Blogs

The Economist has a report on digital nomads, sometimes known as techno-Bedouins. since it looks like I'll be heading back to Australia, I'll no longer be one of these :) perhaps whilst on short trips. it's been great for the past 4 years though, but I've been missing home and friends so it'll be good to have a base again. it's amazing how long you can live without a fixed address though. moving from country to country - hotels and short term rental apartments. most of my life is now on the internet - might sound strange, but it's a good place to backup your files, as well as posting dvd backups back home. I read the first article about Nomad Cafe and this rings true. in many places I've been to cafes and there've been people logged in to their laptops. in Jerusalem cafes you often hear Americans talking on skype to their family (I assume) back home. sometimes there's two people at the table facing each other, each having a conversation with someone online.

Labour movement mentions examples of virtual office companies where the employees are all mobile / working from home or cafes.

I've just been reading articles on the human network blog by Mark Pesce. all have been interesting, particularly the Unevenly Distributed : Production Models for the 21st Century where he talks about the death of television and film industries in their current distribution method. also mentioned were the examples of Ronda Byrne's online / streaming version of The Secret and the success it has brought her. as well as the "League of Peers" movie Steal this Film - Part 1 which is a documentary about file sharing and the troubles faced by Sweden's leading BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

another article I read last month (when I couldn't post to the site), was the Kevin Kelley article "1,000 True Fans" from his Technium blog.

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

just read about this on the toplap list :
Clojure was developed by architect / programmer Rich Hickey who has worked on projects such as scheduling, automation, election displays, fingerprinting, audio analysis, machine listening.

"Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection."

week1

I made a couple of flairs on facebook and sent to the girls

so I don't forget ... here's the events coming up at Uganda & Sira. I went to Music House today and bought some more Israeli / Jerusalem based music. the guy in the store told me about Uganda and Sira, a couple of places in Jerusalem where you can see / hear live electronic & experimental music.

Uganda myspace page

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Sira events :

this is great! I installed this greasemonkey script to import Facebook events into Google Calendar by P. Organisciak, so now it's easier to add events to the site! I'm not using the drupal events module any more as it had a problem creating thousands of repeating events (which should have ended), so I linked one of my google calendars - the aliak.com one - into the site instead. plus this way events are easier to import and people can use it easier with their own google calendar (if they have one). perhaps the drupal module works better now I've upgraded to version 5. but adding manual events is a pain - very time consuming which means I miss a lot of them. the google calendar allows me to add them simply from gmail as the emails arrive and now with a single click from Facebook also! I just add the url and adjust the text as I prefer. cool!

Art of Record Production Conference

Brisbane, Australia in 2007 and Lowell, Massachusetts in 2008

PRESS RELEASE – Feb 2008

The Art of Record Production Conference organised by London College of Music, TVU lecturer, Simon Zagorski-Thomas just seems to be going from strength to strength. In December last year it moved out of the United Kingdom for the first time when it was hosted by Professor Andy Arthurs, Professor Julian Knowles and Dr. Donna Hewitt at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia and in November of this year it will be hosted by Professor William Moylan at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The keynote speaker in Brisbane was Hank Shocklee who rose to prominence producing Public Enemy, has worked with artists as varied as Madonna, Peter Gabriel and Janet Jackson and who currently heads up his own New Media Entertainment company, Shocklee Entertainment. As well as academic papers on a wide range of subjects on and around the central theme of record production, the conference featured other industry speakers including Richard Lush (Beatles, Lalo Schifrin), Daniel Denholm (Tognetti’s Bach violin sonatas and partitas, Kylie), Pip Williams (Nightwish, Moody Blues), Mike Howlett (Martha and the Muffins, OMD) and Steve D'Agostino (Depeche Mode, John Foxx).

a video by Nam June Paik (RIP) - this would be fairly easy to do using isadora these days. though a different story if you consider how he made it!

Nam June Paik - Ryuichi Sakamoto; Replica, for keyboard Composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkjxG_k0VDo

http://www.spoems.com/tag_paik.html has a collection of his video works

I was checking out the NZ Audio Foundation website again today and came across a link from an email on the AF-l about funding from Damian from Frey. it's an interesting argument. I think Australia is similar to New Zealand in this way, but also at a glance I think New Zealanders have the creative support advantage over the Australians, or so it seemed to me at least, as they have MANY! support organisations helping the artists. will have to do some more research to see if my assumptions are founded.

right click to download the audio mp3 file

a sound walk through the old city of jerusalem

today I went to the western wall and left a note in the wall with my friend Angus' (RIP) name (this is what the Jewish people do - it's their holiest place being the last remnant of the Temple which was destroyed a couple of times) and then went to the Church of Holy Sepulchre (built over the spot where Jesus died so a holy spot for Christians) and lit some candles for him. and I went to Dome of Rock, one of the holiest places for Islam but because it's friday only Moslems are allowed in so I took a photo at the door. (this is the closest I've been able to get to Dome of the Rock - it's always closed when I go). I recorded video whilst walking but the camera was by my leg so most of it is of my legs walking on the stones, so I've extracted the audio. I felt so bad that I couldn't get home to Brisbane in time for his funeral. I've been thinking about him non-stop so I wanted to remember him and leave something for him in Jerusalem. if there is a God and he is close to this spot then I wanted to make sure he was looking out for Angus. I thought of other people close to me who'd passed away too, and lit candles for them too in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on my next visit. this walk was for Angus.

I always get a bit lost in the Old City. the market lanes and labyrinth starts looking the same and I often can't see above to get a sense of direction. so I tend to always go to the Wall first, then work my way in from there. today was the first time I found the quickest route to the Dome of the Rock - which is quite obvious in hindsight but I've always missed it and walked past. not knowing how to read Arabic has been part of the reason on other visits. the Christian quarter area is less marked too. some of the streets have recognisable names but I seem to miss the signs to the Church. today I was determined though and I had less offers from market stall owners to visit their shops. I went in the afternoon when most would be closing up soon. I was thinking of my friend the whole way, sometimes getting a bit teary.

the sound was recorded on a Nokia N95 8Gb phone - it was recorded along with video and I extracted the audio only later. I've left my mini-disc, microcassete recorder and microphone back home in Australia now so I carry less gadgets. I wondered how much disk space would be used up but it was less than 2Gb and I still have plenty left.

here's a flickr slideshow of the photos from the walk :
photos only

15/02/2008

jugglers in jerusalem's ben yehuda mall. my friend darren & late friend angus are both jugglers so I took this to show them. my timing was out a bit as I watched the guys juggle for a while then remembered to start filming.

08/02/2008