An overriding hatred of planes and airports

Has fuelled this post. That hatred keeps me conscious while waiting in lines, going through customs, performing stupid security theatre movements, waiting in seats, standing in more lines, raging at stupid bovoid humans unable to get the hell out of the way, flying, eating horrible reconstituted synthesised microwaved refrigerated food, being unable to sleep, landing, waiting for more cattle to get the fuck out of the aisle, and then escaping to Singapore airport, home of free internet and XBox 360.

The last couple of weeks has been nuts. I haven’t blogged for ages. Been prolific with the work and art and design, but nothing has actually made it out into the web. I’m now on a 3 week holiday in Vietnam with Rach though, so I hope I’ll be able to give j.com a little love in between sleeping, eating, and not sitting at my desk for 12 hours at a time.

Gig last Friday was fantastic. I absolutely killed it and incidentally didn’t spill any conductive liquids on my laptop. Photos on inthemix seem to indicate that I don’t ever smile when I’m playing, but I’m having a blast, promise.

Rock.

Movie Reviews With More Hatred: Ash Karreau Returns

There’s something great about watching movies and calling it “work” (or at least “research”). If not for the VJ thing, I think I’d want to be a film reviewer. Except of course the interweb’s best reviewer has started writing on the 16mm Shrine again.

Ash Karreau is the Mark Driver of film review, an ironic ball of angry, politically incorrect racism and sadistic narcissism. Here are the first two sentences of his comeback review:

Like Seth Putnam of Anal Cunt, I like drugs and child abuse. Unfortunately, the closest I can come to the latter is punching my underage girlfriend in the stomach after unprotected sex.

From this quote you can probably already tell if you’ll enjoy his writing. Movie reviews are about figuring out what you want to watch. You find a reviewer who likes similar things, then you can go to see movies they like, because you’ll probably like them too. Ash hates basically everything though, so it’s a rather novel method of movie selection. If the things you hate are similar to the things he hates, then you go see the movies in which the things he’s hating are things you’ll actually kind of like. Umm. I think that’s how it works. Anyway, he’s written possibly the best film review ever, so read the 16mm Shrine.

The Update O Updates: Blog Birthday, Re-flatmatination, Death, Birth, Python, Work, Play, Sleep

I seem to lie a lot on blogs. Not about things which have happend, but often about things which I intend to do. I intended to take photos of my poor beer-corroded Thinkpad, I intended to write up the gig, I really did, but there has been so much life getting in the way, and now I have another site to write on that people actually read, well the old faithful actual all-about-me honest to blogness Jaymis.com just seems to take a bit of a back seat.

I thought that the beer gig incident was a bit of a karmic prod, a “you’re not invincible, stop acting like you are or you may get slapped” kind of thing. It turns out that I was wrong, that was a “pay attention, here comes stuff” prod. Now I’m out the other side of that stuff, I’ll try to recall what’s been going on:

Eddie and Jade have returned from almost a year away, shattered our serenity, trashed the house, stirred up dust, made an incredible mess, got everyone drunk, dropped gingernut biscuits into their Gin n Tonics, and generally disturbed the crap out of the natural order of things. It has rocked.

My python licence arrived. Soon afterwards I arrived at the breeder’s house with Rach and Eddie, and not long after that we arrived back home with a 6 month old Centralian Carpet Python, a.k.a. Morelia Bredli, a.k.a. Bredli. He was quickly dubbed Irwin by the house, bit me a couple of times and then set about settling into his new home.

Then Eddie’s dad Howard returned to Paris from Nigeria, got sick with Malaria and ended up in intensive care. Ed prepared to fly to Paris.
Then Jade’s (flatmate-Jade, not ex-Jade) brother Aaron was mortally injured when he fell down a waterfall on Hinchinbrook Island. Jade flew to Townsville with her family. Ed stuck around. Howard got better. Aaron died. Jade had to organize the funeral. Eddie had to move Aaron’s gear out of his house and into our garage.

Amidst all of this, Irwin has settled in beautifully. He’s now a very placid, inquisitive little python, and everybody lubbs him. We managed to get through the feeding process reasonably easily, and last weekend he shed his skin to an exstatic crowd of Rach, Jude and I. Several hundred photos were taken. Highlights are here.

Coxy’s birthday BBQ was last weekend. Caught up with loads of the old crowd. Great time. He is a proper doctor now with his going to sleep extremely early and driving of hotted up Mini Cooper.

My Sister is having another baby, they’re due in April. Congratulations Breebs! Drey has also turned 2. He is super awesome cute o rama, well behaved, friendly, talkative, active, funny… basically the best baby anyone has ever seen. I hope Brie and Dan’s second one isn’t the hellspawn of the pit everyone is predicting that karma will deliver to them.

I’ve just turned my long lost Yahoo! account into a Flickr account so I can order some moo mini cards. 100 little awesome cards with photos and words on them. US$20 and free shipping until the 15th of October. Wundershoen.

Hopefully the world is back to a reasonable pace now, so I should be able to keep up with multiple sites at once. We shall see.

Jaymis.com’s 6th birthday was on the 26th of September. I’d say 6 in website years is a little like 23 in human years. You just want to ignore it and get your life going smoothly.

Elements:6 Part 1: Preparation

Dave’s gallery - SmugMug - segwist : Elements:6 Part 1: Preparation - contains the last photos of my Thinkpad Pre- beer electrolysis.

Elements:6 was a great gig, despite my performance being the worst of my life. The day was going beautifully until I met up with Rach in the Valley and locked the keys and my laptop in the car. This should have been a sign for me to go home, get into bed and pull the pillows over my head. I didn’t, and my laptop paid for it.

Full writeup soon (with pictures of corroded motherboard chips) on CDMotion, but for now my quest for python (that’s snake, not programming language) and trying to extract data from clients has left me underslept and underworked.

Things what which that have done happened

It’s slightly too late to be thinking up intelligent titles, and Driver has fixed his site and is writing in a legible format again. He still hasn’t got an RSS feed, so you have to either keep checking back at his page, or use the stopgap feed which I created with clever but ugly service FeedYes.

Read driver people. You really should, start here, here, here, here, here and here. I did, and now I do, and shall continue to do. I also bought his book, read it once and then mailed it off to Dr Dave to read. That was about 3 years ago. He still has it, and is apparently going to send it back.

I’ve been busy. So busy I was unable to wiggle my fingers at a keyboard for long enough to update this site. I just looked and it’s been a month. Wow. I have managed to do some updating on another site though, so since then on CreateDigitalMotion we’ve seen:

• Regular Posting Returns Soon. In the Meantime: Miscellany
• Digital Photo Management: Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 Review
• VLOBLIVE’s Tips for Sending & Receiving Big Files
• Resolume 2.4 Beta Public Release
• Pimp My Photonbomber: Projection Van and Site Specific Production from France
• Photon Bombing: Outdoor Portable Projection Howto
• Enough Megapixels: When Older and Cheaper is Better
• Shooting Objects in Boxes: DIY Lightbox and Antigravity Chamber
• Christmas Bauble Lens: Ghetto 360° Panoramic Video
• Submerged Shooting: DIY Underwater DV Camera Housing
• Pre-produce on Paper: DIY Planner includes storyboard and script-nerd templates
• Better quality projection over longer wires: S-Video to CAT5 Baluns

We’ve also been to the Eels and DJ Shadow. Both at the Tivoli, both incredible shows. Had Rach’s birthday, I was particularly proud of my presents of Dance Mat Controller for the XBox and a canvas print of Mr Nibbles (pictured below).

Now: I’ve got clients paying invoices, other clients giving me resources, everything is rock, so maybe I’ll be busy enough not to update for another month.

Flatter me sincerely

I suppose as I’ve spent most of my web-writing time firmly in E/N and personal-blog-navel-gazing territory I haven’t produced much stealable content. Although I have heard of people writing blogs based on someone else’s life and imagery, I suppose I’m not quite attractive, female, or naked enough to have my life appropriated.

So it’s with a little trepidation, a slightly wry smile and a sigh at all the future watermarking and EXIF tagging I’m going to do, that I notice the similarity to my Intervalometer Article this page on QJ.net bears.

So it’s not quite wholesale plagiarism. The writer has paraphrased large chunks of the article (blockquoting the part too complex to reword), and mirrored my original images on their site. I’m aware that this is the internet and blogs (CDMu and CDMo included) rely on linking and editorialising for a large chunk of their content, however there’s a difference between blogging about an article and wholesale appropriation for google rank. Looking around QJ.net, it’s clear that they’re not just stealing content through RSS feeds as a huge number of spam blogs seem to be doing. There’s a bit of selection going on, a little bit of appropriation, a little bit of plagiarism. It’s hard to be really unhappy about it as these ripoff sites will never be as popular or successful as those which do the real work, who do the research, have the creativity and write about their experiences.

The lost potential these minds contain does sadden me a little. If these people just used the brains sitting idle within their skulls rather than relying on others to do the thinking for them, imagine how much more incredible stuff the world would contain.

Then again, I wonder how many of them would turn out to be inventive child molestors, mass murderers or advertising executives. Perhaps it’s better they labour in mediocrity.

Mi Elemento

I VJ’d Elements:5 (no link or photos yet) on Friday night. Fantastic gig, huge lovefest for The DRi and Kris of D-Ko for putting this on.

/Edit: Elements:5 photos are online at ITM. Damn those visuals were hot, I would like to find the VJ and touch him all over.

Saturday was the most excellent recovery ever: Yum Cha with Rach, Jum, Krissy, Shelly, and Rowley, Dead Man, Sensible Soccer 2006 (taking Jum and I back to about age 10), Cars (again), Canadian Club and Coke, Pizza, Sleep. Fantastic day.

Sunday Rach and I wasted cleaning the living hell out of our garage. I swear I’m becoming my parents, I used to hate cleaning and yardwork, now I have - of my own accord - spent an entire Sunday sanitizing a room which had been annexed by the geckos. I even thought of new tasks, like setting up a compost bin and raking up the layer of dead leaves from around the house to seed said compost bin.

WHAT HAVE I BECOOOOOOOOOOOME!

In slightly less insane news: MediaMonkey! If you use Windows and care even a little bit about your music listening, then go, now, and download this incredible program. I’ve been excitedly messaging and emailing people about it all afternoon, so I’ll just compile those gibbering messages here and let the world sort them out:

UberJaymis: jum
UberJaymis: http://www.mediamonkey.com
UberJaymis: holy freaking awesome
UberJaymis: so. much. customization.
UberJaymis: I think it may be killing itunes.
uberdeimos: ohhhhh
uberdeimos: auto volume compenstation
UberJaymis: this program is incredible
UberJaymis: it’s got massive scripting, and lots of scripts have been written for it.
UberJaymis: so for instance it can auto-rate songs for you, depending on how often you play them.. and songs you skip before they finish get rated lower.
uberdeimos: whats the tag lookup like do you think
UberJaymis: you can edit tags within the program, or it can get tags from amazon.com
uberdeimos: those things make me wary sometimes
UberJaymis: it’s all editable though
UberJaymis: so you’ve got full control.
UberJaymis: I just added a couple of scripts so now I’ve got a “most played albums” bit in the library, which, you guessed it, shows the albums I’ve played most
UberJaymis: and the number of times I’ve played tracks within that album.
UberJaymis: initial impression - a bit complicated, but prettymuch everything I’ve ever wanted within a music app.
UberJaymis: check this - “magic nodes” are like smart playlists but even smarter: http://students.washington.edu/~shmerkin/magic_nodes/examples.htm
UberJaymis: ooooh faaaaaaark. just made one which shows the highest rated artists by average rating.
uberdeimos: sounds like you need to give it some time to come up with the corret stats
UberJaymis: it imported all the stats from itunes, and it does so from winamp too :)

Jaymis: man
sushi: jaymis
Jaymis: have you used MediaMonkey?
sushi: never
Jaymis: holycrap
sushi: was ist es?
Jaymis: http://www.mediamonkey.com
Jaymis: go. now. download.
Jaymis: killer app
Jaymis: everything I’ve wanted in a media player
Jaymis: customizable like hell.
Jaymis: scriptable, lots of scripts.
Jaymis: it can do stuff like automatically downrate songs if you skip them all the time.
Jaymis: lots of internal tagging functionality, you can import tags from amazon straight within the program.
Jaymis: also has this awesome script: http://students.washington.edu/~shmerkin/magic_nodes/examples.htm - like smart playlists but even better..
Jaymis: so now I’ve got my library showing my most played albums (with the number of tracks played), top rated artists (with their average rating)..
sushi: wow
sushi: sounds crazy
Jaymis: totally incredible
Jaymis: AND it imports stats and ratings from itunes
Jaymis: synchs with ipod
sushi: so…you like this application?
sushi: im feeling some positive vibes
Jaymis: just a tad
Jaymis: this is what I’ve been wanting forever.
sushi: more than a smoking monkey?

Email To Rainer - We’ve talked about music player functionality for a long time

http://www.mediamonkey.com

FUCKING INCREDIBLE!!! Everything we wanted in a media player. Scriptable, edits tags within the app, synchs with ipod, IMPORTS ALL YOUR RATINGS AND PLAYCOUNTS FROM ITUNES!! keeps track of which tracks you skip. By default it’s pretty normal, albeit customizable to hell. With just a couple of scripts I’ve got it:

Able to prompt me for a rating if a song plays through and isn’t rated
Magic Nodes (smart playlists basically) showing Top Rated Artists, Most Played Albums, also everything that normal smart playlists can do.

It also has super-advanced stuff (which I haven’t tried yet), like this:
http://mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7961
=========================
The purpose
The whole point is that most of us have a lot of tracks in our library that we never listen.
We usually listen to whole albums or generate some auto-playlists and we listen to them all the time.
This script works like an AutoDJ. If enabled it will add a track “recommended” from Last.FM everytime the playback of the last track in the Now Playing List starts.

How it works
When the playback of the last track in the Now Playing List starts this script will ask a list of related Artists from Last.FM. It will then randomly pick a related Artist that exists in your library and ask from Last.FM the list of his top tracks. It will then play a random suggested track, as long as it exists in your library. If it can’t find such a track it will play the most High Rated track of the specific Artist that exists in your library. Finally if it cant find anything (or if your tracks not accessible) it will play a random track from a default playlist of your choise
=========================

Fricking crazy. There’s plenty of Party Shuffle functionalities, it has “Auto DJ” by default, but there are also scripted ones which go more in depth, give tracks higher weighting if they haven’t been played recently, or if they’ve been added recently etc.

Really really really seriously awesome stuff. Get it the hell now.

CreateDigitalMotion should be launching tomorrow. Hurrah.

Equal parts slackness and rockingness

First up: My BCD2000 Review on CDM was just picked up by Gizmodo - BCD2000 Mix & Scratch DJ/VJ Controller Reviewed (Verdict: Good, Mostly). Yay Gizmodo, yay me. Mostly yay me of course, I wrote the damn thing, they just made some pithy comments. Aaah Gawker media crew, you make the best pithy comments in the blogosphere.

I’ve been.. Busy. That’s probably the best way to put it. CDM is plugging along nicely, we’ve almost finished all of our template stuffing around and are ramping up to launch CreateDigitalMotion very soon. Peter added the CreateDigitalMotion forums last night, so I will be heading on in there and talking to people or whatever. ABOUT VISUALS.

Did a little photography on Tuesday night with the Dave and Leo of Segue. Check out my skills coming to Brisbane street press near you. I’ve got so much photography needing to be put online I think it’s paralized my brain, hence the lack of basically everything, aside from strange friday afternoon graphics tablet doodlings.

Just ramping down some visual work for Tom in Austria. Plenty of kitschy stuff but one piece I’m quite proud of that I may be uploading soon.

Musically - I had quite a bit of success adding Acrylic Records to the CDM ad rotation, several hundred downloads of the Acrylic Sampler. Because of this we’re releasing the Musiq for Pleasure album Soultime for free public download. This will have a lovely site to go along with it eventually, but for now a bare directory of files will have to suffice. Standout tracks go like:
Intergalactic Mystery
Iziah Quire
Tongue Catching Lizard
Mack N Cheese
Monkeyforest Road
No Tomorrow

While we’re on a roll, Dave has pointed to the Briztronix albums being available online for free as well. Eeeeexcellent.

Funny: It is what you are going to eat at the dinner table

In the last couple of days I’ve been to both Tim Minchin and Daniel Kitson (again). Both were fantastic and rocked me out in their own special ways. Tim Minchin was a great surprise, after seeing him close the Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala with his song Canvas Bags I decided that he’d be worth checking out, but it seems I just wasn’t prepared for the pure talent sluicing over my exposed nerves.

It’s not even raw talent. This is talent which has been obviously refined over many years of practice, stage work and possibly flagellation. His stage persona is one of the most refined I’ve seen. Augmented with excellent songs, amazing piano playing, a little crowd-participation (from an excellent crowd) and just the right amount of mood lighting and smoke, this was one of the best comedy shows I’ve seen for a long time. We walked out with massive smiles and I immediately bought his live album, which I’ve had in my head ever since.

Daniel was last night and I took along a proper posse of punters. As expected he rocked me out, but as I’d seen this show before it was tempered by a little knowing as I knew what shape the night would take. He seems to speak a little faster when he’s in a well-rehearsed bit - possibly so as not to let the stutter get a toe into his carefully constructed sentences - but they’re so good, and the digressions, reminiscences so much fun that even a second time I came out with cheeks hurting from too much smiling.

Icing on the cake was running into a gaggle of old workmates from DarkBlueSea, along with some of their new crew (Now including Rhi! Whoo!)

In amongst all of this we’ve had some problems with CDM’s webhost 1and1. They decided that the site was getting popular enough that they could move the site without any prior notice and hold it hostage on an incredibly slow server, despite the fact that we were using 1/10 of allocated bandwidth and not a causing a particularly high server load. I think their plan was to make Peter pay for a dedicated box. We instead decided to move the site to Site5, my favourite host inna world. Setup the account last week, did all of the mirroring and database stuff and then redelegated last night.

That’s when the badness started, the WPG2 plugin (used for all blog images on the site) stopped working. It took me a large chunk of last night and this morning to fix, information on such can be found on this WPG2 forum thread.

Everything seems sorted now, so it’s back to business as usual. After eating too much coffee and date loaf on Monday night I decided to rearrange my studio at 11:30pm. So right now business as usual is cleaning up, tweaking my workspace and figuring out what’s next on my list of cool stuff to do. Possibly playing with and reviewing my new BCD2000, or setting up my midi sax to trigger visuals.

Or maybe I should finish installing programs on my new computer…

Or…

James Loveday: I was so close to saying “we’re not using wpg2 anymore” and doing some regex in the database.
Peter Kirn: heheh
Peter Kirn: yep
Peter Kirn: maybe wpg2 felt your rage
James Loveday: more likely that it realised that I was about to kill myself and it wouldn’t get anymore attention
~Jaymis fixes the WPG2 setup and all is happy again~
James Loveday: yeeeeeeeeah
James Loveday: I AM ALL THAT IS MAN
Peter Kirn: hellll yeah
James Loveday: RAAAAAAAAH
James Loveday: I AM GOING TO EAT A FUCKING BACON SANDWHICH AND THEN PICK A FIGHT WITH A STRANGER

Things I have done lately

Melbourne rocked. Apart from the Comedy Festival being fantastic (everyone should go and see Daniel Kitson and Spymonkey if they have a chance) and the break being wonderful, something else particularly special happened: Rach and I found the best chinese restaurant ever. Spicy Fish’s signature dish, “Spicy Fish“, is both the best chinese (technically Szechuan) and best fish dish I’ve ever eaten. Incredible.

Daniel Kitson is a genius. I’ve actually just found some mp3s online (probably bootleg, haven’t listened yet, but I’m downloading them all). He’s coming to Brisbane in May, I shall be there.

In between eating fish, laughing and getting my new Dual-Core computer upgrade, I’ve written 2 articles for CDM:
How to choose a midi controller for VJing
Wrangle Multiple Computers with Synergy

They’re not very good, but it’s been a long time since I’ve written outside of the conversational, blog style, so it’s going to take me a while to get the normal articles flowing and feeling natural.

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