Blog Without An Important Name

Someone at paypal doesn’t get phishing, and is sending out emails that look like they really could be scams. Not only that, but the email shouldn’t even be sent, according to the paypal preferences.

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Recently I have discovered a really cool website, Jamendo. In a nutshell, it provides free music. Unlike most uses of P2P, it does so legitimately. The creators are required to release under one of the Creative Commons licenses, so you can be sure that not only is noone going to mind you having it, but they’re going to be happy if you pass it along, or remix it (depends on the artist), or whatever.

The site also makes it easy to find new stuff (for those in the know, it’s very ‘Web 2.0′ :)), and to send a donation to the artist if you like.

There’s a heap of French music on there, it is based in France and I guess it got pushed there a bit or something. However, although I’m less fussed on the French language stuff, there is still a lot of English stuff too. And German metal and industrial, which is nice, too.

It’d be great to see more people, especially local people, getting into this kind of thing.

One of the features of the site is that you can write reviews on albums that are automatically synchronised to a blog. So I plan on doing that. Expect to see a whole lot of links to and reviews of free metal, industrial, synth-industrial, and gothic (and whatever else I hear that I feel is worth writing about) to come through here. I’ve already found a few albums I really like, and I haven’t spent a whole lot of time looking.

[Explanation of terms]

There’s an interesting (I think) article on Wired, titled Every Old Meme Is New Again. It refers to the creation of Godwin’s Law, which is something of an internet staple, especially on Slashdot, and probably Usenet still, if I ever looked at it more than once a year. The interesting bit is that it was consciously and deliberately created, by going and using the term, until it got picked up and took on something of a life of it’s own.

It also talks about someone recreating this effect in a much more overt and webserver destroying sort of way. Probably a good thing he’s hosted on typepad. However, in this case, it’s for a worthy cause (not that stopping endless Nazi/Hitler comparisons isn’t worthy). He plans to present something at the Modern Language Association conference about it, and wants people to link to his blog so that he can track the spread of this meta-meme (that is, seeing how a meme about how a meme spreads over the internet spreads over the internet). Just like I’m doing really (the linking, that is).

Apparently it took off a lot faster than he expected, and he’s having trouble tracking it. So I feel compelled to do my part and make it that much harder. Of course, I don’t expect my little blog with somewhere between half a dozen and one dozen readers[0] to make much of an impact. Unless of course, everybody links back to here and then to his, just to make me look more important…

[0] unless it’s something about Java[1], in which case it gets syndicated and spreads a bit further over the intertubes.
[1] I wonder if that mention of Java is enough to warrant putting the Java tag on this post and getting it syndicated far and wide. I might go with ‘no’ for now.

All my transport for Linux.conf.au 2007 is booked, and there’s quite a comfortable holiday surrounding it all. I have yet to pay for the conference itself, but that’s because they’re having technical problems it seems. (Update: turns out the payment went through fine)

My itinerary is:

• 11/01: Christchurch -> Melbourne
• 14/01: Melbourne -> Sydney, Conference checkin
• 20/01: Conference checkout
• 24/01: Sydney -> Canberra
• 27/01: Canberra -> Brisbane
• 31/01: Brisbane -> Christchurch

Involved in this, are four plane flights with three different airlines, and a train ride from Sydney to Canberra. It should be fun.

There is a lot going on at the conference. I haven’t yet gone through that properly to see what I want to go to. If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to get a laptop for the duration, which will mean I can go to the tutorials (this one on GTK could be interesting, an alternative to using SWT in Java).

Aside from that, there’s a fair number of family and friends to visit in all the places. It seems that half the people I know have ended up in Sydney, and a sizable chunk of the rest scattered around a bit further away.

My credit card is just about smoking from all the money passing through it though…