My track ‘enigmatic xii – beacons’ is included in the latest pertin-nce net label release ‘things are bad in haiti’. Label owner Maxime Tanguay’s family were directly affected by the earthquake:

Hey all!

As some of you know, our label has a special connection to the earthquake ravaged country of Haiti – so in the tradition of our charity net releases we quickly pulled together this compilation to help out.
Thanks to our regular contributors and everybody who responded so quickly.

Luckily, all of our family in Haiti are safe, but as you can imagine, the damage to their homes was devastating, forcing the majority of them had to temporarily relocate to Florida, the Dominican Republic or other regions of Haiti where they are sharing housing and other resources.

Needless to say, getting our family’s lives back to normal requires money for the basics: food, water, clothing, as well as the resources to build new housing.
This is why we’re dedicating this release’s proceeds entirely to the Haiti relief cause.

When you download this Pertin-nce release you can make a donation via paypal at account [bleupulp (at) hotmail (dot) com]
and use reference ”pertin-nce_031”. All of these proceeds will go directly to members of our family in need.

If you’d rather not give money directly to individuals, we also encourage you to give to an organization of your choice.

Thanks and enjoy our latest collection of music!

Download, enjoy, and make a donation if you are able: http://www.pertin-nce.com/

I always liked the quality of sound from my H4, but was getting frustrated by mic bump due to the Zoom-supplied shield which was just a basic piece of black foam which slotted over the mic – meaning it never shielded it fully, and was always falling off – which was how I eventually lost it while out recording one day.

Whereas the Redhead fits snugly over the top of the device – cutting out mic bump even on a windy morning down by the beach. And it doesn’t fall off in the wind! I tested it this morning on a fairly windy day, and got some very nice clean samples of waves. They are available for the H4, H4n and H2 – the blog on the website features some impressive demos of video and audio recording out on the beaches in Maui, where the products are hand made.

And yes, I got mine in wine :). The only thing I need to worry about now is children and dogs trying to play with it.

One hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of these tracks will go
to support www.foodforthepoor.org, a 4 Star Charity which according to Charity Navigator has 96% of their funds going to directly to buying food. $20 will allow them to buy 100 pounds of beans and rice. That’s a lot!

I have submitted my work ‘enigmatic x – transmission’ towards the project. For further information, or to download and donate towards Haitian relief, please visit http://sonicanta.bandcamp.com/.

As an ongoing investigation into the function and the practice of publicness radioplateaux asked artists to respond to the concept of publicness as art practice. In a broad paper composed in 2006/7 radioplateaux artists describe the practice of publicnes as one that may be “a revolutionary everyday practice”. We claimed that publicness may open ones practice essentially to a multiple of public and private places and spaces. To a street, gallery, or to a region of being.

The inaugural selection of artist’s responses is hosted online in the Public and Private gallery, including my work ‘thioridazine dream’, an exploration of the private realms of the mind; alongside a work by friend and fellow composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz.

“they promised liberty, they promised freedom, but they themselves are slaves”

My first piece in… too long. Available on sendspace for download – see my Music page.

Until we were asked to contribute our questions by Twitter.

I took a look around the room. Very few people seemed to have brought a laptop or netbook, a few started checking their iPhones or Blackberries. I suppose it is safe to assume that most people have a net-connected mobile phone, at least. But I wasn’t surprised when very few questions came in via Twitter… they gradually dribbled in, but not in the huge flood that the presenters had expected. Probably others were sitting there, like I, thinking “What’s wrong with just talking to your audience?”.

On the whole I’d say I’ve embraced in my own way what seems to have become known as ‘Web 2.0′. I enjoy the technology, I like to develop what you’d call Web 2.0 interfaces and I love jQuery and the various scripting languages that have come along with much of Web 2.0 design. Yet even the speakers at the conference still seemed to have difficulty defining what this whole Web 2.0 thing is. To me, Web 2.0 in a nutshell is simply two-way communication with the user. Software where the user can interact and contribute, rather than sit and read static web pages. It’s been around for years, developers have used wikis, blogs and forum software to work across national borders but with recent developments in web technologies now has a nice glossy look and feel and has become accessible for practically any non-computer user to enjoy. Great idea. And as far as accessibility goes, Web 2.0 has done great things in enabling people who might otherwise be restricted by disability, illness or isolation, such as the You Be the Difference website where people with cerebral palsy are encouraged to share their stories, meet others and join an online community.

Except that corporate web development seems to have jumped on the bandwagon, and to everyone I speak to, Web 2.0 == Twitter.

Why do I hate Twitter so much?

Social networking software brings with it all the baggage of interaction in the outside world. Sure, people can create themselves an avatar on SecondLife and roleplay an alternate personality. You can log into WoW and make yourself a female bloodelf, statistically, most of which are played by males. You can explore aspects of your personality that you didn’t know were there – or, as many seem to do, become the stereotypical jerk when anonymity is combined with the internet – just because You Can. Because there’s no way you’d dare to act like that IRL. But when social software is brought into the workplace, there is no room for exploring a user-defined world – you have to be the same ‘you’ online that you are in the office. (Which of course may or may not be the real ‘you’ – many people have ‘office personas’ as well).

Twitter is microblogging, which means it is fast, immediate and tends towards total information overload. After a few minutes of trying it out with it’s linked SMS services I just wanted it to shut the f*ck up. I still have a Twitter page, under a different name, but I don’t post – I use it to subscribe to other people’s pages and check what they are up to.

I don’t doubt it’s value in marketing and communications – US President Barack Obama uses Twitter and YouTube to communicate news in a format relevant to the younger audiences he wishes to reach. I’ve subscribed to a number of authorised ‘tweets’ from my favourite musicians to catch updates on their work. But I still don’t log in very often. Around once a month at most… which isn’t what the tool was designed for. Those advocating its use in the office would like to see us link it to our staff Intranets and read live feeds… something I’d find unbearable unless subscription was optional.

The trends in social networking software seem to be being led by the sort of extraverted, socially oriented personalities one would expect to work in marketing. Ask a software developer what they think of Twitter and you’ll often get a harsh response. Possibly because coders are not always extraverts. The stereotypical geek doesn’t really fit the picture of ‘life and soul of the party’ and from the personalities I’ve seen embracing Twitter in the workplace, you’d have to enjoy partygoing to make the most of the software, or at least, be the sort of person who enjoys large crowds.

I’ve recently set up a Facebook account, where I can log in when I want, and update frequently or infrequently. I do the same with this blog. Some months I write nothing, sometimes I’m prolific. But I’m not, by nature, an extraverted, fast, or immediate sort of person. I like to sit and think before I compose a piece of music or write. I edit, a lot (which makes for messy forum posting). I prefer to be behind the camera taking the picture, rather than in front of it making an ass of myself. I don’t like to be inundated with phone calls or bombarded with information.

Web 2.0, since it hit mass media and corporate development, seems to be being driven by marketing, and has inherited such a social environment – it needs to recognise that not everyone has an extraverted personality or enjoys being bombarded by the increasingly frantic pace of modern life when they log in. A wise friend said to me once that just because email was an immediate medium, it did not mean that I had to feel a pressure to respond immediately. The same should be taken into account with Web 2.0 development – if you want me to interact with you, give me a piece of software that allows me to choose how I want to interact with you.

Awesome. Really worth watching in HD.

Described as ‘when semantic extraction goes horribly wrong’… these are the results of a disastrously untested search engine being let loose on the net… and screenshots of howlers are growing day by day on forum and blog posts. At release, an article on TechCrunch revealed that a search for ‘Causes of AIDS’ rather unfortunately listed ‘Jew’, due to it’s inability to distinguish between the disease and the verb ‘to aid’, which could be found in a Wikipedia article on Jewish history. A company representative offered an explanation to TechCrunch author Leena Rao:

“This is an unfortunate example of homonymy, i.e. words that have different meanings.The showcase was not configured to distinguish between the disease “AIDS” and the verb “aids” (as in aiding someone). If you click on the result “Jew” you see a sentence from a Wikipedia page about 7th Century history: “Hispano-Visigothic king Egica accuses the Jews of aiding the Muslims, and sentences all Jews to slavery. ” Although Wikipedia contains a lot of great health information it also contains non-health related information (like this one) that is hard to filter out.”

LanguageLog also blogged the site under the most appropriate title ‘Semantic FAIL’, with readers posting their own examples of search results… my favourite so far was the suggested treatment for Hookers: ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’.

Just occasionally I come across a story that turns my world view upside down. We’ve become accustomed to the horror stories of large corporations using and misusing software patents to swallow up small business and buy out rights to alleged infringing programs.

Australian entrepreneur Ray Richardson’s story is different. ABC’s The Big Deal featured a story on his Uniloc system, which ties a software license to the machine on which it is installed. He later found that Microsoft had taken the idea and used it in a wide range of their products. Had he not filed a patent at the time of inventing the software, he would never have been able to claim infringement.

His story goes to show that not everything is so cut and dried in this world. It’s all very well to campaign for free software – and I’ll continue to do so – but the software patenting system, while heavily flawed (and, I still believe, is not the right way to protect the rights of an inventor), just occasionally serves the purpose for which it was originally intended.