The ever wonderful (yeah yeah, you get the picture) Gizmodo has a follow up on the recording and selling of live shows at the gig. See, I told you it was a revolution! 😉 Personally, I can’t wait until you can get a scratch and sniff of the gig, but I’m apparently a bit weird.

I’ve talked before about the copyright revolution and how the big record companies are in their death throws. Most file sharers would say “oh der, obviously!”, but there’s more to it than just them vanishing from the earth and the rest of us just carrying on regardless. (For starters, who get’s the Ferraris?)

The wonderful Gizmodo points to an AP story New Device Allows Recording at Concerts. Apart from looking like another cool fad or an attempt to cash in on the MP3 revolution (there’s that word again), this is actually an important indicator that things are changing.

The record companies do in fact provide a valuable service for artists: publicity. The millions of marketing and publicity dollars traditionally spent on artists gets them in the faces of the people who’d most likely buy them, and this tends to convert into filthy lucre. As an artist, you need to make the call, independance and high percentage of small profits, or sell out and miniscule percentage of a huge profit. Of course in the case of the big corporates, you then need throw in the millions of dollars that you owe back to them, as the costs are passed on to the artist. But if you do it right, there’s money in them there hills.

So when the majors have gone, what will be left? Well, for starters we’ll have more artists, because more of them will be getting airtime. But more importantly, artists will derive their income from a whole range of sources, including concert tickets, merchandise, and of course CD sales. But we’ll also see new and innovative ways for artists to produce income, and technology like eMusic’s eMusicLive vending machine is one of these. After the show, you can purchase a copy of the gig in MP3, copied to your own flash drive, or if you don’t own one, you can buy one from the same machine

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

* Ever wondered why every credit I give to another site is fabulous, fantastic, or wonderful? Me neither.

You gotta love the CIA’s attempt to reinvent themselves. Courtesy of the ever wonderful Boing Boing, the CIA has a web site for kids, complete with happy smiley faces of people that I assume are doing what they refer to as “intelligence work”, and at least one photo of what looks like a covert operative. How do I know? Well, they’re in a dark raincoat, with a 1950 cold war hat, under a single street lamp. I thought covert meant under cover, but of course I was unable to check the Australian Macquarie Dictionary to be sure.

Anyway, if you dig deep, you get to this classic description of “Who We Are & What We Do”.

We collect […] information from many sources: newspapers, magazines, and foreign radio or TV broadcasts, which are overt or “open.” Some sources are “covert”–that is, other people’s secrets. We persuade these people to tell us their secrets. The other way we collect information is …

Woah boy! Of course this is exactly what we need to be teaching our children, how to persuade people to tell us their secrets. You probably don’t need the definition of persuade, but here it is anyway.

To induce to undertake a course of action or embrace a point of view by means of argument, reasoning, or entreaty

Probably not exactly what the CIA uses as a primary persuation tactic, but amusing none the less.

“Look, tell me your godamn secret, or I’m going to have to continue arguing with you!”

We now turn to the page describing The People, with a lovely photo of the happy intelligence workers around the CIA logo. That’s where we learn that…

If you like to write papers, long and short, if you like to put puzzles together, solve mysteries and have the patience to go through a mound of different types of information to do all this, then the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is for you.

Yes, that’s right girls and boys! Or of course unless you’re a child between the age of about 7 and 13, in which case, school and Nancy Drew mysteries are probably best for you. When you grow up, then you can start persuading people to tell you their secrets.

Finally, here’s the U.S. secret service in action, persuading interviewing a boy about his anti-war drawings.

The secret service in Washington DC had not yet commented yesterday.

Obviously the persuading is continuing.

I’ve been struggling these last few weeks over whether I should let fly at a well known market research organisation who have recently yet prematurely embraced blogging. Several of their management staff have blogs, yet seem to have no idea what to use them for, and more often than not simply throw mud at other bloggers they disagree with. I’m still reading one of their blogs, having cast the rest aside, and if it weren’t for the collection of material I’ve been saving for my uber anti-blog post, I’d have dumped them from my reader months ago.

Yet I haven’t yet written about them, and I don’t know if I will. I have no problem correcting other writers when they are wrong, but slamming an entire company for stupidity? When I was younger, in those torrid 1980s BBS days, I wouldn’t have bat an eyelid, abusive verbage would have streamed from my keyboard. In those days, it was give as good as you get.

But wouldn’t that just be doing what they’ve been doing? Where do you draw the line between correcting inaccuracies, and highlighting stupidity?

I’m still thinking it through, but it made me want to finally put together a manifesto for my blogging. I’ll have it up over the next few days, but for would be bloggers, jumping into this very public space without much thought, insist upon writing up your own guidelines/manifesto. Why are you blogging? What do you hope to gain from it, and what if anything do you hope to give to your readers?

Meanwhile, perhaps check out this piece (from my work blog) on the privacy issues of blogging. The golden rule, if ever there was one, is know why you’re writing, what you’re writing, and for whom you’re writing. Oh, and don’t forget to have fun!

I had to stop at a servo today to get some milk, and the conversation with the guy behind the till goes like this:

Ya lose a bet?

Gee, haven’t heard that one for a while.

No, your hair’s blue. What’s the occasion?

It’s always blue.

Wow, what does your boss say?

I’m the boss.

[ laughs ] Here ya go mate, have a good day!

…

Of course it depends on the part of town. In Newtown for example, nobody bats an eyelid, and if they do, it’s ’cause they’re thinking…

Geez, all the same colour, why would you bother?

Anyway, if you bump into someone with coloured hair, and you think you have a classic opening line which will cause them to fall to the floor instantly and die in pain from the hilarity of your sharpened wit, think again, because we’ve heard them all before. Here’s the top openers for males:

• You lose a bet?
• What’s the occasion?
• Who are you going for?
• Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!
• How about them blues last night! (insert sporting team here)
• You clean the toilet yesterday?
• Why’d you colour your hair blue?
• Dickhead!

Degrading sure, but most neanderthals tend to leave you alone if you then spit back at them:

Yeah mate, chicks get off on it.

And accordingly, the truth hurts when the top openers for women are:

• Hey, love your hair!
• What a great blue!
• Didn’t you used to have red?
• I wish I could do that!
• Which blue is that?
• Where’d you get that blue?
• Can I come home with you, and have your children?

Well, I made that last one up, but it’s the thought that counts.

One of the most popular search queries that used to bring people to this site, until of course I accidentally told Google that I had nothing interesting to say, was ugg australia. Perhaps, some would argue, that Google is only now getting it right.

Anyway, what was once a shining beacon in the dark and torrid sea of sheepskin boot results, is once again but a mere single blog entry on Richard BF’s web site.

In other words, I used to rank fairly high on the first page, between two popular ugg boot sites, before you’d scroll off into page after page after page of ugg boot sellers.

I’m looking forward to once again fighting the good fight, where good old Aussie bludgeoning know how makes the Australian ugg boot once again a world commodity. But before I go and stick my foot in a freshly skinned merino, here’s a sheep wearing glasses. I can’t believe we’re now killing academics for footwear!

I was amazed back in the 1980s, as IBM and other companies were inventing Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM), the manipulation and display of individual atoms. I remember when IBM researchers were able to write the word IBM, atom by atom. But I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope until this recent post on Gizmodo. It looks like an old Capsella kit, which surprisingly, you can still buy.

Anyway, if you’ve never seen any STM images, you should start at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. And to think that atoms were once the smallest elements in the universe, and actually seeing them was only something we dreamed about.

Caterina told peterme to…

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

What a great idea. Blogs are in a way about self discovery, and what better way to discover yourself than to ponder over text taken completely out of context. I looked forward to the challenge.

I grabbed the nearest book I could find, and embarassingly Extreme Programming Installed only had three sentences on page 23. Caterina wasn’t too clear on what to do when there’s no fifth sentence, or even no fourth sentence, so I made an educated guess, and decided that books in this category are in fact anomalies and therefore invalid.

However, there was a diagram at the bottom of page 23, of a book with the title User Stories, which was an interesting coincidence, because the next nearest book was the classic Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn. Page 23, sentence 5 is…

Let’s first look at a use case purely in the way it captures interactions between actors with goals.

Uhuh… I was waiting for the penny to drop. Technically, sure, the classic definition of a use case, but I wasn’t picking up any particular personal insight. It seemed all pretty superficial to be honest.

So I figured perhaps the problem was that it was not a complete digression from the original book which didn’t have a 5th sentence, which means that it was, in a relational and perhaps philosphical kind of way, the same book. I tossed aside Cockburn.

At this stage I started to wonder whether relevency, or in fact irrelevancy if you like, was important. I mean the nearest and next nearest books would most likely be related in some way, certainly if they weren’t on the shelf at the time. So, seeking randomness, perhaps somewhat ironically reflecting life, I skipped the next 14 books, and grabbed the 17th nearest, which was actually the first on this particular bookshelf. I figured that this would accurately reflect Caterina’s original intention, and quickly thumbed through to page 23.

Page 23, sentence 5 of the classic Unified Modeling Language User Guide, by Booch, Rumbaugh and Jacobson says… well that’s where I started to have problems. Not only was the first sentence actually the end of a sentence from the previous page, but I wasn’t sure whether bullet lists and headings actually counted as sentences. I decided that this was an extremely rare case, and that I’d be best off ignoring the problem for now, and grabbing the next book instead.

The 18th nearest book, page 23, sentence 5 says…

For more details, see the subsequent chapters that outline the UML semantic views, as well as the detailed reference material in the encyclopedia chapter.

About the only insight that gave me, was that for The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, Rumbaugh must have done much of the work, because the authors are now listed as Rumbaugh, Jacobson and Booch. Interesting, perhaps even amusing, but not in the least particularly relevant to the metaphorical road to self discovery. I mean, it’s not even a closed off culdesac hidden at the back of the self discovery street directory. It took me a few minutes to realise that my bookshelf was sorted by technology, with a subhierarchy of author surname. Again, a logical ordering would seem to contradict Caterina’s original intention.

I left what I effectionately call “the work room”, and went to the lounge bookcase. Although Caterina’s requirements weren’t exactly clear, I grabbed the nearest book to my right hand, assuming that distance would in this particular case be the appropriate objective measure of nearness, and would probably be measured between the two points of contact between me and the book.

Rough Magic, A Biography of Sylvia Plath, while not technically a novel, isn’t exactly a reference book either, so I turned to page 23, and found that old classic sentence breaking across a page again. I knew I should have clarified that the first time, because then I wouldn’t have had to choose between the two classics:

Still, Sylvia cried on the day Aurelia left.

…and…

On April 27, 1935, Aurelia traveled back across the harbor into Boston, checked into Jamaica Plain’s Faulkner Hospital, and, after going into labor, gave birth — again three weeks early — to a boy, whom she and Otto named Warren Joseph.

I put Sylvia back on the shelf, and decided that by sentence, while the technical, and most useful in this context, definition would be a complete sentence with a beginning middle and end, that a spanning sentence is in some way still in fact a sentence. I instead grabbed Dibs: In Search of Self, by Virginia Axline, and turned to page 23. Counting the spanning sentence, which by the fact that it is called a sentence, is still considered a sentence, I read out sentence number 5.

Life, for him, was a grim business.

Indeed.

Due to the fabulous technology available to us in this modern age, I regularly synchronise information between home and work via the habitat that is email (I’d hyperlink link the research paper, but I’ve lost it). I just love trawling through those extra emails I get from myself each day, letting them clog my inbox, and forcing me to disconnect and reconnect my thought patterns while in a completely disparate environment and usage context. Well, I don’t really, but an ex-girlfriend once told me that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit, supposedly paraphrasing Shakespeare, so who am I to deprive her of a degree of satisfaction. Although, I couldn’t find any trace of him ever saying it, and she’s the one with a masters in English lit. It would be ironic if irony weren’t supposedly the highest form of wit, which would of course render her claim rather useless. I prefer witless, but I digress…

So I’m trawling through my emails, and get to this one from a few days ago titled: BITCH ABOUT U.S. ENGLISH IN WORD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1. Not sure where the “1” came from, but considering the mood I was in, I probably have a good idea.

OK, so all that just so that I can bitch about U.S. English in Word. Well, U.S. based readers wouldn’t have the problem that we have, in that Australian English is different to U.S. English. Not only is our spelling correct different, like colour, analyse and arsewipe, but so is the use and interpretation of the language.

In Word 2003, at least in the Windows version anyway as the Mac version doesn’t seem to have a problem, any document you write, will have “English (U.S.)” in the status bar. You can click this to change it to the default “English (Aus)” but it typically changes back to U.S. when you least expect it. Sure, you can set it in the Options… dialog, but again, intermittently it will revert back while editing a document. The closest you can get is by selecting all in the current document, and then changing the default to Australian. This will give you at least 15 minutes of writing before Word again starts suggesting U.S. spellings for words.

Now typically we’d write this off as a simple bug, but it has been in every version of Word that I can remember since different language dictionaries were available. You’d think their test team would have picked it up by now.

But not only does Word think that U.S. English is the only English, but I’ve posted here before about how our only Australian dictionary, the Macquarie (which I’m so frustrated with that I refuse to inline hyperlink it), is now pay only.

I guess with Microsoft having analyzed the situation, and the Macquarie sniffing the color of our money, we’re all destined to end up speaking U.S. English. Asswipes.

Updated 17^th June 2004: Due to guilt and high Google traffic, I’ve now provided a solution. Enjoy.

Another collection of bits and pieces from my favourite sites. Starting with of all places the Sydney Morning Herald article saying that extending copyright protection for another 20 years, like in the U.S. and Europe, will stifle creativity (via Lessig), the Iraqi people may not have freedom, sanitation, running water, hospitals, schools or electricity, but the U.S. have designed them a new Olympic logo (via GLOBALIZE THIS!), an interesting user pattern analysis of file sharers, not so much the Grand Unified Theory claimed, but certainly a starting point in differentiating types of users, which has typically been the blocker to representing the positive side of file sharing (via Copyfight). Some amusing IKEA product names (via BoingBoing). And finally another from BoingBoing, a Bush photomosaic of American dead in Iraq. Bring them home, and end Bush’s empirialistic folly!