Arc Tangent

I man­aged to get my mitts on a pre-​release leak of Pendulum’s newest album, Immer­sion (iTunes link). I’m about to launch into a track-​by-​track review, pep­pered with food analo­gies — if you’re feel­ing hun­gry, I sug­gest you make a sand­wich now.

I did this inter­view simul­ta­ne­ously with @ruzkin; it might be inter­st­ing to com­pare and con­trast our reviews.

Before I begin though, I’ll dis­claim: this album is going to be dis­ap­point­ing to a lot of fans. It’s going to take a pretty broad mind to get a lot out of it, and if you’re after more of Hold Your Colour (iTunes) or In Sil­ico (iTunes again) I sug­gest you lis­ten to a few tracks first and get a feel for it before purchasing.

This is not what you’re expect­ing. It’s exper­i­men­tal. @ruzkin described it to me as “rem­i­nis­cent of early BT”. It crosses a lot of genre bound­aries and tries to cover a lot of ground. In my opin­ion, the album is fun­da­men­tally com­po­si­tion­ally flawed; the wrong tracks in the wrong place, and some that should have been left off the album alto­gether. It is by no means perfect.

I found a lot to love in it; I’m a fan of elec­tronic music in gen­eral, so I’m not wed­ded to the con­cept of Pen­du­lum as a drum’n’bass act. I wager that at least 70% of their for­mer fans won’t feel the same way.

Here we go, track by track …

Con­tinue reading

As part of my duties at Site­Point, I’m imple­ment­ing a Google Cus­tom Search Engine (Busi­ness Edition).

One of the neat fea­tures of Google’s CSE is Refine­ments. You can tag por­tions of your site — sub­di­rec­to­ries, sub­do­mains, or even sep­a­rate sites that you’ve added to your engine — with labels. You can then cre­ate refine­ments that will either boost results from these tagged regions of your site, list only results from spec­i­fied tags, or exclude cer­tain tags alto­gether from the result set.

Unfor­tu­nately the means of using these pro­gram­mat­i­cally are not so well doc­u­mented — the API doc­u­men­ta­tion doesn’t spec­ify how to include or exclude cer­tain labels (as far as I’ve been able to determine).

So! For the record, the solu­tion is to use the strings ‘more:<label>’ and ‘less:<label>’ in your query string.

Con­tinue reading

I want to buy BT’s new album, These Hope­ful Machines. BT is a rad dude and his music is excel­lently sweet. I’ve heard some tracks off this col­la­tion of musi­cally arranged bits, and I know that it is some­thing I wish to par­take of more deeply. Sadly, despite the album being legally avail­able in some places around the world today, I can’t buy it because I’m in Australia.

Now, Aus­tralia is not a large coun­try, but we are fairly tech­no­log­i­cally advanced. We’re well con­nected. Sure we’re slip­ping back­wards a bit in the sociopo­lit­i­cal sphere but we’re doing pretty well as denizens of the planet. We con­tribute. We get stuff done.

So why is it, in the era of the Inter­net, of cheap copy­ing and dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, a time of won­der and joy — why is it that I have to wait 10 more days than the rest of the world to buy these eas­ily repli­cated bits? I want to give these peo­ple my money and they’re mak­ing it hard for me because I live in Australia.

They’re mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for me to give them money.

Let those words sink in for a moment. It’s easy for me to acquire this album. I can go to any num­ber of tor­rent track­ing sites and get instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion right now. Today. It’ll take all of an hour, at most, for this album to down­load, and I’ll have what I want. The effort of doing so is vir­tu­ally nonexistent.

Or, I can wait another 10 days for iTunes, Ama­zon and Beat­Port to release this album to me in Aus­tralia. I can choose not to lis­ten to the music, to be patient, and then hand over my $12 to have a dig­i­tal copy of the album. In my imag­i­na­tion, I can see myself impa­tiently eking out my 10 day wait as a bit­ter second-​class cit­i­zen, hop­ping from foot to foot to pre­vent the cold from set­ting in. Bat­tered by adver­tis­ing, I slouch into their dig­i­tal stores, and weakly hand over my money.

Dear music indus­try: Do you even WANT my money? Quit your bitch­ing and get with the program.

The pod­cast that myself, @klepas and @chisa do together has finally got its own web site — so it’s not going to be posted here any longer!

The new site is: http://​www​.cap​i​talpod​cast​.com/
The new pod­cast feed URL is: http://​feeds​.feed​burner​.com/​A​C​a​p​i​t​a​l​T​e​c​h​T​alk

A 301 redi­rect has been placed on the pre­vi­ous feed URL, so hope­fully your RSS reader /​iTunes will update automatically.

It’s been great hav­ing the pod­cast here on arwhite​.org but it’s def­i­nitely out­grown this lit­tle blog. Long live the new site!

The pho­tos below show you where I was for New Years Eve — Sen­sa­tion White! A dance/​trance event of about 40,000 peo­ple held at Eti­had Sta­dium in Melbourne.

It was an awe­some event. A per­sonal high­light for me was get­ting a thumbs-​up returned by Richard Durand (whose music, if you’re into dance/​trance, is brilliant!)

The cen­tral stage was enor­mous and fea­tured water foun­tains, flamethrow­ers, fire­works, lasers and dancers in an under­wa­ter theme (huge white jel­ly­fish sus­pended from the roof com­pleted the motif).

Only down­side was the pres­ence of a few unsa­vories who wanted to harass or intim­i­date oth­ers — cripes peo­ple, it’s a rave! Peace, Love, Under­stand­ing, Respect!

Thanks to my Can­berra boys Jonesy, Pedro, Rob­bie, @klepas, Delbs, Will, Geoff, Truckie, Alex and Sean for a great night; thanks too to Mel­bour­nite amigo Elex!

Happy New Year every­one — hope 2010 is fan­tas­tic to you. (Yes the post is late, shush.)

EDIT: Cripes, for­got to men­tion Rohan! THANKS TO YOU TOO ROHAN! :D

The pho­tos below were taken yes­ter­day, as I drove South from Can­berra to Mel­bourne. It’s about a 680km drive — only trance music and caf­feine kept me going!

The first is The Dog on the Tucker­box. Story goes some­thing like: old drover orders his dog to guard his tucker­box as he goes into town to wet his whis­tle at the local pub. Being the kind of man he is, he gets into a bit of a biff, and loses his life over some­thing silly. The dog, ever loyal, guards the tucker­box — howl­ing and pin­ing for her mas­ter — until she finally expires.

Gets me all misty eyed every time.

The sec­ond is a bloody great sub­ma­rine in the ground. It’s HMAS Hol­brook — which I guess is named after the town — and it’s a weird sight as you drive down the arid NSW stretch of the Hume High­way. The town styles itself ‘the sub­ma­rine town’ and has a top-​notch bak­ery in it!

So. My story. I’m now work­ing for site​point​.com, and just to make it clear, my opin­ions and expres­sions on this blog are wholly my own and do not reflect upon my employer, etc etc!

I’m in Mel­bourne. To live. Look­ing for a place to call home, camped out in some friends’ largely empty flat. It’s weird and excit­ing to think I’m liv­ing here now — not going home at the end of the week like usual.

Depend­ing on the out­come of this week, the next month may end up being com­pletely mad. I have a poten­tial job down in Mel­bourne — not a bad one, by the seem­ing of it — and if it all pans out, I may have to be down there for at least a week or two in Decem­ber (and then mov­ing down there per­ma­nently thereafter).

I also have my Uncle Phil’s wed­ding to go to in a fort­night, so I have to work that in.

Then there’s the usual Christmas-​period mad­ness; par­ties, social engage­ments, try­ing to get enough con­tract­ing work done to make enough money to sur­vive. It’s get­ting some­what stress­ful already and it hasn’t even started.

Every­thing could work out mag­nif­i­cently (what a refresh­ing change that would make) or it could all go rather pear-​shaped. I don’t know what to expect, but I’m deeply hope­ful that I can make some big and pos­i­tive changes.

Ruzkin pointed out to me today that I have now been blog­ging on arcwhite​.org for over a year. My updates may have occa­sion­ally been patchy and spo­radic, but I’ve man­aged to post some­thing just about every month at least — I con­sider that a bit of a win.

So — happy birth­day, arcwhite​.org!

Com­ing up in the next few months: Some more big posts about grandiose sub­ject mat­ter, more travel ret­ro­spec­tives, big per­sonal news, a change in theme and plenty more waffle.

To every­one who’s been read­ing, and com­ment­ing — and there’s more of you than I ever really hoped there would be — thank you!

We haven’t for­got­ten the pod­cast, fear not! We’re in the process of relo­cat­ing to a new, ded­i­cated blog. We’ll post details here as soon as it’s done, and redi­rect the iTunes pod­cast feed appro­pri­ately. We’ll also be sched­ul­ing pod­casts a bit more reg­u­larly (we’re look­ing at a bi-​weekly release cycle). There’s some pretty neat inter­views com­ing up — stay tuned!

If you have any ques­tions or com­ments, or if there’s some­thing spe­cific you’d like to see us dis­cuss, please drop us a line.

A quick post, because I’ve been busy and not updat­ing my blog as well as I should’ve. Only way to get back into the habit is to keep writ­ing, right?

So, a few inter­est­ing things I learnt in the Czech Republic:

• You’ve prob­a­bly heard that Prague is beau­ti­ful. The descrip­tions are not doing it justice.

Old Clock Tower, Old Prague

• Watch­ing Opera (Dvorak’s Rusalka) is much more enjoy­able when cap­tions are pro­vided. Goes dou­ble if the per­for­mance is in Czech and you’re not a native speaker.
• Any coun­try where beer is cheaper than water (~25 kro­nes, or AUD$1.50, give or take) is fan­tas­tic fun — but hard on the liver!
• Czech food is extremely rich and dense (and deli­cious). I have a the­ory that this is some­thing to do with the colder months of the year and need­ing high energy input tra­di­tion­ally to stay warm. Cita­tion needed. If you can find a good, trust­wor­thy restau­rant, you MUST try tatarak.
• Many Czech peo­ple speak Eng­lish to some degree or another; most of them are quite ner­vous about actu­ally using their English.
• Every­body appre­ci­ates it when you speak at least a few words of their lan­guage. In Czech, this seems dou­bly so.
• Lots of peo­ple (at least in Prague) have dogs, even if they don’t have a back yard. This seems vaguely cruel to me.
• Any pub that’s been around since the 14^th cen­tury is Doing Some­thing Right.
• Lucerna is a fan­tas­tic night­club full of very friendly, drunk Czech party ani­mals — if you like music from the 80s. And I don’t mean the best of the 80s. I mean 80s music, all of it, even the stuff that wasn’t very good.
• Really good cof­fee can be hard to find. (I highly rec­om­mend Café Lam­borgh­ini, around the cor­ner from the Lazarska tram stop — the food is a bit expen­sive but the cof­fee was solid! Ser­vice is great too.)
• A large num­ber of Czech peo­ple that I encoun­tered did not seem par­tic­u­larly opti­mistic about their lot in life. I believe this to be a holdover from Com­mu­nist oppres­sion, and sus­pect that the Czech peo­ple will become extremely entre­pre­neur­ial over the next 10 years and that the rest of Europe should watch out. The folks I met who were opti­mistic and/​or ambi­tious were pow­er­houses of hard work and talent.
  

  Stat­u­ary atop the State Theatre

• There was a Czech movie a few years ago about a simple-​minded young man who wore big head­phones around every­where. Walk­ing around Prague wear­ing a pair of Tech­nics head­phones will earn you strange wry grins from peo­ple that will baf­fle you ini­tially — all because of this movie.
• Every­body smokes, every­where. Get used to it.
• Accord­ing to pop­u­lar leg­end, the Russ­ian mafia own a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of busi­nesses in the Repub­lic. Pol­i­tics and crime are closely inter­wo­ven. Despite this, petty crime on the streets, at least in Prague, seems quite uncommon.
• Tea houses are a fan­tas­tic way to unwind if you a) like tea and/​or b) like shisha pipes. They’re turkish-​style dens of relax­ation, usu­ally very quiet and a great place to sit with a friend and talk. Def­i­nitely need more of these in Australia!
• Hav­ing a higher pop­u­la­tion den­sity in an area makes a lot of really cool things pos­si­ble that you just can’t do in a place like Aus­tralia (re: pub­lic trans­port, util­i­ties, busi­nesses), where every­one is accus­tomed to hav­ing a back yard and a lot of space. Not hav­ing a yard really isn’t that big an impost, in my opin­ion, and we should be build­ing up rather than build­ing out where possible.

Finally, the key words of the lan­guage for a trav­eller: pivo (beer), prosim (please), dekuji/​diky (thank you/​thanks), dobre [den|rano|vecer] (good day|morning|night), vyborny (fantastic/​delicious). Guar­an­teed to get a smile if you can use some of these.