Every hour.

Sometimes I avoid work by wondering what takes about 7 minutes there and back and has to be done every hour. By the time he’s locked his fine vehicle and made his way back up to his fine apartment, surely there’s only enough time for a quality cigarette and a snifter of brandy before it’s time to go get the car keys. Hell, can’t he use the phone?

Now you’ll be all eager to tell me something sensible like the man has to pick up the takings from a local bar every hour so that it’s safe from villains. So why not do what they do at most family restaurants and get a night safe? Maybe he has to put money back in the tills? It just seems too much trouble for something so banal.

More likely:

• He is the victim of a time loop and I am seeing the same journey every hour. That doesn’t explain Sundays, more on that in a moment.
• Every hour he has to type a code into an Apple 2 to stop an island from exploding. Hell, get the bouncer to do it.
• Has to turn over the C120 cassette that has the background music. Plausible.
• Extremely precisely timed domestic arguments.
• Something to do with MegaUpload.

I’m not opposed to this phenomena, because on Sundays something far worse happens. On that day Ferrari Neighbour (or somebody in his household – let blame not be ill assigned) takes out his favourite DVD: Bruce Springsteen Live Somewhere Or Other. And on the finest plasma display (I guess) and the highest quality surround speakers (I can hear) The Boss pumps his fist in the air for a multitude of proud Americans, bellowing all his hits and yelling DIDJA LIKE DAT? WUN TOO FREE FUH with 100 Percent Patriotic Fervor and a singalong.

Every. Fucking. Sunday. Loud. I mean PA loud.

WUN TOO FREE FUH!

I can’t be down on Ferrari Neighbour for playing the same piece of music over and over because most people seem to do that. On the other side of my house is The Bag Of Britons. You know the sort, come to Australia to get away from the dreary situation at home and then only ever talk to other Britons, usually about how Australia ‘just isn’t the same y’know?’

(Something which could easily be remedied y’know – two flights on BA every day back to mother country.)

The Bag have I think two CDs total in their collection, because there’s two possible programmes for each evening. God knows what they are called but I guess one is NOW THAT’S WOT I CALL MUSIC VOLUME 13 and the other is JIGGY BOOTY 18 INCHES. The former gets most of the play. I know it so well, having heard it some nights starting at 6pm and still rotating at about 3am. JIGGY BOOTY gets an airing when the wifey is off at the pub and has some bitchin’ gangsta action for the lads yo.

Some songs on WOT I CALL MUSIC are exceptionally deep and meaningful for the Bag and have to be played a few times until everyone tires of howling along including myself. These people are happy, they have good times, and they love music more than most people who chin scratch at sound art festivals so good on them. If it sounds like I am annoyed it’s only a little. I save that for Soggy The Sailor who seems to be having a ‘Enya at 3AM’ phase. Fuck him.

While I was writing this LinkedIn sent me FIVE MORE STUPID ARTICLES FOR THIS WEEK. Here’s the Chronic Of Higher ED with yet another whoa man the kids are using iPads article. Look, we’ve had quite a few of these thank you, and if anyone else claims that we have to move education onto FaceBook I’m going to double the bet and say NO let’s move onto SECOND LIFE. Remember when journalists treated Second Life like Twitter? I do. They pretend they don’t.

The cone of silence

Oh yeah and Apple released an AMAZING and MAGICAL APP that lets anyone make a textbook! It’s revolutionary! It is also a hack of the EPUB format, a simple case of embrace, expand and extinguish. Go and look at an ibook file on a PC. It’s just a zip, with modified EPUB components set up to add stuff that works on an iPad. Like all previous E.E.E. cases it does add quality; Microsoft’s changes to HTML added quality too …  similarly it locks you into the ecosystem of World #2 Multinational. And requires ‘upgrading’ to Lion which is otherwise a complete pain in the arse.

It sickens me that so many ‘technology writers’ haven’t stated the obvious: you could have already written a textbook that could be read on any device, could have done it for years running, nothing has changed. If you really really had to have movies and 3D spinning then there’s been Acrobat, which is really the whole point of this charade – to attack the success of Adobe Editi0ns in textbook distribution.

But I notice that these journalists seem to think words are sufficient in their own damn articles.

There goes the Ferrari again.

In that exhibit ‘Radio One’ has 38 different sounds that it can make, as MP3′s they’re a total of 13.6Mb which goes way beyond the bandwidth for a web exhibit without audio streaming. The exhibit very simply uses two or three embedded flash jukeboxes that fight over the connection and randomize their playlist. In Unity you can pseudo-stream OGG files but no one seems to do that, preferring to buy the Pro license and stream video. At $1500.00 a Pro license is something I’d like to leave until the project earns funding.

Information is a bit scanty. User Warwick Allison suggests a script that goes and gets the OGG as raw data, keeps checking every 1 second for the stream to end and then hands the data over to an Audio Player. Not that I am in any way competent to say so, but this looks like the only way that you could do it. www.audioClip isn’t smart enough to tell you what is coming up, it just keeps pumping until it runs out.

I’ll do it this way until the demos have been provided, then should be able to switch to the luxury of video playback.

NEW DEMO – 4 tape recorders. Click on a recorder to start/stop. This page will attempt to install a plug in. Note that the sound is actually muted instead of paused as at the moment I have no means to address the audio instance. Yes there’s some texturing not right yet.

Frickin’ LinkedIn. You had enough? It’s like a sad FaceBook for middle managers. Everybody links in and then avoid each other not wanting to seem too eager – at least on FaceBook you can try get laid.

The worst thing is the FIVE BULLSHIT MOTIVATIONAL ARTICLES YOU HAVE TO READ THIS WEEK that they mail to you. How do I get off that thing?

The one a week or so ago about how early CEOs got up in the morning. That one.

Slime P’orridge is CEO of Venture Capital Death Ray Corporation and gets up at 2am every morning. ‘I like to lie on the floor of my stone cave for a few hours before lashing myself with a leather whip and chanting FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION YOU DIRTY WHORE. Then I have breakfast of steel wool before hitting the office to get sacking staff bright and early.

Seriously, when they start using what time you get up in the morning as a measure of your business acumen we’re screwed.

Then I just got sent this prick.Who the hell is this fountain of sad cliches? A Marketing Guru? Oh right, marketing. This is exactly the kind of person who knows all about employment across all possible realms of endeavor. ‘Stop what you’re doing there – listen to me – I’m a MARKETING GURU. The way we do business is changing fast. You should try be better at your job. Thank you, please buy one of my 13 books’.

The ex vice president of direct! marketing! at! Yahoo! is telling us how to be successful. Sorry we can’t all try sell our failing company to Microsoft and then screw even that up. Can you find the tiniest bit of actual meat in the fluff this guy is woofing?

10 Questions That Create Success. What a sleazy title. I have questions in life; why me? who ate my chocolate? when is the next pay day? why the hell does it keep crashing? why is there no hot water? I ask these things without pretending that I’m somehow CREATING SUCCESS. This guy, he takes the sort of mottoes that hippies sew on their duffel bags and says, ‘Ask them at the end of each day and I absolutely guarantee that you’ll become more successful.’

My favourite: 10. Have I felt grateful for the incredible gift of being alive?

I’m just pausing a moment to let that wash over me. Hmmmmm. Nope, sorry, no success bulging out. (Mind you I wonder how many people are ungrateful for the wonderful gift of being dead?)

This guy. As Speedy Gonzales would say I like this guy, he’s crazy. This tenured academic knows an awful lot about Artificial Intelligence, but Dear Lord – not much about trying to sell stuff over the Internet.

One of Udacity’s first offerings will be a seven-week course called “Building a Search Engine.” … He hopes 500,000 students will enroll.

Week one, the course video will be pirated and uploaded on YouTube by SexyBoy23. No one will pay. Week twelve, no income has been made and staff are being laid off. Week 50, our man is trying desperately to get his tenure back. Why do academics ever think they know anything about the real world?

The test scene has three devices with: 3D sound, facial animation and a metal shader. The shader will break on older display cards causing polygons to break.

My current issue is that mouse look appears to be broken on OSX10.7.2, specifically that moving the mouse in the game window doesn’t rotate the view unless you first right click and get the modal menu. Full screen is OK. I think this is a security issue.

You should be able to get all three ‘Big Mouth Singers’ stopping and starting with a click on the bellows.

And here is a modelling test from 2012.

Click to biggen.

This guy is a Big Mouth Singer, and one of the musical instruments that feature in an installation code named Firelight. If you have suffered my company for very long you might think … it that the same project as he’s been wanking on about since 1999? And you would earn a gold star on the forehead!

The difference was in 1999 I simply could not achieve the results I wanted. VRML didn’t cut it and neither did MPEG-4 once that came and went.In 2003 you might remember these guys:

…that ran in AXEL (sorry I don’t have the work anymore). And then there was Anark and then I had to give up for a while.

In 2012 there are the tools, there is a budget and there is a deadline. Because of this it must be finished and because of this many ideas will have to be cut and the whole thing scaled back to a feasible size. But there’s 13 years of sketches and plot lines and discussions and many guest appearances of the things I’ve tried out (yes, including some airplanes). Mostly there will be many instruments for you to play, rooms full of them.

This guy:

also appeared in a 1999 sketch book and as a simple VRML toy that same year. He’s shaping up to be something a bit more exotic this year

I was once a cube!

He plays the drums. Loud.

Firelight will get updates throughout the year, so stay tuned for the real name and venue a.s.a.p!

Dear TomEllard,

Your video, Dead Eyes Opened Sydney January 2010, may have content that is owned or licensed by IODA.

No action is required on your part; however, if you’re interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
- The YouTube Team

Dear YouTube.

The composer of the music, the recording artist, the maker of the video and the person that posted it ARE OBVIOUSLY THE SAME PERSON.

You idiots.

You have a million people uploading shit they stole from where ever. So instead, you send out a pissy insulting form letter to somebody that contributes their own work. A form letter that offers 4 tiny boxes where I am allowed to reply that hey, I have no idea who IODA is, why they should be able to do this, what it has to do with the fact I am promoting my own goddamn work on your site.

And it’s the SECOND time you’ve done this. You haven’t even dealt with my first dispute yet.

I am going to try walking and calming down, but the temptation is to go somewhere else because hey, you really are the exact opposite of everything worthwhile.

Tom Ellard, a person that makes shit that you monetize.

UPDATE:

Through my own efforts I find that IODA is a US based distributor of my music. They have a non exclusive sub-license, which is kind of like having a franchise in that territory. It doesn’t give them any exclusive rights – certainly they don’t own the synchronization rights of my music, and that’s exactly what YouTube’s automated system can’t understand. It’s twigged a match between the soundtrack of these videos and their licensed material. Being automated it starts a process which is inflexible and stupid to any nuances in the situation.

Somebody at IODA has countered my claim that they don’t own my videos: at least that’s the probable reason why the dispute robot has rejected my disputation. But no one has actually emailed another person to ask, hey is this TomEllard account ‘official’?

It is (as always) up to the artist to start fixing the mess that the companies have created ‘on their behalf’. This begins with human communication; I have started that. It involves pressure; I have damaged the videos on YouTube with an annotation and an audio swap. This may help the companies involved to feel a small amount of monetary and PR displeasure, the only sensation that they can feel. I have provided an alternative venue on Vimeo. I always wanted to do that, so this is as good a time as ever.

As soon as somebody notices that their robots have screwed up, I will be happy to put things back as they were. In the meanwhile they can ‘own’ a web page that explains just how dumb they are.

"Rheem" is Japanese for expensive.

Now all I have to do is get the kitchen fixed up and … anyway. Bigot. So I met with LTM over in Belgium and the plan is now to box up Bigot with a couple of other LPs – Stretcher, Bigot, Bad Mood Guy and Rotund. In each case I have to revert to the original track listing and none of this modernity stuff. OK.

This is most difficult with Bad Mood Guy because I have the digital masters, but not the analogue tapes that Robert then hand spliced from those masters. Robert transferred some tracks to open reel tape and then used sticky tape to make edididididididits. That open reel tape was then duplicated to have vinyl cut (the Nettwerk LP was a dub of a dub). When I remade the CDs, I thought that the edidididididididits weren’t as important as working from the original sources. Well think again buster. LTM want it just like it was in 1928.

This was a puzzle indeed, because there wasn’t much chance that the tape still existed in which case you have to use a transcription from the vinyl which is more poetry than fidelity. To my surprise there had been a PCM digital copy made back in the 80s, and I still have the PCM recorder that could read it. Score 1 me. Getting good playback is a bit tricky (it’s on videotape) but I now have a decent rough of the whole album.

Next problem is that the analogue tracks have a different sound to the digital ones. They have gone from PCM tape through a mixer to 1/4″ tape then through a mixer to PCM and that through a mixer to my Pro Tools A-D. First, get rid of the 50Hz hum. A tiny bit of exciter rebuilds the treble. The bass is a whole different problem – it undulates very slowly, gaining and losing strength over a period of seconds which I think has to do with the way PCM used to work. There’s not really a way to fix this and so it’s just another factor in the patchwork that of this accursed album. Hell, the mix was made both at my studio and at CBS in 2 days flat. No two tracks are quite the same already. Let it be.

We haven’t decided on how the box set will be packaged. James asked me and I asked Stewart and he said he wanted it to sit nicely with all his other CDs. What do you think? A box? Jewel case? Hat box? Hollow out a goat? I’m a bit over CDs so I don’t feel that concerned.

It could come as many large boxes and a woman that took the CDs out for you when you wanted to play them. Although that would be creepy because she would stare at you while you had the headphones on.

Like this except with Captain Kirk crossed out and Severed Heads written on it in texta. Actually leave Kirk in, so long as he is the bad Kirk from the parallel universe that’s pretty accurate.

This Pentangle Box would be a good CD box if you smoked cigars. You could buy the Bigot Box and tip the CDs out and put cigars in it instead.

Maybe you have a better idea for a CD box set? If you have an idea that we can use we’ll credit you as executive box consultant or something.

ADMIN here, with some updates.

• Finally updated Cutline theme to 1.4. and fixed the widget support so we have some custom layout.
• Thus, recent comments are listed with links to your own WordPress blogs if any.
• Also a tag cloud so you can see what a moaning old shit tte really is.
• Removed dead blogroll links and added some updates.

Upcoming changes to www.tomellard.com; we are going to update, removing old TABLEs and chairs. There will be occasional odd moments throughout January.

{www.sevcom.com is not going to upgrade because a thousand whining geriatrics will have heart attacks if anything changes ever.}

In 2011, many people protested about their shitty government and in some cases like Egypt managed to replace them with an identical shitty government wearing different epaulettes. The American media slow clapped along like a fuckwit, wanking on about Arab Springs and Tweets until their own young middle class intellectuals started shitting on their lawn. Hey! No Fair!

Hilarious edgy Pol Pot T Shirt for women only $12.99

Time Magazine’s solution to the doublethink is an astounding piece of nationalistic bullshit – for the period 1990 – 2010 for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy and rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters. Although Kurt Andersen, author of this very special piece of pleading allows that there were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Millions of oppressed black South Africans say thanks for caring Kurt!

“Massive and effective street protest” was a global oxymoron – pardon me while I go tell the people mourning their dead over the last 20 years – hey! Stop that! You guys aren’t Protest 2.0.

PROTEST 2.0.

If you’re a venture capitalist by now you’ve stopped reading and whipped out your white iPhone 4.0. Everybody get back to the office pronto we’re ON A NEW ROLL! The protests of the last 20 years were scruffy disagreeable things, brought on by the dregs – this time we are live on Twitter and Facebook – the revolution will be narrowcasted – the executives at PepsiCo are dusting off their old ‘Pepsi Generation‘ campaign. There are Guy Fawkes masks to sell, camping equipment, black turtleneck sweaters and WiFi by the hour. Protest 2.0. is OK with the system because there is money to be made. In 2012, protesting becomes a solid career choice:

What Do We Want? We want to emulate the baby boomers by honing our media skills in faux rebellion before founding media and advertising companies that strangle the world for the next 50 years. When Do We Want It? Can we skip the 70′s and get straight to the comfortable bit?

We're all expressing our anti-statism by these masks we bought on Amazon © Warner Brothers.

In 2012 the election process will incorporate angry street demonstrations by individuals such as General Motors, Blackwater and Boeing, ‘sticking it to the man’. This piece of theater isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Revolution nearly always is rewarded by Bonapartes, Stalins, Pol Pots and Lukashenkos, which makes all the spilled blood a sorry waste. North Korea’s succession planning looks pretty smooth compared to these ‘springs’. As do ‘elections’ in which one wealthy tinkerer hands over to another.

Worldwide: Putin isn’t going anywhere in 2012; the Tzar is the Country to the last drop of (your) blood. China on the other hand is safe only so long as they keep the money rolling, something that looks a bit dicey. China is like a huge mall with not quite enough shoppers – stockpiles of unsold goods, entire empty cities built for real estate investment, piles of useless US cash… and the Chinese government will be quietly changing hands in 2012.

USA ELECTION

I’m stoked to hear that Ron Paul is in the running for United States president. The USA is like an old friend on life support in a hospice, waiting to die but taking time to do it. President Paul is the sweet release the country needs.

Imagine the scene on Paul’s entry to the White House – the first day his supporters totally sparking up a fat doobie because hey it’s 4:20 all the time with the TOKUS POTUS. Weed smoked they are surprised to find their local bank closed as going back 50 years to the gold standard wiped out the liquidity of the US economy, destroying inter-bank loans and consequently banks. So maybe Pizza Hut can pay their wages in bottle caps – problem is with no loans, there’s no credit, no buying and so no business to conduct. Sorry dude, closed down.

OK so it’s barter system – I’ll swap you for your bacon. Thing is, most pig farmers don’t want skull candles, bitcoins and paintings of Sonic the Hedgehog in Karma Sutra positions. By the time they figure out that with no cops you can just go take the damn pig, it’s too late, the unemployed cops have already formed a gang running the city. That lasts for as long as it takes for US troops to arrive back from their closed postings, hungry and in pitched battle with the cops, pig farmers and cons sprung from jails. Let Liberty ring!

This is the moment that musicians have waited for. Years have gone by where they’ve been told they can live off T Shirt sales. Some bands have entire warehouses full of unsold tour T shirts. In Ron Paul’s America, a black XXL Tshirt with AC/DC Ball Breaker is worth a day’s weed. Pretty soon there’s a new economy you can wear.

In the 2016 Elections the top candidates are all self made via tour merchandise and it’s a close call between Democrat Spears and Republican Simmons. What no one expected is that China now wants their money back – all of it. As the paper amount owed is more than the entire gold reserves of the nation the Chinese declare the USA a special economic zone with their own appointed President David Bowie.

CULTURE

The plebs were encouraged to horde for most of the 20th century and filled their huts with LPs, CDs, DVDs, cartridges,VHS tapes, in some cases even books. In the 21st century a new money making idea spun up – to have plebs copy all this media onto hard drives for consumption on newly purchased e-books and tablets. The ripping and scanning took a while, but by 2012 the effort had nearly paid off – threatening the lucrative money making. In February a new fashion is struck – conspicuous dubbing. The very wealthy start to copy their ripped VHS and vinyl back onto VHS and vinyl, breathlessly reported in Tapedecks of the Rich and Famous, Cassette Idol, Hissy Missy and New Bounce causing a wave of copycat copying back and forth from disc to drive to tape back to disc. It’s a sorry teen that doesn’t have at least 50 copies of each title clogging every inch of their intimate space. For this reason the children born 2000-2005 become known as generation loss.

In 2011 wealthy photogenic people married, selling photographs for large sums of money to women’s magazines. Then promptly divorced. The battle for GLBTQ people to carry on the same crap is won over the following years, extending hence to pets, the deceased and animes allowing a glut of stars, marriages, editorials, lawyers and divorces that reaches a crescendo with the infamous Twenty Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Seven Sisters, Two Corpses, A Chinese Dinner et al. fiasco where the cost of the cake greatly exceeds the take.

GAMING

Most popular game for 2012 – Bioshock Angry Birds. You are the lone stranger thrust into a forgotten valley – the decaying masterwork of Chinese ultra libertarian 恭喜發財紅包拿來 who planned to fill it with the entire Yangtze before being overcome by rebel forces. You arrive in the fifth year of the endless war between the objectivist Pig and communist Bird forces. And there’s a young psychic girl or girls that have to be rescued or something because the Bioshock franchise ran out of ideas in 2007.

AUSTRALIA

The Prime Minister describes the Leader of the Opposition as ‘something nasty shat out a pole cat’s exhaust pipe’. The Leader of the Opposition replies that the Prime Minster is ‘the film that forms over a bucket of cold goat’s sick’. The Australian People join in mass whining about how poor they are, conducted by wealthy radio announcers. Miners dig stuff out the ground. 500 more branches of Pie Face open in Sydney, bringing certainty to a diagnosis of epicurean cancer. By the end of 2012 hostilities between Pie Face and Flight Centre escalate to pie throwing and pilot stomping before Nibiru wipes out the whole lot and good riddance.

(Edit: repairing some of the weird tenses and other effects of Gin.)

It’s not that I can’t make music. I’m just making things with all the presence of an IKEA chair or the seventh disc of a Prince album. After a while it gets pretty easy to adjust the panning and velocity level on the alternate closed hats. Splurt – here’s some more music for the sonic landfill.

I wondered why bands went into decline. The cause is now obvious – once you are successful at something you are required to repeat it ad-nauseum, which kills off the ability to do anything else. The treatment is to (a) just keep doing that forever – the European cure, or (b) become an academic – the Anglo cure, or (c) punch through the block and somehow reach a new level – which is most often about as effective as herbal remedies. Myself, exhibit A. Which is why I’m suffering (b) for the while, and feeling pretty down about it.

It was fun to play in Belgium (so long as you ignore 60 odd hours of air travel in one week). The people love their scene and they age gracefully – look at Front 242, who have kept their vim and vigour despite looking like some kid’s embarrassing dads. And if we looked like two old guys sitting at a bar eating peanuts, well we always looked like that. But you have to wise up and ask how long it’s possible to keep the museum travelling.

Chatting with Suicide Commando, they have gigs lined up back and forth over Europe, cities all in a row with crowds ready to punch the air. We have nothing like that in Australia; a population of 22m is condensed into the east coast and a tour can last a week before you’re all fished out. But even if we had a European population there comes a time when your audience has arthritis of the air punching arms and what then? I am jealous of our European friends but fear for their retirement years.

No, I’m not part of that EBM scene. Nor am I in with the monome-arduino-blip-twiddlers that are the arse end of the post digital movement. (Actually, the whole post digital movement – have you gone back and listened to any of that recently? Isn’t the whole glitch/micro-sound thing as embarrassing as DX-7 horns? Jesus that stuff was a tepid gruel propped up by vacuous talk and The Goethe Institute).

Similar guru to one described. Contents may vary.

This all gets very depressing, but here on Christmas Day hope comes from an unexpected quarter. I usually read Create Digital Music just make myself angry enough to get out of bed. It’s the epicentre of smug and twiddlers and I can usually rely on at least one fatuous young thing prating about how they just discovered both ears. But recently they covered Mannheim Steamroller, that cheese pump of Christmas schmaltz and damn it the guy sounds like he’s completely aligned in his own universe. Or as Bradbury would say – he is utterly what he is. That doesn’t mean that I am inspired to get into Christmas jingles. It means by age 65 I would also like to be entirely comfortable making whatever the hell I want despite being told it doesn’t fit with the expectations of the marketplace. I’d like to free from (a)(b)(c)’s, scenes and the baggage that holds you, me and everyone else down.

Instead of being preoccupied by how I can’t seem to align with anything around me, I need to be more like Saint Chip, to follow my own inner dag. To wear the grin and beard of a man that gives not a fuck about what is cool this week. This sounds like an attitude adjustment, easy to prescribe but hard to achieve without the right community and dammit that’s exactly what is going to happen. Who else will follow Chip Davis to freedom from the confines of good taste?