I’ve been testing our shiny new 2Mb link to Adelaide and the Net today – there something about being required by your job to be downloading enough to saturate such a fast link that fills be with glee. In other words, as part of my job I have to ‘test’ a very, very fast Internet connection by downloading as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

As you can tell, it’s made my day.

In other news, packing proceeds apace for the move on the weekend – PC is packed up already, as is the cable modem. I jsut have my room to go, and then the move – and I have Monday off to unpack. Wish me luck!

I found a place! I’ve put down my deposit, and will be moving to new digs on Alison Rd, in Randwick. It’s actually across the road and down the hill about three doors from Rommel‘s place. So our Thursday night deals will assume new heights of ease. I’m probably going to move the weekend after next, or possibly the weekend after that, depending on what happens with the new flatmate and old flatmates.

But in the meantime, yay me!

Here‘s a great collection of accounts from people all over the world who went to the anti-war protests. There’s heaps of links scattered throughout the comments, along with lots of interesting discussion.

Just got back from the Sydney Anti-war rally. Very impressive, and not at all what I was expecting. I had been expecting basically a ‘usual suspects’ protest, but I think I wasn’t the only one surprised at the 250,000 people, or the spectrum of people there. And watching the news and checking the SMH, it looks like Sydney’s protest fits in with the rest of the world.

It’s always really nice to have your cynicism proved wrong.

Happy Valentines Day!

Trang and I are having a picnic at Coogee this year. I’m really looking forward to it. Hope your Valentine’s (or Anti-Valentine’s) goes well.

Some links:

Engrish captions for The Two Towers – this is a hilarious set of screen grabs from a dodgy asian bootleg DVD of the Two Towers, showcasing the truly awful subtitling. Favourites are ‘Aragon son of Alfred’ and Gimli yelling ‘bring your pussy face to my ass’. There’s also a FOTR page.

Here‘s a darkly humourous piece from kuro5hin -’ A heartbreaking national tragedy’. A quote:

It happened one morning, on your drive to work, or while channel surfing on your 400-channel cable-satellite or whatever-mind-numbing-media outlet you feed the desires lurking in your mental cage. The Heartbreaking National Tragedy.
So sudden. So devastating. No one saw it coming. And who could believe it happened? “Honey, did you hear? It’s devastating!” Even the Dr. Pill show is interrupted. Little Cousin (the incestuous child of Big Brother) comes on with pancake-makeup face and shellacked hair carefully arranged to hide his receding hairline….

Also humourous in a less intentional way is the Liberator Shapes website, where shaped cushions to help people remain comfortable in the oddest sexual positions are sold. Enjoy!

There’s a great article today on Salon, by John Snyder, a board member of the American Nation Association of Recording Arts and Sciences.Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’m not in favour, in general, of the idea of intellectual property. Snyder has a great quote from Thomas Jefferson about how the most wonderful thing about an idea is that you can pass it on to others without losing it yourself. He also makes a lot of good points about how the record companies are amongst the most loathed corporations in the world – he attributes this to the moves by them to make music into a commodity rather than an art form. He points out that, by making music into something you listen to for 90 days and then throw away, they remove the inclination of people to want to reward the artist.

It got me thinking on a more general level. The problem for these record companies is that the people who are doing the stuff that the moguls don’t like are the people who are the most computer literate, the most able to navigate the web. I think that a lot of older people, or more accurately, less compluter literate people don’t realise is how the ease of finding information leads to what can be called, for lack of a better word, wisdom.

The fact that it’s so easy to find and read conflicting opinions, or varied opinions, makes it easier to see the slants/biases/angles people put on their own opinions. It’s also easier to trace people’s connections online – it doesn’t really require special access.

What it comes down to is that, for people who spend any reasonable amount of time online, a version of Feyerabend’s idea of ontological pluralism is acting. In less hifalutin language, a large amount of bullshit makes it easier for people to train their bullshit detectors, to immunise themselves against propaganda.

And that’s where the record companies are failing – I don’t think they realise how easy it is for people to correlate what they’ve been saying and doing and form a picture of their actions – a picture that usually ends up showing that what they say to the consumer is either an insult or a lie.

And insulting your customers, calling them thieves and scoundrels, when the evidence suggests that you are not innocent of such behaviour yourself is hardly conducive to those customers being prepared to give you money.