Three years ago all sorts of cool stuff happened. I missed a Fantomas gig to go to a Pre_Shrunk CD launch. Now I'm going to two Fantomas gigs in December to make up for it. Heath and I went and saw the Micallef Pogram being taped. It didn't get another season. mp3.com was paying $50m+ to record companies to shut them up. Now they're deleting the whole thing. Any wonder the world is going broke.

Gigs: St. Kilda Inn Saturday 29th Nov 2003 (Bruce drums acoustic), Revolver Wednesday 3rd Dec 2003 (Welcome back Leigh), Laundry Friday 26th Dec 2003, Green Room (CBD) Thursday 8th Jan 2004.

Revolver and Laundry are with Meebar (and others), who rock muchly. Green Room is with Indicator and Old Kent Road (they of the massive drum kit).

As an Australian tax payer who never claims anything (99% of what people claim should really be paid for by your employer, not the government/other tax payers), I'm all for simplified tax. Anything that forces the rich to pay the tax they should instead of claiming everything against their spouse/children/pets/dodgy business would get my vote too. Same goes for corporations.

Racism makes you stupid [The Register]? Argument being, that racist people spend so much time trying not to say something wrong when speaking to someone of another race that they leave little space for thinking about anything else.

Further on that, thinking too much makes you stupid? So really really smart people who think all the time are stupid? Saying whatever comes into your head without a filter is the opposite of stupid?

Meanwhile, Michael Jackson's weblog. He's over 40. He's a burnt out musician. But he isn't British... not guilty by the rules of statistics. Jokes aside, I hope they find solid evidence either way so that we leave the guy alone, either at home or in jail. I've got to say, anyone who assumes you can't sleep in a bed with someone without having sex with them should go get help, and maybe think about getting sterilized too.

Completely unrelated... Tori Amos best of out 1st December in Australia (thanks Dave). It's got a DVD thingy and re-recorded/mixed versions of old favourites. Not your usual best-of.

Warp Records (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher) have announced they plan to sell their entire back catalog online, in MP3 format, DRM free. Check it out at www.bleep.com. [via Rocknerd.org] This includes all the singles and b-sides including vinyl releases. Particularly cool if you think spending $X is cheaper than trying to rip your vinyl singles yourself. No info I could find on price or quality. The website's a bit of a nightmare to browse. A bit overfunky.

Web pages the weak link in the chain of knowledge [slashdot.org]:

The Washington Post reports on the loss of knowledge in ephemeral web pages, which a medical researcher compares to the burning of ancient Alexandria's library. As the board chairman of the Internet Archive says, "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture.""

More interesting is the Washington Post's article's suggestions of alternatives to URLs.

I also find it interesting how much faith people have in the internet. I've been researching a band that broke up in 1996, less than ten years ago, around the time the net was just starting to take off (or it seemed to me who discovered the net in 1996 when I started Uni). There were a total of three significant websites on the band that I can find. Two of them are still up, one of them is accessable via The Internet Archive. If the band had broken up in 1993 instead of 1996, there would be no webpages on the band. Nothing on the web at all, except buried in pay-per-view newspaper articles and possibly in the Google Group archives.

The majority of information I'm likely to find is going to be buring in old Beat and Inpress street magazines between 1992 and 1996. That's a lot of paper (52 weeks * 5 years * two publications * 100ish pages).

Not everything... in fact... almost nothing is on the web. If it isn't on the web, that's just the easy bit of research done. Time to hit the library.

Sometimes I think the internet only works because the majority of people only seem to be interested in at most the last 100 days worth of history. Usually only the last week.

Further on the DOS attack on the servers I look after... although most of the IP addresses are random, some of them repeat (most likely a "check if the server is still up", and therefore, probably the hacker). All of the repeated IP addresses are from hinet.net, which a appears to be a Chinese ISP.

Not much you can do about it. One of the main markets of one of the websites is China so I can't just block the whole ISP. I've informed everyone worth informing to see what happens.

And I've been getting a lot of spam with EXE files attached lately. Worm time again. It's like a cycle. The collective derbrain idiot internet user memory must be about four months.