Have heart-to-heart discussions in the intimate conversation nook!
I've been reading this fantastic blog, It's Lovely! I'll Take It!. Weird photos from real estate listings, and great captions. Simple but awesome.
I've entered all the upcoming fixtures for this season into the public Sydney FC calendar I maintain. It means I know when games are coming up as I live by my calendar and refer to it constantly.
Timezone is Sydney but for away games outside NSW and Victoria are likely to be wrong until a week or two before the game. I couldn't be arsed working out the complicated daylight saving bollocks and both Sydney FC and FFA give only "local" time. I'll look them up in Betfair periodically. The betting agents want to take bets right up to kickoff, so their times are always accurate.
All Sydney FC matches, times in Sydney time (though probably wrong for away matches until the week of the game).
These links will take you there. You probably want the HTML version if you use Google Calendar.
If you're viewing this on my site directly, you'll be able to see the calendar below. Coming through a feed, it should be stripped.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence. For commercial use, contact me and I'll probably let you use it for a donation to SFCU.
Something big is coming to the music industry. The smart ones have already worked it out, and it scares the crap out of them. The really smart ones are getting ready.
Weird music
When I was young, my parents owned a radio station in Bega. It was great for us kids because all we had to do to listen to music was head down to the station and hang about in the record library. We could take a few records home and tape them too if we wanted.
I discovered some pretty incredible music for a country radio station. Kraftwerk, Devo, Run DMC and more poppy stuff like Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Culture Club.
This is probably how I got into weird music--by having the opportunity to listen to anything I wanted without having to pay for the privelege. When my parents sold the station, I had to buy music and much of the new music I discovered was coming from radio. I went through a pretty dire patch of crap music.
Later in life I was dragged to a rave by some friends. It changed my life. Once again I discovered that weird, pulsing, electronic sound I'd glimpsed in my youth.
Now the problem became how to find the music. Fortunately, the record stores selling this style of music anticipated the need to listen and had banks of headphones to listen before you buy.
Still, there's only so much time you want to spend standing in a record shop trying every weird and wonderful piece of music you can lay your hands looking for "the one".
You don't own music
The thing that's about to completely change the music industry isn't really a technology. It's a mindset. Sure it's driven by stuff like mp3, cable internet access and the like, but it's really a mindset.
In the very near future, the concept of owning a piece of music is going to disappear. Buying a piece of vinyl, magnetic tape or CD as the storage medium of music is going to disappear.
Why bother buying a record when you have every piece of music every made available through a high speed network connection? Particularly when all you pay for that connection is a flat monthly fee?
Now consider the changes that brings to the way we listen to music. Instead of being generally restricted to just the music we "own", we're free to explore the entire cornucopia that is music. Occasionally I feel like listening to schmaltzy classical music, but I don't own any Strauss CDs. I'd love to give everything Laibach have ever made at least one run through, but I'm not sure I'd want to pay big money for it.
The empire strikes back?
Now the smart ones amongst you have just started thinking about where this leaves record companies. The role of the record company, outside marketing, is as a venture capitalist of music.
Record companies put up the bucks to get the physical pieces of music made and distributed. Without that barrier to entry, who needs a record company? Well the Spice Girls and Brittney Spears, certainly need them. But artists creating funky music for the love of it? Established artists like Prince or Public Enemy? I don't think so.
The smart ones, and I think Sony are there about now, saw this coming a long way off. The way they're hoping to reintermediate themselves is to be the network software or hardware supplier for this new form of music distribution. Witness how Sony Music has supported SDMA and bagged out mp3 while Sony Electronics has produced a portable mp3 player. Some of them get it.
Of course the dumb ones aren't going to like it one bit. They'll go out kicking and screaming: lobbying governments to prosecute people making mp3 players and make copyright laws even more favourable to them, telling people they're harming artists by getting their music directly from them and so on. Should be fun to watch!
Your thoughts?
So where do you think it's headed? How are we going to do this?
Jason Parker-Burlingham posted a confusing pictogram so I thought I'd add my own. This is from the path to the beach in Nida in Lithuania, which is at the Lithuanian end of the Curonian Spit. That's the sliver of sand that juts into the Baltic, half of which is a piece of Russia marooned inside the EU.
Anyway we worked out what the pictogram meant after walking on the beach. It means the left path leads to a part of the beach reserved for women only, which we worked out when Des and I were asked to leave. Confusingly there seemed to be lots of nude women as well as the bikini-wearing ones you'd expect from the image. The right-hand path was a general nudie beach for anyone.
Back in early March I wrote to the NSW Transport Minister by email about Shittyrail threatening developers of third-party apps using Sydney timetable data. Late last month Parliamentary Secretary for Transport Penny Sharpe finally got around to responding, by post of course.
She spends much of the letter defending Railcorp, but apparently they've come to an agreement with some third-party developers with a standard license agreement. Hopefully the terms aren't ridiculous (I might register just to find out) and it's free, as it should be.
Anyway, she then goes on to say this:
The mobile.131500.com.au webpage is specifically designed for mobile phones.
Passengers who have access to a mobile phone with a web browser can access
timetable information. This service also provides breaking news and information
about service changes and major events. With modern phones and the location features,
the phone (and sites it talks to) knows where you are. Surely this would be an
awesome thing! But don't expect the NSW government to provide it. They still
supply timetables
as if they were printed documents.
The problems with this site are many. You can't plan trips. You need to know Sydney and its transport system fairly well to get anything useful out of it, which is a common problem for tourists in Sydney: try working out where to wait for a bus to Marrickville in the CBD after the kiosk on York Street has closed. But there's far far worse than that.
The "breaking news" seems to be that the bus stop on Enmore Road near Addison Road hasn't had a bus for about a week. Brilliant site guys! Why would any third-party developer think there's an opportunity for improvement?
I managed to score myself a Google Wave account by promising to write a Swedish Chef robot. So this afternoon I wrote one, in a language I've never used before (Python) and to a target platform I've never explored (Google App Engine). Mostly I ripped off code from other sources, especially Dive Into Python.
So if you have a Google Wave sandbox account, add borkforceone@appspot.com to a wave and your text will be translated into cod-Swedish.