I was searching for details on the new Nodame Cantabile live action movie when I encountered one of those antivirus scam sites of the “Your system is infected, launching your virus scanner to clean the infection!” variety.
Would have been quite convincing were it not for the fact that I use Linux and therefore unlikely to encounter Windows error messages or diagnostic screens.
I was beginning to despair that the tree in my front garden had been too savagely cut to ever recover. Six weeks had passed without any sign of recovery. I’d shown the damage to a number of people, ranging from concerned neighbours to seasoned horticultural experts, and the general consensus was not positive. The name of Dickie’s Tree Surgeons has been cursed by many and will continue to be so.
Fortunately, I made a discovery this morning that has given me hope.
It took a few days for me to stop foaming at the mouth and baying for the blood of the people responsible for the mutilation of the trees in my front garden. After three days of cursing and calling of unflattering names, I came to accept that even if I were to fertilise the grounds with the eviscerated corpses of the vandals disguised as tree surgeons, it would not put back the branches and restore the trees to their former glory.
I had sent photos of the devastation to my property manager in an effort to say “This is not my fault!” but the only purpose it served was to remind my landlord that I was still here and that he hadn’t put my rent up in a year. Accordingly he did, by another $15 a week.
As you can imagine, this only added insult to injury and I was sorely tempted to walk around the garden and tear up every plant that I had put in since I arrived eight years ago, keeping only clipping of the plants I wanted as I had done once before in 2005 when I was making an effort to move out due to problematic neighbours.
Instead, I went to opposite route – I opened the shed, took out every seed that I had accumulated from my last gardening experiment and scattered them all over the front garden, the garden of the apartment next door and their opposite number since both units were empty. I’m also watering aggressively since I don’t have to pay water rates and I want to give the trees every chance I can for them to sprout life again. Having scattered seed on every bit of bare ground I saw, I then started to spread around lawn food and soil wetter just to help the process along.
Since my finances are somewhat tight at the moment, the rent increase effectively killed off my gardening budget (though that was not itself very much) and absorbed my token pay rise for that last financial year. I have decided from now on to only pay for things that I intend to grow as a food crop, such as my pak choi plants, or items that I can plant to use as a food crop but will also be decorative, such as nasturtiums. Anything more than that will have to be something I can acquire for free. Although sometimes I can put bonus items in, such as my pumpkin plants that have sprouted from the waste products of my dinner a few weeks ago.
I was pleased to harvest the first of my pak choi last Friday and cook myself a nice chicken stir fry – I’m trying to stagger the growth of the plants so I can pick them as I need because I haven’t a large freezer to store them when they all sprout at the same time.
I won’t say that I have lost of the pleasure of gardening, but it has been trampled somewhat. I spent over an hour in the back garden this evening replacing some of the risers from my reticulation – the lawnmowing entity apparently getting a little too excited and attempting to mow the flower beds. Having replaced all the missing risers, I thought the next step would be to stop a repetition of this since previous lawnmowing entities have each done this a few times. I had some bamboo canes that I bought years ago to keep my seedling trays up off the ground to assist drainage – for each riser, I put a stake 40 to 50cm into the ground and tied them together with yellow electrical tape for increased visibility and the opportunity to make each of the risers point roughly in the direction I wanted them to. The reticulation pipe is buried some 30cm under the surface so it took a bit of digging to locate it again, forcing me to prune several of the bushes back to the edge of lawn. And whilst I was at it, I might as well reinforce the edging of the lawn since no one has made the effort to do that for a while.
So instead of a quiet, relaxing evening munching chicken curry and watching the new episode of Top Gear, I’m instead covered in sweat and fighting off mosquitoes and flies.
But the result was much more satisfying and the garden is looking nicer each time I go outside.
Groundskeeping staff are kindly reminded not to mow the reticulation. It will not grow back.
Additionally, anyone caught bringing a chainsaw onto the premises will be decapitated at waist height.
That is all.
I’m really very irritated at the moment.
When I saw the retarded buttock monkeys from Dickie’s Tree Service playing football in the carpark next to my apartment complex, I figured that someone was probably going to have their trees trimmed. Maybe they were here to sort out the dead pine trees in my back garden.
I’m used to gardening type persons turning up now and again to clean the gardens (not that mine requires much work since I take care of that myself) and occassionally lopping off branches – I’m not used to wholesale destruction of my front garden, however. I wonder if they were given a standing order to cut everything down to be level with the gutters.
I’m certain they weren’t instructed to trample all over my garden.
Apparently there is little or no deliniation between tree surgeon and chainsaw wielding monkey anymore.
Needless to say that when I returned home this evening, the thoughts that went through my mind were not particularly charitable. Indeed, had I verbalised them, I think their tattoos would have fallen off.
Today has been a very grumpy day and this only made things worse. I think that you can understand, I’m not happy with these people or the strata managers.
Given the chance, I would do to them what they have done to the trees – prune them off about halfway down their bodies.
So I was talking to Antoni, frontman for Perth band “Fixer”…
We were discussing the intricacies of recording and publishing independent music CDs, and the merits of limited run pressings versus burn to order CDR.
To my mind, a limited run press has the advantage of looking polished and professional but you need to have a minimum order of around 2000 pieces and the capital to cover that. Burn to order media is convenient in the sense that you only need to create as many discs as you need – but you can’t help the feeling that it looks cheap.
I’m a strong supporter of amateur and independent musicians – when they’re not trying to con me, at least. I’ve recently purchased CDs from UK folk musician Dogan Mehmet and American composer Ronald Jenkees (you might have seen my recent posting about that one). Previously I’ve supported local bands such as Los Chasquis and solo musicians such as Trent Humphreys. Los Chasquis publish their CDs via Latin Music and adopt the CDR approach – I loaned one of my CDs to an associate and they assumed that because the disc was a CDR, I had made a copy for them so it was a bit of a struggle to get it back again.
Trent Humphreys conversely takes the pressed CD path but ran into trouble when he had a falling out with his publisher and apparently lost the rights to previously recorded tracks. I bought a copy of his third CD, Etherdrive, under the impression that some of the older tracks had been rearranged and rerecorded “but it was mostly new material” quoth Cam McAzie of The Kilted Generation. So you can imagine my irritation when I discovered that it was actually just bits of his first two CDs with the song titles listed in French. Although I needed to replace my copy of “Journey” (his second CD), I ended up giving Etherdrive to a penpal in Japan for their birthday.
Publishing music as MP3 files downloadable from a website is probably the most convenient way of publishing music but there is something “real” about owning the original CD. I may only ever play the CD once or twice before copying it over to my media centre (plural) but somehow buying the music without the CD still feels like piracy to me – you may own the music but without the physical media in your hands, it seems somehow wrong.
Perhaps this is why I’m uncomfortable with the burn to order approach.
A few years ago, I discovered the website of Russell Lieblich – an American jazz musician perhaps best known for the music he composed for a number of Activision games on the Commodore 64 during the mid to late Eighties. After breaking away from the computer industry, he spent time composing music and writing songs which he hosted on his website, “Galaxy 7 Music”. I downloaded a number of tracks from this site but forgot about them for a while. Locating them again in March 2005, I found that I really rather enjoyed his music and went searching for more only to find his website shut down. Further research revealed that Russell had died of a heart attack on January the 26th.
In December 2007, ACM Records released a collection of Russell’s music titled “Another galaxy” but it was a curious arrangement – you could trawl through their website and download all the tracks for free or if you wanted, you could purchase the music via Amazon, eMusic or iTunes. The CD could also be purchased from Amazon but on a burn to order basis only, taking around six weeks from order to shipping.
I have mixed feelings about that idea. Although I like the idea of owning an official copy of the media, paying $10 plus shipping for a CDR of music that both the artist and record company permitted me to have for free seems faintly absurd. Having watched authors like Debra Doyle and James McDonald for some time, I’m also aware that Amazon make an enormous commission publishing their media this way – the original creator makes only a fraction of what Amazon charge. Added to that the fact that Russell Lieblich has now Run Down the Final Curtain and Joined the Choir Invisible and thus cannot profit from the sale of this CD, I ultimately cancelled the order – there is no mention of Russell’s family so if anyone is to benefit, it would only be the record company.
Had it been a pressed CD, I would be anticipating receipt sometime in mid-November.
In the past, I’d given thought to buying an album released by Johan Åstrand (aka Zyron of Oxyron) through MP3.com. Again, paying $10 for a CDR burned from the same MP3 files I had downloaded just seemed stupid – I’d rather stuff a $10 note into an envelope and post it to him directly.
So, independent musicians, have some respect for your fans and do the right thing by them if you want them to do the right thing by you – give them something substantial for their money.
Ironically, the person who “borrowed” my Los Chasquis CD had published a CD of his own but had no concerns about copying someone else’s material…
Since I obtained my classical guitar a few months back, I’ve tended to carry it around with me rather a lot, usually taking it with me when I go to JAFWA on a Saturday night – there’s quite often shows on that don’t capture my interest.
Out of curiosity, I decided to play some songs I used to perform back in the early Nineties when I was in a band called “Cerebral Nomad”. The band didn’t last long but it showed a lot of potential.
Or so I thought.
As a four piece band – Barry on drums, Steve of lead guitar, Jason on bass and myself on rhythm guitar (though we often swapped instruments for certain songs) and we preferred to do mostly original material. If we did a cover, we played it how we thought it should be done – never mind what the original artist thought. We also split in to two songwriting teams – Barry writing the lyrics and I composed the core melody, whilst Jason and Steve would share duties. Arranging was generally a group effort.
When the band split after six months, I took my songs with me and wrote new lyrics for them. As Barry had ambitions of being lead singer as well, he had a tendency to keep his lyrics to himself. I usually had little idea how they went. Though I did do several instrumental arrangements as well (you’ll find a couple of them under the High Voltage SID Collection).
So as I sat outside JAFWA one evening fighting off the mosquitoes, I tried to recall some of the material written by the other band members, such as “Mother” or “Dove”. My parts were generally pretty easy, usually only three or four chords. Steve wrote songs to demonstrate his guitar technique, not mine. Easy but dull, so I developed a more intricate playing style incorporating different techniques that I’d picked up over the years – arpeggios, tapping, slapping and plucking (usually used on bass guitars), four note chords (when most people would use three) and using my little finger to play a melody around the chord. All of this designed to make my part of the music sound much bigger and more interesting.
I struggled to recall the arrangement of the music, but it came to me after a while, along with some of the lyrics. Its funny how the mind sometimes distorts experiences, exaggerating certain points. What I recalled as powerful, soulful imagery proved to be a whiny, immature and incoherent tirade as told by a spoiled, bratty teenager. Seriously – cheer up, emo kid.
I had a similar experience many years ago when playing back some of our recordings made at the Fremantle Music Centre – I wanted to show some of the material to the lead guitarist from my then current band (we never really settled on a name, though we had narrowed it down to “Electric hooligans”, “Hooligans with guitars” and “Fastidious rabble”). I remember playing some of my best guitar ever during that recording and yet we ended up with a ghastly cacophony of twangs, out of time drumming and squeaky, pained vocals – I only retain the tapes to stop them falling into the wrong hands (they are hidden away with my collection of Ringo Starr LPs).
So I’m thinking it might be time to walk away from the older material – put the worthy material down on disc and recycle the rest before it pollutes the environment. Whilst I still want to get a band together again, I have two main projects on the go now – the folky (or filky) concept album inspired by BlackSylph and a new electronic suite inspired by a conversation with a friend the other night (for those of you wondering what “Ybeq Rexl” was all about). And that game soundtrack I’ve been promising since 1993.
Three! Three mains projects. And that music demo that I formed Project: Synthesis for.
Four!
I’ll go sit in the corner now…with the soft cushion…
A co-worker asked me the other day “Your older brother is older than you, right?”
You can see how these people make it into managerial positions, can’t you.
I have taken a step along the road to enlightenment. That is to say I have started experimenting with Linux. Again.
Not that one is obligated to look like Richard Stallman in order to use Linux or open source software but it appears to help – if most of the Linux users I’ve met are anything to go by. I grant you that the rebellious part of my nature has sprouted a goatee beard and a beret and has taken to carrying a placard and waving its philosophical fist in the air.
I’ve been using Windows as my primary operating system since May 1997 though I have trialled various alternatives over the years – FreeDOS, BeOS, early incarnations of Linux and OS/2, all with mixed success. Outside of SCO or BSD Unix at TAFE, my first proper taste of a Linux-like operating system was playing with Red Hat 5.0 way back in 1999. Though it looked impressive, getting anything useful done required much delving around in the Land of the Big Scary Command Line and editing scripts. It all seemed like too much hard work. More recent attempts tried to make use of some older hardware that I had lying around – mainly my Celeron 600 – and conservative installations such as Xubuntu. The software would install nicely but refuse to talk to my internet connection. I could use the operating system but couldn’t update or hunt for new software.
On my current system, I use Vista Home Premium on my notebook (and primary workstation) and XP Pro on my file and print server – Home Server being far from suitable for my requirements due to the strange “may corrupt your really important information without warning or apology” bug that I believe still hasn’t been fixed as I write this (at least, when I started writing back in July 2008).
Microsoft has received a great deal of criticism regarding their rather restrictive licensing schemes, questionable security and debatable stability – I’ve always seen it as “You don’t have to buy it, you know – you can always use an alternative system.” Other people have taken the attitude of “We want to use it, we just don’t want to have to pay for it. Repeatedly.” What really irritated me recently was Service Pack 1 for Vista was released earlier this year and the update manager has been nagging me for weeks to install it. I’d heard whispers that the upgrade often failed and ended up corrupting people’s installations so I made a point of doing a complete backup first. This was a very wise move as two thirds of the way through the upgrade, the system balked and refused to boot again. Six hours of frustration and restoration later and I’m back to where I was previously. And the update manager is still bugging me to upgrade.
So out of sheer irritation, I thought I’d have another go at Linux – this time on reasonably up to date hardware. I’d recently built myself a new server and so I had a spare system lying around looking for something useful to do. I’d been getting regular copies of Kubuntu since June 2006 and version 8.04 seemed to be mature enough to warrant a second look. Friend Style has been using Linux in various forms for as long as I can recall, dedicated enough to even have had Tux the Penguin tattooed on his arm, and has been an advocate for Ubuntu for some time.
Kubuntu seemed the logical choice since it came with a comprehensive install base (the only distribution of the primary three that came on DVD) and a familiar user environment. So where to start? I took the install DVD, started up my decommissioned server and waited for the system to start installing.
Since I started investigating Linux again, one thing has come to cause me a great detail of annoyance – the Linux Evangelist. Such people will talk endlessly about how much better Linux is than Windows at absolutely everything, often with such fanaticism that even seasoned Linux enthusiasts shudder at the mention of their name. Most people just walk away – this doesn’t seem to bother the Evangelist as they will quite happily continue talking, with or without an audience. If you can bring yourself to endure their incessant waffling, you will note that they often contradict themselves several times and bring their knowledge of their subject matter into doubt.
So after several practice installations and configuration sessions, I started to become familiar with the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Gnome and KDE, and their associated foundations – to the point of migrating a number of my daily tasks over the Linux system, and even to the point of installing Windows versions of some of the applications on my Vista notebook (notably OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird since I had being using Lotus Smart Suite for over ten years and Opera web browser for the last eight).
Out of the box or – more accurately – from the base installation, Ubuntu does around 80% of the tasks I need. With around an hour’s tweaking, downloading and configuring, it can do about 95%. I figure that the remaining 5% has mostly to do with my inexperience or simply not having found an application that will do the task I require.
The environment reminds me rather a lot of the days spent working on my Amiga 500 and later the A1200. Much of the software is a little unpolished, a little rough around the edges, but include most of the features needed. As I continue to become familiarised with Gnome, I’ll likely find better programs, or new ones that do old things in a better way.
So where to from here? Whilst it nice to not have to spend money buying applications to perform the tasks I require, I now find myself pondering upgrading my hardware again. Having wasted yet another morning attempting to configure my Vista notebook for dual booting with Ubuntu – and failing miserably – I ponder upgrading my spare notebook with additional memory to improve performance. For some odd reason, 512MB doesn’t quite seem to be enough and the older video controller doesn’t want to recognise an external monitor (which may or may not be related to the limited memory). And you can understand my reluctance to spend $135 on upgrade parts for a six year old notebook that might die tomorrow.
Playing with Fedora Core 10 on another system implies that that would be a better solution, up until the point of not being able to access my Windows network. Does everything nicely until that point – though I have yet to test it accessing another Linux system on the same network.
As I write, I’m testing an installation of Xubuntu 8.10 downloaded this morning (Xubuntu tends to be a later release than Ubuntu or Kubuntu) – I’ll let you know how that goes.
It would be nice to be free of Windows though – maybe I ought to upgrade the hard disk of the Vista notebook just for a test…