Open Source

I love free software. I especially love open source software.

The concept of code available to everyone so that it can continuously be refined and developed is fantastic. The idea that anyone with a good idea can contribute to the process, benefiting others in the process, while reaping the benefits of previous contributors just makes perfect sense. It’s a true “wisdom of crowds” ethos.

Nowadays, it’s entirely possible for anyone to run their PC exclusivley on freeware and open source programs (including the operating syatem itself, something I’m yet to do). Gone are the days of such ideals only being embraced by the uber-tech-nerdy types.

A great starting point, if you want to make the leap, is here.

I’ve used many of these programs, and others, for a while but some are relatively new to me. I only decided that OpenOffice has attained a user-friendly enough state for me to use it regularly, and train others to do so, in the last year. But for people that are not advanced users of MS Office, it’s actually a much easier switch.

I was never a great Photoshopper, so GIMP is perfect for me. Others I’m still trying to figure out are Scribus (instead of InDesign), and Blender (a Carrarra type animator). CDBurnerXP is a great substitute for Nero or similar. VLC media player plays almost anything, and MediaCoder converts almost any media format.

But the flagship of open source is Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is the open source program you are most likely to have on your PC if you have an open source program on your PC. It has achieved a market penetration second only to Internet Explorer. It is brilliant. It pioneered features that the others now emulate, it dramatically enhances your online experience.

Firefox 3 launched with great fanfare, breaking download records and overwhelming web servers. It has a fantastic new interface, and is still compatible with most of your old plugins and enhancements.

But it’s crap. It crashes for no reason at all. I’m running XP with the latest service pack, on a new installation on a new laptop. So why????

It hurts me to say so, but Firefox 3 sux. But it pleases me to say that a solution will not take a year or two. Mozilla isn’t Microsoft. I put my faith in the open source community. All shall be well in short order.

Confiscation

This better be some kind of really unfunny joke. No, not the part about Simon Crean not being dead yet.

In response to complaints by influential and wealthy media companies such as Time Warner, moves are being made to introduce laws allowing customs or border officers to seize and erase the contents of MP3 players and PCs, if they suspect you may be “trafficking” copyright material.

Yep, if that really is an iPod in your pocket, then you won’t be happy to see them.

“Oh, I see you have the ubiquitous backpacker classics on here. Are you able to demonstrate that you purchased the original album? What, you mean you don’t bring a few hundred CDs with you when you explore South America? Well, even if you did, it doesn’t matter, it’s still against the law to transfer songs to another device. I’ll have this thanks. I love Jeff Buckley…”

Now let it be said that I’m against music piracy as a whole. I download, sure. But if I listen and like, I purchase, both for the Virgoan completion fetish and for the enjoyment of music that hasn’t been compressed beyond recognition. I’ll download a bootleg live recording of a favourite band, but then bootlegs have been around for decades. And I do of course love having my whole music collection in my pocket courtesy of EAC, the LAME encoder and 160gb of Apple’s finest.

I consider music downloading to be the modern incarnation of the mix tape – a chance to share and sample, but in no way a replacement for buying an album. And if you’ve ever shared time with working musicians, you’d know that most of them aren’t exactly living it large. Download Metallica on principle though.

However, Hollywood blockbusters? Please, do go ahead. I’m all for it. Any company that willingly parts with $20 million dollars to produce more evidence of Adam Sandler’s mediocrity certainly doesn’t deserve my $15. You buy an album, it’s yours to keep, share with friends at home, or give away. Buy a movie ticket to watch some of the excrement scraped from the bowels of Hollywood, and you’re left with a feeling of violation. Four cups of coffee and two hours of your life that you will never get back.

It’s not all bad I hasten to add, and a good movie in a good cinema with good sound and good company is one of life’s great joys. But then, so is curling up at home watching a DVD, with equipment that is ever closer to providing the cinema experience, and the freedom to do things that would just be anti-social in a public movie theatre.

I’ve been known to rip a DVD or two simply because I hired it then ran out of time to watch it, and I like to return it so that someone else can watch it and I don’t get fisted by fees. But if the movie is good, chances are I’ll buy it some time.

If a customs official tries to seize my iPod or laptop on the basis of the material it contains, they best have a few friends restrain me heavily, lest iKick them in the balls.

Girl Talk

No, I’m not going to divulge any mysteries surrounding my love life, though with recent history and new developments in that area, I’m sure I could go on. And on…

But no. My latest love is Girl Talk, also known as Gregg Gillis, a hyperactive mash-up DJ from Pittsburgh. Now I must confess that I’m a relative newcomer to Girl Talk, having seen him at Southbound, and subsequently purchasing Night Ripper – my girlfriend at the time bought it for me too. But I find the anticipation and excitement in the blogosphere for his new work just a little bizarre. It’s like all of these too-cool-for-school types are just desperate to shed their pretensions without sacrificing their cool kid credibility. Girl Talk makes Kelly Clarkson sound cool.

His latest release, Feed the Animals is available now at Illegal Art for whatever you feel like paying. You can pay nothing, or for $10 plus postage you can download FLACs, MP3s and have a CD mailed to you.

Not only is Gillis eschewing the traditional record company distribution model (joining Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and others), he’s also using something like 300 tracks – all without royalties I’m assuming – to create this ADD inspired sample plate of cheesy pop, rap and rock riffs. There’s really nothing quite like it that I’ve heard. Have a quick taste on his MySpace.

How can you not love anyone that moves from The Carpenters to Ministry?

In the dance-music-consumes-everything mad fusion world of music at the moment, it’s joyous to stumble upon something that sounds so unique by combining elements that sound so familiar.

If you put this on and don’t raise a smile or move your feet, there is something clearly, disturbingly wrong with you – you’re probably taking your music listening wwaaaayyyy too seriously.

Do it.

Edit: This makes me very happy. Someone in US Congress…? What…?

Budgie

My friend Jeremy has one of those nicknames – nobody can remember its precise origin, and nobody can recall what it meant at the time. Over years of constant use, the nickname became his identity. When somebody said “Jeremy” nobody knew who the fuck they were talking about.

But everyone knows Budgie. Everyone likes Budgie. I have trouble coming up with a single person (other than former partners, but hey, who hasn’t pissed a few of them off?) who has a negative thing to say about him.

He is a man of great and generous warmth. He seems so unaffected by the nastiness in the world. Not indifferent, just unafraid.

I distinctly remember the time he was violently assaulted by an ice-addled former partner of his then-girlfriend. He was hospitalised with severe swelling and bruising. Yet when I went to see him the following day, his irrepressible smile shone through the bandages, the bruises and the blood.

He was upset, sure – but not the slightest bit interested in violent retribution. “I just think there’s something a bit wrong with the bloke” was his explanation.

Budgie is an unnatural talent behind the wheel of pretty much anything. He spent some time racing karts as a kid, he was ridiculously quick at auto-cross in a beaten up old Datsun, and took such great joy in anything quick. He won a state championship in dirt-karting just last year at his first attempt.

Trying to keep up with him when riding motorbikes around our local back streets was a constant source of embarrassment. He’d be riding an old Kawasaki dirt bike, wearing thongs, flannel and a helmet from the Buck Rogers props department – sparks flying as he leant it over in the corners – and I’d be scrambling to keep up on the latest and greatest road-race bike of the day. We’d pull up at his families home, and he’d just chuckle – totally nonplussed. Just another reason to be happy.

We used to have tremendous Australia Day/Triple J hottest 100 parties at his home. “Australian bands make the best music” he’d say. “Why the fuck would you want to listen to anything else?”

The man can drink. And he drinks Emu Export – voluntarily – which I cannot fathom. We did give serious thought to paving his driveway with empties, such was the surplus.

Budgie is the quintessential Aussie larrikin, the archetypal good bloke. He’d do anything for a mate, and he’d do it with a smile and a laugh. He works ridiculously hard. He has a dangerous, nothing-is-sacred razor-sharp sense of humour, and says the most outlandish, outrageous things. Yet he gets away with it – he just cracks that jovial grin and chuckles to himself. He can’t quite fathom why anyone would take him so seriously.

Serious he can be though – he has an extraordinary ability to get to the crux of an issue. We’ve had plenty of conversations that left me wondering just why he lays bricks for a living.

I still don’t know. I just know that he doesn’t waste a moment being miserable.

My friend Jeremy “Budgie” Coleman died this morning after a short battle with cancer. He was 30.

The Plague: Endgame

We spent a thoroughly unpleasant Sunday at Chez Bulwer cleaning. My mission was to clean the kitchen cupboards out, and deprive our rodent room-mates of any alternative food source, in order to make our humane mouse traps a successful endeavour.

Well, here we are on Tuesday afternoon, and we have detained and deported no less than thirteen illegal immigrants. We’re all terribly smug at the thought of keeping our karma intact, and sending these kinda cute (but really stinky) creatures off into a better life in the park a few streets away.

But is it really humane? What would the human equivalent be?

Well, imagine:

you’re walking around your neighbourhood – it’s a lovely autumn afternoon – when down an alleyway you swear wasn’t there the last time you were out you spy a new restaurant. In the window are the most magnificent cakes and pastries. They look positively divine, and you’re really hungry, because, for some strange reason, everything else is closed. Your favourite 24 hour café that hasn’t been shut even once since the day you were born is boarded up.

Just as you step up to the window, the ground falls away beneath you, and you drop 12 metres into a pit below. Amazingly, though bruised and shaken, you haven’t broken any bones, but you ache from the impact. The walls are smooth and sheer, and though you can see light coming from the top, it’s far too high to jump, and impossible to climb.

You sit at the bottom, terrified, cold, and still hungry. With a dawning horror, you realise that the ground you’re standing on is covered in the faeces of previous occupants. You can see the futility of trying to escape, so you save your energy. What happened to them though? What awful demise did they meet?

Thump! You almost have a heart attack when you look to see that your best friend has fallen into the pit next to you. You try to conceal your glee at not being alone, and offer condolences and support to your friend. You plan desperately together, but you conclude that there is no escape – your fate is in god’s hands. You huddle together for warmth.

Thump! Thump! Aghast, you turn to see your ex-partner, whom you despise – it has not been long since you split up – and the screaming child you mercifully no longer have custody of. You’re trapped with a screaming kid and your ex. But your ex and your best friend seem to be comforting each other… Hang on a minute! What the fuck is going on there?

“Oh, we meant to tell you…” they begin, when suddenly it goes dark, and the very ground you stand on seems to lift up and move. You all huddle desperately close together, the fear so absolute that everyone loses control of their bodily functions. The smell is unbearable, but the fear of the unknown is what cripples you. You scramble ever more desperately, digging at the rock-hard ground with your teeth and fingernails, but to no avail. You’re flung back and forth as the unpredictable pitching of the ground prevents you from attaining any balance.

The motion seems steady now, but you feel a change in the air. It’s cold, so cold. Raindrops the size of cars begin to fall on you all, drenching everyone. The water level begins to rise. You shiver uncontrollably.

Suddenly, the motion stops – and for a brief instant you see a bright light. then the world turns upside down, and your are sent catapulting down the once vertical wall. The water throws you about, and flings you like a rag doll onto the ground. You’re drenched, naked, and on the edge of hypothermia. You fear infection from the excrement that coats your whole body.

Your surroundings are completely foreign. Other than your three companions, there’s not another person in sight anywhere. You see some strange creatures lurking in the shadows as you flee – somehow free of the chamber you were trapped in, but faced with an environment as far removed from your own as you can possibly imagine. You’re in a hostile jungle, and you fear that you have mere minutes to live – death lurks in the darkness all around you.

You begin to feel dizzy, and you know that your tenuous grasp on consciousness is slipping. You hear a booming voice in the distance say, “we did the right thing…” just as you black out.

Jesus. Maybe next time a traditional back-breaking mousetrap would be more merciful.