travels...
Travelling through England and meeting with various Shipmates. Went to Manchester yesterday for the first time, and heading down to Bournemouth later today (Sunday).
I'm off...
This arvo I head off in the northern hemisphere direction. London via Vienna with Austrian Airlines.
Will update as I go, and be back on December 13th.
Went in the Black Dog Bush six hour Cyclogaine/Rogaine yesterday up at Chiltern. We did it on foot, but the bike option looked pretty good. It was good to be up out of the city in a part of Victoria I haven't visited for years, but the warm weather, blazing sun and numerous flies made for slightly trying conditions. The friendly `family' atmosphere and inclusiveness - of all levels of confidence and fitness - that I've encountered at rogaine events is very welcoming.
I looked at the results of the last rogaine we did at Mt Disappointment in October and it seems that our team got a very good score for doing just six hours (the full length of the event was 12 hours).
And on another note...Paul Schmelzer has linked to a great collection of weird and wonderful bicycles.
Flying off to the UK on Thursday.
iTunes opens in Australia
The iTunes Music Store is now available to Australians!
Not that I'm really one for downloading singles, but some of those audiobooks look tempting.
It was a hot night last night here in Melbourne and I got up in the wee hours, and for want of something to do, I downloaded and installed the 97MB 10.4.3 update for Mac OS X. There seem to be various horror stories of this update going wrong, but my computer seems ok, apart from having a startup disk that needs a repair (I thought I could perform the repair from Disk Utility in DVD-boot mode, but no luck in the immediate term).
Dons slightly nostalgic snob hat...
With the iPod culture well entrenched - a result of Apple's enormous marketing machine - I am often thinking dark thoughts about the way music is being distributed today, and the enormous oversaturation of the market in terms of ways of downloading singles (and, more irritatingly, ringtones, etc.). For me, the music listening experience is about having a disc in my hands (or, preferably in the disc player, with the liner notes in my hand), and sitting down to listen to the album in its entirety.
Nokia and EMI are joining forces to commandeer the Bluetooth interface to allow people to download music in [suitably equipped] cafes. Any way to grab a bit more money for a single...once you've downloaded it from the web, ripped from a CD (like - who does that???), or got from a friend, you can then download it to your phone all over again...
Never mind the reality that there is probably software that will transfer the music files to your phone. I guess the marketeers will tell you that it's the immediacy that matters - if the single is available to buy and download then and there then people will go for it, especially if it's only a couple of bucks. Quick Fix music is what it's about.
My first thought is usually that such facilities are no good for me as the kind of music I like, while not all being *out there*, is sufficiently off the beaten track enough to probably not be available through avenues such as a bluetooth music server in a cafe. Perhaps in my cynicism I underestimate the range.
