Car has new brakes. They feel... tight. Which is apparently good. Feels like they're fighting against me instead of working with me.

Drinking beer. Free beer (the best kind) from work. The first non-money and non-paperwork thing my work has ever given me. Got lots of food too. The Christmas hamper is probably only worth $20 but it's a nice thought. Very nice. Still think working in Box Hill would be close to hell (but not as bad as Mitcham). Which means I'm likely to be in my current contract (in the CBD) until June next year. This makes me happy. Ultimately what I do in my job is irrelevant. I want to enjoy my life around my job.

It's going to be weird not doing Walken things for the next three months. It's been so much a part of my life for the past three years... I'll be working on a metal project (*cough*Approximate*cough*) in the next three months though with our old drummer so the music never stops...

Coopers Draught. It's like Carlton Draught only without the Chemical Ali after taste. Right now it's nice. After a Coopers Sparkling I'm sure it would taste like water.

Buried at the end is the content...

Interview with Regurgitator on the Bubble experiment [The Age] with this lovely quote:

"If you're really enjoying art," says Yeomans, "you're not even aware you're doing it, you're just kind of addicted to it. You have to get it out of your system. The result is often a kind of grotesque surprise that you're not really willing to put your name to a lot of the time."

No matter how many times I change breaks to brakes I always miss one.

Walken had what could be their last practice for three+ months last night at Revolver. Much fun. It started out fairly normal, running through a setlist and practicing it. But as usual we got bored. But instead of playing random metal/funk jams as usually happens, we decided to play all of our songs at double speed, turning us into a speed metal punk band. Absolutely fantastic fun. [Un]fortunately the minidisc ran out well before all of this...

Last gig for many many many months tomorrow night (18th Dec) @ The Epsy Gershwin room. I'm looking forward to watching Meebar's CD launch (directly after us). I'm trying not to think about our gig. I get nervous.

After reading a discussion on DVD copying (regarding generations and quality loss) it occured to me again that DVDs are little more than a standard file system with a standard menu system. Ignoring the menu a DVD is just a bunch of video files (MPEG-2 standard) no different to just burning them to a PC DVD-R.

To "rip" a non-commercial DVD (ie. one without Region coding) you only need to copy the .VOB files which are simply (usually) .MPEG files.

To upgrade DVDs to Blue Ray or HD-DVD or whatever you don't need to change the DVD (software) standard at all. You can still have the same menu code, same directory structure, there is just more space to put in the video files, so better qualilty is possible.

It then occured to me that the music world is struggling to produce some magic new format CD to win over the downloading consumer. It would be insanely easy to allow the DVD standard to be burned to a CD-R and played on a DVD player, allowing for a STANDARD system of menus and extras on commercial albums. In fact I'm sure you can already do this in some burning software (nero?)?

You could got a step further and introduce a new format of CD which uses a similar menu system to DVDs but audio is stored in FLAC (lossless compression). Ripping the CD would be a case of simply copying the FLAC files from the CD. No more potential loss from bad CD rips. Everything is digital files.

But the last thing we need is a new format of CDs. People wouldn't be able to play them in their cars! Actually, I'm fairly sure this new format would take off like a house on fire (due mostly to the ease of ripping), thus prooving it isn't really the fact copy protected CDs won't play in the car that people have a problem with.

I wouldn't have thought it would be hard for someone to write a CD player for the PC that would allow playing of the CDs, and for someone to create hardware firmware for the format for the new batch of "play anything" DVD players that everyone is now using for the CD players.

rant rant rant