China Blocks Typepad, Prompts Weblog Blackout

What is the world coming to? .. It’s funny how world events like this (and others.. oh the others) usually don’t get too much of a response out of me, but some of the stuff that’s been happening in regards to censorship and the weird, skewed control of information just doesn’t sit right with me.

The idea of the internet where chunks of it are not allowed just seems really strange, it’s like going into a museam and all the exhibits on natural disasters and the crimes of humanity are off-bounds, they’re behind a locked door (possibly with guards armed with rifles) .. I mean, the people are obviously aware that this content *does* exist so why completely ban it? I’m not sure of the legal implications of viewing this content from china but i refuse to believe that it’s helping ANYONE .. i mean typepad .. of all the sites they banned a blog site (and i am sure there are more) .. i mean why don’t they ban the horrible sites like.. oh god.. i can’t even think of any!

Banning of information. This can’t sit well with anyone can it?

I mean, relative to my weird spot in the universe, my exposure to china (and things chinese) is the takeaway food we occasionally get and the glimpse of chinese culture that we might see on travelling shows, and from what i’ve seen (which is limited i know) the chinese culture seems to be vibrant and beautiful, so then what prompts the government to filter information out.

Do they filter phone calls as well? Every single phone-conversation leaving the country has a monitor listening to the conversation, and as soon as certain topics (such as who said what at typepad) come up the monitor bleeps over whoever is speaking?

Or personal letters? Does all mail get opened, read by the gov’t and re-sealed.. i mean i’m all for the echelon approach, whereby the gov’t simply monitors everything and can use this information in a retro-spective manner, but a pro-active filtration of information, of web-sites in particular. It just seems like something got messed up somewhere. It’s like when the internet first got discussed by the chinese government someone swapped all the documentation about it with propaganda: “you will not trust the internet, the internet is bad, the internet can and will destroy your control (repeat until fade)”

Okay, i’m going to stop showering with my 2c’s.

Yesturday was possibly one of the hardest uni days i’ve ever had, especially when i wasn’t even on campus. Yesturday i had my list of tasks to do, my goal to reach, a word/page count that i was striving for .. but it was all just such slow going. Every paragraph seemed like hours of time, every word seemed to be coming out at such a snail-pace. I kept on finding myself going back and re-wording previous sections (which i suppose is good, because this will have to happen eventually).

I’m assuming that it wasn’t the wall that i hit, more of a hump, because if that was the wall i’ve hit it approximately 6-8 months too early :P but it’s so weird in that i have no way to describe why i was having such a hard time.. was it just a bad day? or was i stressed about something else? I’m hoping that today will be better, even though today i have to be finished up earlier.

Already i’m starting to feel the impact that this sort of work can have on your life, any time spent away from my workstation that’s not important (like paying work) instills in me such guilt! Even after a long day of studies a couple of hours out living life seems to almost be horrific, my head’s telling me that i have to get back to work, what am i doing, you’re wasting time.. it can’t be healthy.

I’m hoping to be able to read back on these entries in a couple of months (when i’ve got my writing-style a bit more refined for academia *crosses fingers*) and laugh about how i was so easily stressed early at the beginning..

So anyway, i’m sorry that content wise this place has started hitting a wall, that i’ve been ignoring certain aspects, i promised a new layout and it’s been sitting in the same stagnant place for ages but eventually it will surface.

oh and happy belated bidday to michelle!

As a complete reversal from last weekend i managed to spend every night this weekend at home.

It was sort of weird, friday arvo i got home from work and just fell asleep on the couch, i remember waking up sometime later on to see that i had an sms from mike saying to come to his new place for a house-warming, i then promptly fell asleep again. I think i must have woken up sometime around 9pm and had no idea what was going, i think i did some reading or something.. then fell into bed.

Saturday i spent rehersing (i got a new drum-stool .. it’s the most amazingly, comfy thing i have ever seen!) .. which ended up around 4-5pm, and then like the night before, i passed out on the couch. I woke up sometime around 8pm and then suddenly remembered that i had to go to mike’s place for a housewarming.. but then after standing up realised that it was saturday night and not friday night.

Anyway.. my sunday was much more controlled, spent most of the day studying ..

anyway.. today is going to be un-bearably hot (41 degrees) so i’m going to get going to uni and hang out in the a/c.

I had one of those huge weekends, you know, the ones where you wake up and you’re already dressed ready for the upcoming night, then fall asleep, then repeat.

Friday night: I had scored these tickets to the opening (re-opening) of a club/bar in the city, my boss had done the re-branding of the place and it was quite exciting, i had a handful of VIP tickets.. as soon as we turned into the street, we saw the HUGE queue, each and every one of them waving their own VIP tickets, and i knew the night was doomed.
So anyway, we (em, amy, jen, daev, nic, zoe) headed off to this nice lil bar (sorta swish, sorta not too swish) where we proceeded to down various cocktails “i’d like one of them, one of them, 2 of them.. oo oo.. and one of them” .. after them and a couple of beers em yanked us home (*sigh*). I really wanted to stay out longer, but she was driving and there wasn’t much i could say.

Saturday night: Blair’s 21st. Great night, good to see a lot of people i hadn’t seen in a while, the place was PACKED. Mike+Ant performed this joy lil song/piece for blair (instead of a speech, the sneaky devils) which i thought was possibly the coolest birthday present i had ever witnessed. I suppose it says something special when someone’s willing to do something like that for you, i remember for my 21st Em had prepared a DVD collage piece for me, with all these old photos.. I suppose it’s all about the effort.
Anyway, after a couple of beers Em was tugging at my shirt, and once again because she was driving it was time to go (*sigh again*).

Sunday night: Melange show at the Newport!.. WOOO.. for AGES i’ve wanted to play this venue, true it was an early-nighter (closing at 10pm), and we were on first (7pm).. and it was empty (except for my bigger sis and her kids+husband) .. but we sounded it great, it felt great, i had a shit-load of fun. The place sounded like the rosemount, up on the stage anyway, so everything we played just sounded terrific. I was told later by some mates (thank you rob for all the kind compliments btw) that it sounded damn good out the front-of-house too (yus) .. anyway.. it’s getting to 2am, i have to go to work really early tomorrow.. i should go.

open all your mp3’s yada yada (all 3500) into winamp, randomize list.. show the 1st 20:

1. Bad Company – Spider (4:48)
2. J Majik – Hypnotizin (Futurebound & Recall) (2:19)
3. Norah Jones – Nightingale (4:12)
4. Four Tet – She Moves She (4:41)
5. Charlie Parker – Bongo Bop (2:46)
6. On The Virge – Invasion of the Ants (6:09)
7. LTJ Bukem – Undress Your Mind (7:42)
8. Massive Attack – Spying Glass (6:18)
9. Four Tet – Hilarious Movie of the 90’s (3:29)
10. Sweep – Abstraction (5:27)
11. GC-161 – She’ll Be There (4:22)
12. Dom & Roland – Sky Spirit (5:55)
13. A Perfect Circle-3 Libras (Feel My Ice Dub Remix) (4:31)
14. A Perfect Circle – Lullaby (2:01)
15. Limp Bizkit – Livin it Up (4:23)
16. Refused – Bruitist Pome #5 (1:25)
17. Rage Against the Machine – Killing in the Name (5:14)
18. Smoke City – Underwater Love (3:50)
19. John Coltrane – Moments Notice (9:09)
20. The Tea Party – Alarum (4:58)

Yesturday was a long exhausting day. From 9 until approximately 7pm i was helping with work stuff, read: Moving to our new kick-ass Office!

Until about 1-2pm it was just packing up, ripping up flooring, dragging shit down stairs, loading it onto the truck, then from 2-5 it was dragging all that crap back off the truck into our new place. Then from 5-7 it was connecting all the computers, wiring up the network cable, fiddling around with stuff.

It was the first time i had seen the place and wow .. it’s SO freakin’ cool. Much much MUCH larger than our old office. Two main studio’s which have a wall gap allowing each room to see into each other, heaps more deskroom than before.. not only that but our new 1TB fileserver arrived as well as a new G5 (which means the G4 900MHz Powerbook gets handed down to me!)

Ahh .. happy days. It was really exciting to look around and see how happy everyone looked, seeing them just imagine how great this place will be, especially in a couple of weeks when we’ve completely settled down and made it our own.

I must admit, upon initially starting work at this place about 4-5 months back, i was a bit hesitant, but I have to say that it has pulled through .. big-time. The potential of this place just grows by the day. The boss is there 150%, the other staff are really enthused, everyone just seems to be “lets keep on heading higher”, hopefully some new large clients are coming in.. ahh.. it’s exciting to be there!

So what does work entail for me for a while? Setting up the fileserver, setting up the laptop to work nicely in my corner (should i dual-screen: 15″ Wide LCD + 19″ CRT or just use the 19″ CRT monitor by itself?) and working on a couple of projects.

Anyway.. back to uni work.

So i finally got sick and tired of the fact that the last 12 comments made to this site were trying to get me to buy viagra. Not anymore, thanks to MT-Blacklist – A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin – which i recommend all other MT users should download and install (and if ur lucky like me, the installation will be super quick and painless) …

So what does this mean for you guys out there? nothing really. Just means if u happen to have a legit comment about viagra or vi@gr@ or anything like that (see: pr0n) .. u might get a funny error message, advising that the content of your comment was *dodgy*

On-to the daily musings..
Just after 2-3 weeks of having mike live here with Amy and I, he’s got to move on. The reasons for his move are totally acceptable and if I were in his boat, the same thing would probably happen. Basically what happens is mum works in the country, only coming here for term-break (for 2 weeks) .. so until that time mike is free to do what he wants, but then that fortnight comes up and mike finds that he’s basically living in this house with a different family.. which is pretty weird and awkward.. in fact he’s quite lucky that a new place popped up for him to move to. This way he’ll be living closer to uni, get more room to move and make his own (really make his own, as opposed to being limited to a bed-room i suppose)..

I must admit though that when he told me i was a bit saddened, but was aware that something like this was going to happen sooner or later.

So anyway, to Mike! Hope you enjoy living in nedlands (or is it Dalkieth?) .. Amy & I will miss you .. maybe this way we’ll stop smoking so many cigerettes :P

Over the last 4 months the designer within me, which i must remind all is a small, midget with webbed-feet, has been getting a taste of good design practices. Not just work but also in my broad daily reading ..

Unfortunately for me getting a good taste of design won’t have any huge, life-altering affects on my site because a) even though i have a good sense of design (i think) i don’t have any of the skills to apply that out through my fingertips b) i’m still learning (as i feel everyone is) and the fact that everyone has different opinions on good practice means that an idea that i initially thought was great will turn out to be a dud in a week or a month, whatever.

This second point is hammered home for me especially in the contrast from my working life to my studying life to my personal net-active life. The ideals coming from a physical medium design studio, sifted through a content-is-king, engineering style world back through the equation of content-is-king but the use of standards can still make said content appealing in a universally acceptable, presentable way! So where do i sit? I have no idea.
You can’t please everyone, but you shouldn’t taylor to a specific demographic, so where do the circles lie?

As much as i’d like to think my site is all about content, it isn’t. I don’t really offer anything except what i type here in my entries, and i’m quite sure that because my scope of content shifts from side to side like some small boat in a storm i’m not too capable of keeping a steady audience.

Anyway, i’m going to stop rambling, i was meant to comment on how i think a new layout is coming soon, and with that a total new method of accessibility .. i’ll be posting initial designs and that to the Phobic Designs forum, which you should all check out.

Hope you have had a great long-weekend, those aussies out there, and for everyone else.. be good to your mother.