You might be surprised to find yourself at this blog. There’s a few sites hosted on this machine, which recently suffered some very serious hardware trauma. Our hosting providers have worked incredibly hard to sort the issue out, and we’re in the process of restoring some damaged data from backups.
If you expected to be somewhere else, and found yourself on my blog — I apologise! The issues will be sorted out shortly. In the meantime, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Watching 60 Minutes is a mistake, sometimes. Other times, it manages to make me think. Of late, it’s almost always sensationalist tripe.
Tonight’s major story was what I would call a fluffy PR piece on the Riot Squad up in Sydney. Their job — at least according to 60 Minutes — is to ‘keep the streets safe’ from ‘increasing street violence’ by employing ‘aggressive tactical behaviours’. My first problem with the 60 Minutes piece is the claim of increased street violence without some sort of backup.
ARERATESOFVIOLENTSTREETCRIMEINNSWINCREASING?
According to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research’s, rates of violent crime excluding robbery reported in NSW have increased from 70 incidents per 100,000 population around 1994 to around 140 incidents per 100,000 population in 2008 (with peaks around January, doubtless the New Years Eve period). These do not include rates of robbery, which change the picture a bit — and do include domestic violence, so it’s not clear how much of this is ‘street crime’.
The first round of the Pang! DJ Comp at Lot33 was — to put it bluntly — awesome.
Many of Canberra’s best and brightest upcoming DJs were out in force. The competition organisers left the field pretty open, asking for trance, progressive, electro, breaks, dubstep, techno, tech house or minimal — and I doubt they were disappointed; entrants gave us a pretty full sampling of the world of electronic music.
Entrants were given a half hour to wow the crowd, using their own equipment or the provided CDJ1000s, DJM800 and two Technics 1200 vinyl turntables.
Sadly, I must confess, I got to the event a little late. A miscommunication with a friend (oops) landed me at the event a full hour after it started, so I missed some of the earlier acts. The crowd was initially pretty sparse — sort of to be expected, in Canberra — which left the earlier DJs down on their luck for the ‘crowd reaction’ criteria of the competition. Hopefully the judges took it into consideration!
Not once was I disappointed by what I was hearing. It’s a dirty cliché, but the standard of competition really was high.
