Hmmm…

I don’t wite here anymore.

I have finished my brand new website about a month and a half - 2 months ago. http://thenicotinediaries.com

Check it out. I think its the shit!

Wow, It’s Been Ages

Its been like a fortnight since I posted I think.

Anyways, I have not really had anything to write about, but now, finally, I have something to post.

http://thenicotinediaries.com is fully functional and live. Its only missing a little bit of content but that will be added over the next few days.

Once I have all the content I want over there, I will probably start blogging at the new site (God, how many times have I said that), but will still keep this one up and running with the occasional post that I don’t want to put on The Nicotine Diaries.

Aside from that, not much has happened. I may have a job, not too sure - I need to confirm a few things first. I have some events coming up over the next fortnight or so. This Sunday is the Australia vs. Iraq World Cup qualifier in Brisbane, then I Killed The Prom Queen (last EVER show) is Brisbane the following Sunday, and finally the following Thursday I have Parkway Drive in Byron Bay lined up. Needless to say I am super pumped for it all.

Henry Rollins Spoken Word

Does everyone know who Henry Rollins is? In case you don’t know who he is, he was one of the singers (and many consider to have been the best singer) for seminal hardcore act Black Flag, singer for his own band - called, strangely enough, The Henry Rollins Band, a talkshow host, Spoken Word artist, and many many other things.

What I know Henry Rollins from is mainly through Hardcore and of course Black Flag. The album Damaged is on high rotation in my car stereo at all times, its just a great record. Anyways, I first heard about Henry Rollins spoken word shows through a skateboard magazine about 10-12 years ago when I was a mad keen skater. At the time I was just a dumb, ignorant stupid little fuck, and couldn’t care less about spoken word shows at all, let alone a singer from a band I didn’t like (at the time) doing spoken word shows.

Once I started to think for myself, and started to step outside the pack mentality, and came to read a lot more about things that are happening in the world, I started to realise that Henry Rollins (I was way into Black Flag by this stage) was a smart bastard. I read a little bit more about his spoken word shows, and ever since I came to realise that there is a hell of a lot of value in these kinds of things I have always wanted to attend one of his shows - a dream that is still unrealised.

Being the stupid naive person that I am, I didn’t think that seeing as this guy was an immensely popular speaker, that perhaps he might have some spoken word records out. I had never actually heard him speak. Until now. I recently was graced with the beauty that is satellite TV, the rural Australian version of cable. Movie Extra is running a series of Henry Rollins spoken word shows at 10pm on Friday nights - ACE! So I recorded last night’s show - the first “Uncut From NY”, and watched it later that night.

I was incredibly impressed. He is part comedian, part outspoken angry bastard, part stream of consciousness public speaker. WOW! I love this shit. That dude is one intelligent, articulate, angry bastard. Kind of what I wish I was. Articulate enough that he gets his point across every time, highly intelligent courtesy of a constant thirst for knowledge, and angry about the state of the world, and in particular the state of the US. Brilliant. Watching that show only served to heighten my desire to attend one of his shows in person. Next time he does a tour of Australia I am definitely going to check out a show.

I Haven’t Written In A While

And why not?

I simply haven’t had anything to write about really. The only thing that has really happened is that one of my best friends got married. It was a beautiful day, and it brought with it many surprises.

I’m not going to go into massive detail about it, but it was an amazing day, and I was stoked to see my friend so happy on such an important day in his life. Best of luck to them for their lives together

My Poker Game

I just realised that I haven’t written about poker for the longest time, and felt it was time.

So, how’s my game? Pretty much non-existent. I haven’t been playing a whole lot lately as the financial situation has gotten progressively tighter. I keep talking about all these projects I have going on but the reality of it is that they are all sitting stagnant (except for the websites) because I don’t have the cash to go any further than I already have.

Onto my actual poker game. When I do play, I play with play money due to the aforementioned financial reasons. I have been playing almost exclusively 90 player sit’n'go’s, of the 2000 play chip variety. It doesn’t really take much of a poker player to play these tournaments, but I’m consistently making the final 18, and about half the time I get that far, I make the final table, and the money. My balance is sitting at around 500,000 chips. I’m playing tight-aggressive poker, which I feel is the best style of poker to play.

Tight-aggressive allows you to conserve your chips, observe the players around you, and get your money in when the going’s good. The only problem I have, is that the pace of these tournaments can be so fast that you end up heavily short stacked if you don’t get good hands early on. It’s usually not a problem, but suck-outs and bad beats can demoralize you in these situations.

That’s another reason I am sticking with play chips at the moment. I was playing some very good poker with real money, and making absolutely the very best moves I could make in most situations, and consistently getting hammered with bad-beats, and more often shitty players hitting their hail mary suckout. I ended up burning through $50 (my standard bankroll) in about three days the last time I topped up, and it frustrated me and dented my confidence to no end. I ended up so scared to get my money in the middle because of the string of strong hands being cracked, that often times I would end up being blinded out, either out of the tournament, or out of contention to make a play.

When I got into these situations I ended up having to make a move with a marginal hand to try and conserve my tournament life, and as a result would get knocked out by someone with about 10 times my chip stack, and far better cards.

In the end I almost ended up walking away from the game, and did for about a month and a half, until I cold bring myself to sit down and play again.

I don’t really know what the point of this post is, but there it is - my poker game since I last posted about it.

Good luck at the tables

New Website

So, The Nicotine Diaries.com is now live

Kind of.

I changed my mind again about the design. It’s all about practice, so I’m allowed to do that if I want. Anyways, its not fully live yet. I have only got a blog, and a landing page up at the moment. I am gonna tear down the wordpress installation on the domain in a couple of days probably… Its warts and all at the moment, but check it out

http://www.thenicotinediaries.com

Random Website Update

Work on The Nicotine Diaries.com is nearly finished.

I’ve got about two pages left to code, then find come up with some background / foreground colours/images and then its all about content baby.

Another Project Idea

Once more I have come up with a project idea that would be fun to do, and would serve a purpose for myself, but take a lot more knowledge than I have, and would cost me money (I think). Keep in mind that most of these projects will likely never be completed, because I have this nasty habit of getting bored halfway through projects.

Anyways on to my new idea. Once again, I am almost certain that there are existing applications that would take care of this for me, but I just like the idea of creating things myself. So, what this idea is, is a proper music database. I know that music software like MediaMonkey, and iTunes create databases (is that the right plural?) for your music collection, but I am talking about a dedicated, stand alone application that has more information than what the player software creates.

For it to be built as a stand-alone app, I think that the best base would be something like SQLite, which is as the name suggests a lightweight version of MySQL. I may be stupid in thinking about how much of this open source software works, but I’m not the kind of person that researches fully before mouthing off about what I’ll use. I’m very stupid like that.

What I would want the database to consist of would be a bunch of different tables, each specific to a specific aspect of the music. For example, a Tracks table, that would consist of information such as artist name, album name, track name, track number, track length, track rating, and some other stuff specifically related to individual tracks. Then I would include an album table, consisting of artist name, album name, album art, producer, album rating (maybe an average of track ratings, maybe an independent rating), record label, year, and other stuff specifically related to albums. I would also include a couple more tables, such as an artist table, and label table, maybe even a genre table. The artist table would include information such as artist bio, years active (ie, year the band got together, and the year they broke up), a selection of press photo’s, past member’s. The label table would have things such as label name, main location, their main genre fous (ie, Roadrunner records is a predominantly metal label), the year the label was started, the year the label was killed (if it doesn’t exist), label type, (i.e. independant, subsidiary, major etc), and maybe who the founder was. If I created a genre table, it would have things such as popular artists, general features of that genre, important albums. The more I think about it, the less appealing that table is, as it would be too much work.

Each table would obviously have relationships with the others, for example the albums table would populate a query with tracks from the tracks table, the artists table would populate a query with information from the albums AND tracks tables, and the label database would populate a query with information from artists, and albums tables. Basically anytime there is crossover between information between tables, there would be a relationship and a link between that information.

Each entry in each table would also be assigned a unique (to that table) identifier to allow physical cataloging (sounds stupid? yes, by its my database, so I can do what I want).

Obviously, it would be stupid to have to manually enter all this information so I would try and sort out scraping of information from the internet, with the option to correct scraped data. That would be most useful with the album, artist, and label tables, with the tracks table being populated courtesy of metadata tagging (yet more incentive to have your music tagged properly), and the user would also be able to correct any incorrect or incomplete data, which would then be transferred back to the tag’s so that everything is synchronized across the board.

An obvious extension from that would then be to build a music player integrated, and if I ever start this project I would probably go down this route as well.

I don’t know anything about how to achieve this, I’m just throwing this out there as an idea for a project, and as a reminder for myself cos I come up with heaps of idea’s, but don’t put them down anywhere, and as a result, forget all about them.

That’s it for now, I’m going back to coding up my website.

Taking A Break

I’m taking a break from working on the new website today, as I have run into a problem that I can’t seem to work my way around. That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit in front of a television and vegetate. There is not really anything that appeals less to me that just sitting and wasting away in front fa television. At least at my computer I can be learning things. I know that statement is at odds with my desire for a complex and awesome MythTV set up, but that is as much about learning to do it as anything else, and then will allow me, when I sit and watch television to do it an environment that I control and enjoy.

I thought I would discuss an idea that I had for a possible future project. Basically, it takes some of what I want to achieve with MythTV, and extends it, maybe a little, maybe a lot I don’t really know. It’s nothing revolutionary, in fact there are a couple of commercial options to do almost exactly what I want, but are extremely expensive, and don’t have everything I want.

So, what is this idea? Well, its part home automation, part media centre, part server, part thin client. Basically, what I would love to do is create a home music centre, as opposed to an all purpose media centre, that is controlled by touchscreen device that will fit into a person’s pocket - probably a PDA sized device, but it probably wouldn’t need the computational power of a PDA. I’m not making any sense yet am I? I’m not particularly good at expressing my abstract ideas.

I’ll try and put it into a practical example. You and your family have got a house, with a basic home network set up, with a medium duty file server, and everyone has their own, perhaps local, media library, with a particular focus on music. You have a whole bunch of speakers lying around, in fact enough speakers to create a few “music zones” around your house - that is, enough speakers to set up a speaker system in a few certain area’s of your house. For example, zone 1 is your main entertaining area, whether this be a deck where you regularly entertain with friends, a home theatre room, or the dining room. Zone 2 is your relaxation area, maybe out by the pool, in a little hut/gazebo type thing where you like to kick back with a good book and some smooth jazz. Zone 3 is your bedroom, where you like to put on some romantic music to set the mood for a romantic night with your partner. You would want to be able to control what music get’s played in any of these zones at any time, from anywhere in your house. sound like home automation? That’s a pretty big part of it.

So you have your “music zones” all set up, and now you need a way to get all your music to each of those zones. Simply house all of your music on the centralized file server, and have you are starting to get there. What you would need now is a media player capable of playing back multiple files simultaneously, and through different outputs as well. I don’t know if something like this has been created as yet, but I’m pretty sure that someone somewhere would have a solution. So, now we are well on our way to having our dream come true. We can access the server, and start playing music to any zone in the house, and control the volume of each zone (hopefully). But we need a computer to access the server, and it’s both impractical and defeats the purpose of the set up to have a computer in each zone to have to use a computer to access the server.

Enter the tablet PC/PDA/Whatever touch screen device we end up using. What we need to do is to create a program that can access the server, and provide an extremely easy way of navigating through the files stored therein. The way I would like this to work is to simply power the device on, have it start immediately, with access to the server as part of the boot process. From there, I would have as few buttons on the screen as possible. Start with zone selection. Simply touch the appropriate zone, and the system will know which music zone we want to control. Then through the use of playlists (compiled automagically by the software based on metadata), we can select what type of music we want to play. A button for smooth jazz, another for hard rock, another for romantic’s, and hey, let’s chuck in a blues playlist too. Select the appropriate button, and we will get random playback of the files referenced in the playlist. But there’s more. Once we have playback happening, the screen will display relevant metadata, i.e. album art, title, artist, and perhaps a rating if you want to get into that side of things. Then you can simply turn off the controller, and the music will keep playing back, and as soon as you turn it back on, will jump straight to the metadata interface, with options to jump back to any previous menu.

Does that make sense to anyone? If not, check out the this package here, and see more about what I mean. The only difference is really the ability to carry the control around in your pocket, and hopefully also the cost involved.

I really hate the fact that I can’t articulate my idea’s well.

Ouch!

I’m starting to think someone somewhere is trying to tell me something about the way I live my life. I hurt myself again today, and I have no idea how it happened, again.

So far this week I have pulled my hamstring, nearly dislocated my shoulder, stubbed countless toes, and then today I was getting changed, and was walking out of my room when my, admittedly very dodgy, ankle must have given out on me and I started to fall, I kicked the shit out of my bed rail, slammed my sore shoulder into my bulky TV, nearly sending it through the wall behind it, then kept falling, managed to grab my washing basket to try and hold myself up (yeah right!), and slammed my other shoulder and head into my bedroom door, nearly pushing it through the wall too.

I am almost certain that I have broken at least three bones in my foot, including a toe, and I can barely walk right now. I never used to be clumsy, but lately its starting to feel like everything I touch, I break. I’m actually starting to get quite upset about it.

On a positive note, my music metadata is starting to take shape again after a disaster with an attempt to fix it all, and I’m scrobbling like a crazy person to Last.fm