24 page catalog. 3 pages on CDs. 1/8 page on the front page, a third of a page about a third of the way in (the other two thirds of the page are music DVDs) and a full page next to it. A full page focused on $9.99 CDs (that's darn cheap in Australia).
Compare that with 6 pages for DVDs (4 full pages, one 2/3 page and 1/8 front page) and 2 pages for games and consoles. The rest is gadgets from HiFi and surround sound systems, VCR, DVD Recorders, DVD players, MP3 players, camcorders, digital cameras, car stereos, portable DVD players, colour/photo printers and consumables, speakers, giant TVs (4 pages!), digital TV receivers.
Competition for consumer $!
You could argue that JB HiFi, given the name, should really be focusing on HiFi and gadgets rather than CDs, but I'd argue JB HiFi is the default CD store in Melbourne these days. Next probably to Target and K-Mart (for top 10), Sanity for cheaper Top 10 and catalog, and HMV (for full price catalog and imports).
We've not completely stalled. I've written a few half-songs, although my inability to write lyrics and/or interesting melody has stalled that process. Heath has been writing half-songs too. Maybe we could do a half-gig.
I have rediscovered my Zoom 505 effect pedal after realising it has been sounding so crap lately because I've been using it in mono. All of it's effects make a large use of the stereo space and sound pretty bad in mono. A recent brief listen to my old Approximate days has me vaguely enthused about experimenting again.
The good bands are the ones that start early (in school or uni) when they have time to let the music flow. Bands that record and release early, before their musical filters begin to develop, before they think everything they do sounds like something they've heard before, when they're just excited about creating music. Few bands move beyond that point.
Maybe we will. Maybe we won't.
For the moment, life gets in the way, and we need to decide if we like it that way or not.
The Wikipedia article about unconference gives me credit for coining the the term, but if they read my piece about it, which they link to, they'd see that I credit Lenn Pryor with coining the term. This is just plain sloppy, if you were grading an undergraduate's report and he or she made this mistake, what grade would you give?They also list Foo Camp as an unconference. I don't think so. One of the hallmarks of unconferences is that they are unrestrictive. It's so totally opposite to the spirit of unconferences to make one invite-only. Where did they get the idea that Foo Camp is an unconference? What's their source on that?
I never want to see a post like that again. A two second read of Slashdot find hundreds of similar "read-the-effing-article" errors. Wikipedia isn't Slashdot. You don't bitch about the mistake in the discussion area. There was a mistake in the article, Dave as an authority noticed the mistake, and so he should fix it. If you like you can comment on it in Discuss, asking any questions he has in there.
A post I'd have prefered from Dave would have been "The wikipedia article on unconference had a few errors. I've corrected them here and have opened a discussion on the topic here."
Then some explaination in his blog as to what the mistakes were and why he fixed them, explaining for example why Foo Camp is not an unconference.
We can see exactly what I'm talking about in the edit history now. The change was made, the reason commented on.
One thing missing from Wikipedia is a way to subscribe to the edit history of a particular article. You can subscribe to the recent changes of the whole site but that's fairly useless. I'd love for recent changes to articles I'm interested in (for whatever reason) to show up in my RSS feed. You can "watch" an article (when you have an account) and have an email sent when changes are made, but email is so oldschool.