Random rambling from the Athens of the South
Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog.
Interesting article — and statistics — from The Times, showing that, while recording revenues are declining, artists appear to be doing very well from live gigs, where the revenue is surging. At $100+ per ticket for stadium concerts, it’s not surprising. I always figured the big names must be rolling in it after concert tours.
Not sure where legal downloads fit into this. Aren’t they meant to be surging too?
To a play last night at the State Theatre, Shakespeare’s King Lear.
While not among the most jolly of Shakespeare’s Comedies (a few good laughs, quite a few deaths), this was nonetheless a very enjoyable production. If I may be permitted to summarise the Bard, the play concerns an aged parent who signs over his property to his offspring, who then proceed to evict him. Hey, wait, didn’t I see that story on A Current Affair last week? Anyway, the aged parent is Lear, the King, and his offspring are his daughters Goneril and Regan. His youngest daughter, Cordelia, he disowns for getting an ‘F’ in Diplomacy, and as a King, who can blame him really. Well, of course, the youngest daughter is the one who truly loves him, while the other two turn out to be grasping bitches.
Cordelia is not seen again until the last Act, although her place as truth-teller is taken by the King’s Fool (brilliantly played by Sarah Snook). Since both roles are given to the same actor, at this point I became a little confused, having not seen Lear in a long, long while. Since the Duke of Kent (likewise banished) reappears disguised as a common man (Michael Habib, likewise brilliant), I assumed that Cordelia had also returned in disguise as Fool, both to look out for the King’s welfare. It seemed a fair assumption, given the number of characters who assume disguises in Shakespeare’s plays. (And is it amazing that they are never recognised? Or shall we blame the poor lighting in the Middle Ages?) Well, apparently my assumption is wrong. But would it not be an improvement to the play were it true?*
Meanwhile, a parallel subplot unfolds, involving the Duke of Gloucester and his two sons, the nice Edgar and the illegitimate (and therefore wicked) and extremely handsome Edmund (played by .. well, I wish I could say, but the STC page gives no details. Renato Fabretti?). Edmund is scheming to discredit his brother and thereby gain position for himself. This of course in some way mirrors the scheming of the evil sisters. Both the King and the Duke are elderly and therefore presumably, a bit silly and easily manipulated. Edgar runs away and pretends madness. Lear is cast out and becomes mad. See the parallels?
In short, a fine Shakespearian drama, full of scheming, back-stabbing (literally), storms and tempests, sword fights, madness, murder and mayhem. All wonderfully played by the cast, with great gusto. John Gaden’s Lear is superb, as are Victoria Longley and Martha Lott as Goneril and Regan. As are, indeed all the main players.
And the set! The set is a masterpiece itself, and worth the price of a ticket.
A must see production.
* My memory also supplied the Hollywood version of the ending, wherein Cordelia and Edgar lived happily ever after. Alas, my memory was wrong. She dies, quickly followed by Lear. Perhaps it was a Tragedy after all?
Ever wish you could save that Youtube video for later? Or some audio file you’ve stumbled on and loved? Well, you can*. Just install this brilliant little Firefox† extension, and any page with a flash video, mp3 or similar will cause a little icon to show in the status bar. Click on this icon and the video etc. will be automagically downloaded while you continue browsing. Awesome, huh?
FlashGot :: Add-ons for Firefox.
* Not guaranteed to work on all sites. But does work on Youtube, among others.
† What do you mean, you don’t have Firefox? Get it now. It won’t take more than a few minutes, and your life will be better.
Health for humans!: Go small and save the world- and yourself!!.
Excellent post here about health and personal responsibility. Bursting with ideas. I love the idea of “personal trainers” for communities, which she could expand on, I think. A community trainer, to get people out and moving a few times a week, that would be hugely beneficial to community health and well-being, and would not cost as much as a new hospital wing.
After using the iPhone for a while, I now want an mp3 player! Preferably one that does not require iTunes. Apple have simply left me feeling frustrated and p’d off with their restrictive and badly designed system.
Part of the problem of course is that I choose to use Ubuntu (linux) for my desktop. And Apple have elected not to provide a Linux version of iTunes. Since Mac OSX actually has unix at its core, it should be easy for them to port iTunes to Linux. So why not? I would guess that they see no money in it. Obviously they needed a Windows port, because 80% of the world still uses Windows. But only a few sensible people have a linux desktop, so there’s no need to bother, right?
In a sense, Linux is actually the major competitor to Apple, not Windows. Windows is so dominant, that it turns everything else into a niche product, and the niche products compete with one another for the scraps of market share that remain. I hate this situation as much as anyone, and I could actually mount an argument for Windows as a contributing factor to global misery, but we have to accept what we cannot change.
So anyway, here I am, with around $20,000 worth of music purchased over the years on CD. And now I would like to transfer that music — that I have paid for — to new technology. My CD player/Hi-Fi is on its last legs; I can see the way the world is going, and the future is in micro-format speakers and mp3 players. I don’t want to pay for a new CD player, because it’s old tech.
Now, I can do this if I boot up Vista instead of Ubuntu, and use iTunes. But that’s a pain. It’s a disruption to my normal workflow. With Ubuntu I can copy a CD to hard disk and write a report while that happens. Not to mention that every time I use Vista/iTunes I usually end up seething with rage. Both products seem designed to irritate with barriers and restrictions.
(I also think the iTunes interface is a travesty of design, especially coming from a company that prides itself on design.)
So, anyway, to get my music — which I have already paid for — from the CD to disk is easy, but then to get it onto the iPhone, I must: copy the mp3 files to a stick; shut down; boot up Vista; wait 5 minutes for Vista to do whatever it does (?) before I can use it; copy the mp3 files from the stick to the Vista partition; start iTunes; import the mp3 files into iTunes; copy them to the iPhone.
I could short-circuit all of that if the iPhone could be used like a USB stick. I should be able to simply plug in the iPhone with Ubuntu, and upload the mp3s to it just like copying files to a stick. No. Why not? Because Apple are bigger arseholes than Microsoft, that’s why. The iPhone software does not allow you to use it as a stick, even though technologically it is prefectly possible. Basically, Apple want to control every aspect of your iPhone use. If you could just upload stuff willy-nilly, then where would their crappy iTunes store be? How would they sell you stuff? So they blocked all these perfectly reasonable, legitimate and useful uses of the iPhone. Bastards.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the iPhone, it’s a great little device, and all respects the most useful multi-function personal device I’ve ever owned. I would just love it more if it were less restricted.
Meanwhile, I still have all these CDs to deal with.
Any recommendations for a non-Apple USB mp3 player that hooks up with a hi-fi?
Tonight I watched a new “special feature length” episode of Jonathan Creek, the BBC series about unwilling paranormal investigator Jonathan Creek. This episode, “The Grinning Man”, concerning the disappearance of people who sleep in a locked room, is presumably the prelude to a new series — I hope so, because there’s a lot to like about this series.
But this was a disappointment on many levels, but mainly due to some very clumsy editing and/or scripting. Scene changes are unexplained and confusing, and character behaviours are unlikely — one minute our hero is meeting an old friend who thought he was dead, a few scenes later and they are sleeping together like a long-married couple.
The program also suffers from too many sub-plots, some of which have nothing to do with the main story at all. I really wish they would drop the Adam Klaus character — the idiot magician for whom Jonathan works. He adds nothing to the plot and his embarrassing and ridiculous sub-plots serve only to intrude and break the mood.
What saves this series is the performance from Alan Davies as Jonathan Creek. Dead pan, world weary and long-suffering but tolerant of the fools that surround him. Enjoyable fare, but could be oh so better.
The Top Ten Things Library Administrators Should Know About Technology | TechEssence.info.
Excellent short summary, good for passing on to your senior people, esp. those giving you grief.
Here’s an interesting study on the content of Twitter:
… mostly, many people still perceive Twitter as just mindless babble of people telling you what they are doing minute-by-minute; … So we took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:
News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.
As you may have guessed, Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total tweets captured; however, Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the tweets captured.
OK, I’ll give them credit for actually doing the study, and the results are somewhat interesting, but …
This study makes sense only to someone who doesn’t actually use Twitter, someone looking in from the outside. E.g. some marketing type wondering, “should I jump on this latest bandwaggon and use Twitter to promote my thing?“.
But from the perspective of someone who actually uses Twitter on a regular basis, it makes no sense at all. Here’s why:
I get zero spam because I choose who I follow. If someone started spamming me, I would unfollow. (I have.)
And “babble” is a value judgment based on knowledge of context. If you follow someone, that suggests you are interested in their day and how it’s going. If you are not interested, then don’t follow them. It’s not rocket surgery.
Of the categories they chose : News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value — I would say my stream contains only 3 categories: News; Conversation; and Shares (Pass-along Value). I simply don’t allow anything else in there.
The essential point here is this: you get to choose who you follow, and if your screen fills up with mindless babble and irritating puff, then it’s entirely your own fault. Prune your followers. Be ruthless. Try and discard, continuously.
Fascinating report here on Internet use in China:
http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2009/07/28/5644.htm
The 24th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China Report published by China Internet Network Information Center CNNIC on July 16 shows that by June 30, 2009, China had remained ahead in three indicators-number of Internet users 338 million, number of broadband users 320 million and registration volume of top-level domain names 12.96 million, with the popularization rate of the Internet rising steadily. Affected by the launch of 3G business, the number of mobile Internet users has also reached 155 million, accounting for 46% of all Internet users and surging by 32.1% within six months.
The numbers involved are, of course, mind boggling. And one’s perceptions of China might be badly shaken by them. For example, 320 million broadband users is 25% of the population. Yes, there is poverty in China, but there is also progress and a huge middle class ( > the pop. of America).
Travelling through China a few years back, I was struck by — many things — but relevant here is that we were never out of mobile phone range. Even crossing the Gobi desert, where there were solar-powered mobile phone towers at regular intervals.
And before you say Uighur/Tibet/minorities, I also recall seeing buddhist monks in “Little Tibet” (Xiahe) with mobile phones (and driving around in Land Cruisers).
“The rapidly evolving world of digital books is presenting new
challenges” – http://ping.fm/ytGdn
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