I’ll say it right now. I didn’t listen to the first major release, Original Pirate Material. I’m told it was pretty popular – I heard a couple of the songs on the radio, and was impressed, then annoyed, by the – um – unique sounds.

So I have an advance copy of the new one, and listened to it this evening. Impressive! The writing is clever and interesting – a story is presented through the dozen or so tracks, about an ordinary bloke who’s really had enough of life. It’s a bit of a pat story, but the way it’s told, in typical Streets style, make it interesting enough to keep listening and even laughing.

An online review site has done a review of the CD and it pretty much covers what I wanted to say – they’re just a little more enthusiastic than I am about it. It’s good enough to make me want to go back and see what all the fuss was about over the previous release…

I was trudging into work today, feeling really tired and run down (and cold!). iPod was paying whatever, in random order. Then The Fake Headlines by the New Pornographers came on, followed by Doves’ Pounding. Now I’m happy. No one else is in the office yet, so I’ve got the silly pseudo-punk-lite of Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies playing loudly, and feeling even better by the second. Music is pretty cool that way.

Alright! It’s up. It took two evenings of data wrangling (mostly due to iPhoto’s weird ideas about data exporting). Next time, I’ll do something database-related and more clever. But anyway.

It’s up! Go have a look! This is big news! See inside my mundane life on a very normal weekend! It rains! It rains some more!

It’s up! After it’s done raining, it gets cold then rains some more! Yeah, okay, it was kind of a crap weekend, but we had fun with balloons and went mini-golfing. Oh, and chocolate pudding.

It’s up! I’m bloody tired of HTML.

Well it’s done. I’ve taken 138 pictures, starting Friday morning and ending Sunday evening. I went past the planned deadline of Sunday noon, since we really didn’t wake up until shortly before noon anyway.

I don’t think this year’s photos will be as interesting as last years, mostly because it was raining and we didn’t get out so much to do stuff. There’s some funny bits in there though, and I should get them posted by this evening. Stay tuned.

Workmate Emma called my website “random”. I took it as a compliment. I hope that’s what it was.

Anyway, I must apologise, gentle reader, for the lack of updates and juicy tidbits of late. I could offer up any number of excuses (too busy, quadruple amputee, nothing interesting happening in the world) but none of those are true. I just haven’t really been in the mood lately. Well, and I have been busy.

Work’s been really full-on lately, I’m developing what amounts to a simple CRM (“customer relationship management”) system from scratch, along with all the regular stuff of being the local geek. Plus, in addition to watching Duckman in the evenings, I’ve been working my butt off on “minty site”, a website framework I’m building for Mint Records in Vancouver. It’s gonna be a fantastic site, and it’s very very cleverly built (if I do say so myself). It is, of course, months overdue. Sigh.

Well, I am looking forward to threedaysinmelbn, which I’ll be doing starting Friday and running until Sunday noon. I’ll get the photos up here (in a special little sub-site) hopefully by Sunday or Monday night. Check out last year’s effort if you haven’t already.

Like jurgenmelbournetwodayphotodokumentationprojekt before it, this will document my life here in Melbn. Many things have changed
since last year:

• I moved to the other side of the river


• I fell into a relationship


• Melbn lost a few letters


• I live with just one person (who’s never there).


• I got a promotion


• I got a new visa


• I got a new doona


• I got a new table


• I’m less in debt than I was


• It’s now three days, not just two

I’ve still got the same laptop, the same camera and many of the same shirts. I’m not sure yet what I’ll be up to this weekend, but it’s going to be photodocumented in all its mundane glory.

I’m doing this as part of a global project, based around people who are part of Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms Community. We’re like a mob, but smarter. Kind of like a cult who worships toasters. Or something. Anyway, I’m publishing my pictures in the community and here too (stereo simulcast!). I’m not sure if anyone else is, but I’ll put some links into the subsite when it goes live.

Warm hugs straighten my earmuffs
And got me through
Metal-detector mornings.
And if never to be seen again,
You’re in my air.

Yeah, I’m still watching Duckman reruns. And listening to Meat Loaf. Be thankful I’m not quoting any of that.

Lybia has disappeared. Someone has pulled off one of the greatest magical feats of the century. No longer content with making buildings disappear, someone has deleted an entire country. Amazing stuff.

El Reg has the story. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Seriously though, the Register hints at this being possibly the fault of the newly politicised IANA – if a country doesn’t agree with the IANA’s policies, will they too be deleted?

Since the article was published, Lybia’s whois information has changed, showing “ns1.magic-moments.com” as one of the countries’ top level DNS machines. (Get your minds out of the gutter, it’s a hosting company for goodness sake).

I have sat through worse movies, but I don’t think I have ever experienced one as blatantly disrespectful to its source material as The Cat in the Hat. It pains me to say this, because I think Mike Myers is a talented and funny man, but he pissed all over the grave of Dr Seuss.

The first 15 minutes or so of the film was pretty good. Then Myers showed up. The best part turned out to be the very beginning, where they replaced the standard studio logos with Seussian versions, all animated and three-D. I was very impressed. Then, things started to go wrong. The town looked like a cheap version of something out of Edward Scissorhands”:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0099487/ – the cars were ordinary Fords – but I’m not going to waste any more time on this piece of festering shit. First time director. Sigh. He watched too much Chris Columbus and not enough Tim Burton.

1. What do you do for a living?

From 9-5, Monday to Friday, I am IT & Systems Manager for a marketing company located in Melbourne. If it’s got buttons or wires, it’s my problem. I’m in the middle of moving the organisation away from reliance on Microsoft products, and making our systems more open and accessible by our clients.

At all other times, I work on making websites. I’m working on one right now for an independent record company based in Vancouver. It’s going to be the best record company site ever, and very simple to administer. It’s nearly finished!

2. What do you like most about your job?

It’s challenging. I’m doing interesting work, and I can do pretty much what I think is a good idea. I’m a department of one right now.

3. What do you like least about your job?

There’s not enough time in a day to do everything I want to do. Also, there’s a Linux server that’s been giving me the shits lately. Serves me right for not using FreeBSD.

4. When you have a bad day at work it’s usually because

People expect something that takes a week to do, to be done in 1 day.

5. What other career(s) are you interested in?

Designer, studio technician, restauranteur, talk show host. Yeah. Not writer anymore.