I've completed my first week at my new job. And I'm pleased to say I'm enjoying it. It's new. It's organised. The suit doesn't bother me at all. I love working in the city proper (Southbank is just teasing). I have friends at the company. And I've been flat out working most of the week. Fantastic. I give myself a month to be back to my old complaining self but let's live it up while we still can huh? ;p

Subject URL: Review your brains out

Records Ad Nauseam reviewer Rory went nuts and reviewed a few albums I've been sniffing at for a while. He practically crucifies himself for the love of Muse's new album 'Origin Of Symmetry'. When I first heard Muse I thought it was silverchair being weird, and was disappointed to find out it wasn't. But I was still interested, and what I've heard sounds alright. After this review I might think harder.

And then there is Ben Fold's new album, "Rockin' the Suburbs". I liked the single but more recent tracks I've heard havn't impressed me much. I've been difficult to impress lately. Ben Folds are one of those "bands" that I've ignored for a while. Like I did with R.E.M. But now I love R.E.M. but still think lots of their early stuff is lame... I think there is something in that for all of us.

Anyway, Rory has got be enthused about reviewing again. I may dig up some old albums and have another go. That was after all part of the point of RAN, to review old favourites, not just new stuff.

Subject URL: Music Industry Antitrust

An interesting case of conflicting ideas. I'd always figured one of the best things about the internet was that it cut out the middle man. A company could sell it's products direct to customers without the need for retailers. Cutting out the middle man as they say.

Then we get pressplay and MusicNet (digital music retailers) and soon Moviefly.com and Movies.com (digital movie rental). And suddenly companies like Blockbuster (movie rental) and Sanity (music/video sales) are worried that they're being pushed out of the picture.

But it's not as simple as that. Such retailers have been prevented from building digital media distribution technology because they cannot license the content to sell. And soon if internet retailers want to sell digital music / rent digital movies from the bigfive they'll have to use the bigfive's technology, most likely paying them for it. So they'll effectively not only be paying for the wholesale product (as they do now), but for the right to sell (by way of licensing the selling technology) as well.

I can see how they'd have a problem with that. Fortunately it's easily solved. The technology to sell digital music / rent digital videos must be free. Completely 100% free forever, including all required updates / future versions. Problem solved?

Well that depends on if retailers are allowed to sell non-bigfive media with the technology. We don't want a situation where independant artists can't easily sell their music online without the need to be signed to the bigfive now do we?

Subject URL: Blogged Story

Dave's Blogged story is a fun idea I'm going to be keeping my eye on. It's like one of those stories from year ten English where you write for five minutes, and then pass the story on, until at the end you end up with an incoherent mess... except that the year ten's in this story are bloggers from all over the world, and the pieces of paper are their webpages/weblogs, and it's entirely possible the story will tree from the middle, not just continue from the end. So get out the spanners (for the works see?), start reading and get writing.

Subject URL: RIAA owes us an apology

The one thing I guess I missed in my recent RIAA rant is that it's pretty darn heartless and evil of a company to lump copyright infringers into the terroist basket. Interesting rant from ZDNet linked above... I guess RIAA has lost a lot of previous friends in this last joke. (via VM)

Subject URL: urban jungle

My latest obsession has been photos of the city. Tamesapien is just starting a collection of photo essays on Melbourne. I look forward to it...