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Posted by toxic — Jan 19, 08:25 NZST

So, we let the blog go stale. 

So stale that it was clear that it was time to shut it off. 

And so, I did.

Watch this space.

 

Was that you, hon? *sniff*

Posted by nadise — Feb 22, 13:05 NZST

Last night Auckland had its first notable earthquake cluster since 1970. I felt the biggest one, a 4.5 that happened at 9pm. Jeff was standing 2 yards away from where I was sitting on our couch, and he didn't feel a thing. It was a shallow quake, whose epicenter was underwater off the east coast of the island. We rumbled a bit, but weren't alarmed. Apparently lots of people freaked out, many of them never having felt an earthquake before. Luckily there were no reports of damage or injury.

Yep, the earth is alive.

 

And the music (writers) never stopped?

Posted by toxic — Feb 14, 20:24 NZST

(We know you've been waiting, and we promise, sometime soon, we'll tell you dear readers about the two weeks we spent driving all over the north island (and a few days on the north end of the south island) with Jen and Jim. Days were spent sampling wine in several regions, hiking nearly 18km across volcanoes, kayaking 15+km along shorelines, floating on innertubes through caves, jumping off of waterfalls, and enjoying all the things that New Zealand has to offer outside of Auckland. Denise has been updating the photos over on flickr, so you can see some of what we did.)

But this post is about two musical resources that you probably don't already know about.

First is an absolutely awesome station out of Spindale, NC (near Asheville -- where I spent several summers): WNCW. They've got a great-sounding 128kb/sec stream (which is rare for a station of their size, and speaks volumes about them). I put Local Color, their local music show, on underheard.org a few months ago, but have recently been spending more and more time listening to their live stream (especially in their overnight hours) -- usually with a smile on my face. If you're looking for an alternative to KCRW, that's a little more eclectic and somewhat less urban, check them out.

Second is that I recently discovered that Bob Lefsetz is posting The Lefsetz Letter as a blog now (actually, he has been for some time, it's just that I recently rediscovered him). Bob's been a music industry insider since before I purchased my first LP (for the record: Blondie's Autoamerican -- which easily dates me as being from the Atari half of Generation X), and he's been publishing The Letter for more than 20 years. We used to get a copy of it (on paper) at KZSC, but it's been nearly 15 years since I last read Bob's writing. It's still as good as I remember it (he pulls no punches, and he stays current; check out what he has to say about DRM and why the music industry doesn't get it.) But Bob... go back to the black T-shirt or fold your collar. You're old enough to remember how stupid that looked in the 80s, and you're only embarrassing yourself by repeating that fashion tragedy.

 

Her Majesty

Posted by toxic — Feb 11, 11:59 NZST

So, you'll remember that we were visited by The World, back in October.

Today we woke up to see the world's most famous cruise liner off our balcony.  Passengers on this voyage of the Queen Elizabeth 2 left New York on January 8th, and will be arriving in England on April 21st.  During those four months, they're meandering around the globe.  Today and tomorrow, they're in Auckland.

 

Watch this space

Posted by nadise — Jan 19, 11:04 NZST

Our vacation has officially begun!

Today is the Big Day Out, the biggest, most anticipated, most hyped, and most attended annual summer music festival in the country.  It might be the biggest in the whole of the southern hemisphere, but Australia is a big place so I don't know if that claim is true. Bands big and small, from here and far fill 7 stages for just over 12 hours.  We plan to see new-to-us bands like the mint chicks (local favorites) and Afra & Incredible Beat Box Band (a hip hop a capella trio from Tokyo); and old friends like the Violent Femmes (yep, they're still around).

We got our tickets about three weeks ago after hearing from a musician friend of ours that it's an event we shouldn't miss. Since then the show has sold out. Twice.  In a display of PR mastery that's downright unusual in New Zealand, the promoters of this festival cunningly worked the press. First they announced the tour. Then they announced the first set of bands. Then tickets went on sale. Then they announced the second set of bands. They held back 2,000 tickets (almost 10% of them, as it turned out), and announced that the show had sold out. Trademe (the ebay-like auction site) went wild, and the news was reporting that people were paying as much as six times the face value for tickets. Scalping isn't illegal here yet. Then the festival promoters announced they would release 2,000 more tickets, and separately announced when. The last 2,000 tickets sold out in one day. The other night I heard a local radio station making the best of it, accepting on-air phone calls from people selling tickets, interviewing them about why and for how much, and then accepting a flood of calls from people looking for tickets, and putting buyers in touch with sellers. 

There were a couple of whiners on the news talking about how it's "unfair" that they should have to pay more than face value for the tickets they're finding available now through scalpers. As if the tickets weren't on sale for months before they sold out. But I'd say most people didn't expect it to sell out, and they won't make the same mistake next year.

The most astonishing thing to me is that they could sell out an all-day concert that's taking place on a Friday. Apparently my office will be noticably empty, and I should expect to see lots of my colleagues in the beer line. The second most astonishing thing is that the festival has a coat and bag check.  How civilized. Could you imagine that happening at Lollapalooza? Having been to a couple of Lollapaloozas, we'll be drawing inevitable comparisons. Kiwis are known to be far more proper and reserved than Americans, but they tend to be drinkers too. I've got no expectations, but I can't wait to people-watch. It promises to be a fun day.

And this weekend we'll greet the first of our visitors from home!  For those of you who've been reading this blog since our days in Venezuela, we're welcoming back Jen and Jim, the friends who visited us there.  They're definitely MVP visitors, having now followed us to far and obscure places where we weren't getting married (and didn't force them to come) twice. We can't wait to see them! We've been planning a big road trip down to the south island, full of fun activities along the way. We'll take pictures, and hopefully write blog entries along the way.

Yay, vacation!

 

364 days, 4 hours. Close enough.

Posted by toxic — Dec 31, 22:31 NZST

So, we rang in 2006 in Sayulita Mexico (where according to this picture, I almost had a martini named after me, despite the fact that I don't drink them). Sayulita is in GMT - 7. This year, we're in GMT +13. Yep, because we're now in the first major city on the planet to welcome the new day, we've just lived a 364 day year. We'll make it up in 2007, which (assuming we make it back to the the GMT -8 of California) will have nearly 366.

Like every other person who occasionally writes about technology, it's time for me to make predictions for 2007. Fortunately, I have an advantage, since it's already 2007 here and we're going into a 366 day year. So, without further ado, here's what my rather hazy, well traveled crystal ball says we have in store for us next year:

• Sun Microsystems stock will see $10 a share again. They're starting to see that the future of Unix is open, and they're back to doing what they do best: Making the best Unix servers available at any price. Sun is, at its heart, a hardware company, and after a long hiatus, it's starting to act like one again. Microsoft Vista's obnoxious licensing requirements will help Sun regain some of the Enterprise server market that it lost in the early part of this decade.
  

• Microsoft will ship a firmware update to the Zune, which will allow it to sync to a PC via wifi connection. MS already allows PocketPCs to do this via ActiveSync, and it's downright stupid that they put a radio in that thing and then crippled it with their software. If MS is smart, they'll allow the Zune to connect to their music store via wifi. Microsoft has a long history of producing crappy version 1 products, and then refining them into market leaders by revision 2 or 3. It's too early to tell whether they can do this with the Zune, but the hardware is very very interesting, and most people seem to have already written the device off as an also-ran (even commenting on the color). If they can manage to produce firmware that takes full advantage of the capabilities of the Zune hardware (and they can make the darn thing smaller for version 2), they're likely to have a winner on their hands. Last year, MS wasn't a player. This year, they're #4. Next year, they'll be #2.
  

• Apple will admit to some really nasty shenanigans surrounding their options plan (lets see, they illegally backdated options worth more than $30M that they then gave to key employees without getting board approval -- then they forged documents suggesting that the board did approve -- but it's all cool right?, because once the public found out, the options were made invalid, so nobody profited). Steve Jobs is guilty as sin in this, but will walk away freely (in much the same way that while there's lots of ink spilled about how awful DRM is, nobody seems to notice that Apple is quite possibly the most guilty of imposing this plague on consumers, or at least convincing them to accept it).
  

• Somebody will launch a commercial product based on MythTV.
  

• MPAA will lose or drop one or more of its lawsuits against the torrent search engines (like isohunt). These (perfectly legal) sites direct users towards content shared via BitTorrent. Some of this content is legal, some is not, some is somewhere in between. The thing is, while isohunt (and BitTorrent, Inc.) may help users commit copyright infringement, the search sites aren't the ones that are breaking the law (nor is Xerox responsible when you illegally photocopy a magazine article and send it to your friends). Ultimately MPAA knows this, but the search sites are an easy target -- and because MPAA has very deep pockets, their lawsuits can put small startups out of business quite easily, unless a judge puts a stop to it.
  

• One of the major online music stores will start selling major-label music unencumbered by DRM. It won't be iTunes.

• Big Brother will admit that it's been watching your travels on the Internet, and make it retroactively legal. Congress will pass a law requiring ISPs to keep logs of their customers' email and Internet surfing habits for 3-5 years. Everything you do on the Internet will become subject to subpoena, for 3-5 years after you do it. This will be sold to the American public as necessary to protect children from online predators, and to catch terrorists. However, the only subpoenas issued will be on behalf of the music and movie industries.

• Facebook will not be sold to a public company. Neither will digg.
  

• Google will continue to lose some of its lustre among technologists. For those who haven't been paying attention, Google's lost a significant amount of their ability to hire experienced talent on the open market, as most of their new employees are being picked up straight out of college or through (expensive) acquisition. While once, employees at the big G were thrilled that they'd get the opportunity to change the world, now they're seeing it as a better alternative to grad school. The analysts are taking notice. People are also starting to notice that GOOG underperformed the market this year. An investment in an S&P 500 index fund on Jan 1, 2006 is worth more today than the same amount invested in Google stock on 1/1/06 (graph - The green line is the S&P, the blue line is the Dow Jones industrial average, the red line is GOOG).
  

• Toyota will build more cars than GM, making it the leading automaker in the world.  This is not because Toyotas are great, or because GM's cars are absolutely awful (that's only a symptom).  This is because GM is run by accountants and marketing people who think they can make people want to buy technology of the past, and Toyota is run by engineers, who know that if you build the technology of the future, people will buy it.  Witness the Toyota Prius and the Buick Lacrosse.

• Copyright law will become increasingly broken, worldwide. For example, as of January 1, 2007, it will become illegal to play a DVD that you own on your laptop while flying on Air France. France has effectively made it illegal to play DVD movies on anything other than a standalone player in their jurisdiction, so users of VLC in France who watch content that they've legally purchased are now criminals. New Zealand is about to implement something akin to the US's disastrous DMCA (as if this country needed any more incentive to fall further behind in the technological race). What's going on is quite simple... there's about to be a new format of 4.5 inch plastic disc, that will contain movies in High Definition format (essentially the next generation DVD), and Hollywood is successfully forcing legislatures all over the World to write laws to protect their distribution monopoly. In the US, this is taking the form of the HDMI interface, which because it's designed primarily as a copy protection device, will refuse to work with devices that aren't blessed by a committee of lawyers for the movie industry. An engineer would never have designed this, because it intentionally breaks interoperability (and because we've learned through more than 25 years of history, that technological means of copy protection don't ever work). The impending legal requirement that specifies that HDTV screens must only have HDMI interfaces will set back (legal) digital media convergence by at least five years (and will make your old videotapes unplayable on modern hardware). It will do absolutely nothing to curtail piracy.

• Microsoft Vista will ship on new computers, making a fortune, but will not be a strong seller as a retail upgrade. Few people will notice just how many restrictions it includes, instead focusing on the beautiful interface that it provides. Sure, it looks great, but it lets you do fewer things with your computer than XP (for instance, editing or viewing HDTV video content on your current monitor, or ripping a DVD, or using an open source device driver, or significantly upgrading your computer without buying another copy of the OS). This is not a step up. Also, there will be a major security hole found and exploited (probably to send spam), before the end of January. So much for Vista's improved security. Microsoft stock will still beat the S&P 500 for the year 2007.
  

• More than half of new computers shipped in 2007 will be laptops.

• AllofMP3 will be shut down by the Russians. This will represent the first profitable Russian company shut down because of US pressure since the fall of the Berlin wall. This act of US corporate imperialism will not be popular among the Russian populace.
  

• Fidel Castro will pass away, outliving at least 6 US Presidents who served while he was the head of state (Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan). Thanks to a small contingent in Miami who don't think Raul is a suitable replacement, It will remain illegal (but curiously, not difficult) to purchase a Cuban cigar in Manhattan.

• After successfully completing its acquisition of BellSouth (and success with its IPTV rollout), AT&T will make an effort to purchase Qwest.

• Apple, D-Link, Linksys (ahem, that's Cisco), Acer, and no fewer than four no-name Korean manufacturers, will ship set-top-boxes designed to allow you to download full-length TV shows and movies and show them on your television. They will be joining Netgear (eva700) and Microsoft (xbox 360 marketplace) in this race. Whichever company best integrates automated BitTorrent downloads will win this. Apple will cripple its device with DRM and PC compatibility problems, but will still sell more episodes via iTunes than anyone else.

• Tivo will be acquired.

• Apple will ship more products named MacSomething than iSomething, unofficially moving away from the i- prefix.

• It will remain impossible to get Internet bandwidth in New Zealand without going through Telecom in some fashion. At least one more Kiwi Internet analyst will expatriate.

Have a good year, everybody.