I want to use it (and will) because it’s freaking awesome. The bitrate thing doesn’t massively concern me… generally speaking, I can’t tell the difference (though I will continue to rip my CDs as lossless, mostly in case I lose them). What concerns me is the potential undermining of my CD-store perusing ways as a result! I haven’t had to consider this until now because mainstream music simply hasn’t been available in a relatively open (don’t give me crap about MP3 patents, anyone can read them), DRM-free format.

It ships with artwork but that so doesn’t count.

Oh, so apparently this post was a waste of time. Of course, it’s only licensed for US sales. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me, but it didn’t. Now I’m grumpy. And irrationally craving popcorn.

Well, if you’re in the US and using iTunes… stop. This is pretty cool for you guys, meanwhile I’ll keep buying my grey-market imported CDs (which is completely legal in Australia and morally fine). All that’s standing between me and Amazon’s MP3 music is a US shipping address for invoices, presumably, so I totally could just make one up. Not breaking any law that I’m under there. But whatever, it’s all too messy.

Yeah, that’s right, record companies screwed it up again.

We’ll get there, one day…

If this ever finds its way onto real CDs (i.e. albums), I may just cry. I probably spend in the vicinity of AU$60–75 a month on new albums, which is likely more revenue than you’d get if I bought things online… and I reckon a good half the reason I do that (aside from knowing what DRM is and why I don’t want it on my music) is for the packaging and associated retail experience. Most recent purchases include Gotye’s Mixed Blood, MoS Australia’s Electro House Sessions (it’s completely different from the global MoS release of the same name), Bob Sinclar’s Soundz of Freedom, and the super duper excellent soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

I have ripped each and every track from them all as WMA Lossless. I wouldn’t have bought… about three of the four… if it wasn’t for retail CD stores.

Video was annoyingly bad in the entire first half, because the vision switching was rubbish, the cameras were inappropriate for the task, and the camera ops had not the foggiest idea how to pull focus, adjust iris, or obey cues. Alternatively, the person calling the show was just really bad at letting people know when they were clear to start moving. I’d say somewhere between the two. Given there were only four live vision sources by my count (centre at audio desk, centre right (stage left), stage right, organ loft) it’s not exactly as though it should’ve been too complicated. The first two were house cameras and generally pretty okay. The third was an XL-1 or –2, whilst the camera at the organ was probably a XM or maybe a compact Panasonic camera. Both cameras 3 and 4 had serious aperture issues. The third was often too dark (failing to compensate for dim lighting in the room), whilst the fourth was waaay too far open. Apparently someone must have set it up when house lights were on and the organ was not: accordingly, it was absurdly bright against the other 3 cameras (zebra bars, anyone?).

Part of the issue also stemmed from having two different classes of projector in use in a configuration where the primary screen (called A) is ~18x9” and two secondaries (collectively, B) are perhaps half the primary screen’s dimensions (that is, a quarter of its size). All three were rear-project and I’d imagine that projector A was vastly more powerful than projectors B. Accordingly, camera 4 appeared on B without losing details, while on A the sheet music was a vast white expanse. This is why it’s important for video nerds to look outside their little control booth sometimes — preview monitors lie.  Also, the larger screen was one of the dirtier fast-folds I’ve seen used, with clearly visible lines three-by-two across it becoming especially apparent in bright, high-motion segments.

Somehow video redeemed itself in the second half (maybe different cameramen, maybe the person calling shots got a clue in intermission, or maybe my hypercriticalness subsided somewhat), but I wasn’t left amazingly impressed.

Lighting, on the other hand… delightful. Eight 5kW fresnels with Colourset scrollers gave a nice wash to the stage above and beyond what the (more) intelligent fixtures could provide. I couldn’t pick the movers on the back bar, but I’d venture a guess at MAC600’s for the sides. Also four per side, as with the fresnels. Five along the back bar, though I’m quite sure they were a different kind of fixture. Lighting didn’t help out the cheap Canon video cameras, though the house cameras dealt with it admirably… there were a few really beautiful shots in there from those two.

Audio worked. The 6.1 (which I read about somewhere but now can’t find, and for which there were puncy little speakers about the size of SX100’s set up in their appropriate positions) was useful for drowning out the organ at one point and making percussion come from weird directions, but other than that I didn’t particularly notice it. Which is good. Either they weren’t using it, or the sound was just swallowed by the room. Quite a lot of mics and those sound partitiony things (they surely have a name, but I don’t know it), which would tend to indicate they were being quite ambitious about either recording the concert or mixing to surround and didn’t want audio leaking between microphones. Hence (in part) my frustration at the single mic on Yamaoka’s amp… redundancy is important where one instrument is that important, especially in a high-traffic area like that (conductor walks around more than anyone else on stage). There’s always the possibility to re-set mics in intermission, but if either Yamaoka or the conductor were to knock it on entering after the intermission? Stuffed. It was a decent sized amp, but it’d hardly carry throughout the building very well. Aside from that… well, I don’t really know what I’m talking about with audio, anyway. It sounded good.

I shocked myself by remembering large swathes of Zelda. This makes me think I must’ve had Butterfly-Effect-esque blackouts in my childhood, but oh well. I’ve also decided I want to buy a Dreamcast, difficult though that may prove, because I really wanted one when they first came out (on account of that whole Linux thing, Internet connectivity, the brand’s relative innocence — hey, maybe that’s why it’s gone now –, and a handful of delicious looking screenshots from games which got great reviews) and never got around to it before they stopped making them.

Konami are morons. Everyone else gives their game footage gratis, quite reasonably understanding that such coverage is only going to boost the value of their brand, yet Konami apparently insisted on a watermark on some footage provided. I’ve never been a fan of many of their games anyway, but that watermark pissed me off enough that I’m exceedingly glad they’re mostly stuck in arcades with aging picture tube consoles, anyway. About the same decade as their marketing saaviness.

As much as I will always whine about anything visual (I “enjoy” or “dislike” regular concerts without too much analysis, because I can’t), it was a good night. It made me miss productions enormously (live vision especially), which is funny because I think the desired effect was to make people miss video games instead. Claud had fun laughing at the geeks getting all dressed up. We both laughed as certain members of the audience were baffled by performance conventions! All in good fun.

Michael’s pulling the plug on the server that this website has run on since 2003.

The ‘server’ has changed dramatically in constitution since it all began way back when, but… wow. An astonishingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Internet had altogether ceased to exist everytime Dale’s connection went out. In the early days, we were all running servers on port 1200 to circumvent ISP restrictions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, running Apache — on a pirated copy of Windows 2000 (those were the days in which “legitmate software” constituted an oxymoron). Operating on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoticons were hosted on free web space provided by iiNet in order to conserve bandwidth. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incredible. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future readers: that’s what happens when the internet goes out for a couple of hours, none of this occasional connection time-out rubbish), an irate explanatory post from mwdmeyer would emerge and life would continue as normal. Until parents discovered the server running and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to conceal yet another computer in a room crowded full of equipment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.

These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones powering Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recycling hardware, a subscription to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky magazines than anyone I know–I think it was that strange meeting place of compters, creativity, and cant that I later became comfortable with), when GeForce 2’s and Pentium 4’s (the first ones with RDRAM that everyone despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redirects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?

Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for personal publishing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic website was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web software in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birthday. Twelve US dollars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redirects — static IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was outside of the experience of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the privilege: static IPs being available only on business grade internet connections.

These are mere details. The forums themselves constitute an amazing chronicle of the lives of mwdmeyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n|cktangents, angelicdeity, baibai, Sphinx^, ludvikas, and a handful of others over a fairly tumultuous time. There is so much not recorded explicitly that surrounds the nearly 16,000 messages from these eleven users alone. Some has been suppressed, other parts forgotten, but all of it inextricably linked together in the momentum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.

The forums didn’t survive post-school. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given relationships faced with that manner of transition, but it was still bizarre witnessing what would have been several months of time spent on a single website evaporate into (not much). The server moved from Balmain to Marian Street, eventually finding its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recognise mutual busy-ness had a role such that neither of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blameless “but things changed” is ever sufficient when talking about close relationships. I’m fairly certain my closest friend for about two years at school is someone that I no longer have anything to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of failing to keep working on relationships myself.

I suppose the point of all this is that the computer formally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amazing contributor to Linux-based gaming, 2000–2002 RIP, but it could just as easily have been named after the Norse trickster and Odin’s wily accomplice!) isn’t just the latest in a series of bits of electronic gear that some markup and pixels have been piped off for a couple of years. This is just one step closer to a complete closure of a very large chapter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incredibly sad.

Please don’t for a minute consider this to be my arguing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about something far greater and more personal than a startlingly reliable FreeBSD web server that just happened to host a website for free for a long time.

There aren’t too many people you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birthday, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.

This isn’t an obituary, just a poor expression of remorse at the (human) disconnection and ‘drifted’ relationships of that era. Michael, once all this stupid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.

Thankyou.

I haven’t had a great day with Firefox. Well… I spent 3–4 hours in meetings today, so I didn’t even have that much time with Firefox! Still managed to let me down twice, though.

Damn its indisposable development tools *sobs uncontrollably*

I think I’ll switch back to Opera for all non-development Internet-related activity for a while… unless anyone has any other browser recommendations? I’ve seriously thought about IE7, but its rendering is still just a little too patchy for me to be able to live with myself as an Internet user.

Bleh. Let it be observed: even high-profile open source does not always lead to a good product. Its memory management is nothing short of repulsive. It will regularly use more memory than Photoshop and Illustrator combined — admittedly, I use Photoshop mostly for web production and not high resolution print stuff (though that does happen a few times a week, and it won’t often go far beyond the 350MB that Firefox seems to manage fairly regularly)

I’m still using CS2, so there aren’t any magical CS3 memory management advances that make such a claim possible… Firefox just sucks :P

I’d blame Windows being in need of a reinstall (it’s been running since October… more than six months without death :P Plus I started out not being happy with it because it’d been installed from the guy I bought the computer off, I just hacked it to use my CD key instead of the one he’d used to test things… so it’s never been perfect), but really, it’s not that bad for any other application. I normally do a reboot once a week and things are fine… heavy duty graphics editing, occasional video editing, constant mail and occasional wordprocessing… and of all those things it is a web browser that can’t get it right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so derisive about it seeing as I make a living off developing in this relatively simple world… but I am.

The flip side to all of that, of course, is that I’ve been trying to live (more) like a normal user the past few years. Essentially, recognising that it’s simpler to buy software than write it (WordPress, Flickr), using hackably-open technologies instead of truly open ones (WMA Lossless sans DRM), and a general abandonment of open source principles in favour of vastly improved productivity (Photoshop, Premiere, Office 2007, royalty-free stock).

It’s certainly paid off in terms of professional development and enhanced creative potential… but there’s something lost in not being able to hack visualisations hooked up to a webcam together on a command-line anymore. Admittedly, that sort of thing only comes around half a dozen times a year! But no matter, it’s all good fun. Given more friends who were into that sort of thing and some good music, I’d so live in the party house. I’ve not figured out how to do the same command-line video tricks using Windows just yet, so next time I’ll probably use Windows for visualisations (woo particle emitters!) and a separate Linux-powered laptop (maybe?) for webcam trickery. Then I’ll take webcam stuff straight out into Windows capture and skip my vis mixer altogether for once… I gotta learn to travel lighter anyway!

The magical secret, it seems, is Bluesoleil’s free EDR Bluetooth manager software that allegedly has a 20MB data transfer limitation per session until it’s purchased, but I’ve just downloaded it and done over 50MB of audio data transfers in A2DP streams and it’s not complaining. Plus, Buy/Register under the Help menu are greyed out… so I don’t know quite how serious they are about selling this thing.

At any rate, it’s working great for me, though my crappy Bluetooth dongle slows EVERYTHING about this computer down… must try another one, it’s not A2DP’s fault because whenever I pair my mobile with it to sync the same thing happens — even when nothing’s paired, as soon as you plug the dongle in (USB) everything starts crawling.

All that said, BlueSoleil are great. Works well.

TACKLES is back again for another year next Sunday and we’re gonna try and sell parents the end of year video we made (yes, at the end of last year) for $5 a copy when they come down to rego for the year. Accordingly, the more reliable DVD burner here (it’s — surprisingly — a Sony, the other drive is a Liteon that plays up quite a lot) has been spinning nearly non-stop from about 5.30 til now. All done, though.

DVDs and so forth aside, it’s shaping up to be quite the exciting year. We’re kicking off with four weeks looking at why Paul wrote letters in the New Testament part of the Bible, which should be good fun. Will probably post more as the term progresses.

Even, it seems, when it comes to locating files on disconnected network shares. There’s some seriously weird project file caching thing they’ve got going, but whatever it is, I like it.

I’m yet to figure out the Multi-Camera edit thing but until such a time as that starts working (it may be disabled in the trial?) I’ll just be editing the Gandevia’s (!!! That describes both Eddie and Hannah now!!!) wedding video the old fashioned way (no tape splicing, though).

And, oh yeah, that was yesterday. I had three cameras going and assurances that the cathedral’s vision stream was being recorded (to VHS, of all things, so I should’ve known better)… they lied. Well, probably not intentionally, but I scored a wonderful blank video tape for free out of the whole saga. So this could be an interesting wedding video when the safe camera stops working — it was a bloody DVD camera, which sucks. If you buy one of these things you should be shot. Not just because you can’t use them for editing, because most people don’t care about that, but because it’s damn near impossible to get hour-long DVDs for them, the quality is worse than miniDV, and the media costs more anyway!
I went out of my way to locate hour long blank media but it carked it at 40 minutes… must’ve been set to a higher quality setting by accident. Still looks (relative to a crappy little DV Canon and an XL2 which I was carrying) like absolute rubbish. But it was a wide shot of the room that would’ve saved my butt if the Cathedral’s thing stopped working. Ironically, they both did.

Hooray for multiple technology failures!

This is probably really average stuff these days, but I’ve never driven Protools and haven’t touched audio editing things with a barge pole for so many years now that, frankly, it doesn’t matter whether it’s objectively innovative or not. Seems brilliant to me.

My biggest problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to add to an existing selection? That, and because I’ve been spending a bit of time in graphicsland this week (so I’m a newborn Adobe junkie, oh well!), it seems like the Remove a Sound task (and effects in general) would be a perfect candidate for application of whatever the audio equivalent of a mask layer is in terms of user interface. Non-destructive, easy to turn on/off, easy to build up in multiple passes (because it’s really still quite linear in the way you have to work).

Then again, it’s entirely probable I’ve just completely missed some way of working that makes it all very sensible… but possibly not. Whatever, I’m quite content to keep playing for a while longer… only I’d like to get this particular job done (audio & video) before today is over!

I bought a Switchfoot CD today. And enjoyed it. Their music works a lot better as an album than as standalone songs, especially that horrific title track. I don’t understand its appeal at all. The rest is quite pleasant (and surprisingly, to me at least, overtly Christian — probably because they somehow get by without mentioning Jesus or Christ or anything like that on their website)

Almost sarcastic in places, which isn’t quite what I was expecting. I like that sort of thing. Meh.

Also been listening to Sarah Blasko the last week, trying to figure out all kinds of clever links to the poem on which the album What the sea wants, the sea will have is based (Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner). So far I have nothing. Except a burning question as to the hierarchy of the two — is this like “the film based upon the book”, wherein the more artful form is generally taken to be that which was prior? Or is there something else afoot, when one can extrapolate an entire album from a relatively straightforward (though admittedly textually rich and voluminous) poem?

There is a certain frustration deciphering contemporary works that isn’t there with those of dead white men, simply because with one there is the possibility of exertion to obtain a straightforward answer. That, of course, would be admitting defeat — and I probably wouldn’t like it as much as the frustration, anyway.

What the sea wants is, by the way, a prime example of why not to buy albums off electronic music stores. The album is physically superb (though there are dodgy jewel case versions floating around — the cardboard one is the good one) in terms of its packaging (yay for UV spot printed birds & comprehensive liner notes & photos in a separate booklet!) and content.

Also speaking of competitive advantages of… everything vs. online music stores… the $10 Switchfoot CD is not, in fact, a CD. It’s a SACD. Presumably Hybrid goodness because it played in an anachronistic CD player I’m using when in transit at the minute (yes, you read that right. I can’t get a portable device that works with this lossless stuff, it’s ridiculous. And if you dare suggest I buy an iPod, the latest Bond movie has a method of torture that you may be interested in–saw that film tonight with people, was good times–though that scene had every male in the building cringing massively). I wasn’t sure if it would even work — because, yes, I check the packaging that closely before I buy stuff — more for watching out to see if it was infested with crappy doesn’t-really-work-properly copy protection rubbish than anything else. But it did. I don’t know if it’s any better, but I’ve only really listened to the SACD version at work on a crappy Dell computer. It has bad AC’97 audio which = lots of line noise, etc.

Onboard audio can be okay for playback (my Venus is but it bloody well should be given how expensive it was), just that computer wasn’t. And it’s time for me to sleep now so I’m not about to test, or then I’ll have to rip as well and inevitably wind up discovering some new and exciting set of codecs that are better for SACD for x reasons, and so forth, then it’ll be 2am again and… general badness ensues.

I’ve already sat up and read the Wikipedia article and lamented the copy protection measures in place. Sigh. *feels like a geek… at least I’m not playing Wii ;-)*

I was lead to believe that iMovie was a safer bet than Windows anything-free, but after this afternoon’s experience, perhaps not. Time to blow $800 on Adobe Production Studio already, methinks. This end of the year makes me feel like applying for a credit card (for practical reasons, not just “silly-season” consumerism), but I won’t, yet.

Also had fun this morning sending a hundred and fifty dollars (or thereabouts) worth of lamps up in flames. Well, not quite anything so spectacular, but they’re dead now. Even so, still vaguely ahead of the game. If anyone wants to buy a stack of 110V 1,000W GE Par 64 globes… heh. I have a feeling this investment may prove profitable sometime in the next decade when there is finally spare time enough! Meh! Either way, this morning was good times. And Katy & myself now feel rather more pleased with our ghetto grey-area-legality electrician skillz, knowing that it was the lamps, not our wiring, which sucked. Or, didn’t suck but were totally not designed for certain usage. Or something.

Mind you, I’m no particular stranger to blowing theatrical lights. At ANCON, out of a rig of perhaps twenty par 64’s, three broke on my watch (two on the last day). I’m adamant it’s because the venue’s power sucked, but the site manager reckoned they hadn’t needed replacement in over two years. Which makes me think that, given a 2000 hour rating on such things which gives <170 days @ 12 hours a day, they can’t have been using the space too much! Shrug.

I should probably just leave the lights alone for a couple of months so that I spend enough time working to afford video things — which would, recursively, cause the same problem as the lights, I spose! All good fun.

I would be interested to know, because regardless as to how it works exactly, their levelling kind of sucks. I’ll admit I haven’t used a library programme to manage my music for a while, but seem to recall things on Linux being that much more consistent. That was before I tottered off to CD land several months back (long story, involving a missing road case and a messy office… things still aren’t quite back to normal, that’s one of my summer projects), where you’re expected to flip the volume control backwards and forwards with alarming regularity. I don’t know if this problem would be any less prevalent if I didn’t have such a smattered collection of tracks from different genres… one would think that, in the same way all pop is mixed to sound identical, surely it would be mastered in a similarly stereotypical fashion. Or perhaps not.

They’re trying to raise a bit over half a million dollars from listener (member) contributions. It’s probably not the way I’d do things but then… well, I’m trying to get money for web properties instead, and don’t have a reach of 200,000 people a week like they do (yet :-)). Their other fundraising models (fee-for-promo) are great — though probably very common in commercial radio, only FBi are open about it and have to count it as part of their four-minutes-per-hour commercial content under their broadcast license — and I’ve appropriated it for use in other contexts… funny how MSM and Internet media can overlap.