with IMDB pics, but they don't seem to allow external linking... oh well, I know Yahoo do anyway...)

Max Barry | Jennifer Government and Her Barcode

Author Max Barry discusses the origins of the barcode tatooed on the eponymous cover model pic for his novel "Jennifer Government". It's more complicated than you'd think...

By the way, read "Jennifer Government" - a funny and thoughtful book that has put fellow Aussie Barry exactly where I'd like to be also :)

Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy

Or, mad hippie makes good, gets into computers, accidentally becomes a multimillionaire by being the first employee of Sun Microsystems, starts EFF because he should, and is now taking on the US government because of their unreasonable attacks on privacy in the post-9/11 world.

A fascinating character, and he's absolutely right, although he can fight this more than most because of his riches.

At the very least of course, all of us should be able to see the laws that we're being subjected to, and that's the most amazing situation in the case John Gilmore is pursuing.

The Great Thompson Hunt - Hunter S. Thompson - King of Gonzo!

A site I hadn't heard of or seen before... it wasn't run by Hunter, but it's got a lot of material by and about him. I suspect it's been getting a lot of hits this week.

Voodoo Doll knife rack

For when cooking is more about punishing the person you like the least than cooking your favourite meal :)



(I wonder whether they have politically themed models... Bush or Howard anyone...?)

Vice President, CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute at CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute

This is just too weird... an American cable TV channel is offering a job to a committed Dukes of Hazard fan. They will watch the show for a year, blog about it, attend a few conventions... and be paid $100,000 for the year!!

That's right, $100,000 per year to be a fanboy blogger. Incredible.

(I can see how it works sort of though... they get publicity because of the pay, and they get increased traffic and increase their user community. Just wish it was a) in Australia, and b) on something I was into!)

Paul Theroux on Hunter S Thompson

A great piece on Hunter by his friend Paul Theroux. I've noticed that Thompson knew the best and brightest of our times, and they are all keen to write about him now. As it should be.

The end says it all about the man really:

"America is a country that celebrates fakes and posturers, but Hunter S Thompson, who shot himself to death inside his walled compound, Owl Farm, in Colorado, on February 20, was the real thing. The genuine article, as he would have said; the real McCoy. He lived the life he wanted, as half outlaw, half hero, without any inhibition; broke the law when he felt it impinged upon him, was beholden to no one, shot holes in any fakery he found - either with a .44 Magnum or a breezy vocabulary; and he died the same way, at the moment of his choosing, probably in great pain from a variety of ailments - spinal injury, broken bones and psychic wounds. "Pain" in the metaphysical sense too."

Thompson's Wife Forgives His Suicide

It's an interesting way to live with it I suppose. But after Warren Ellis made a comment on the problems of someone who would kill themselves knowing their wife or son would find the body, it seems as if Anita Thompson has come to terms with the situation remarkably well (then again, what else can she do? - at least she's young.)

Still, the article is worth a look, because some of the descriptions are very bizarre, to say the least. And the man certainly had a unique "breakfast":

"On the last day of his life, Hunter S. Thompson woke with his usual breakfast of fresh fruit inside a thin layer of jello with gin and Grand Marnier drizzled on top..."

And apparently the man really knew how to shoot as well (go on, read the article!)

Downloaded and Ready to Rock

Now people are using iPod's to put on their on hi-tech DJ mixtape nights. Sounds like fun, provided you pick the right room full of people to expose your musical tastes to :)

LHC: The First Band on the Web

Apparently the first ever photo displayed on the web was in the link above - a "girl geek" group at the CERN laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee was still working on his new invention in 1992.

Sometimes the biggest things in the world start so small...

Optus suck... but I should have known that...

Back online finally. Terrible problems with the phone line that were entirely the fault of Optus led to us having no phone for a couple of days, then no DSL for a week, which was much harder to cope with than I thought it would be. But we survived, and the posting is back on track :)

Optus have given us pretty good service over time, but in the last couple of month's it's suddenly sucked. The DSL is good as well, a little overpriced maybe, but that's tempered with their excellent $0 startup deals, which is the only reason I could get it to begin with. And it all seemed fine for a while...

... Until we discovered that no one was charging us for our phoneline. Which seems great in theory. Until we worked out that Optus didn't know we existed. Some jokers called RSLCOM had somehow become our carrier but weren't billing us, and Optus wasn't billing us, but when no one wants to bill you it's actually a bad thing. This all should have been solved in January, and I thought it was, because I talked to an Optus guy and he got me to answer all these recorded messages to get reconnected to them, and it should have been fine. But then suddenly a week ago...

Out phone line was dead. Disconnected. Didn't work at all. So naturally, the DSL went out as well. Called up Optus about it, and it turns out that they still didn't have us as a customer, and that this was somehow still the fault of RSLCOM, and they were the ones who had disconnected us. After some polite screaming at Optus, then a call to RSLCOM who still didn't seem to know about us, I gave up and called the Telecommunications Ombudsman. It's where you go when everyone is screwing you around and you want a result.

And that's what I got. Dean, the guy on the phone there, listened to my problem, gave me a special Optus complaints line to call, recorded my complaint and gave me a number to use. When I called Optus at their special helpline, a completely different level of person was immediately accomodating and got my phone back on the next day. However, as is typical for this country, I was told the delay in getting my DSL back online would be up to a week, because Telstra have to do that, and we all know that Telstra suck already. At least she promised me a month's free service.

So I was stuck without DSL for a week. But now that it's finally online again, I haven't received any discount (just paid my normal fee a few days ago via auto deposit), and the emails I've got from them make me think there could be more problems next week, if they decide I'm a brand new user. If that happens I will be investigating ways of getting out of Optus altogether, even though I have 8 months on the contract left.

As it is, I'd get out of Optus now if I could - iiNet's new deal is looking so much better, and I have all the hardware I need now. We'll see what happens...