phocks

So it seems I have unwittingly found myself fronting this psychedelic band called The Strange Attractors for just about a year now, ups and down and all, and still I seem stumped at what to tell people when they ask about it, so it usually comes out just the same old stuff, when what I really want to say is… I’m not sure. It has played a permanent role in the direction of existence however these past few months. What I’m still trying to figure out is if it is an enemy or a friend.

The group is still evolving, like all else, and we’re still to record a proper album. A video emerged on our YouTube channel the other day, something from a recent rehearsal: a cover of Anenome by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. See for yourself.

Purchased my ticket for The Brian Jonestown Massacre the other day. They’re coming to Brisbane in August.

Got this email just then:

Hello Joshua,

I am writing in regards to the Brian Jonestown Massacre tickets that you have purchased through OzTix.

Upon receiving your tickets you may notice that the date on your ticket states the 7th of August. This date is incorrect; the correct date is Wednesday the 27th of August. All tickets will be valid for the correct date.

Once again the correct gig details are as follows:

Brian Jonestown Massacre
27th of August
The Arena

I would like to apologise in advance for any confusion that this may have made. If you have any questions or queries, please contact OzTix on 1300 762 545 or simply reply email.

Cheers,
Dean.

Wouldn’t miss it for the world, regardless of what day it’s on.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Oasis’ Wonderwall song in the last.fm charts for quite some time now.

Before the whole Radiohead digital only release and subsequent digital only releases from other bands which seem to be skewing the charts a bit, just due to the nature of last.fm audioscrobbling software counting only tracks played on a computer, Wonderwall would often be up there usually within the top 10 or top 5.

Even now, the track still regularly places up and amongst all these newly released tracks.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the track, and am glad that it is up there. I do however find it kind of an anomaly.

Any thoughts?

It’s currently at number 19, but last week it placed at number 9. Seems to have been pushed back by the Portisehead release.

http://www.last.fm/charts

Probably more television than I’ve watched for the past year combined. Hit that mute button now to end noisy vibrations penetrating my inner cortex. It has been a big week, a strange week, and I’ve been laying low, flying high, I can’t decide; a vagrant heart.

Home it seems doesn’t feel as its name would suggest. So I’ve been the wanderer, the seeker, the midnight drifter, up and down this old town. Currently commandeering control of a friend’s slavish computer, whose master is half the world away, following the heart, or something similar.

Not much to report that hasn’t already been broadcast through alternative means, or that which lies lock-safe within. I need to write more, but sometimes it is what you don’t write… who am I kidding? The days take control, and the daze takes control.

In my head there is a future brewing, vying for evolutionary equilibrium… strange… attraction.

While taking a forced break from recording due to unforeseen software issues, I decided to turn my hand to the other side of band life, the organisation and chaos.

Updating The Strange Attractors on Last.fm there was a little notice saying that they are now going to start paying royalties for music played on Last.fm. I signed up immediately, although I think I’m going to have to expand my catalogue a little beyond the three demo tracks before any real revenue starts streaming in. Dreams of a new music label are still unevolved in the mind, but they’re getting there.

With the music economy in a wave of confusion, this is a major step in the right direction.

Keep listening.

Good to see some regular comment coming in to this relatively new blog, but…

Check out the comments to this article (or leave one if you are the first one) and you will see that next to the comment will be a groovy little image. This will more than likely be of a grey anonymous head at the moment, but it doesn’t have to be this way…

WordPress now comes with Gravatar support built in. So head on over, sign up, and upload your pic and use your avatar associated with your email address on loads of different websites around the web.

Here is my current gravatar pulled from the Gravatar site (probably due for a change soon maybe):

You’ll also be able to grab the URI for a direct link to your image, which can be handy at times. It will look something like this:

http://en.gravatar.com/avatar/0b194e4cae0828e21142af8506696cc6?s=80&r=any

Anyway, it’s late and I have no idea why I’m blogging this. Till next time.

Like fish in the pond, only moderately aware of the mysterious goings on just above the surface we all solemnly swim. In the blinding light of the unknown, the complexities of human drama, emotion, aspirations, expectations, hopes and dreams, loves and passions, the fish swim blissfully unaware, day in and day out. They live out their lives and serve the perpetuation of their kind as though they are the centre of their little universe, and they marvel at their ingenuity, while looking to the stars.

Who goes there, watching from above?

“It’s not especially private, but I still don’t want you reading it.” — My brain, Me

Yesterday I dug up the GNU Privacy Guard email encryption software again, inspired by a recent wave of news about the possibility of employers being commissioned by the Australian government to monitor our emails, the old take the people’s liberties by saying you’re protecting them from ‘terrorist threats’ trick. O what insult to intelligence. My only assumption on their reason for going to the public for help in cyber-snooping is that they are too incompetent to be ‘up for the job’ themselves — if you know what I mean.

I’m unsure of what we the people have demanded in regards to secrecy of correspondence in this country. It seems, from these articles, that email spying by government agencies is just fine and dandy, but for employers it would seem to be illegal, which personally I find to be a little back to front. Perhaps it is strange to think that the government should stay out of privacy for the main part, to hold the that government be restricted in passing any law denying free access to any information, to put privacy not in the hands of any bumbling third party, but in the power of he who values it most, the individual.

I think you’ll find that although I’m not an especially private person, I do respect privacy, and am vehemently against forceful invasion of privacy, particularly by government organisations, or dangerous cults. Working the machines in an office though, I can divulge that it is extremely easy to track electronic correspondence and especially email, though I think the person I’d keep an eye on is the IT guy and not the company administrators, who most likely wouldn’t have a clue. So to those concerned about their own privacy, don’t rely on ineffectual totalitarian control — which doesn’t work from what I can tell anyway — and take your privacy into your own hands.

That’s my little rant over anyway. This post is really just about the creation of a contact details page that I made. Included on that page is my PGP Public Key so that anyone can encrypt an email to me and it would take anyone else about a hundred million years to crack. Also, if anyone does have a public key, could they send it to me, or leave it in the comments here, so I can add it to my keyring.

Human contact is a valuable thing in this age on inhumanism.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
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=umby
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

That’s my public key anyway. I use a Firefox add-on called FireGPG to add encryption to emails.

“Then, my dear Herbert, I cannot tell you how dependent and uncertain I feel, and how exposed to hundreds of chances. Avoiding forbidden ground, as you did just now, I may still say that on the constancy of one person (naming no person) all my expectations depend. And at the best, how indefinite and unsatisfactory, only to know so vaguely what they are!”

–Pip, Great Expectations, Volume II Chapter xi

This dialogue of Pip’s struck me, scanning my eyes over it once more on lunch down at the sushi bar. That it would strike me so is yet another matter to ponder. Identification, as it exists between reader and subject is most certainly beneficial to the survival of a story. This very reposting is testament.

Infefinity, as opposed to indefiniteness, I would define as the state of being presented with a plenitude of potential outcomes, bombarded by choice and chance, so as to make any certain action or decision a virtual impossibility. Some would say the word is in regard to something vague or poorly defined, nearing the indefinite. Fair enough. I’m sticking with my definition as well though.

Here I stand, pure in my indefinity.

I do sometimes miss the good old days, days still early in the evolution of the consumer camera. A trip to the corner shop for a roll of film, loading it up and away you went with 24 or 36 chances to achieve perfect momentary photon capture. No instant review for the impatient snapper, and no willy-nilly shots aided into existence by the thought of a quick and easy delete. Wind and snap, wind and snap ’till the film’s exposed its last, then it’s off to the shop for development and the waiting game begins. The feeling you used to get when you got to see your photos for the first time was hard to top.

There is no question that digital cameras have revolutionised photography in the hands of the people, but in some ways it has also reduced the value and merit in hitting that shutter button. We’ve become a global community of trigger happy snappers, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but as I said before, I do sometimes miss the good old days.

So I propose a new feature for the digital camera, a feature I thought of when trying to deflect the volleys of “can I see it?”s and “let us have a look”s, not so much a feature but a way to alter the photographic experience, an emulation of the way things were back in the days of film. It would simply be a new mode that could be activated.

Film mode could include:

1. A limit to the number of shots available, thus making the photographer think about each shot taken.
2. No review available after an exposure, and no way to review shots until all the shots are used up. This could be handy if you’re sick of having to show people the photo after every shot.
3. Limits to the automatic focus and shutter speed could be optional.
4. For the real hardcore types the photos could be encrypted in a way that only photo print shops could decode, forcing you to get them all developed in one go.

Ok, I’ll see if I can think of some more and add them. And yes, I’m aware of the seeming silliness of placing such restrictions on cameras capable of so much more. It is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek.

Optional “film mode” on a new digital camera design could be a handy marketing gimmick though. I’d buy one, or maybe I should just dig out my old 35mm right now.