Mentally Incontinent

but I won’t be polite about it.

Regurgitator

Well for the first time I ended up going to Big Day Out by myself because my friends are either too stingy, (ie don’t have enough money,) or have a terrible taste in music, (ie didn’t like the bands that were playing.) I skipped most of the early stuff and only arrived mid-afternoon. When I arrived Midnight Juggernauts were playing. Not really my sort of thing, I’ve only listened to them briefly before. Regurgitator was the first band that I had on my “to see” list. It appears that they enjoy their old stuff better than their new stuff, they played all their classics, mostly stuff from Unit. They weren’t afraid to swear and played all their obscene ones which meant they played favourites suck as “I Sucked A Lot Of Cock”. I also really enjoyed their stage demeanour. All four of them came out dressed completely in white including white sunnies. In between songs they got the crowd to curse random people and the police blimp. Defiantly one of my highlights from the day was Regurgitator getting the entire crowd to turn around and flip said blimp off. While I’m on the subject of the blimp it appears to have been pretty pointless. This was the only point in the day that I could actually see it, (yes, I was looking for it at other times.) So I don’t know if they took it down, it crashed or they realised it was a waste of money and stopped using it. As always with Big Day Out half the action is in the crowd. At this stop there was a security guard with a fetish for rather large woman. He would walk up to them with the hose and spray directly onto their chests.

Battles

Next up was Battles. I only listened to these guy’s album, Mirrored, in the last week or so and I absolutely love it. That being said they were kind of average live. They paid little attention to the audience and they dragged a lot of it out, (at least it seemed like that to me.) However I do give them massive kudos for some of the stuff they played. At one point during Atlas they had one on bass, one on drums and two of them both playing keyboard with one hand and guitar with the other. Although it wasn’t the least rock-and-roll thing I saw yesterday it was right up there, their drummer. During one of their songs he held a stick with bells on it with both hands and shook it back and forth above his head. This then caused his whole body to wobble. It was an odd sight to see.

The Naked Guy

Spoon

The band I was most looking forward to was Spoon. They have been one of my favourite bands for a while, Kill the Moonlight would have to be one of my favourite albums and “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine” one of my favourite songs. Last year’s album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, didn’t fail to impress and I was glad to see it make many music critics’ top ten lists. They play all the songs I wanted like “The Way We Get By”, “I Turn My Camera On”, “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” and “The Beast and The Dragon Adored”. I honestly can’t think of any other songs I would have liked them to play. They also had excellent stage manner like Regurgitator. They really seemed to enjoy having the crowd sing along and know all the words. After they played “The Ghost of You Lingers” (which was fantastically done, really loud and quite tight,) they said that they received an email that morning claiming that it was the only good song of their album, most of the crowd disagreed with this sentiment. The freakfest managed to arrive to this set and brought with it the least rock-and-roll thing I saw there: a balding man with no real definition to his body who stripped down to his jocks and hugged everyone around him. I didn’t let this ruin the set though. Spoon played fantastically, Britt Daniel is an amazing frontman and they really added something to their songs as they played them live.

The Arcade Fire

Billy Bragg,Tom Morello and Anti-Flag

After Spoon finished I swung by the main stage to try and find one of my friends who was watching Arcade Fire. They were good enough but I’m not really familiar with their music. I thought it was pretty cool that they had a pipe organ on stage. Unable to find my friend I went to catch the end of Tom Morello’s solo set as The Nightwatchman. I really wish that I had swung by earlier, I only heard two songs but they were played with such enthusiasm and energy. For his last song he called on Anti-Flag and Billy Bragg (who I missed unfortunately though I hear his levels were all wrong,) to back him up on a cover of Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning.” He really got into it and got the whole crowd to jump around and go nuts. It became apparent though that he may not be all there in the head when he started ranting about Rage Against The Machine sort of things like “history is written by you people” and “we must fight American imperialism wherever it rears it’s ugly head,” (not saying that I disagree but he was very odd about it and it sounded like he needed a tin foil hat.)

Silverchair

After a quick bite to eat I headed over to the main stages to get in position for Bjork and I ended up with a fairly good spot just off the D barrier right in front of her stage. When I arrived Silverchair were playing. I really do not like their new stuff, it’s very plain and poppy. Their live show sounded very different but they tried to build themselves into something they’re not. Everything sounded a lot more raw and rock driven than on recording. Daniel Johns put on a really phony American accent and got started yelling stuff like “how are y’all doing”, note that this was not in an ironic way. He was really trying to emulate the style of the large American bands which I think was a terrible choice, most Aussie bands that I’ve seen are much more chilled and talk to the audience in a different way. He also spent a lot of time between songs with fillers like getting the crowd to “yell one! Now two! Now one! Now Three!” The only positive part of their set was “Freak” which went off with everyone.

Finally Bjork came on, she’s missing more in the head than Tom Morello but she was so fantastic. Her horn section came on like a funeral procession all dressed in a bizzare sort of uniform and Bjork herself followed, also in a rather odd dress. Unfortunately her DJ, drummer and keyboard played didn’t follow the dress code, I think it would have looked much more impressive if they had all dressed up. Bjork live is a mix of music, art and interpretive dance. Her DJ pulled out various really cool looking electronic instruments for each song. She played a really good mix of songs, both new and old, slow and fast, soft and loud. However it seemed to go over the head of many Rage Against The Machine fans, I’m told that those by the other stage started booing her. At one point two someone inebriated fellows stood next to me and they seemed quite confused about her horn section’s dress code. In fact pretty much everything that Bjork presented went right over her head and I suspect that this would be an accurate portrayal of many there. The only thing they seemed to realise was that there were cool lasers. If she comes to Perth again I will defiantly see her again, hopefully in a more intimate setting where everyone there has more of a clue about what is happening. She also had a really cute way of saying “thank you” after every song which due to her really strong accent came out more like “tink you”.

LCD Soundsystem

Towards the end of her set I left however to go see LCD Soundsystem. On my way to the boiler room I had to wade through a massive crowd. So many people were walking back that I thought I had missed the band but alas it was just people bailing to go see Rage. This was very good for me as it allowed me to get very close to the front. Just after I arrived they launched into North American Scum with a huge backing ensemble, mostly extra singers. It seemed that it was more like a rotating group of musicians than an actual band. This allowed for some great in between songs banter between James Murphy and the crowd. They mostly played songs from last year’s album Sound of Silver. Overall it was a pretty tight set though I would have liked to hear Daft Punk Are Playing at My House but you can’t always get what you want. By the time they had finished I was pretty tired. A lot of my friends said that I had to see Rage Against The Machine so I headed over to the main stages. It was pretty packed and I couldn’t really find a decent spot so I went home.

Obligatory Rage Against The Machine picture, yes I really dont like them

Today after work I needed to pop into the shops for a few things. While there I thought I may as well check out the news agency for some light reading material. The particular magazine that caught my eye today was “Mac Life Australia” or some similar inane title. For those who don’t know, yes I am now a Mac user. I love my Macbook, it really is a fantastic product and I can understand why Mac users are so loyal, I wouldn’t think twice about getting another Macbook when this one gets old. However their magazines leave much to be desired. Simply put Mac users are a bunch of fucking posers. There is little content, that content that does exist is mostly about looks. The bulk of the magazine is an advertisement for how fantastic Apple’s products are. Why can’t there be a Mac magazine that actually details issues that users deal with rather than just day dreaming about the latest Mac product? Perhaps there is no such thing as a real Mac user, they mostly just buy the products to say they own one and get some street cred and rather than switching it on they just wistfully look at pictures of the next big release.

So yeah, the blog is back. Kudos to Fodder who must have had a really boring night, she went through and read all of my previous entries with lots of comments that I didn’t see until I logged in again today. At the moment my big project in the pipeline is a CMS for musicians as I cannot seem to find a decent already existing one. More news on that if it happens. Oh and as always I’m thinking of redesign.

She lives alone and I’m worried if she falls over. She’ll fall over call out and I often wonder, will anyone hear her?

In other news I must say that this semester of uni is quite good. For a change some projects have the semblance of being real world projects. In Advance Electronic Commerce, (which is really a re-cap of Foundations of Electronic Commerce,) we’re running a Google Adwords campaign for a local clothing company. It’s not just a simulation, it’s the real thing. All the groups are doing it for different companies. It’s quite a contrast from Electronic Communications where we’re creating a marketing strategy for a fictional company. It’s giving me a real insight into how this type of marketing works in the real world. The other big project going on at the moment is Professional Computing. It’s been… interesting. At the start of the break for some reason I ended up working all night on getting one person’s work done from scratch and re-working another person’s. For the project we talk to a real client who we’re designing the system for and working in a self managed team of eight. From this project I’ve firstly gained insight into how teams functioned (though I feel that it’s a bit unrealistic as there isn’t as much of a repercussion if people don’t do their work) and I’ve also discovered I have more working knowledge than I thought I did. This weekend I spent a lot of time developing a graphing utility to graph data from a database.

I’ve also spent a bit of time over the past few weeks playing around with my recording equipment. The first project I completed a whole song of was a cover of John Mellencamp’s hit, Jack and Diane. Hit me up if you want to hear it. Other than that I’ve also been working on a few demos that I’ve written.

Another idea that I’ve been toying with changing my site over to a complete content management system that I can upload a portfolio of programming work I’ve done as well as my music. What do you, my (loyal?) readers think of that? Lastly, which do you want me to finish first, my Bob Dylan concert review or my OK Go concert review?

Again, don’t let me near your computers folks. If someone asked me how I thought I was going to die I’d say that if it isn’t from old age due to leading a very boring life it would be due to exploding computer parts.

Even after messing around the past two days my computer is still crashing and restarting. Last night I hunted around on the Internet a bit and there wasn’t much help to be found. So I switched off automatic restarts on crashes and get a STOP message. Google tells me that this stop message is most likely caused by faulty RAM. So I ran Memtest and lo and behold some errors started appearing. Initially I thought it was the most recent memory addition but that’s not it. None of the ram sticks individually recreate the issue. So I thought perhaps the computer is overheating due to the amount of dust inside. I bought a can of compressed air from Dick Smith and came home ready to have a crack and cleaning the insides.

This is where the fun begins. Plan was to blow air over offending dust, thus lifting it into the air, then suck it up with the vacuum cleaner. This does not work. Do not try this yourself. When the flammable compressed air gets sucked up into the vacuum cleaner it gets pushed through the hot hot engine. Thus causing the second explosion in a couple of months while I’ve been trying to fix computer equipment.

EDIT: Just to clarify, explosion was in vacuum cleaner not in computer. Nothing is broken, just a lot of smoke and a fast heart beat.

I really have no clue. Technical post ahoy. My computer has been slowly dying. During the inter semester break I bought a new hard drive with the intent of backing everything up before reformatting and reinstalling. After my computer resetting itself at random times while I was playing games today was the day. So I backed up the last of it and rebooted with my windows install disc in the drive, it gets started and first thing I do is erase the partitions. It would have been a good idea to switch the external backup drive off and unplug it. Instead I erased the partition table. Great. For those of you who have been following from home, this is not the first time I’ve done such a thing. This time was simpler though. There is no way I can now pimp this program enough: TestDisk. It scanned my hard drive and it fixed it. Wonderful. I’m pretty sure I shall be donating some money to them. So, if you too have Just accidently deleted a partition on your hard drive use that to fix it.

For those of you who are not nerds would you prefer I finish my OK Go review or my Bob Dylan review first? Both pretty awesome concerts, I’m just lazy.