Finally a storm that has had a brilliant build up! This year from October has been a year of powerful storms that won’t be forgotten in a long time, but where has the build up been? The answer was provided yesterday as the hot and humid weather gave Brisbane City the site of some truly magnificent clouds. The sky was blue with amazing white updrafts, which as they drew closer and larger became grey and darkening more with each minute. Being on holidays in the city I viewed these clouds and even got some photos of them on sunset from my hotel window. Then I spent 15 minutes in a hallway with no windows, and when we left the hotel for a night stroll and dinner the storm was there in its dark, thundery beauty.
The sky was illuminated by the lights from buildings and streets in the city, with the light being reflected from the underbelly of the clouds, reminiscent of photos I’ve seen of Hong Kong where the lights are reflected off the pollution.
We went to dinner and were seated outside at the restaurant. The wind died down and bit and as we discussed the menu the odd infrequent droplet would fall on one of us. The waiter came to take our orders and along with the food we requested to be moved to a sheltered table. We were moved and then it began.
Only a minute after we shifted table an almighty gust of wind threw leaves from trees and into the restaurant and the rain began. It came fairly quickly after the wind and the waiters rushed to accommodate the rest of the outdoor diners. Some lights in the parklands went out for a short while but then came back on mid storm, while the restaurant lights and city lights stayed on so a blackout evidently did not occur.
The meals were served and everyone had a great time dining while the storm raged on.
It is because of this I could not perform an overly detailed account of the storm, but it did remain raining for some time, finally stopping some 90 minutes later at which point we left the restaurant, though the lightning hung around longer than that.
Because I was in town and not at home, the final statistics are a little different, but nonetheless, time for the final statistics:
Final Statistics:
Wind: yes
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: no
Structural damage: no
Human damage: no
Deck: flooded
Northern alfresco: dry
Southern alfresco: wet
Inside the restaurant: dry
Total score:
Although I was out and couldn’t do my usual observations, the storms don’t wait for me and this one was certainly great whether out or trainspotting. (That last sentence doesn’t seem to make sense so if you don’t understand it then ignore it.) The build up was exactly like the one I’ve been describing all season, and it is about time we got one. I’m extremely happy about this storm, certainly didn’t have everything and wasn’t the heart-racing thrill a minute downpour of some other storms, but then it didn’t kill anyone either (as far as the news suggests). More storms like this would be nice, bring them on!
Brisbane storm 29th December 2008:
Total Score: 8/10
If you’re a BoM forecaster then please give a detailed explanation of how this storm varies from others in this season, otherwise general comments and opinionative contributions are appreciated as always.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Notable Songs of 2008
Well it is the end of the year (almost) and people are releasing their lists for the best songs of 2008.
And I'm of course no different except that my annual list of notable songs for 2008 was made at a slight disadvantage this year because I didn't listen to any new music and so didn't know what the notable songs of the year actually were.
I knew of the important albums, like Apocalypso, The Slip, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, stuff like that, but what everyone else was listening to was a different world away at times.
After consulting logs I kept earlier in the year about new releases, checking Last.FM, waiting for rage to announce their best of 2008, I finally compiled the mandatory 4 hours of music to make the list.
So please understand why it is you may have never heard of most of these songs, it is because most of them are free tracks that I acquired from the internet, iTunes singles of the week and other such things. And of course the songs that I heard on Triple J in the small infrequent amounts of time I payed attention.
So without further rambling I present the notable songs of 2008 according to me. Many questions may be asked of this list: what was the song of the year? How many MGMT songs made the list? Which Nine Inch Nails' Ghost made the list? The answers to these questions are Viva La Vida, 1, 28 Ghost IV. However you may wish to read the list yourself so here it is:
As always, the first song is the song of the year, and then they continue in a flowing order for 4 hours.
00:00 Viva La Vida – COLDPLAY
Violet Hill – COLDPLAY
Sex On Fire – KINGS OF LEON
Tessellate – TOKYO POLICE CLUB
Always Where I Need To Be – THE KOOKS
Expectations – CUT OFF YOUR HANDS
Darling I Need Ya – KID CONFUCIUS
Rainbow Kraut – THE JOHN STEEL SINGERS
Mr Hurricane – BEAST
00:30 Half Full Glass Of Wine – TAME IMPALA
Dig Lazarus Dig!!! – NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS
White Noise – THE LIVING END
Chinese Democracy – GUNS N’ ROSES
Psychosocial – SLIPKNOT
The Day That Never Comes – METALLICA
01:00 Window And The Watcher – THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Silhouettic – BIRDS OF TOKYO
Supernatural Superserious – R.E.M.
Sleepwalking – FAKER
The Only One – THE CURE
I’m Outta Time – OASIS
The Festival Song – PEZ
Beautiful Ugly – MUPH & PLUTONIC
01:30 What It’s All About – GIRL TALK
2020 – THE HERD
Clockwork – PHRASE
Got To Do – TZU
Be Bad – LOWRIDER
Sleepwalking – BOOMLA
No Sex For Ben – THE RAPTURE
02:00 Kids – MGMT
Human – THE KILLERS
I’m Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You – BLACK KIDS
Run – GNARLS BARKLEY
Neo Violence – THE TOUGH ALLIANCE
Disco Lies – MOBY
Bodytalk 08 Remix – JUNK CIRCUIT
We Are Rockstars – DOES IT OFFEND YOU, YEAH?
02:30 Crimewave – CRYSTAL CASTLES
Paris Is Burning – LADYHAWKE
Lights & Music – CUT COPY
This Boy’s In Love – THE PRESETS
Energy Games Theme ’08 – NOISE BOY
Black Eyes – AMY MEREDITH
Like New – DEERHUNTER
03:00 28 Ghosts IV – NINE INCH NAILS
Discipline – NINE INCH NAILS
Propane Nightmares – PENDULUM
Mercury – BLOC PARTY
Chariots Of Fire – MISSION CONTROL
Ghosts – LADYTRON
The Rip – PORTISHEAD
Ghosts – LAURA MARLING
03:30 Young Love – MYSTERY JETS feat. LAURA MARLING
Start Again – LOVERS ELECTRIC
Open – KAHN BROTHERS
Make You Happy – JOSH PYKE
Porch Dweller – ARMEN FIRMAN
Drawing Smoke – LEROY LEE
Business Time – FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
If you want a fanciful copy of the properly formatted list then ask for it, at noiseboyNOSPAMartist@yahoo.com with 'notable songs of 2008' as the subject line. (Obviouly you need to remove the no spam part from the address, that just stops spam bots.)
Still to come will be my Hottest 75 list for 2008 and all my thoughts on the Triple J Hottest 100 for the year. So watch this space for the coming month!
And I'm of course no different except that my annual list of notable songs for 2008 was made at a slight disadvantage this year because I didn't listen to any new music and so didn't know what the notable songs of the year actually were.
I knew of the important albums, like Apocalypso, The Slip, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, stuff like that, but what everyone else was listening to was a different world away at times.
After consulting logs I kept earlier in the year about new releases, checking Last.FM, waiting for rage to announce their best of 2008, I finally compiled the mandatory 4 hours of music to make the list.
So please understand why it is you may have never heard of most of these songs, it is because most of them are free tracks that I acquired from the internet, iTunes singles of the week and other such things. And of course the songs that I heard on Triple J in the small infrequent amounts of time I payed attention.
So without further rambling I present the notable songs of 2008 according to me. Many questions may be asked of this list: what was the song of the year? How many MGMT songs made the list? Which Nine Inch Nails' Ghost made the list? The answers to these questions are Viva La Vida, 1, 28 Ghost IV. However you may wish to read the list yourself so here it is:
As always, the first song is the song of the year, and then they continue in a flowing order for 4 hours.
00:00 Viva La Vida – COLDPLAY
Violet Hill – COLDPLAY
Sex On Fire – KINGS OF LEON
Tessellate – TOKYO POLICE CLUB
Always Where I Need To Be – THE KOOKS
Expectations – CUT OFF YOUR HANDS
Darling I Need Ya – KID CONFUCIUS
Rainbow Kraut – THE JOHN STEEL SINGERS
Mr Hurricane – BEAST
00:30 Half Full Glass Of Wine – TAME IMPALA
Dig Lazarus Dig!!! – NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS
White Noise – THE LIVING END
Chinese Democracy – GUNS N’ ROSES
Psychosocial – SLIPKNOT
The Day That Never Comes – METALLICA
01:00 Window And The Watcher – THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Silhouettic – BIRDS OF TOKYO
Supernatural Superserious – R.E.M.
Sleepwalking – FAKER
The Only One – THE CURE
I’m Outta Time – OASIS
The Festival Song – PEZ
Beautiful Ugly – MUPH & PLUTONIC
01:30 What It’s All About – GIRL TALK
2020 – THE HERD
Clockwork – PHRASE
Got To Do – TZU
Be Bad – LOWRIDER
Sleepwalking – BOOMLA
No Sex For Ben – THE RAPTURE
02:00 Kids – MGMT
Human – THE KILLERS
I’m Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You – BLACK KIDS
Run – GNARLS BARKLEY
Neo Violence – THE TOUGH ALLIANCE
Disco Lies – MOBY
Bodytalk 08 Remix – JUNK CIRCUIT
We Are Rockstars – DOES IT OFFEND YOU, YEAH?
02:30 Crimewave – CRYSTAL CASTLES
Paris Is Burning – LADYHAWKE
Lights & Music – CUT COPY
This Boy’s In Love – THE PRESETS
Energy Games Theme ’08 – NOISE BOY
Black Eyes – AMY MEREDITH
Like New – DEERHUNTER
03:00 28 Ghosts IV – NINE INCH NAILS
Discipline – NINE INCH NAILS
Propane Nightmares – PENDULUM
Mercury – BLOC PARTY
Chariots Of Fire – MISSION CONTROL
Ghosts – LADYTRON
The Rip – PORTISHEAD
Ghosts – LAURA MARLING
03:30 Young Love – MYSTERY JETS feat. LAURA MARLING
Start Again – LOVERS ELECTRIC
Open – KAHN BROTHERS
Make You Happy – JOSH PYKE
Porch Dweller – ARMEN FIRMAN
Drawing Smoke – LEROY LEE
Business Time – FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS
If you want a fanciful copy of the properly formatted list then ask for it, at noiseboyNOSPAMartist@yahoo.com with 'notable songs of 2008' as the subject line. (Obviouly you need to remove the no spam part from the address, that just stops spam bots.)
Still to come will be my Hottest 75 list for 2008 and all my thoughts on the Triple J Hottest 100 for the year. So watch this space for the coming month!
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Santa Claus is Real
A bold statement to make as a 16 year old who wants to be taken seriously, I know. But it is true.
I’ve just finished watching The Hogfather, which upon last year’s viewing got me thinking this and although I was too late to post it last year, I will share why I think that Santa is indeed real.
Aside from the obvious point that even if Santa Claus is not real he is based upon the real Saint Nicholas of Myra who gave gifts to the impoverished, the modern fat man with reindeers and such exists too. Although he isn’t actually making a trip around the sky with a sleigh to give presents to everyone in a physical sense, I’d say that in a mental sense he is. Well maybe not the presents part.
If there were no truth at all in the concept then why would there be a man in a fat suit at every shopping centre for a 12th of the year? Why would it be fashionable to have santa shaped lights in a our yard to illuminate the house-front?
Why would Air Services Australia have spent a fortnight making plans to ensure Santa’s airspace is not intruded by emergency or late night aircrafts in Australian airspace?
Because whether you want to believe in a fat man with a sleigh and reindeer is coming through the air tonight or simply that when you wake up tomorrow it will be the 25th of December, Santa will be there somewhere. Thousands if not millions if not billions of children will be in bed now with the only thing stopping them from staying awake all night in anxious excitement for tomorrow is that if they don’t sleep then Santa won’t come. That is power.
The myth that Santa won’t come if you stay awake waiting for him? Well that is true, because if you stay up then Santa won’t come- that is common sense as he isn’t a physical man coming into your house, so if that is what you are waiting for then of course it won’t happen. But if you go to sleep believing that Santa will come, then that thought is what ensures its truth. Like a kind of believe it to see it thing.
There is no point filming the sky to point out the exact moment Santa passes over because the result will not be identifiable, but if you think he’ll come then he will, leaving no evidence of it at all, except for the thousands if not millions if not billions of sleeping children, shopping centre stand ins, fairy light manufactures, airspace controllers.
I know that Santa is too often used as the figurehead of the over-commercialization that the holiday season has become, but the spirit of Christmas is still there. Yesterday when I posted my anti-capitalist rant on the holiday I was waving that flag, and waving that flag is necessary in this day and age. But it is the night before Christmas and for one night at least I think I can put my campaigning and opinions down for a short break. It would be a mistake to think that all the world’s problems will go away just because it is Christmas- a view that The Weekend Australian tried to convey last weekend, but if we don’t stop to celebrate things like this then what is all the campaigning and opinion stuff for?
On a more scientific note even if Santa was a physical man traveling the world, of course he can do it in an entire night! It is about 11:10pm in the cities sensible enough to get daylight saving, unlike our own miserable sleepy town where it is only 10:10pm. That gives Santa a whole hour just to travel up to the Queensland border. It’s only 8:10pm in China so a couple of hours before they get their visit from Santa. 12:10pm in London, 4:10am in California- the sun hasn’t even risen for the day before Christmas in west-coast America, Santa has plenty of time.
But wherever in the world you are, I hope you have a very merry Christmas, whatever material stuffs you get or whatever family events you attend or don’t attend or whatever else happens. Even if you don’t get into the holidays season spirit, the 25th of December only happens once a year so you might as well enjoy it.
I’ve just finished watching The Hogfather, which upon last year’s viewing got me thinking this and although I was too late to post it last year, I will share why I think that Santa is indeed real.
Aside from the obvious point that even if Santa Claus is not real he is based upon the real Saint Nicholas of Myra who gave gifts to the impoverished, the modern fat man with reindeers and such exists too. Although he isn’t actually making a trip around the sky with a sleigh to give presents to everyone in a physical sense, I’d say that in a mental sense he is. Well maybe not the presents part.
If there were no truth at all in the concept then why would there be a man in a fat suit at every shopping centre for a 12th of the year? Why would it be fashionable to have santa shaped lights in a our yard to illuminate the house-front?
Why would Air Services Australia have spent a fortnight making plans to ensure Santa’s airspace is not intruded by emergency or late night aircrafts in Australian airspace?
Because whether you want to believe in a fat man with a sleigh and reindeer is coming through the air tonight or simply that when you wake up tomorrow it will be the 25th of December, Santa will be there somewhere. Thousands if not millions if not billions of children will be in bed now with the only thing stopping them from staying awake all night in anxious excitement for tomorrow is that if they don’t sleep then Santa won’t come. That is power.
The myth that Santa won’t come if you stay awake waiting for him? Well that is true, because if you stay up then Santa won’t come- that is common sense as he isn’t a physical man coming into your house, so if that is what you are waiting for then of course it won’t happen. But if you go to sleep believing that Santa will come, then that thought is what ensures its truth. Like a kind of believe it to see it thing.
There is no point filming the sky to point out the exact moment Santa passes over because the result will not be identifiable, but if you think he’ll come then he will, leaving no evidence of it at all, except for the thousands if not millions if not billions of sleeping children, shopping centre stand ins, fairy light manufactures, airspace controllers.
I know that Santa is too often used as the figurehead of the over-commercialization that the holiday season has become, but the spirit of Christmas is still there. Yesterday when I posted my anti-capitalist rant on the holiday I was waving that flag, and waving that flag is necessary in this day and age. But it is the night before Christmas and for one night at least I think I can put my campaigning and opinions down for a short break. It would be a mistake to think that all the world’s problems will go away just because it is Christmas- a view that The Weekend Australian tried to convey last weekend, but if we don’t stop to celebrate things like this then what is all the campaigning and opinion stuff for?
On a more scientific note even if Santa was a physical man traveling the world, of course he can do it in an entire night! It is about 11:10pm in the cities sensible enough to get daylight saving, unlike our own miserable sleepy town where it is only 10:10pm. That gives Santa a whole hour just to travel up to the Queensland border. It’s only 8:10pm in China so a couple of hours before they get their visit from Santa. 12:10pm in London, 4:10am in California- the sun hasn’t even risen for the day before Christmas in west-coast America, Santa has plenty of time.
But wherever in the world you are, I hope you have a very merry Christmas, whatever material stuffs you get or whatever family events you attend or don’t attend or whatever else happens. Even if you don’t get into the holidays season spirit, the 25th of December only happens once a year so you might as well enjoy it.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Free Christmas
It is 2 days until Christmas now and I’m looking forward to it. I have been for all of about 16 hours in fact. I just don’t find it easy to get into the Christmas spirit now. Maybe it is because I don’t do all the fun Christmassy things, maybe it’s because the fun Christmassy things aren’t actually as they seem- for instance the girl who served me at Coles on the weekend compared carolers in the shopping centre to torture but caroling is supposed to be on of the fun things to get us all in the Christmas spirit. Maybe the feeling of being trapped by retail in the holiday season is what makes Christmas so unChristmassy.
Whatever it is, I’m only 23 days slow and am now looking forward to it, although not to the extent of snooping for presents, singing carols or spending any time at all in a shopping centre.
Still I’ve been thinking that while I am getting older even a few years ago I was fully into the swing of Christmas spirit. In 2005 I was really into it, and here is the story of how it happened…
It was December 2005. The household had a new computer, ADSL internet for the first time and online gaming was a good pastime. Yes, I was playing Runescape on a regular basis. Runescape was the first MMORPG that I played and I took advantage of the 1000s of other players live on the server to share a bit of Christmas spirit. I went around mining ore and smelting and crafting it into Iron Maces. If you have never played Runescape, Iron is the second lowest quality metal. It beats bronze but that is all. So when I had all these maces I went to Lumbridge, the city where all players start, and initiated anyone I could in a one-on-one trade in which I would give them a mace for free. (Being the city all players start in, Lumbridge is usually full of n00bs, so the players for whom an Iron Mace would be most valuable.) Some players didn’t really understand why I would be randomly giving them a free weapon but most if not all of them were grateful. I was also wearing ridiculous combinations of armour and clothing so I looked funny. It might have appeared I was mentally unstable running around like that giving people free weapons but there was definitely a degree of cheer about the whole thing. 90% of people I came in contact with were cheerful, the other 10% were just confused.
Well that kind of thing can’t happen now, at least not in Runescape, because (mainly as a side-effect of being populated mainly by 8 year olds) the rate of scamming in the game became so high the rules were changed so that one-on-one trading was replaced by the trade-exchange where all trades must be fair before they can go ahead. My gifts wouldn’t work like that because giving away a free weapon would be classed as an unfair trade. Also having to go to an exchange to trade is a real pain. It is as a result of this and many other rules that came in for the same reason that I have not played Runescape in over a year and probably never will again. Eventually the game becomes to hard to survive in due to the social level of the play; anyone seriousness enough about it to keep playing moves on to World of Warcraft.
While that is how I played Runescape in 2005 the analogy isn’t unfitting. The reason we are supposed to give presents at Christmas is in celebration of Jesus Christ being given to the world. It was a free present from God. Unless you count the gold given to Jesus by one of the wise men, there was no money in the story at all. So it is kind of off from that perspective that the holiday should be the most commercial event of the year. Inevitable, but odd.
The Wombats released a Christmas song this year which I quite like because it says to me at least that Christmas is supposed to be a great cheerful time of joy and yet we have bad weather, fighting leaders and a need to spend the little money we have left, and where is the cheer in that? Well the cheer and joy of Christmas for me isn’t in the material things, and while it always will be for some people, I don’t think that is what it should be about. Presents are a fun part of Christmas, but it really is the thought that counts, the act of physically receiving a gift is no more important than the lunch, the people your with, the games you play or whatever, in fact it is probably less important than those things.
Here is an idea that will never take off in a capitalist society: instead of shops being open longer leading up to Christmas, they all shut. Not convenient for shoppers I’ll admit but I guess the general shop-going public will have to use real cheer for their holidays rather than material gifts, and the gift the shops give their staff is an extra weeks holidays. For some people in retail any holidays at all in the holiday season is rare.
Sure this theory might not save that girl at Coles, Coles being a supermarket it needs to stay open cause regardless of the time of year people need food, but plenty of other people would be happy.
It will never happen, but I like the idea of a society happy in the holiday season rather than a society of stressed, broke shoppers desperately avoiding he appalling shopping centre carols.
All this said, there is without a doubt Christmas spirit left in the world, and plenty of it. To suggest there is no spirit left is like suggesting that because we are in a drought the Pacific Ocean has been drained. I may talk about the remaining spirit tomorrow or Christmas day if I have time.
Hope your holidays aren’t too stressful.
By the way, I've removed the word verification because I was unable to reply to comments, it would never actually show me the picture with the letters. So while Google is momentarily higher on the displeased list than MySpace which has now started working again, no word verifcation needed.
If you spam me though I will publicly defame you, Christmas or not.
Legitimate comments most welcome as always.
Whatever it is, I’m only 23 days slow and am now looking forward to it, although not to the extent of snooping for presents, singing carols or spending any time at all in a shopping centre.
Still I’ve been thinking that while I am getting older even a few years ago I was fully into the swing of Christmas spirit. In 2005 I was really into it, and here is the story of how it happened…
It was December 2005. The household had a new computer, ADSL internet for the first time and online gaming was a good pastime. Yes, I was playing Runescape on a regular basis. Runescape was the first MMORPG that I played and I took advantage of the 1000s of other players live on the server to share a bit of Christmas spirit. I went around mining ore and smelting and crafting it into Iron Maces. If you have never played Runescape, Iron is the second lowest quality metal. It beats bronze but that is all. So when I had all these maces I went to Lumbridge, the city where all players start, and initiated anyone I could in a one-on-one trade in which I would give them a mace for free. (Being the city all players start in, Lumbridge is usually full of n00bs, so the players for whom an Iron Mace would be most valuable.) Some players didn’t really understand why I would be randomly giving them a free weapon but most if not all of them were grateful. I was also wearing ridiculous combinations of armour and clothing so I looked funny. It might have appeared I was mentally unstable running around like that giving people free weapons but there was definitely a degree of cheer about the whole thing. 90% of people I came in contact with were cheerful, the other 10% were just confused.
Well that kind of thing can’t happen now, at least not in Runescape, because (mainly as a side-effect of being populated mainly by 8 year olds) the rate of scamming in the game became so high the rules were changed so that one-on-one trading was replaced by the trade-exchange where all trades must be fair before they can go ahead. My gifts wouldn’t work like that because giving away a free weapon would be classed as an unfair trade. Also having to go to an exchange to trade is a real pain. It is as a result of this and many other rules that came in for the same reason that I have not played Runescape in over a year and probably never will again. Eventually the game becomes to hard to survive in due to the social level of the play; anyone seriousness enough about it to keep playing moves on to World of Warcraft.
While that is how I played Runescape in 2005 the analogy isn’t unfitting. The reason we are supposed to give presents at Christmas is in celebration of Jesus Christ being given to the world. It was a free present from God. Unless you count the gold given to Jesus by one of the wise men, there was no money in the story at all. So it is kind of off from that perspective that the holiday should be the most commercial event of the year. Inevitable, but odd.
The Wombats released a Christmas song this year which I quite like because it says to me at least that Christmas is supposed to be a great cheerful time of joy and yet we have bad weather, fighting leaders and a need to spend the little money we have left, and where is the cheer in that? Well the cheer and joy of Christmas for me isn’t in the material things, and while it always will be for some people, I don’t think that is what it should be about. Presents are a fun part of Christmas, but it really is the thought that counts, the act of physically receiving a gift is no more important than the lunch, the people your with, the games you play or whatever, in fact it is probably less important than those things.
Here is an idea that will never take off in a capitalist society: instead of shops being open longer leading up to Christmas, they all shut. Not convenient for shoppers I’ll admit but I guess the general shop-going public will have to use real cheer for their holidays rather than material gifts, and the gift the shops give their staff is an extra weeks holidays. For some people in retail any holidays at all in the holiday season is rare.
Sure this theory might not save that girl at Coles, Coles being a supermarket it needs to stay open cause regardless of the time of year people need food, but plenty of other people would be happy.
It will never happen, but I like the idea of a society happy in the holiday season rather than a society of stressed, broke shoppers desperately avoiding he appalling shopping centre carols.
All this said, there is without a doubt Christmas spirit left in the world, and plenty of it. To suggest there is no spirit left is like suggesting that because we are in a drought the Pacific Ocean has been drained. I may talk about the remaining spirit tomorrow or Christmas day if I have time.
Hope your holidays aren’t too stressful.
By the way, I've removed the word verification because I was unable to reply to comments, it would never actually show me the picture with the letters. So while Google is momentarily higher on the displeased list than MySpace which has now started working again, no word verifcation needed.
If you spam me though I will publicly defame you, Christmas or not.
Legitimate comments most welcome as always.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Word Onto Word Playlist Game
Another music game for you to try! It is a simple linking game and it is all about the composition of the playlist rather than the listening experience, so it is a good one for people too busy to play Beat The Bomb but challenging enough to keep people with large iTunes libraries going.
1. Pick one song.
2. Pick a second song that contains the key word from the title of the first word, as well as another key word.
3. Find a third song that contains the new key word from the second song title as well as another key word.
4. Continue in this pattern until the list has 20 songs on it (or another larger round number if you have more time)
5. The last song on the list must be by the same artist as the first song.
Some key words can be built upon flexibly if you have limitations, but be sure not to be too flexible otherwise it won’t be any fun.
Now I actually stuffed it up, you should be able to see where. I’ll explain that at the end.
Here is my first list:
The Prayer – Bloc Party
Prayers for Rain – The Cure
It Can’t Rain All The Time – Jane Siberry
Blackbird – Expatriate
Black Fingernails Red Wine – Eskimo Joe
The Wine Song – The Cat Empire
Like A Song – U2
Smells Like Funk – Black Eyed Peas
Funky Shit – The Prodigy
Love Is Da Shit – Spearhead
Love Like Winter – AFI
Winter Born – The Cruxshadows
Born Yesterday – Something For Kate
Yesterdy’s Men – Madness
Leaders Of Men – Joy Division
Let Your Good Heart Lead You Home – Editors
Homeward Angel – Moby
If God Will Send His Angels – U2
God Has A Plan For Us All – Angtoria
Plans – Bloc Party
Now the list does not follow the rules because It Can’t Rain All The Time does not lead onto Blackbird. Except that it was from The Crow soundtrack and a crow is a black bird. I was making up the rules as I went along and when I got to the end I didn’t want to change it.
So now I’ve lost at my own game, time for you guys to all try it.
Good luck.
1. Pick one song.
2. Pick a second song that contains the key word from the title of the first word, as well as another key word.
3. Find a third song that contains the new key word from the second song title as well as another key word.
4. Continue in this pattern until the list has 20 songs on it (or another larger round number if you have more time)
5. The last song on the list must be by the same artist as the first song.
Some key words can be built upon flexibly if you have limitations, but be sure not to be too flexible otherwise it won’t be any fun.
Now I actually stuffed it up, you should be able to see where. I’ll explain that at the end.
Here is my first list:
The Prayer – Bloc Party
Prayers for Rain – The Cure
It Can’t Rain All The Time – Jane Siberry
Blackbird – Expatriate
Black Fingernails Red Wine – Eskimo Joe
The Wine Song – The Cat Empire
Like A Song – U2
Smells Like Funk – Black Eyed Peas
Funky Shit – The Prodigy
Love Is Da Shit – Spearhead
Love Like Winter – AFI
Winter Born – The Cruxshadows
Born Yesterday – Something For Kate
Yesterdy’s Men – Madness
Leaders Of Men – Joy Division
Let Your Good Heart Lead You Home – Editors
Homeward Angel – Moby
If God Will Send His Angels – U2
God Has A Plan For Us All – Angtoria
Plans – Bloc Party
Now the list does not follow the rules because It Can’t Rain All The Time does not lead onto Blackbird. Except that it was from The Crow soundtrack and a crow is a black bird. I was making up the rules as I went along and when I got to the end I didn’t want to change it.
So now I’ve lost at my own game, time for you guys to all try it.
Good luck.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
How I Set The Stove on Fire
In the same vain as my storm reviews, here is a review telling the world how I set the stove on fire while cooking tea tonight. Hopefully you will find it slightly amusing at least.
Long story short I am doing all the cooking this week. Well this afternoon my sister had a great idea to bake a cake. The cake is great, however in the process of cooking the cake a fair amount of chocolate was spilled onto the large hotplate of the stove.
When I came to cook tea I refused to put anything on the hotplate until it had been cleaned, so my sister attempted to clean it however most of the chocolate remained on. The rest of it couldn’t be reached without a more experienced kitchen hand so I turned the heat up to full and figured that I could burn it off. After a while bright orange ambers were forming beneath the heat ring so I turned it off and went and described it to Dad. I was worried that it was a fire risk. Dad said that there was nothing that could be done now I had already heated the plate up, something that I was worried about. So I went back and continued to burn it off. I was told that smoke was nothing to worry about and if any flames did form I was just to turn off the hotplate and not touch it. If it went crazy in a flaming fury to destroy all the kitchen then I should use the fire blanket, but otherwise it should be fine.
So I headed back and turned the hotplate back to full heat and continued to chop herbs. The hotplate turned bright red and started smoking incredibly. This was not usual stove-smoke but really dense smoke that was starting to inhibit breathing ability in the room. I didn’t worry about it though, I mean it was just smoke, not fire. My sister on the other hand was saying “the smoke detector is going to go off.” I didn’t think it would but seeing as this wasn’t just oil smoke but a potential fire so she was probably right. She then left the room and Dad came up. I said that it was smoking a lot but I wasn’t worried because there was no sign of fire yet, just smoke. He said that he could smell it from the backyard so it was probably more problematic than I was suggesting.
Then right on cue the flames rose up out of the hotplate. I turned off the stove and as my sister came back into the room we all watched the fire. We quickly ensured that it wasn’t going to catch onto anything else, it didn’t. The smoke detector didn’t go off either. When it burned out I started water boiling on another hotplate and went to post this.
Final Statistics:
Smoke: yes
Flame: yes
Smoke Alarm: no
House damage: no
Human damage: no
Kitchen: smoked initially, but cleared
Dining room: cleared
Rest of the house: cleared
Total score:
This is the first time I’ve ever set fire to the stove while cooking and while I can’t take all the credit I am going to anyway. It was impressive, it ensured I can’t use the large hotplate for the rest of the night but there are 3 small ones still available and nothing was damaged so I count this as pretty cool, or more appropriately hot.
My first stove fire:
Total Score: 8/10
If you want to know more about my sister's cake, then you can read about it on the other end of this link.
Long story short I am doing all the cooking this week. Well this afternoon my sister had a great idea to bake a cake. The cake is great, however in the process of cooking the cake a fair amount of chocolate was spilled onto the large hotplate of the stove.
When I came to cook tea I refused to put anything on the hotplate until it had been cleaned, so my sister attempted to clean it however most of the chocolate remained on. The rest of it couldn’t be reached without a more experienced kitchen hand so I turned the heat up to full and figured that I could burn it off. After a while bright orange ambers were forming beneath the heat ring so I turned it off and went and described it to Dad. I was worried that it was a fire risk. Dad said that there was nothing that could be done now I had already heated the plate up, something that I was worried about. So I went back and continued to burn it off. I was told that smoke was nothing to worry about and if any flames did form I was just to turn off the hotplate and not touch it. If it went crazy in a flaming fury to destroy all the kitchen then I should use the fire blanket, but otherwise it should be fine.
So I headed back and turned the hotplate back to full heat and continued to chop herbs. The hotplate turned bright red and started smoking incredibly. This was not usual stove-smoke but really dense smoke that was starting to inhibit breathing ability in the room. I didn’t worry about it though, I mean it was just smoke, not fire. My sister on the other hand was saying “the smoke detector is going to go off.” I didn’t think it would but seeing as this wasn’t just oil smoke but a potential fire so she was probably right. She then left the room and Dad came up. I said that it was smoking a lot but I wasn’t worried because there was no sign of fire yet, just smoke. He said that he could smell it from the backyard so it was probably more problematic than I was suggesting.
Then right on cue the flames rose up out of the hotplate. I turned off the stove and as my sister came back into the room we all watched the fire. We quickly ensured that it wasn’t going to catch onto anything else, it didn’t. The smoke detector didn’t go off either. When it burned out I started water boiling on another hotplate and went to post this.
Final Statistics:
Smoke: yes
Flame: yes
Smoke Alarm: no
House damage: no
Human damage: no
Kitchen: smoked initially, but cleared
Dining room: cleared
Rest of the house: cleared
Total score:
This is the first time I’ve ever set fire to the stove while cooking and while I can’t take all the credit I am going to anyway. It was impressive, it ensured I can’t use the large hotplate for the rest of the night but there are 3 small ones still available and nothing was damaged so I count this as pretty cool, or more appropriately hot.
My first stove fire:
Total Score: 8/10
If you want to know more about my sister's cake, then you can read about it on the other end of this link.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Music Can Wait
1. Put your iPod on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!
Seen this kind of thing before? Well it’s not surprising, they are very common. But what interests me is the way the language has evolved over time. It started off with the most usual player being Windows Media Player, something that each time I copied one of the quizzes found necessary to change to Winamp, Winamp being a much better mp3 player.
Then it started being more inclusive, it would say Windows Media Player, iTunes, mp3 player.
As you can see from this one, it says iPod. I’m kind of intrigued to know why it says iPod when the person doing the quiz is so clearly at their computer surely they would be using iTunes. However today I did a quiz all about my phone, so some people seem to think hardware is more interesting. I still don’t get it though.
Another interesting thing is aside from me and the people who blindly copy the chain from me, I have never seen Winamp come up as one of the mp3 players even though it is one of the best available. I have also never seen Creative even though they are well known for their sound products, maybe more hardware than software in some cases, and I’ve never seen one that I haven’t heard of. There must be as many music players as there are songs, so why is it that I have never seen one I don’t already know?
It may be wrong to read too much into something as simple as a quiz on your music, but I suspect it has to do with the demographics attracted to this kind of quiz. The people doing this kind of quiz would be primarily teenagers I suspect, more so the kind of teenagers who have MySpace profiles. This type of chain has its origins in social networking, you wouldn’t send this kind of thing in an email.
I just think that the kind of people who are teenaged myspace users aren’t the kind of people who would care enough to go searching for an alternative music player. This explains why it says either the default music player for most computers (Windows Media Player) or the most popular music player (iTunes). Friends I have who go searching for better music players aren’t the kind of people who spend much time on social networking sites, if they have one at all, and most definitely they aren’t the kind of people who do these surveys.
Sadly, although I continue to add Winamp to the list on most occasions, I no longer use Winamp as since getting my iMistress have had no need for it with iTunes fully integrated into the operating system aleady. So I used iTunes for this, but then I am the kind of teenager who spends time doing quizzes.
Here is the quiz for anyone interested:
IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OK" YOU SAY?
Out Here In The Cold (- Gotye)
WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Ghost (- Regurgitator)
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
Like Toy Soldiers (- Eminem)
WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Honour (- VNV Nation)
WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
This Boy’s In Love (- The Presets)
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
White (- Something For Kate)
WHAT IS 2+2?
Stinkfist (- Tool)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
20 Fathoms Deep (- Sounds Like Chicken)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Virtual Life (- Regurgitator)
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
One Big Mob (- Red Hot Chili Peppers)
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Terminate (- Noise Boy [you may have read his blog])
WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Surrender (- U2)
WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Is There Anybody In There (- Hunters and Collectors)
WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
The Ocean (- U2)
WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Treat Your Mama (- John Butler Trio)
WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
In The Night (- Expatriate)
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Dudley (- Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Holy Grail (- Hunters and Collectors)
WHATS THE WORST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN?
Jigsaw Falling Into Place (- Radiohead)
HOW WILL YOU DIE?
Lullaby (- The Cure)
WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
Atrocity Exhibition (- Joy Division)
WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Together (- The Presets)
WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Easily (- Red Hot Chili Peppers)
WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
Parallel Universe (- Red Hot Chili Peppers)
WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
Chain Of Fools (- The Commitments)
DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
Nothing Else Matters (- Metallica)
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
(-) Ions (- Tool)
WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
It’s Not Over Yet (- Klaxons)
WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Heaven Can Wait (- Meatloaf)
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!
Seen this kind of thing before? Well it’s not surprising, they are very common. But what interests me is the way the language has evolved over time. It started off with the most usual player being Windows Media Player, something that each time I copied one of the quizzes found necessary to change to Winamp, Winamp being a much better mp3 player.
Then it started being more inclusive, it would say Windows Media Player, iTunes, mp3 player.
As you can see from this one, it says iPod. I’m kind of intrigued to know why it says iPod when the person doing the quiz is so clearly at their computer surely they would be using iTunes. However today I did a quiz all about my phone, so some people seem to think hardware is more interesting. I still don’t get it though.
Another interesting thing is aside from me and the people who blindly copy the chain from me, I have never seen Winamp come up as one of the mp3 players even though it is one of the best available. I have also never seen Creative even though they are well known for their sound products, maybe more hardware than software in some cases, and I’ve never seen one that I haven’t heard of. There must be as many music players as there are songs, so why is it that I have never seen one I don’t already know?
It may be wrong to read too much into something as simple as a quiz on your music, but I suspect it has to do with the demographics attracted to this kind of quiz. The people doing this kind of quiz would be primarily teenagers I suspect, more so the kind of teenagers who have MySpace profiles. This type of chain has its origins in social networking, you wouldn’t send this kind of thing in an email.
I just think that the kind of people who are teenaged myspace users aren’t the kind of people who would care enough to go searching for an alternative music player. This explains why it says either the default music player for most computers (Windows Media Player) or the most popular music player (iTunes). Friends I have who go searching for better music players aren’t the kind of people who spend much time on social networking sites, if they have one at all, and most definitely they aren’t the kind of people who do these surveys.
Sadly, although I continue to add Winamp to the list on most occasions, I no longer use Winamp as since getting my iMistress have had no need for it with iTunes fully integrated into the operating system aleady. So I used iTunes for this, but then I am the kind of teenager who spends time doing quizzes.
Here is the quiz for anyone interested:
IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OK" YOU SAY?
Out Here In The Cold (- Gotye)
WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Ghost (- Regurgitator)
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
Like Toy Soldiers (- Eminem)
WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Honour (- VNV Nation)
WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
This Boy’s In Love (- The Presets)
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
White (- Something For Kate)
WHAT IS 2+2?
Stinkfist (- Tool)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
20 Fathoms Deep (- Sounds Like Chicken)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Virtual Life (- Regurgitator)
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
One Big Mob (- Red Hot Chili Peppers)
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Terminate (- Noise Boy [you may have read his blog])
WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Surrender (- U2)
WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Is There Anybody In There (- Hunters and Collectors)
WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
The Ocean (- U2)
WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Treat Your Mama (- John Butler Trio)
WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
In The Night (- Expatriate)
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Dudley (- Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Holy Grail (- Hunters and Collectors)
WHATS THE WORST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN?
Jigsaw Falling Into Place (- Radiohead)
HOW WILL YOU DIE?
Lullaby (- The Cure)
WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
Atrocity Exhibition (- Joy Division)
WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Together (- The Presets)
WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Easily (- Red Hot Chili Peppers)
WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
Parallel Universe (- Red Hot Chili Peppers)
WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
Chain Of Fools (- The Commitments)
DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
Nothing Else Matters (- Metallica)
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
(-) Ions (- Tool)
WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
It’s Not Over Yet (- Klaxons)
WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Heaven Can Wait (- Meatloaf)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
MySpace vs. Facebook
As you probably have guessed by looking at my blog over the last couple of days, I’m fighting with MySpace. Nonetheless I am going to post this with as little bias as I can be expected to.
When I opened MySpace this morning I discovered that they have added the “people you may know” section to the homepage. This is very obviously a copy of the same feature that has been in Facebook for some time. In Facebook it is great and certainly I feel the need to constantly add more friends because they just keep appearing on this list if I don’t. It is not only due to this, but largely due to this that on my Facebook profile I have 96 friends and on MySpace I only have 39. But this is not the first move MySpace has made to be more like Facebook.
A time ago now (I can’t remember exactly how long) the news feed feature was added to MySpace, although it is called ‘Friend Updates’. Applications have appeared on MySpace recently, a back-flip of sorts seeing as adding flash content to profiles was advised against previously. As well as this there have been more subtle changes like the default on comments for bulletins now being ‘allow comments’ rather than needing the user to select ‘allow comments’. That isn’t as extreme as Facebook where you can comment on absolutely everything, but I’m not sure that Facebook has always been like that or if that was a recent change.
As far as evilness goes, MySpace is without a doubt evil. It’s very evil, right along side Microsoft on the top evil list. Even if you haven’t heard any of the talk about the evils of MySpace just remember it is owned by Fox, who are responsible for Firefly being cancelled: you don’t get more evil than that. Even so they are a necessary evil in my mind. The promotion tool MySpace serves as for underground musicians, film-makers, comedians, whatever else you want is incredible. It’s also not that bad simply as a social networking tool. I only got my MySpace profile to host music on but as you can clearly see that isn’t all I use it for now, I host pictures, videos, the blog, well it is ok, that’s what I’m fighting about at the moment, and bulletin board feature is something that I a adore and am fascinated by. It is possibly the most versatile website I have ever encountered and it is probably the website responsible for sucking me into the social networking world which as you should all know I am firmly stuck in.
Another thing to remember when counting evilness is that people, especially of the parenting generation, i.e. my parents’ generation, are not as used to the internet as my generation, the main users of social networking sites. Obviously that is a huge generalization, but the point is that people tend to panic about sites like MySpace because of problems like cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking and other child safety problems. While the cases of these problems are easy to find and they appear quite common, I’d suggest this is over-reporting and that you are as safe using MySpace as you are catching a train, the difference is simply that if you enter a dangerous situation on a train it is easily identifiable and you can escape it, whereas online the boundaries are not as clear. The truth about the internet, not just MySpace, is that to be safe you need education and common sense, not parents up in arms about child safety and most certainly not the preposterous and undemocratic censorship the Australian government is trying to bring in. The biggest problem is sexual predators. Well, if you don’t insist on putting suggestive photos of yourself up on your publicly viewable profile every month then maybe you won’t get sexual predators. It seems pretty obvious when I say it like that, but I can guarantee that in the next month one of my friends will do that, and I’ll guarantee that their parents don’t know about it.
You can’t save stupid people from themselves. In this way I think MySpace and other social networking sites are victimized slightly by the hordes of Today Tonight viewing parents wondering what to get in an outrage about this week.
On the evil front, Facebook is not evil, but it is the largest social networking site in the world which automatically prevents it from being the slightest bit good.
So why is MySpace making themselves more like Facebook? Simple, they were the biggest social network in the world, now Facebook is. MySpace exists only to make money, the good they do in the world is only a side-effect, but that isn’t a bad thing, that is the exact same thing as commercial TV, commercial radio and most professional sport, and people still love them so there is no reason not to be grateful to MySpace for the valuable promotion they give artists.
What do I think about this? Well I see MySpace and Facebook as being different things. Myspace hosts my artist ventures and of course this blog, I love the bulletins and my friend’s list is much more selective. I will only be friends with someone on MySpace if I really want to be. Facebook on the other hand is more for discussion, I go there to comment on everything, I’ll be friends with anyone I know and generally I’d say my Facebook friends are more intelligent. That is in no way an insult to my MySpace friends, especially considering most people are friends with me on both, but on Facebook the average age of my friends is much higher, most of them are in Uni or at least Senior with me. MySpace is almost entirely school friends and there aren’t as many of them, it’s an education thing, not a brightness thing. So I’m not between one website or the other, I’m staying with both, they have different purposes for me and I like them equally; they both fulfill my needs for them and you can’t ask for more than that.
Well you may want to know why I’m fighting with MySpace. I’m finding they are increasingly unstable, some nights every single time I load my home page it comes up with an error screen, thus rendering the site completely useless. Also the blog didn’t support my browser or operating system (Firefox 3.0, MacOS 10.5.5) and then thanks amazingly it did. It was great, and on top of that the formatting of the blog changed and it looked good even if I posted multiple times in one day. Then a few days ago it stopped supporting me again and the formatting changed back. The blog can’t input pictures even though it claims it can and the links almost never work. I’m even considering leaving them because of it, but if someone can fix it then that would be nice.
As I’ve said, they are a big evil corporation, there is almost certainly someone reading this to make sure I don’t say anything bad about them and to that person, could you please upgrade your servers, technical support or whatever. I have no problems other than that, and like the website.
I have just posted 2 whole pages of why MySpace is evil, but like I said: it is a necessary evil and I like it and will keep using it. Like a bank I guess. Nobody is in any doubt that banks are evil, but you can’t live in modern society without one.
For anyone interested in more about Facebook, Meaghan Morris gave a talk about it in early November sometime. I wasn’t there, but someone else was and they took notes, so you can read the notes at Home Cooked Theory. (That link may not work, in which case search for it, the exercise will do you good.)
Other than that I’m done talking for a bit. Enjoy your afternoon.
When I opened MySpace this morning I discovered that they have added the “people you may know” section to the homepage. This is very obviously a copy of the same feature that has been in Facebook for some time. In Facebook it is great and certainly I feel the need to constantly add more friends because they just keep appearing on this list if I don’t. It is not only due to this, but largely due to this that on my Facebook profile I have 96 friends and on MySpace I only have 39. But this is not the first move MySpace has made to be more like Facebook.
A time ago now (I can’t remember exactly how long) the news feed feature was added to MySpace, although it is called ‘Friend Updates’. Applications have appeared on MySpace recently, a back-flip of sorts seeing as adding flash content to profiles was advised against previously. As well as this there have been more subtle changes like the default on comments for bulletins now being ‘allow comments’ rather than needing the user to select ‘allow comments’. That isn’t as extreme as Facebook where you can comment on absolutely everything, but I’m not sure that Facebook has always been like that or if that was a recent change.
As far as evilness goes, MySpace is without a doubt evil. It’s very evil, right along side Microsoft on the top evil list. Even if you haven’t heard any of the talk about the evils of MySpace just remember it is owned by Fox, who are responsible for Firefly being cancelled: you don’t get more evil than that. Even so they are a necessary evil in my mind. The promotion tool MySpace serves as for underground musicians, film-makers, comedians, whatever else you want is incredible. It’s also not that bad simply as a social networking tool. I only got my MySpace profile to host music on but as you can clearly see that isn’t all I use it for now, I host pictures, videos, the blog, well it is ok, that’s what I’m fighting about at the moment, and bulletin board feature is something that I a adore and am fascinated by. It is possibly the most versatile website I have ever encountered and it is probably the website responsible for sucking me into the social networking world which as you should all know I am firmly stuck in.
Another thing to remember when counting evilness is that people, especially of the parenting generation, i.e. my parents’ generation, are not as used to the internet as my generation, the main users of social networking sites. Obviously that is a huge generalization, but the point is that people tend to panic about sites like MySpace because of problems like cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking and other child safety problems. While the cases of these problems are easy to find and they appear quite common, I’d suggest this is over-reporting and that you are as safe using MySpace as you are catching a train, the difference is simply that if you enter a dangerous situation on a train it is easily identifiable and you can escape it, whereas online the boundaries are not as clear. The truth about the internet, not just MySpace, is that to be safe you need education and common sense, not parents up in arms about child safety and most certainly not the preposterous and undemocratic censorship the Australian government is trying to bring in. The biggest problem is sexual predators. Well, if you don’t insist on putting suggestive photos of yourself up on your publicly viewable profile every month then maybe you won’t get sexual predators. It seems pretty obvious when I say it like that, but I can guarantee that in the next month one of my friends will do that, and I’ll guarantee that their parents don’t know about it.
You can’t save stupid people from themselves. In this way I think MySpace and other social networking sites are victimized slightly by the hordes of Today Tonight viewing parents wondering what to get in an outrage about this week.
On the evil front, Facebook is not evil, but it is the largest social networking site in the world which automatically prevents it from being the slightest bit good.
So why is MySpace making themselves more like Facebook? Simple, they were the biggest social network in the world, now Facebook is. MySpace exists only to make money, the good they do in the world is only a side-effect, but that isn’t a bad thing, that is the exact same thing as commercial TV, commercial radio and most professional sport, and people still love them so there is no reason not to be grateful to MySpace for the valuable promotion they give artists.
What do I think about this? Well I see MySpace and Facebook as being different things. Myspace hosts my artist ventures and of course this blog, I love the bulletins and my friend’s list is much more selective. I will only be friends with someone on MySpace if I really want to be. Facebook on the other hand is more for discussion, I go there to comment on everything, I’ll be friends with anyone I know and generally I’d say my Facebook friends are more intelligent. That is in no way an insult to my MySpace friends, especially considering most people are friends with me on both, but on Facebook the average age of my friends is much higher, most of them are in Uni or at least Senior with me. MySpace is almost entirely school friends and there aren’t as many of them, it’s an education thing, not a brightness thing. So I’m not between one website or the other, I’m staying with both, they have different purposes for me and I like them equally; they both fulfill my needs for them and you can’t ask for more than that.
Well you may want to know why I’m fighting with MySpace. I’m finding they are increasingly unstable, some nights every single time I load my home page it comes up with an error screen, thus rendering the site completely useless. Also the blog didn’t support my browser or operating system (Firefox 3.0, MacOS 10.5.5) and then thanks amazingly it did. It was great, and on top of that the formatting of the blog changed and it looked good even if I posted multiple times in one day. Then a few days ago it stopped supporting me again and the formatting changed back. The blog can’t input pictures even though it claims it can and the links almost never work. I’m even considering leaving them because of it, but if someone can fix it then that would be nice.
As I’ve said, they are a big evil corporation, there is almost certainly someone reading this to make sure I don’t say anything bad about them and to that person, could you please upgrade your servers, technical support or whatever. I have no problems other than that, and like the website.
I have just posted 2 whole pages of why MySpace is evil, but like I said: it is a necessary evil and I like it and will keep using it. Like a bank I guess. Nobody is in any doubt that banks are evil, but you can’t live in modern society without one.
For anyone interested in more about Facebook, Meaghan Morris gave a talk about it in early November sometime. I wasn’t there, but someone else was and they took notes, so you can read the notes at Home Cooked Theory. (That link may not work, in which case search for it, the exercise will do you good.)
Other than that I’m done talking for a bit. Enjoy your afternoon.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Thoughts on Ambient Music
After reading the comments to this thread at The Memes of Production (please, Myspace, let the link work for once) I got thinking about ambient music a bit. Now I like my ambient music t be just that, ambient MUSIC. Some people create ambient audio which is exciting as listening to nothing. If I want to listen to the world I’ll listen to the world, not the world as recorded by someone. Some albums in that genre are really just sleeping pills in audio form.
But good ambient music is certainly worth listening to, it creates the mood through atmosphere only, and I suppose in that sense it is one of the hardest musical genres to write successfully, even if it is one of the simplest to compose. I especially like ambient industrial, Ghosts I-IV – Nine Inch Nails being the best example to come to mind at the moment. But even more mainstream genres such as rock and especially some more alternative electronica use ambient scapes as another instrument in the otherwise ordinary song, and it adds a level to the song that a studio recording just isn’t capable of capturing. An example of this that comes to mind presently is Exit – U2 from the Joshua Tree album. The song is second last and starts very quietly with chirping crickets among other effects that make it seem like you are in the middle of a desert at night. It is so quiet that on a cheap sound system or with the volume turned down you may not even notice the song has started.
This brings me to the point I actually want to make. What is the best sound system to listen to ambient music on? The mp3 vs CD or vinyl battle comes up immediately. CDs I can understand would be an appropriate medium. Mp3s are of a much lower quality though (unless you put the bitrate right up in which case you lose the advantage of the mp3’s small file size) so the full “hear the world in its complete richness” is lost. To go the other way though, vinyl is the highest quality medium for sound recording, but I have never heard a record that didn’t have some kind of crackling on it from dust or whatever. The care you would need to take to preserve the quality of the record so that the act of playing it did not add any sound would be so great I would lose interest in it. I don’t mean keeping it sounding clear and not skipping, that is easy enough if you care for it, I mean the not a single other sound. Even CD players make extra sound while playing a disc, for that matter an Mp3 player does too, because if iTunes is running then your computer is on and making noise. Probably the best set up you could get would be a CD, where the speakers were in one room with you, and the stereo itself was in a different room.
But there is another problem. The world itself doesn’t stop making noise just because you are listening to an ambient record. As such, you may have birds chirping, dogs barking, cars driving passed, neighbours mowing the lawn, the people in the next room having a conversation or a phone or whatever interrupting you. Even if it doesn’t stop you from listening to the record, you can hear it, so it may add but usually detracts from the environment that the artist wanted you to be in. Certainly not to the point of failure, but it isn’t possible to fully leave the real world and enter the world of the recording.
That is, unless you own an enclosed theatre, such as a cinema. If in a cinema with the record playing then you would finally be able to listen to it as perfectly as the artist intended. Well, except for the deafening sound of irony that the only way to enter the audio world is to block all natural audio from the world.
I don’t think it matters if the sound you hear is not all exactly as the artist intended though, the tiny, even unnoticeable differences are what makes each listening a little more personal.
But good ambient music is certainly worth listening to, it creates the mood through atmosphere only, and I suppose in that sense it is one of the hardest musical genres to write successfully, even if it is one of the simplest to compose. I especially like ambient industrial, Ghosts I-IV – Nine Inch Nails being the best example to come to mind at the moment. But even more mainstream genres such as rock and especially some more alternative electronica use ambient scapes as another instrument in the otherwise ordinary song, and it adds a level to the song that a studio recording just isn’t capable of capturing. An example of this that comes to mind presently is Exit – U2 from the Joshua Tree album. The song is second last and starts very quietly with chirping crickets among other effects that make it seem like you are in the middle of a desert at night. It is so quiet that on a cheap sound system or with the volume turned down you may not even notice the song has started.
This brings me to the point I actually want to make. What is the best sound system to listen to ambient music on? The mp3 vs CD or vinyl battle comes up immediately. CDs I can understand would be an appropriate medium. Mp3s are of a much lower quality though (unless you put the bitrate right up in which case you lose the advantage of the mp3’s small file size) so the full “hear the world in its complete richness” is lost. To go the other way though, vinyl is the highest quality medium for sound recording, but I have never heard a record that didn’t have some kind of crackling on it from dust or whatever. The care you would need to take to preserve the quality of the record so that the act of playing it did not add any sound would be so great I would lose interest in it. I don’t mean keeping it sounding clear and not skipping, that is easy enough if you care for it, I mean the not a single other sound. Even CD players make extra sound while playing a disc, for that matter an Mp3 player does too, because if iTunes is running then your computer is on and making noise. Probably the best set up you could get would be a CD, where the speakers were in one room with you, and the stereo itself was in a different room.
But there is another problem. The world itself doesn’t stop making noise just because you are listening to an ambient record. As such, you may have birds chirping, dogs barking, cars driving passed, neighbours mowing the lawn, the people in the next room having a conversation or a phone or whatever interrupting you. Even if it doesn’t stop you from listening to the record, you can hear it, so it may add but usually detracts from the environment that the artist wanted you to be in. Certainly not to the point of failure, but it isn’t possible to fully leave the real world and enter the world of the recording.
That is, unless you own an enclosed theatre, such as a cinema. If in a cinema with the record playing then you would finally be able to listen to it as perfectly as the artist intended. Well, except for the deafening sound of irony that the only way to enter the audio world is to block all natural audio from the world.
I don’t think it matters if the sound you hear is not all exactly as the artist intended though, the tiny, even unnoticeable differences are what makes each listening a little more personal.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Storm Season 08/09: Storm 9, A Commentary
Another severe thunderstorm has hit south east Queensland, which means it is time for another storm review to hit this blog. From about 9am it was unbearably hot inside, reaching about 30 degrees but being very humid. It was hotter outside, but the house is lovely and insulated. Fortunately BoM was promising a storm. At 2:30pm cloud cover came across and the blue skies disappeared. This did two things: brought a nice breeze to cool things down and rose the humidity level, consequently it wasn’t all that much cooler. The storms were on the Gold Coast at this point, but were heading NNE.
The storm soon after began moving straight north towards Brisbane. The radar showed it was big and heavy and the hail cell was clearly visible.
Before the storm hit the cloud was a large, very dark fading storm blending smoothly towards us, but with very clear marks where the sky suddenly darkened. As it got closer though the wind suddenly split into several directions all at once and sped up. The clouds broke into bunches and moved around, even drifting towards the west. That’s right, THE WEST! But that wasn’t the strangest thing, when I say several directions I don’t mean just ordinary directions, one of the directions was down; not down in a precipitatory sense, but the cloud was actually moving closer to the ground as a cloud. It was the strangest thing that anyone there had ever seen. I can’t describe it other than cloud moving down, it was too bizarre for me to adequately describe.
The wind was blowing leaves around at high speed too but no explosions.
There were small amounts of hard rain for a matter of seconds at a time, not lots of rain but large raindrops, none of these breaks of rain lasted more than a minute though.
It was around 5:15pm at this time.
Finally the rain came, but it was only shower heavy, not storm heavy. It had been very dark but now it was only light grey and the atmosphere of ominous storm was somewhat lost. As it got later the rain died a bit and then came back at 6:25pm but only lasted a short time.
Overall this wasn’t a great storm. But it gets worse: damage has been done elsewhere. The Gold Coast has suffered roofs off houses, there are large areas blacked out and hail damage has been done. And none of it was here. I’m all glad I didn’t get damage, and I feel sorry for people who did get damage, but wouldn’t it be nice to have another decent storm that was spectacular but didn’t destroy stuff. Time for the final statistics:
Final Statistics:
Wind: yes
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: no
House damage: no
Car damage: no
Human damage: no
Car-tracks: flooded
Side yard: wet
Breezeway entrance: wet
Carport: dry
Inside the house: dry
Total score:
The cloud motions of the beginning of the storm was seriously awesome, but ultimately doesn’t make up for the damage on the coast or the lack of any real substance. BoM has forecast the next storm for Saturday, it had better be good.
Brisbane storm 11th December 2008:
Total Score: 4/10
It goes without saying that if you did bear the full grunt of this storm we would like you to comment with your experience.
The storm soon after began moving straight north towards Brisbane. The radar showed it was big and heavy and the hail cell was clearly visible.
Before the storm hit the cloud was a large, very dark fading storm blending smoothly towards us, but with very clear marks where the sky suddenly darkened. As it got closer though the wind suddenly split into several directions all at once and sped up. The clouds broke into bunches and moved around, even drifting towards the west. That’s right, THE WEST! But that wasn’t the strangest thing, when I say several directions I don’t mean just ordinary directions, one of the directions was down; not down in a precipitatory sense, but the cloud was actually moving closer to the ground as a cloud. It was the strangest thing that anyone there had ever seen. I can’t describe it other than cloud moving down, it was too bizarre for me to adequately describe.
The wind was blowing leaves around at high speed too but no explosions.
There were small amounts of hard rain for a matter of seconds at a time, not lots of rain but large raindrops, none of these breaks of rain lasted more than a minute though.
It was around 5:15pm at this time.
Finally the rain came, but it was only shower heavy, not storm heavy. It had been very dark but now it was only light grey and the atmosphere of ominous storm was somewhat lost. As it got later the rain died a bit and then came back at 6:25pm but only lasted a short time.
Overall this wasn’t a great storm. But it gets worse: damage has been done elsewhere. The Gold Coast has suffered roofs off houses, there are large areas blacked out and hail damage has been done. And none of it was here. I’m all glad I didn’t get damage, and I feel sorry for people who did get damage, but wouldn’t it be nice to have another decent storm that was spectacular but didn’t destroy stuff. Time for the final statistics:
Final Statistics:
Wind: yes
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: no
House damage: no
Car damage: no
Human damage: no
Car-tracks: flooded
Side yard: wet
Breezeway entrance: wet
Carport: dry
Inside the house: dry
Total score:
The cloud motions of the beginning of the storm was seriously awesome, but ultimately doesn’t make up for the damage on the coast or the lack of any real substance. BoM has forecast the next storm for Saturday, it had better be good.
Brisbane storm 11th December 2008:
Total Score: 4/10
It goes without saying that if you did bear the full grunt of this storm we would like you to comment with your experience.
Humanity and the World Wide Something
PART A:
Last night I set up a Twitter account. A lot of people have Twitter accounts, even Kevin Rudd has a Twitter account and he’s leading the government trying to enforce the universal internet filter. It isn’t having a Twitter account in itself that is a problem for me, it is that I also have a Pownce, MySpace, Last.FM, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Yahoo and Blogger. Now the defense many people have raised when asked why they have this many profiles is simply they all do different things. But they don’t.
To make it simpler to understand this point I have a table.
*Google quite obviously has Gmail, but I haven’t set that up. Flickr can host videos but only if you get a Pro account, and I’ve got a free account. Myspace has an instant messenger but I haven’t set it up.
^Twitter hasn’t got “friending” as such, but mutual following where both parties read updates from each other. Flickr is also like this, where you add someone as a contact and then they can say if you are a friend or family or just some random.
I have 3 email addresses, my ISP address, my Yahoo account and my school email, then every single one (except Google and the ISP) of the above services offer internal mail between users, although on Pownce it is just a private message rather than an internal email.
I can’t even use the other great excuse that each one has different friends. Between Myspace, Facebook and Yahoo I can contact all my friends. And if they fail then an ordinary email will work, having an email account is necessary to sign up to any of those services (except possibly Yahoo and Google, but they both ask for secondary email).
It is clear that I have a significant web-presence, but mine isn’t as great as some other people’s.
PART B:
The internet has been described as many things since it first came into being. One of the earlier ones, from the mid 90s, was ‘the information super-highway’ with it being envisaged as a road network of sorts: you get on and move to a certain destination, move in a fairly linear manner from one place to another, all at high speed without leaving your workstation. Even like that it seemed like a good idea, but that isn’t what it is like at all. The more popular description to come into use was the internet as a web. It is called the ‘world wide web’, every universally accessible WEBpage has the www at the front of the address as a sign of that description. The idea of it being a web is that there are points everywhere, all connected in a non linear manner and one position can lead to another by an infinite number of routes.
I think that even the notion of the internet being a web is a bit outdated though. In fact I think that the best description hasn’t yet been thought up. My thinking here is that the idea of a web leaves out the most vital part of the internet: reality. Nobody has yet uploaded their soul to the internet, every user on the internet is either a person accessing it through an internet enabled device, or a bot that was written by a person.
The internet is more like another dimension than an object of this dimension, even in a metaphorical sense. Me is one central point and all the ways of finding me on the internet lead directly to the central point that is me, and through me all the ways of finding me are directly linked. You can’t tell that by staying in the internet though. You may recognize usernames in common, linked profiles across different services, but those services are all spread across the ‘web’ and apart from the links directing you between selected ones they aren’t even linked properly. My Twitter account for example is not linked to anything yet. It will be soon, it will be linked to this post, but this post goes up in many locations and it will only link to one of them.
You can’t really find me on the internet, you can’t really find anyone on the internet because nobody is really on the internet. We are all connected to the internet in some way, but we aren’t on it. Maybe we will be in the future, maybe we won’t.
So, how are parts a and b related? Well, to be cynical part b is my excuse for the problem raised in part a but to be open-minded and enthusiastic towards humanity and the greatness it has achieved it can be described better than that. Part A is a spectacularly large list, as I have already stated not as large as other people’s though, but the list lacks something: it lacks the humanity that created it. You can follow me on every website I have a profile on, but you will find no central point until you stand with me as I jump between tabs in my browser. That’s not to say anything as extreme as “you can befriend me online but you aren’t my friend”, that isn’t the case. But there is distance, I guess the best way I can describe it is like making a phone call to your mate’s mobile and having a conversation, but your mate is on the other side of a wormhole.
I hope this has all made sense, my brain is melting in the heat. Please comment with any further thoughts.
Last night I set up a Twitter account. A lot of people have Twitter accounts, even Kevin Rudd has a Twitter account and he’s leading the government trying to enforce the universal internet filter. It isn’t having a Twitter account in itself that is a problem for me, it is that I also have a Pownce, MySpace, Last.FM, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Yahoo and Blogger. Now the defense many people have raised when asked why they have this many profiles is simply they all do different things. But they don’t.
To make it simpler to understand this point I have a table.
*Google quite obviously has Gmail, but I haven’t set that up. Flickr can host videos but only if you get a Pro account, and I’ve got a free account. Myspace has an instant messenger but I haven’t set it up.
^Twitter hasn’t got “friending” as such, but mutual following where both parties read updates from each other. Flickr is also like this, where you add someone as a contact and then they can say if you are a friend or family or just some random.
I have 3 email addresses, my ISP address, my Yahoo account and my school email, then every single one (except Google and the ISP) of the above services offer internal mail between users, although on Pownce it is just a private message rather than an internal email.
I can’t even use the other great excuse that each one has different friends. Between Myspace, Facebook and Yahoo I can contact all my friends. And if they fail then an ordinary email will work, having an email account is necessary to sign up to any of those services (except possibly Yahoo and Google, but they both ask for secondary email).
It is clear that I have a significant web-presence, but mine isn’t as great as some other people’s.
PART B:
The internet has been described as many things since it first came into being. One of the earlier ones, from the mid 90s, was ‘the information super-highway’ with it being envisaged as a road network of sorts: you get on and move to a certain destination, move in a fairly linear manner from one place to another, all at high speed without leaving your workstation. Even like that it seemed like a good idea, but that isn’t what it is like at all. The more popular description to come into use was the internet as a web. It is called the ‘world wide web’, every universally accessible WEBpage has the www at the front of the address as a sign of that description. The idea of it being a web is that there are points everywhere, all connected in a non linear manner and one position can lead to another by an infinite number of routes.
I think that even the notion of the internet being a web is a bit outdated though. In fact I think that the best description hasn’t yet been thought up. My thinking here is that the idea of a web leaves out the most vital part of the internet: reality. Nobody has yet uploaded their soul to the internet, every user on the internet is either a person accessing it through an internet enabled device, or a bot that was written by a person.
The internet is more like another dimension than an object of this dimension, even in a metaphorical sense. Me is one central point and all the ways of finding me on the internet lead directly to the central point that is me, and through me all the ways of finding me are directly linked. You can’t tell that by staying in the internet though. You may recognize usernames in common, linked profiles across different services, but those services are all spread across the ‘web’ and apart from the links directing you between selected ones they aren’t even linked properly. My Twitter account for example is not linked to anything yet. It will be soon, it will be linked to this post, but this post goes up in many locations and it will only link to one of them.
You can’t really find me on the internet, you can’t really find anyone on the internet because nobody is really on the internet. We are all connected to the internet in some way, but we aren’t on it. Maybe we will be in the future, maybe we won’t.
So, how are parts a and b related? Well, to be cynical part b is my excuse for the problem raised in part a but to be open-minded and enthusiastic towards humanity and the greatness it has achieved it can be described better than that. Part A is a spectacularly large list, as I have already stated not as large as other people’s though, but the list lacks something: it lacks the humanity that created it. You can follow me on every website I have a profile on, but you will find no central point until you stand with me as I jump between tabs in my browser. That’s not to say anything as extreme as “you can befriend me online but you aren’t my friend”, that isn’t the case. But there is distance, I guess the best way I can describe it is like making a phone call to your mate’s mobile and having a conversation, but your mate is on the other side of a wormhole.
I hope this has all made sense, my brain is melting in the heat. Please comment with any further thoughts.
First Spam Email
Ok, I’m really excited right now because I have just received my first ever spam email! Spam emails are something that most people hate, but I’ve never received one before, and this one is extra good because it is a bank scam.
I’m not sure what kind of spam filter my ISP has but I think it is fairly good, and I use Thunderbird which has a good spam filter, aside from trying to trash a few family letters when I first set it up. So I guess I probably get heaps of spam that is filtered out before it gets to me, but this one is the first I’ve seen.
This email is from The Farmers and Merchants Bank, I’ve never even heard of it before and I am certainly not a member of it. Once open the email reads:
And then it has a link to the website. I’m not an idiot though so I didn’t click the link. There was no attachment.
Now I have a pretty good idea of why I have now received this email. A short time ago (potentially months, but the year has gone so fast that is a short time in my head) my friend sent a chain email to her entire address book. This is a known attractor of spam as now everyone she knows has my email address, and so anyone of them with spam now knows my address.
Also until about that time I would receive maybe 1 or 2 real emails a week and every other email was from a website, all my online communications were conducted internally through social networks. Recently though I have been involved in many discussions on email.
It is really not surprising given this recent rise in activity that spam should be just around the corner.
But I’m really excited about it. I’m certainly not blaming anyone who I have been in correspondence with recently. You see, as I mentioned earlier, I use Thunderbird, which has the best spam filter I have ever seen. But without a spam email ever I’ve never before had a chance to use it. I’ve never even been able to set it up before! Now I can! It’s like a whole new world of virtual letter-shreading has opened its doors to me.
It’s a brave new world (for me)!
Anyway, will post again with another review of my online stuffs shortly, just got to do some, sigh, chores first.
And there is a storm forecast for tonight so maybe a review as well.
Have a good morning.
I’m not sure what kind of spam filter my ISP has but I think it is fairly good, and I use Thunderbird which has a good spam filter, aside from trying to trash a few family letters when I first set it up. So I guess I probably get heaps of spam that is filtered out before it gets to me, but this one is the first I’ve seen.
This email is from The Farmers and Merchants Bank, I’ve never even heard of it before and I am certainly not a member of it. Once open the email reads:
“You have 1 new ALERT message
Please login to your The Farmers and Merchants Bank Online Login
and visit the Message Center section in order to read the message.
To Login, please click the link below:”
Please login to your The Farmers and Merchants Bank Online Login
and visit the Message Center section in order to read the message.
To Login, please click the link below:”
And then it has a link to the website. I’m not an idiot though so I didn’t click the link. There was no attachment.
Now I have a pretty good idea of why I have now received this email. A short time ago (potentially months, but the year has gone so fast that is a short time in my head) my friend sent a chain email to her entire address book. This is a known attractor of spam as now everyone she knows has my email address, and so anyone of them with spam now knows my address.
Also until about that time I would receive maybe 1 or 2 real emails a week and every other email was from a website, all my online communications were conducted internally through social networks. Recently though I have been involved in many discussions on email.
It is really not surprising given this recent rise in activity that spam should be just around the corner.
But I’m really excited about it. I’m certainly not blaming anyone who I have been in correspondence with recently. You see, as I mentioned earlier, I use Thunderbird, which has the best spam filter I have ever seen. But without a spam email ever I’ve never before had a chance to use it. I’ve never even been able to set it up before! Now I can! It’s like a whole new world of virtual letter-shreading has opened its doors to me.
It’s a brave new world (for me)!
Anyway, will post again with another review of my online stuffs shortly, just got to do some, sigh, chores first.
And there is a storm forecast for tonight so maybe a review as well.
Have a good morning.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Storm Season 08/09: Storm 8, A Commentary
Well if you live in Brisbane and have a body capable of feeling temperature and humidity then you will realize that today was flaming humid and hot as a 34 degree day. Those of you with air conditioning are not capable of judging temperature and humidity so for the sake of this are classed as disabled. Nothing personal, I just hate air conditioning with a passion. However if there was a time for gratuitous use of air conditioning, today was it- at least until about 6:20pm. Knowing the forecast and feeling the dreadful local climate, the gathered assembly of my chosen outing for the day kept a close eye on BoM and watched as the storms came further east at a painfully slow rate. Finally the blurred light edge met us at 6:20pm and a light spread of liquid precipitation fell from the sky, easing the temperature slightly.
It was at this time we (my family and I) left the party and set en route for home. Naturally we were in the car 6Km from home at 6:50pm when the storm hit. The sky was not yet darkened beyond expectations for an afternoon storm. The rain picked up and lightning became increasingly obvious. The sun was also setting from above the clouds so the sky rapidly darkened, though not of the storm’s doing. As we moved from the motorway and onto suburban streets the bitumen was deeply wet, indicative of a storm passed. After a brief stop in for a dinner order we set back home and the rain continued for a short while before eventually stopping at 7:30pm. The lightning somehow came closer after the rain began moving off, maybe it was in a lighter cloud that was obscured by the darkness, but it also removed itself from our presence by 7:30pm.
The strangest part of the storm was really when someone started setting off fireworks in the middle of it. Why you would set off fireworks in a storm and not wait for the storm to pass, who knows?
This storm is what I call a background storm. It serves no function by itself, its only purpose being to serve the greater good. Like a nameless worker who’s only goal in life is to build the hive and protect the queen. It is these background storms that mark a storms season, leaving the greater storms such as we experienced last month to define it. The best analogy I can think of is a game of limited overs cricket. In the second innings the batting side is dismissed in 40 full overs to win the game. That means 11 balls claimed wickets. These 11 balls are the defining deliveries, the ones the game will be remembered by and so it is appropriate as they are responsible for the result. However that means 229 other balls were bowled. These 229 balls do not define the game, we will not remember them once the game is gone, however if these 229 balls were not bowled the game would not be cricket.
It is in that way we can have the deadly storms of last month which will be remember for years to come, maybe a whole generation. However without storms like tonight’s or Thursday’s or whenever the last one was, or Wednesday’s, all the small ones, without these background storms we don’t have the storm season. One week of bad weather doesn’t make a season, they define the season, these background storms make the season.
Such is life in the rain shadow that the storm did hit the Gold and Sunshine coasts quite severely and Brisbane’s northern suburbs got their share of the hard rain too, but here I got nothing but a shower and a couple of flashes of lightning to keep me observant. There is no denying this was a storm, but a memorable one it was not. Or isn’t at this point for me anyway, the news may refuse me my opinions, but I suspect it won’t. Time for the final statistics:
Final Statistics:
Wind: no
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: no
House damage: no
Car damage: no
Human damage: no
Car-tracks: dry
Side yard: wet
Breezeway entrance: dry
Carport: dry
Inside the house: dry
Total score:
Just to clarify, the car tracks are quite obviously not dry, they are not covered, if there is a heavy dew they will become wet. However after the least undramatic storm I checked them when I got home and the very top where the car tracks and carport meet was dry so I’m going to declare it representative of the rest in a rare importance over majority decision the likes of which must be spent as far from our political system as possible. The breezeway entrance suffered in the same way, the part near the road end stairs was wet but nothing further in was so I’m declaring it dry. You could walk through all the covered access points without facing water so I’m calling it dry.
Being a background storm this storm was important to the season rather than itself. That isn’t enough to save it from a bad review though.
Brisbane storm 6th December 2008:
Total Score: 4/10
It goes without saying that if you did bear the full grunt of this storm we would like you to comment with your experience.
It was at this time we (my family and I) left the party and set en route for home. Naturally we were in the car 6Km from home at 6:50pm when the storm hit. The sky was not yet darkened beyond expectations for an afternoon storm. The rain picked up and lightning became increasingly obvious. The sun was also setting from above the clouds so the sky rapidly darkened, though not of the storm’s doing. As we moved from the motorway and onto suburban streets the bitumen was deeply wet, indicative of a storm passed. After a brief stop in for a dinner order we set back home and the rain continued for a short while before eventually stopping at 7:30pm. The lightning somehow came closer after the rain began moving off, maybe it was in a lighter cloud that was obscured by the darkness, but it also removed itself from our presence by 7:30pm.
The strangest part of the storm was really when someone started setting off fireworks in the middle of it. Why you would set off fireworks in a storm and not wait for the storm to pass, who knows?
This storm is what I call a background storm. It serves no function by itself, its only purpose being to serve the greater good. Like a nameless worker who’s only goal in life is to build the hive and protect the queen. It is these background storms that mark a storms season, leaving the greater storms such as we experienced last month to define it. The best analogy I can think of is a game of limited overs cricket. In the second innings the batting side is dismissed in 40 full overs to win the game. That means 11 balls claimed wickets. These 11 balls are the defining deliveries, the ones the game will be remembered by and so it is appropriate as they are responsible for the result. However that means 229 other balls were bowled. These 229 balls do not define the game, we will not remember them once the game is gone, however if these 229 balls were not bowled the game would not be cricket.
It is in that way we can have the deadly storms of last month which will be remember for years to come, maybe a whole generation. However without storms like tonight’s or Thursday’s or whenever the last one was, or Wednesday’s, all the small ones, without these background storms we don’t have the storm season. One week of bad weather doesn’t make a season, they define the season, these background storms make the season.
Such is life in the rain shadow that the storm did hit the Gold and Sunshine coasts quite severely and Brisbane’s northern suburbs got their share of the hard rain too, but here I got nothing but a shower and a couple of flashes of lightning to keep me observant. There is no denying this was a storm, but a memorable one it was not. Or isn’t at this point for me anyway, the news may refuse me my opinions, but I suspect it won’t. Time for the final statistics:
Final Statistics:
Wind: no
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: no
House damage: no
Car damage: no
Human damage: no
Car-tracks: dry
Side yard: wet
Breezeway entrance: dry
Carport: dry
Inside the house: dry
Total score:
Just to clarify, the car tracks are quite obviously not dry, they are not covered, if there is a heavy dew they will become wet. However after the least undramatic storm I checked them when I got home and the very top where the car tracks and carport meet was dry so I’m going to declare it representative of the rest in a rare importance over majority decision the likes of which must be spent as far from our political system as possible. The breezeway entrance suffered in the same way, the part near the road end stairs was wet but nothing further in was so I’m declaring it dry. You could walk through all the covered access points without facing water so I’m calling it dry.
Being a background storm this storm was important to the season rather than itself. That isn’t enough to save it from a bad review though.
Brisbane storm 6th December 2008:
Total Score: 4/10
It goes without saying that if you did bear the full grunt of this storm we would like you to comment with your experience.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Storm Season 08/09: Storm 7, A Commentary
Storm time! (Well, actually storm time just finished which is why I’m now writing this, but I hope you all get what I mean.)
Before I go any further, yes I missed last night’s storm. The forecast was for a storm originally but it changed at the 4:50am forecast to be a fine day. It must have changed again sometime while I was out because while sitting in a large enclosed hall the storm hit. As such I cannot provide any review for it other than the area immediately outside the hall wasn’t completely wet, some puddles formed around the edge of the sporting field but that was it. There was some pretty lightning and once the ceremony was over and all the people came out of the hall the balcony outside filled with people meeting with friends and relatives all the while watching the sky as lightning fizzled across.
Well last night I missed the build up to the point of not realizing there even was a storm, this afternoon wasn’t much better. The forecast was for a storm and the warning came through to confirm that. By the way I’m getting very good at self judging the climate, I am consistently going to the warning only 5 minutes after it is issued. It was a very slow moving storm and I found it very frustrating trying to follow it because BoM kept crashing. There are probably 1million people trying to look at the radar now each time there is a storm so it isn’t unexpected that they can’t provide adequate service, but they should upgrade the servers if that many people are trying to use the radar.
Eventually I got sick of the computer being so slow and I went outside (shock horror, observing the world without a computer!). The storm hit at 4:10pm with only very light rain and a bit of lightning. Turkey was building, or rather maintaining, his mound at the time and when the rain started to pick up he picked up the pace, more quickly attempting to get done only what was needed before the storm. In his haste the mound began collapsing under him and he had to work even harder to keep it up. Finally the top was again covered and he flew over the fence and ran off to shelter.
Yes, this part of the storm was that boring that I’m instead reporting on the wildlife.
Fortunately after that the storm began to pick up, the lightning was much closer although still no more frequent and the rain was hard. Shower hard not storm hard though. It was also very light, the sky was light grey rather than even just grey and certainly not dark grey. It was a fairly boring storm but in its own way kind of peaceful. Severe thunderstorms are rarely peaceful so this one was special in that way.
After a bit of that the sky became darker again and the rain became heavier. The car-tracks were now flooding and the side yard was flooding. The guttering was starting to overflow even though it was only cleaned out a week ago. With the guttering, now at both ends, of the carport overflowing the carport began to flood, one meter at each end and on one side, yet for some reason not at all on the most exposed side. Sure the most exposed side does have a wall, but that usually doesn’t stop it.
The rain continued heavily and it occurred to me that there was no wind. I mean obviously there was wind because without wind you can’t have a storm, but whatever small amounts of wind there were must have all been at sky level because there was very little on the ground.
At last the sky went back to the light grey, almost white and the rain began to lighten. The rain was still too heavy to be out in but it was lighter than it had been for most of the storm, and then the wind came to blow it all away. The rain was blown in every direction and there was a brief dash back inside for another round of window checks. I went to check the radar to see if the wind was a part of a new wave or if it was just as it seemed: the departure. Kimi was turned off for some reason that I found quite puzzling but Cailie was still on, although unplugged, so I checked the radar and sure enough the storm was over.
So why was Kimi not on? Well Dad found when he looked at the clocks all trying to tell him that it was 12:01am that we had a blackout. None of us noticed.
Anyway, this was a good storm. It had no build up what-so-ever and it was not at all dramatic but it was still peaceful and lasted a long enough time to be worthwhile. It finished at 4:50pm. Time for the final statistics:
Final Statistics:
Wind: no
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: yes
House damage: no
Car damage: no
Human damage: no
Car-tracks: flooded
Side yard: flooded
Breezeway entrance: flooded
Carport: edges flooded
Inside the house: dry
Total score:
Well like I said I liked this storm, it was certainly not epic in any sense of the word, but without storms like this the appreciation we have for the epic ones wouldn’t be so great, so for that reason I’m going to give it high marks anyway. I could extrapolate that into a huge observance of human kind but instead I think it is easier just to give this storm…
Brisbane storm 4th December 2008:
Total Score: 7/10
Before I go any further, yes I missed last night’s storm. The forecast was for a storm originally but it changed at the 4:50am forecast to be a fine day. It must have changed again sometime while I was out because while sitting in a large enclosed hall the storm hit. As such I cannot provide any review for it other than the area immediately outside the hall wasn’t completely wet, some puddles formed around the edge of the sporting field but that was it. There was some pretty lightning and once the ceremony was over and all the people came out of the hall the balcony outside filled with people meeting with friends and relatives all the while watching the sky as lightning fizzled across.
Well last night I missed the build up to the point of not realizing there even was a storm, this afternoon wasn’t much better. The forecast was for a storm and the warning came through to confirm that. By the way I’m getting very good at self judging the climate, I am consistently going to the warning only 5 minutes after it is issued. It was a very slow moving storm and I found it very frustrating trying to follow it because BoM kept crashing. There are probably 1million people trying to look at the radar now each time there is a storm so it isn’t unexpected that they can’t provide adequate service, but they should upgrade the servers if that many people are trying to use the radar.
Eventually I got sick of the computer being so slow and I went outside (shock horror, observing the world without a computer!). The storm hit at 4:10pm with only very light rain and a bit of lightning. Turkey was building, or rather maintaining, his mound at the time and when the rain started to pick up he picked up the pace, more quickly attempting to get done only what was needed before the storm. In his haste the mound began collapsing under him and he had to work even harder to keep it up. Finally the top was again covered and he flew over the fence and ran off to shelter.
Yes, this part of the storm was that boring that I’m instead reporting on the wildlife.
Fortunately after that the storm began to pick up, the lightning was much closer although still no more frequent and the rain was hard. Shower hard not storm hard though. It was also very light, the sky was light grey rather than even just grey and certainly not dark grey. It was a fairly boring storm but in its own way kind of peaceful. Severe thunderstorms are rarely peaceful so this one was special in that way.
After a bit of that the sky became darker again and the rain became heavier. The car-tracks were now flooding and the side yard was flooding. The guttering was starting to overflow even though it was only cleaned out a week ago. With the guttering, now at both ends, of the carport overflowing the carport began to flood, one meter at each end and on one side, yet for some reason not at all on the most exposed side. Sure the most exposed side does have a wall, but that usually doesn’t stop it.
The rain continued heavily and it occurred to me that there was no wind. I mean obviously there was wind because without wind you can’t have a storm, but whatever small amounts of wind there were must have all been at sky level because there was very little on the ground.
At last the sky went back to the light grey, almost white and the rain began to lighten. The rain was still too heavy to be out in but it was lighter than it had been for most of the storm, and then the wind came to blow it all away. The rain was blown in every direction and there was a brief dash back inside for another round of window checks. I went to check the radar to see if the wind was a part of a new wave or if it was just as it seemed: the departure. Kimi was turned off for some reason that I found quite puzzling but Cailie was still on, although unplugged, so I checked the radar and sure enough the storm was over.
So why was Kimi not on? Well Dad found when he looked at the clocks all trying to tell him that it was 12:01am that we had a blackout. None of us noticed.
Anyway, this was a good storm. It had no build up what-so-ever and it was not at all dramatic but it was still peaceful and lasted a long enough time to be worthwhile. It finished at 4:50pm. Time for the final statistics:
Final Statistics:
Wind: no
Rain: yes
Lightning: yes
Hail: no
Blackout: yes
House damage: no
Car damage: no
Human damage: no
Car-tracks: flooded
Side yard: flooded
Breezeway entrance: flooded
Carport: edges flooded
Inside the house: dry
Total score:
Well like I said I liked this storm, it was certainly not epic in any sense of the word, but without storms like this the appreciation we have for the epic ones wouldn’t be so great, so for that reason I’m going to give it high marks anyway. I could extrapolate that into a huge observance of human kind but instead I think it is easier just to give this storm…
Brisbane storm 4th December 2008:
Total Score: 7/10
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Always Moving On
In grade 6 I was excited because if I were in America then I’d be in my first year of middle school (that might not be actually correct but that’s what I thought at the time) so it felt like I was truly one of the senior students. I mean year 6 is one of the senior students really. The general feeling at the time was that I was ready to move up and would be moving up except for the system I was in. I had no problem with the system I was in, but knew that in a different system I’d be moving up.
In grade 7 this feeling was completely gone. Instead I got the feeling that I’d been at the school for 6 full years and now was in my final year and really I was going to miss the school. By the end of year 7 everything was going brilliantly and it was genuinely saddening to graduate but at the same time exciting to moving on. The trouble of graduating from year 7 was that everything I’d spent the last 7 years building now had to be left behind. I was one of only 3 people continuing on to my high school, so I would have to make all new friends.
That was probably the best summer of my life, if not just because of the large amounts of fudge I ate over Christmas.
So I entered year 8 and for the first term I spent plenty of time with my year 7 friends outside of school, but after Easter things started to take a turn downward. We were all making new friends with people from school and as a result we were seeing less of our old groups. Nothing wrong with that. It was during first term of year 8 I made some friends with people who helped me through high school heaps. I quickly made friends with some year 10s and I mean it honestly when I say without some of those people, two of them especially, I would never have survived the first years of high school.
I didn’t stay with the group of year 10s but I did stay friends with them.
At the end of year 10 those friends finished year 12 and so they left. I am still in contact with some of them thanks to wonderful online places such as MySpace and Facebook, but many of them I have no contact with and will never see ever again. I did get a chance to say goodbye to them all though but it is still sad.
But all these years and relationships have been school based and school isn’t the only place people make friends. I have been catching the same bus since I was in year 5, less frequently some years then others and since year 8 I have been catching the 4 O’clock bus rather than the 3 O’clock bus, catching the 3 O’clock bus only one day a week. On the 3 O’clock bus I have some friends who have been there for many, many years. There is something about the bus route I’m talking about that it brings groups together, the group on the 4 O’clock bus is heaps of fun. I really love catching this bus.
However these friends I have on the 3 O’clock bus are in year 7 and (because they go to a private school) they graduate on Friday. Some of them I might meet in passing again in the future, but some of them I am never going to see again. I have been catching that bus more often recently to be there more often but it still seems like a short amount of time. Yesterday I left a get together at my mate’s place to catch the bus home with them one last time to say goodbye and wish them luck for the future. They had an excursion on apparently though so none of them were on the bus and that was my last chance to say goodbye.
Except that this blog post will be here for as long as the server it is on remains functioning. I’m not sure if any of the year 7s from the bus are ever going to find or read this, but in case you do thank you for making the commute home on Wednesdays more fun than just another journey. Good luck next year and have a great Christmas.
In grade 7 this feeling was completely gone. Instead I got the feeling that I’d been at the school for 6 full years and now was in my final year and really I was going to miss the school. By the end of year 7 everything was going brilliantly and it was genuinely saddening to graduate but at the same time exciting to moving on. The trouble of graduating from year 7 was that everything I’d spent the last 7 years building now had to be left behind. I was one of only 3 people continuing on to my high school, so I would have to make all new friends.
That was probably the best summer of my life, if not just because of the large amounts of fudge I ate over Christmas.
So I entered year 8 and for the first term I spent plenty of time with my year 7 friends outside of school, but after Easter things started to take a turn downward. We were all making new friends with people from school and as a result we were seeing less of our old groups. Nothing wrong with that. It was during first term of year 8 I made some friends with people who helped me through high school heaps. I quickly made friends with some year 10s and I mean it honestly when I say without some of those people, two of them especially, I would never have survived the first years of high school.
I didn’t stay with the group of year 10s but I did stay friends with them.
At the end of year 10 those friends finished year 12 and so they left. I am still in contact with some of them thanks to wonderful online places such as MySpace and Facebook, but many of them I have no contact with and will never see ever again. I did get a chance to say goodbye to them all though but it is still sad.
But all these years and relationships have been school based and school isn’t the only place people make friends. I have been catching the same bus since I was in year 5, less frequently some years then others and since year 8 I have been catching the 4 O’clock bus rather than the 3 O’clock bus, catching the 3 O’clock bus only one day a week. On the 3 O’clock bus I have some friends who have been there for many, many years. There is something about the bus route I’m talking about that it brings groups together, the group on the 4 O’clock bus is heaps of fun. I really love catching this bus.
However these friends I have on the 3 O’clock bus are in year 7 and (because they go to a private school) they graduate on Friday. Some of them I might meet in passing again in the future, but some of them I am never going to see again. I have been catching that bus more often recently to be there more often but it still seems like a short amount of time. Yesterday I left a get together at my mate’s place to catch the bus home with them one last time to say goodbye and wish them luck for the future. They had an excursion on apparently though so none of them were on the bus and that was my last chance to say goodbye.
Except that this blog post will be here for as long as the server it is on remains functioning. I’m not sure if any of the year 7s from the bus are ever going to find or read this, but in case you do thank you for making the commute home on Wednesdays more fun than just another journey. Good luck next year and have a great Christmas.
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