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World Out Watch

When I was nearing the end of university I posted about the major project, tackling a real-world solution, that we had to undertake in our final year. If I may be so vain as to quote myself, from what I wrote about our prototype demonstrations, seven months in to the projects;

Another team doing essentially the same thing as me, has only just managed to get a working server with PHP and SQL installed - which wouldn’t boot for their demonstration.

A toast. To the future of the information technology industry.

I saw one of the guys in that group the other day. He was in a shopping centre wheeling bins around. Admittedly it was the largest shopping centre in the area, and they were impressive bins… poor fellow.

Sometimes our education system fails dismally.

The future of the information technology industry is kept integral, for now anyway.

Ex Communicate

Send Away The Tarts

Last week I picked up the new Manic Street Preachers album, Send Away The Tigers.

I don’t know what’s up with that cover either.

The music however is excellent. You’re not supposed to compare new material with old efforts, but whatever. Most times, trying to sound like what you sounded like ten years ago fails very badly. But not with this record. It’s very akin to Everything Must Go, and that’s a good thing. It never reaches prior levels of greatness (could they be expected to match the heart and soul James put in to screaming out the desperate line, “I am the girl who wanted to be God!”?), but that’s okay by me, as the slightly more produced than usual rock/punk guitar-driven goodness makes up for it.

With the current wave of emo crud going around, the popularity of bland indie rock, and everyone from the Dixie Chicks to Green Day dragging political art through the mud, you may expect the Manic Street Preachers, who built themselves on eyeliner, militaristic outfits, and grating ideas of revolution, to be bound to fail. Yet they have managed to fit somewhere in the middle without conceding socio-political poetry and aggressive rhetoric.

My highlights on the album are AutumnSong, Underdogs (free download at Last.fm), Your Love Alone is not Enough which features Nina Persson from The Cardigans (YouTube clip below), and Rendition mainly for the line, “Good God, I feel like a liberal!”, heh.

A breath of fresh air in some dismal times when it comes to rock music. This album has been making me happy all week. You should check ‘em out.

Bob Evans != Josh Pyke

Last night I went out and saw the man whose hair is too big for his head, and whose head is too big for the rest of his body - Bob Evans. The ‘guys with acoustic guitars who rock out’ sub-genre does not impress me much anymore, but Bob Evans is something special.

It was quite different to last time I saw him at the Big Day Out, which was good and bad. The smaller venue meant the banter flowed, but also meant three drunk guys to my immediate right yelled out ‘Puck Defender‘, and ‘Animal‘ all night, which got pretty irritating. Evans made a joke about being mistaken for Josh Pyke by breaking out into Middle Of The Hill halfway through Stevie’s Song, and the drunk guys then added Middle Of The Hill to their list of heckles. Nothing like drunk attempts at recycling someone else’s jokes.

He played all but two of the tracks from Suburban Songbook as well as three songs from Suburban Kid, and Sister’s Wedding Day which is a b-side on the Don’t You Think It’s Time single.

And it was awesome. Bob Evans live is better than Bob Evans on CD.

(The support was Machine Translations, whose song Love On The Vine I heard on the radio a few years back, and really liked. But they were fairly boring, and didn’t even play the song I knew).

Shoppingcore

I’m really bad at any sort of shopping. That’s okay, I’ll figure it out when I need to. Unlike Tim, who needs know how to shop, but doesn’t. We had beer, chicken nuggets, and chocolate blocks for tea. Whatever. That’s an aside though. Last week we kicked through the shopping centre, and came up with a brilliant way of entertaining ourselves.

We’d assess people’s MySpazz page, based on a number of factors including the tightness of their pants or shortness of their skirts, their fringe length and hair colour, and their level of makeup. And while we did we’d drop all the words the scene kids use… we amused ourselves no end.

For a laugh, it’s also worth going up to a group of (ten or more) scene kids, and point out who in the group you think is least likely to be the other’s ‘top eight’ friends because they look the least like a tart. It works well if you say ‘lol’ and ‘MySpace-X-core’ at some stage during the interchange. You should try it.

Will We End With a Positive Jam?

On the weekend I watched the last parts of JTV - about eight or so songs, and the only good one was Stevie Wonder’s Superstition.

It looks like bland is the new black…

I saw the clip for the Arctic Monkeys’ Brianstorm, and it looked pretty much the same as the clip for My Humps by The Black Eyed Peas (which I saw the other week, after wanting to understand the jokes in Alanais Morissette’s parody).

It further enforced in my mind the trend of alternative and popular music coming together. And that made me wonder if somewhere around the year 2000 we had a pivot point. So about now we can expect grunge/hard rock music to start flailing (cf. any music featuring singers with long fringes and/or eyeliner). And by 2010 we can expect simple synth-pop and pub rock to saturate the next decade. Then from 2020 onward we can expect ten years of singer-songwriters, followed by a decade of acoustic pop and happy drugs. And then a decade where pop rock implodes in on itself and disappears completely. And then, over the proceeding fifty years, we’ll go from songbirds, to gospel choirs, to classical music, to singing families, before finally, music is seen as frivolity, and rarely heard (relatively speaking) outside tribal meetings.

Other than future history, I also learnt from JTV that no matter what, Robbie Buck is always Missy Higgin’s biggest fan.

Sports and Math

It’s safe to say that our indoor cricket team is a bit up and down, performance-wise. Last week we played our best game of the season, winning comfortably by 40 runs. This week we lost by over 100.

Our captain has been away the last two weeks, so I have been filling in. Along with the ball bouncing off the net thing; counting overs in my head, and remembering how many overs each person has bowled is a struggle for me. So my captaincy ends up a little interesting. Or bad, however you want to look at it, you know.

Tonight we bowled first, and conceded over 50 runs after four overs. The other team didn’t take long to get their eye in, and it was soon raining copious amounts of fours and sixes. I saved my own bowling for the end (I had it planned before we started and changing that would have lost me completely), but probably shouldn’t have. Not that I managed to do anything amazing anyway, what with our wicketkeeper having given up actually taking the ball, and just getting out the way and waiting for the rebound of the back net (looking at you Sean). Though I did figure out a new way to stop batsmen scoring runs - bowl around the wicket at their legs - which works alright. They ended up making 200.

My little brother and I went in first, and sacrificed ourselves to try and get us off to a good start, but the other team called the bluff and used a couple of their good bowlers up front (do you like how that made the fact that we made only 11 runs sound so heroic?). I think we ended up making about 35 altogether.

(Ladies, please skip the next paragraph).

I got hit and felled at one point, and it ached for ages. I had a quick check though and it appears we’re all intact.

Our real problem is our fielding. It’s really bad. We gotta work on that.

…Friends Forever

The other week I was trying to think whether or not I had been sent my university graduation certificate yet. I didn’t go to the graduation ceremony, because that sounded like the most boring thing anyone could ever do, and they were going to send my degree certificate in the post. After (unsuccessfully) wracking my brains for a while and (also unsuccessfully) sifting through the two years of papers on my desk, I came to the conclusion that I had in fact received the certificate, and mum had taken it and put it somewhere. A rash conclusion, but for the fact I could picture the thing perfectly in my head, as well as the stiff, off-white folder it was delivered in. Despite thinking it might be a good thing not to lose track of, I promptly forgot about it.

And now I’ve just been delivered another one. It looks exactly the same as the one I previously pictured in my head, and came in the same stiff, off-white folder. Now I’m doubting whether I really did receive the first one. I might be going crazy, but after a four year association with the uni, I’d say it’s more likely they who have messed up.

Plus I’ve lost the second one now anyway, so it’s all kind of moot.

(I guess what I’m trying to say is, that after graduating practically, graduating technically, and graduating actually, I’ve now graduated aesthetically. Possibly twice. I think I’m done now).