What an interesting day!

I spent most of the day today hanging at Artspace (www.artspace-arc.org ) while Lester (of www.originalplastic.com ) was filming interviews with local artists about art/Artspace/etc, quite a lot of fun, and more than a little epic ;-) Should be a very interesting project!

At one point I slipped over to the Knifehammer HQ to confirm details for the drag show that will be taking place tomorrow (March 28th at the Red Dog starting at 10pm), and, yours truly, WEBmadman, will be performing some oh so delicious Dark Cheese, in drag, of course :-) Be sure to check that out if you can...

Then, on the way home, I was waiting to get on the bus and a guy that was waiting with me was trying to read the button on my hat, which said "Full Metal Booty" (be sure to have a listen to some of the archive of FMB I have here ), I explained to him that it was a noise band I was in, which peeked his interest, we then proceeded to have a cool conversation about music as we road the bus (BTW, Brian, the artist I mentioned, Lex Nasa I originally found here , and his homepage is here, I would recommend others to check out his stuff as well). Before he got off the bus, I gave him a card with my website address on it so that he could check out some of my stuff. He introduced himself as Brian (if your reading this Brian, hello, and welcome to my world ;-)) before getting off the bus. After he got off the bus, a guy sitting across from me with his girlfriend asked about my website and I gave him my card as well, he said he liked checking out new stuff, so, if you're reading this, hello to you as well :-)

Now, the drag is (not the good type of drag either ;-)) that when I got home, I checked on my own website here and it seems my page for Dancing Circles, my new album, is not working :-( I'll tweek it and get it going again, but the lyrics page is still working, so 3 steps forward, one step back I suppose. Now a key piece of information that is on that page is that they are in ogg format- this is an Open Source format,mp's are not, not to mention ogg's are higher quality. If your running Windows, these may not play "out of the box"- Micro$oft is very slow to adopt open formats, but I would recommend the VideoLAN player, it plays darn near every media format (video as well as audio) including oggs, it has quite a small footprint (it's a small download and doesn't take over your system like a lot of media players made for Windows does), it's also available for Mac and pretty much any other OS as well, so I highly recommend it...

There are also some videos from the album that are hosted on Google video that are embedded in that page, but if you scroll back through this blog, you will also find them...

Have a lot of fun!

Well, I guess it's time to "premier" a job I've been working on. For a few months now, I've been working with the Peterborough Arts Umbrella developing their new web presence. Check it out at http://www.pauart.com there's still some work to do- but hey, the WWW is a big work in process for that matter :-)For this project I've been doing all the developing on the backend. The graphic elements were developed by Isabel Stukator, who has been working with the PAU on most of their visuals lately, including their newsletter, PAUL . So the visual feel is consistent with their current printed material. At this point, members of the staff and board can log in to the site with a web browser and they can edit and add content directly, making for a very up to date site. As we progress, blogs and personal profiles will be added, first for the board and staff, then for the membership as well. We're also going to be setting up the site for processing donations, membership signup and maybe offer goods for sale- In other words, an incredibly functional site! Thanks to Drupal specifically, and Open Source in a wider sense- helping to enable communities in realizing themselves! 

Well, speaking of laptops a few entries back, I'm now typing this on my own new laptop, yes, I've finally gone mobile... :-)

I just picked it up last week, good thing too- when I got back home, the Internet was out, we've ordered a new service provider, but in the meantime, I can borrow a neighbors signal to check email, update my blog :-)
...a few weeks later,,,
And so now I'm back online and have some time to expand on this...
The laptop is a Gateway with an AMD64 processor. It unfortunately came bundled with M$ crap (when I asked the guy at the store if I could get it without it, he just stared at me blankly...), but, I didn't even boot into it, I went into the bios when I first turned it on, checked that it would boot from cd (and checked some other settings), inserted the Ubuntu disk and rebooted onto it. I immediately installed my preferred OS :-)
Well, almost, at first, while I was in Toronto, I used Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu because I didn't have the 64bit version of Kubuntu with me. Once home, I then did a fresh install of Kubuntu...
I am preferring KDE, it has lots of handy little programs for doing things...

When I first  got up and running, everything more or less worked. I knew the first thing I would want to sort out was the video card. I went over to ubuntuforums.org and put in
the model (ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M) and found this howto:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=321766
Following it, I got beryl up and running (so I can do the 3D desktop thing with all those crazy effects), but I only put it on once in a while, the driver is still limited, so it's a bit of a drain on resource and some things can be a little unstable, but ATI does seem to be progressing in terms of supporting Open Source, and there's a lot of community support on the OS side, if for no other reason than ATI hardware is so wide spread- and ATI (which is now owned by AMD) is recognizing that the Open Source desktop is a growing market...

Down at the bottom of that HOWTO post, it had a handy bit of advice for setting up my wireless, 2 lines of code and the wireless "just worked"-
with the first Ubuntu install, the Wireless Assistant was installed by default as part of the Gnome desktop, I seem to remember it just coming up when I rebooted...
With Kubuntu, it has KWiFi Manager, but, to have some choices, I also installed the Wireless Assistant and another program called Wicd. I don't have any of them on by default, I keep them in a panel menu and run them specifically when I want to connect. For an open system (no need for WEP or WAP), I usually just use the Wireless Assistant- it has a minimal footprint, but isn't as tweakable as KWiFi or Wicd.

I've managed to get the desktop sharing (VNC- Virtual Network Control) thing happening between my laptop and my desktop box (using Krfb and Krdc). It's pretty cool- the desktop of my box comes up in a screen on my laptop and I can control my desktop box from anywhere in the house- and technically I could open a port so that I could do so from anywhere on the Internet, but I wouldn't want to open my box to that kind of security risk- as it is, it needs to accept the incoming connection from the laptop on the box, and requires a password as well... but, then I have full control over one computer with the other- totally cool- as long as I have control over it- pretty scary otherwise...

What hasn't been working very well is the suspend/hibernate thing- it takes longer to go into hibernate than to fully shut down (which is very fast- the startup and shutdown are pretty snappy!) and when it wakes up it's a bit of a Frankenstein's monster that I have to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace out of it's misery. And when I come back out of suspend my touchpad doesn't work (an issue that I saw a bug reported for, I'll keep checking and there will probably be a solution come up for it)... For now I just shutdown when I'm not using it, it starts up pretty quick, so it's no big deal...

As for the Synaptic Touchpad, not only does it work, but it is nothing short of a revelation! I have a USB mouse that I thought I would be using because my past experiences with the "pads" on laptops have not been good- but I have seen the light! Although, this is way more evolved than the ones I've tried before- it has a "scroller" like a mouse wheel along the right edge- I love my mouse wheel, but this is so much more "graceful" :-) and, if I run my finger along the bottom edge it will horizontally scroll in windows where that's available, or in Firefox, it moves back and forth through your history :-)
It has "tapping"- once on the pad for a click, twice for double click, or tap-tap and drag to click and hold to select a region. For middle mouse clicks (in Firefox it opens a link in a new tab if you click on it with the mouse wheel) you "tap" with two fingers side by side on the pad... Like I said- it's just so graceful, it takes a delicate touch at the default settings, but I'm getting used to it fast. I did find a tutorial on adjusting all kinds of things on it, including making it less sensitive, but so far I'm liking it!

I recorded a night of Full Metal Booty, the 08 02 2007 set in here:
http://sketchbin.webmadman.net/fmb/2007/
I used Ardour,  and everything was hunky dory, but then I realized it was in mono- I checked and it seems the microphone input- the only one on the laptop- is only in mono! The output is fine, but, I guess there serious about it being a "mic" input... gr-argh! Well, most of my own recording only mono vocals anyway, but still, that's annoying... not unlike, this specific model does not have s-video out- the outline of the hole for it is there, but no jack... but I wasn't expecting that in the first place, and probably was a factor in it being so inexpensive...

So that's the story so far...

Well, I've been giving myself a bit of a history lesson and figured I would share some of what I've been finding because, to be honest, it makes me kind of excited for the future :-)

First off, I was listening to a lecture (which I'm at a loss to track down again right now, but when I find a link to it, I'll post it here) and the speaker mentioned JCR Licklider- a very interesting and vital part of the early development of the networking systems that have grown into the Internet today. Check out the entry on him on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licklider
He wrote a paper all the way back in 1960 called "Man-Computer Symbiosis" you can read it here:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
There's also a short (30 minute) documentary from 1972 covering the key concepts of networks with Licklider that someone uploaded to Google Video here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4989933629762859961

It's all very fascinating, especially because it emphasises open networks and the free exchange of information. A current development of which is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that you can check out here:
http://www.laptop.org/
With much discussion, both for and against the project, here:
http://wiki.laptop.org

So that should get you thinking, it sure got me thinking... :-)

As a follow-up on the SOCAN saga, I filled out their user survey a few days ago, being sure to inject my views on Tariff 22 throughout.
I just received the latest "Words and Music" magazine of theirs in the mail, I thought I selected not to have the paper version sent, it usually just serves to make me angry- it's so ensconced in the commodification of creative form. The idea of having artists compensated for the commercial use of their work is fine with me- that's why I'm a member- but the monetization of cultural exchange creates artificial class barriers that limit access to participation in the larger cultural dialogue...
An example from my personal experience is this:
The radio station in Killaloe- [chcr] is going to be getting high-speed Internet access soon, but if Tariff 22 becomes a reality, they won't be able to stream their signal. I'm living out of range of their radio tower, so I can't listen to it. A great deal of what they play is local stuff- things I would like to hear, but can't. The reason I have a SOCAN membership to begin with is from being played on chcr, as a broadcaster they are required to pay SOCAN fees, but it makes anybody played on it eligible for a membership. It's interesting to note that, while I have been played on chcr, and have been entered into their cue sheets (I've also been on Trent Radio [CFFF]), it's never registered enough for me to get a payment (as I noted in a previous blog, I did get paid for some incidental music in a short played on cbc tv)- a small community radio station's playlist just gets lost when counted on a national level- even though the ratio of amount played vs. the amount of fees paid on the local scale is very different, it's not taken into account (not unlike the [CPCC], the body that collects the tariff on blank cd's and redistributing it to the artists- but they base their payments on main stream broadcasts, which I don't think is necessarily the most accurate source for this information, especially in this time of diversification of the arts because of digital media)...
In the end it's large Corps co-opting people's sweat, blood and tears to further their agenda of maintaining the centralization of power- keep the spectacle running! Make sure the only power people have is through money- that way all power is codified and co-opted... and above all don't let people start developing their own sense of local community, where they might be able to find ways of autonomously fulfilling their own needs... not unlike the state of local farming in relation to agro-business... or small stores in relation to the mega-franchises...

So on that front, lets try to do something different- create your own culture- grow your own reality- reinvent your way of being :-)