Archive for January, 2009

So much for the economic downturn. I can’t help myself from spending money. I feel I ought to be saving for the looming catastrophe which is sure to come sometime this year, however the ease by which one can spend in the twenty first century is undoubtedly one of the technological wonders that has taken consumerism one step closer to perfection. One can either despise or embrace it. I for one am tempted continually to break out the plastic to purchase things that seem irresistible and all so alluring at the time, before any rational thought can dissuade the urge to gratify the departure of  hard earned coin, let alone examine the motivation behind the escapism of online shopping.

My latest expenditure to leave as rapidly as it came was music, to fill my hard drive space with the bits of data it so craves and I have way too many bytes to even contemplate why I even need so many memory platters – perhaps just for the sake of security or an ill conceived sense of security . I have filled a good part of it with electronica that can be found on the web if one looks hard enough. But my carbon emissions from this excess is a little extreme and I feel torn by the needlessness of it while enjoying the process of accumulating it. Perhaps the old adage of less is more is a truth I have trouble accepting. What it all boils down to is laziness. Hard drives are somewhat easier to manage than DVD, storage wise, but at the same time it is far from a green alternative especially when it is unnecessary. But One has to have a hobby and mine happens to be technology and geekiness. I could just sit around knitting, play sport or some other less sedentary activity but I have taken to the quest of invigorating my mind with the intricacies of technology while tinkering with it.

Well this hobby ain’t a cheap one, the last thing that saw my wallet shrink was the web store at http://www.emusic.com/ and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t stumbled upon it previously. Well I think I had but I recall that it didn’t have the content I was looking for, but searching again last night and I had another look. I was pleasantly surprised to find where all the Metal was!

Forget Bigpond and 7digital. This site kicks ass and it stirs the morbid curiosity of this metal head with thousands of albums to fill the empty platters of hard drive space with. I signed up for a 12 dollar subscription, it only has a subscription service but it appears to be fantastic value compared to the other mentioned sites. I get 30 downloads a month for a US$95 annual subscription fee, so it’ll work roughly as 3 albums a month  for 8 bucks per month. I was paying 8 pounds an album from 7digital so it definitely seems more attractive.

I also get 25 free downloads as an introductory offer, got ten left but I’ve added a couple more albums to my play list. And the best part is; they are DRM free! Can’t go wrong there 🙂

Australia Day is nearing an end and what that means is another week is beginning. I didn’t get all I planned on getting done this long weekend and another week will go by with my flat in a semi state of cleanliness. I wanted to get everything put away so all the bits and pieces were out of sight. I never did get around to initiating that desire except for a last minute dash to have some things out of the way. I did play around with my Hi-Fi rack for my desktop and I even sketched up a 3D  model of what it will look like. Not sure if it really looks that good but it is a hybrid rack I came up with from odds and ends found in Ikea and Bunnings. I found a couple of spice racks and some grille thingy in Ikea which will form the base and the first top layer and then I came across aluminium flat plate in Bunnings which forms the top surface and will be screwed to the spice racks to hold everything in place.

3D Hi-Fi Rack

After messing around cutting the aluminium flat I realised that I needed more so another trip to Bunnings this afternoon. I initially thought of only having one at each end to hold the Ikea grille into place but then I changed my mind and thought I’d have a series of flats on top instead.

Once I’d finished cutting the rest of the flats instead of cleaning up properly I proceeded to make some audio cables out of some antenna  75 ohm co-axial cable I had lying around and also with some RCA plugs I picked yesterday. My soldering job was pretty shocking but they seem to work, although I’m not sure if they made any improvement sound or if the sound is actually worse. I thought they did actually have some impact for the worse but I can’t be sure if that is merely because I made them and I didn’t pay hundreds of dollars on some audiophile super duper silver impregnated specials.

What is the fascination of which hair colour is the most appealing to the male aesthetic? It has to be the twentieth time I’ve read an article in the paper about this controversial piece of scientific research. And the unanimous decision is that brunettes have the choice pickings for sustained happiness in the marital sphere while Blondes make for excellent ethereal girlfriends, in other words they make for a good shag but not ideal to walk down the isle in holy matrimony with. More to the point, why is it that I find these trivial bits of useless information so entertaining because I keep reading these so called breakthroughs in research, no doubt progressing human evolution into loftier heights with the impact of greater sales in brown hair dye.

Perhaps I find these things intensely interesting because I find myself being attracted to brunettes rather than blondes, which is strange because it has only been recently that brunettes have been more appealing, where as in the past I would’ve called blondes the more sexier breed. I’m getting old and the biological clock is ticking and now I have the scientific understanding of why brunettes are so damn hot.  But if I were to be entirely honest I’m not impartial to some blonde ambition and whether your hair colour is white, red, blue or black I wouldn’t outright refuse a date on such superficial stereotypes of pigmentation. Call me an equal opportunist but I think all hair colours have merit, especially when the lights are low and….well you get the idea.

Anyway I’ve perhaps said all that can be said on hair colour. Oh. Me? Well I used to be blonde but my hair is slowly syncing with my attraction to the dark side. Well my mother has darker hair and I often….well I best leave discussions concerning the Oedipus complex to another time and place, preferably while I lay on a leather couch deep in a droning monologue while a professionally trained psychotherapist doodles in her notepad, bored shitless while looking at the clock, calculating how many more repayments are left on the BMW convertible, while the seconds tick in unison with syllables dribbling from my mouth.

Well being a reformed blonde I can say, without bias, that they have the most fun.

I’ve already come to the conclusion that this year will be much the same as last and it could be argued that the world is more or less in the same boat. There isn’t going to be dramatic changes across the globe , the same old same old, the repetitive forecast of doom and gloom, the economy collapsing and more of the ultra-violence that has become our staple diet of media entertainment, but for the time being it is not in the forefront of my mind. My mind is drawn into a more localised world view and that can be a not so good thing when the world shrinks into a tight little ball which constitutes entirely of my inner imaginings.

Invariably my imaginings begin to paint with crooked strokes the bleak picture of how accursed my state of affairs seem to be. It was today when I was battling another afternoon lull in wakefulness when I pondered the futility of what I was doing, staring at bridge pier levels and thinking that this task, a seemingly endless journey, unbearable in its repetitiveness is just another day’s work that has been around before and will repeat in another moment of space. It’s a tedious and monotonous task, checking and calculating a series of reduced levels that really have no importance to me other than the money it deposits into my bank account every fortnight. But having that pay cheque still doesn’t seem to take away the dreariness of doing something that I’ve done so many times before and that’ll come back again.

It seems trivial and it is but when it becomes a recurring nightmare the “joy” of working and being productive and a part of something begins to dissipate into the ether of wondering how much better it would be if…. There’s no gratitude when everyday seems like a prison sentence and the thought of just dying and never having to face the same eternity seems like paradise. But of course it is called work not because we are filling in our leisure time with something to do, but because it is a chore that we must do to get that money to pay off our debts and provide the little amusements to help us forget that if it wasn’t for our yearning and conditioning to have the latest consumer product, to buy our social status from X brand, then we probably wouldn’t have to spend the better of our lives doing the thing we so often despise and complain about and dread.

I’ve often wondered if I just stopped the charade, dropped out and became a bum, what difference would it make to my life? Would I be better or worse off by not having to abide by the enslavement of money and could I get by with a more simple lifestyle? Could I create an alternative life other than the one I find myself in? Perhaps these are just the musings of the disenchanted, the bitter words of defeat maybe.

Happy New Year! Today marks the passing of the first working day for the year and it didn’t get off to a good start. No siree! Another night tossing and turning not being able to sleep. I’m somewhat frazzled now but hopefully tonight will cure me of insomnia, although  I have no real reason to believe it’ll be any different tonight considering it is dreadfully hot here in ol’ Sydney town. In fact this year is proving to be difficult to get enough sleep. For some reason I just can’t get enough. The only good sleep was the last week of 2008 and then bang the new year came and out went sleep and in with my mind in the grip of mania that won’t give me wink until the morn. Well I can probably look forward to another tiring year if it is going to be this same hyper jabbery of restlessness. Oh well if I don’t make some lifestyle changes then can I reasonably expect the Sand Man to grace me with his magic dust?

Apart from that my head is up to its same old tricks, doing the same miles it has travelled countless times, as soon as the same old routine begins it jumps into gear with the tired worries that have no business entering into another year. Well I’m trying some REBT in defence and it is something I can use as armour against the thought processes that are hard-wired into the  fabric of my brain. The trick is not giving the beast an inch cause he’ll take a mile if I allow it. It has become such a bore, listening to the same anxieties that I can’t control so why put up with nonsense and why not just STOP THOUGHT! Do I need to spend my free time worrying about things that aren’t happening right now and that are only figments of my imagination? Imaginings that aren’t real, and only present because I create them so I feel bad and for no other reason than to muse the beast that feeds off the lowly sub terrestrial fungi that has festered for way too long unchecked.

Enough! Time to end the tape and put a new one into the cassette player. There! My unintentional New Year’s resolution. To change the tape.