Wednesday 28 November 2007

the sound of aliens


i want to create a music video. i have no experience or skill in video or music - not a very good start then.... but something is burning inside me, so maybe there is some natural resonance with music video - so maybe i should at least give it a go.
Actually i can strum a few chords on the Uke and youngest daughter has a sweet voice, and we both like quirk (be that musical or visual) so perhaps were not so far off getting something together.... what we dont have though is rhythm (or rather anything that can create a rhythm backing for us) so i thought id have a look on line for a free rhythm generator - Oh what fun! and if you ever need to waste a few hours you couldnt waste them better than playing with online drum looping machines :-)
I particularly liked this one - http://www.zefrank.com/sequencer/ - which is quick and intuitive, and i think will do well for our masterpiece.
if you go to the site you will see that its a simple bit of dragging and droping various elements onto a time line to create a rhythm loop - and a simple rhythm appears to have a simple symetry to the timeline and so i wondered if by starting with a simple symetrical image as the layout for the rhythm elements - would an interesting sound emerge as a result?.... i leave that for you to decide..... and no i wont be using this for our video

Tuesday 27 November 2007

Social Networking forever

Im intregued by the all fuss in the media at the moment about the fact that stuff we put on our facebook / Myspace etc might one day come back to haunt us.
Yes i accept that online data may well be stored forever and that postings about your teen drug experiements could technically be dragged up in an interview one day (geez, if that isnt a sign of an employer you dont want to work for and you dont run the heck out of there then you deserve what evers coming to you) - but is it not going to be the case that all other candidates have got some postings of regretable darker past incidents as well? and if they havent got postings of them - why not? are they SO dark that they dare not blog of them?

What i think is interesting is that the people who are creating these scare-mongering stories about past blogs coming back to haunt you might be thinking this from an old world perspective. They are likely to have grown up when "on-line" was something dave lee-travis would have said of his next competition guest, or where your mum kept your favourite brown nylon planet-of-the-apes pants. That was a carefree age when we didnt have to think about our past effecting our future. But today our future might actually depend on our past.
Kids growing up "on-line" today will be the people who will be making the rules of tomorrow - and i dont think they will be fussed by all the data overload nonsense

and so this makes me think a couple of things....
1. If potential employers are going to search our past, might it be wise for us to be writing stuff that actually bigs us up - what? lieing? telling fibs? - and if this is the case then what can an employer really trust about what he reads on us - in the end its all nonsense
2. lets start a data-jamming circle. If we all shared one random bit of information about ourselves, then mixed all the data and applied everyone names to all the data - we'd all appear the same and - in the end its all nonsense
3. If anyone was to search my email - they would clearly see that my orders for drugs have been processed, My money laundering scam has been approved and i now have passwords for some of the hardest porn sites. there is SO much "data" on me, but in the end - its all nonsense

I, for one, am looking forward to the funny funny day when my youngest daughter truly wishes she hadnt posted some of those awful pictures of her posing in the shopping precinct with a bunch of mates, camera held at arms length, pouting overly glossed lips and premark shopping bags in hand