Aussie Bloggers

It was with great delight that I discovered that my next posting on the Aussie Bloggers blog would be on the spooky Friday the 13th. Instantly I’m thinking of writing about Freddy Krueger or Halloween and of course Jason and Friday the 13th (duh obvious much). But those are all American films and this is an Aussie blog pertaining to all things Aussie so therefore I must find myself an Australian horror film.

But which one to choose?

Do I go with a giant pig in the outback with Razorback, the marsupial werewolves of Howling 3 or for that matter the nastiness of Saw?

Well I finally figured I wouldn’t bother aiming so high.

Houseboat Horror is a cult film, it certainly couldn’t be classified a good film by any measure! It’s possibly described (probably not best described) as the logical outcome if Summer Bay and Ramsey Street had a horrible slasher film as a child, that child would be the 1989 film Houseboat Horror.

The film is about a band that heads bush to film a music video and are picked off one by one by a deranged killer who was horribly burnt and disfigured on a film set some years earlier. Sounds scary enough? Well don’t crawl under that doona quite yet, whilst there are some gory scenes and the effects are OK by 80′s Australian slasher film standards, the film is more silly than scary (unless you count the acting).

For science fiction / genre fans though (and Ugly Betty fans I guess) look out for our resident “Australian (well adopted Aussie) Neighbours star come good” Alan Dale. I can’t believe the stuff this guy has been in by the way, it’s good to see that Houseboat Horror didn’t sink his career!

So if you want an awful Aussie slasher film this Friday the 13th try and find Houseboat Horror (good luck finding it though!).

Bahahahahaha (picture an evil Friday the 13th laugh)

Cellobella got me started on this with her post on meeting deadlines. I have just had my appraisal at work and this was front and centre with my boss. I have a big issue with report deadlines, which is our major work product. Perhaps it is my chronic procrastination which caused me to miss the deadline for this post. I prefer to blame real life commitments.

That said, I would not consider myself an expert in this area and am certainly not going to offer advice when it comes to meeting deadlines and keeping your customers happy, so I will move on to something that I know even less about, The Mulgaphone.

This originated across the Nullarbor in Western Australia so that people in the early years of the last century could tune into Big Brother on the radio. Only 1,200 were ever made and they stopped manufacture in 1929, a lifespan of five years. Kyle and Jackie O are trying to revive Big Brother without much luck Perhaps it is just a metaphor for the speed with which the things around us change. Perhaps Big Brother is past its used by date?

At the risk of sounding old, this got me thinking about my experience with communications technology and just how quickly it goes out of fashion.

While I was not around in the era of the Mulgaphone, much of the technology available when I was little was not so different from that era. We had a wind up 78 player, a radio, a Box Brownie Camera, a large reel tape recorder and a record player when we were little.

Growing up in Scotland in the 1960s, there was only a few radio stations. My mum had it on all the time as she did her chores. Living in the country, the rhythm of the day was broken up by the different programmes. I remember the World at One, which was on for half an hour before a quarter hour childrens programme. We didn’t have a television in the house and only saw it when we visited Granny. My brother and I were scared shitless by the Daleks and hid behind the couch.

Our telephone was a black rotary bakelite with a party line. Imagine sharing a telephone line now? We had to verbally connect with an operator to make a long distance call. I can remember getting our first telegram from my dad who used it as a lame excuse to go drinking with his buddies rather than coming to our school concert.

Our major technology purchases when I was in high school was a small black and white television and a Sinclair Scientific Calculator. We had to do major begging to get our stone age technology parents to break down and buy those necessary tools of civilisation. Of course most other people were moving on to colour televisions by then. Pot Black (Snooker) on a black and white television brings back great memories for many of that generation.

At University in the 1980s, the switchboard was manual and I marvelled at the ladies, who would manage the lines by manually snaking the cables and plugging them in. It was just not the same when I went back to see them 10 years later and they had a small PABX system.

High technolgy when I first went to University were main frames to manage accounting functions, but computers were definitely for geeks who liked to code with cards. Even when I went to University in the 80s, most of the computers were just terminals.

I can’t say that I really came in contact with personal computers until I was in my late twenties when I was at the University of Maryland in the late 90s. It was only then that personal computers were starting to take off. Some of my colleagues were much more up to speed, but not me. I had a scientific calculator with reverse polish notation. Now that was geeky. Talking of geeky, Sergei Brin was there at the same time.

In my first job, the company was almost entirely Apple Macintosh because the person who moved them out of the post mainframe era was a Mac devotee. We had LCs, classics and other fun dinosaurs and one PC for the serious stuff like formatting scientific tables.

The sole PC was camped out in a separate room with the VAX terminal, used for accounting and electronic mail. I hesitate to call it email. It was pretty basic. I would sit on the PC generating a lot of tables for scientific reports. We had Lotus 123 and we had a separate formatting programme to put in the pretty borders. People would come in and use the one dedicated terminal to huff and puff their complaints to California and the one dedicated VAX, which ran the whole company.
My first purchase was an LC, which was slow as a dodo, but could run Word and Excel. A 40 megabyte hard disk and 4 megs of RAM. Eat your heart out Vista. Scrolling down through documents was like pouring vegemite out of the jar. What was fun, was the games, which you had to run off the floppy disc. I liked Golf, which my friend and I played for the last half hour of the day. That and screen savers. Remember them? Snow blowers and Loony Tunes. Later on I was able to dial up to AOL when it really was a walled garden.

Our first email was Quick Mail. We had a somewhat dedicated line. Being on the east coast, with the company being based in California. Colleagues would be pounding out emails, which would be pounded out in adjacent offices, only to be bounced out of Los Angeles.

I can remember my first internal email, which I got from my first wife, who had just moved to Nepal with a long list of tasks for me to do before I joined her in Kathmandu. I can still remember me telling everybody in the building about getting an email from Nepal. Big deal at the time. Just before I went to Nepal I bought a Macintosh Laptop. I was able to hook up to the internet and send crude

I got my first mobile phone when I lived in Singapore in the mid 90s. Singaporeans are early adopters and in the few years that I was there, pagers, which had been very prevelant when I first arrived almost vanished from site. I bought a Motorola StarTAC. I managed to move on to a purple Ericsson, which we still have in one of the kids play baskets.

And so it continues. Most of the communications technology, from my early childhood: tape recording, radio, camera, filming, music playing and shock horror, talking on the phone are available to me on my mobile phone, which I can put in my pocket and which has more memory than my first computer.

Well I hope my ramble hasn’t made you late. I wonder where will all the current technology will be in a few years time? No doubt I will find out if I am there on time.

For a long time I’ve had an account at www.istockphoto.com to source royalty free images for presentations, newsletters, websites and even for books. But I’d not thought about what would be involved in seeking a piece of music that I could legally use until recently.

You see, I’d put together a PowerPoint presentation for use when presenting at conferences but it recently occurred to me that I didn’t want to have any issues with using material I’d not paid for. Further, I wanted to turn the PPT presentation into a movie clip for Youtube, in the hope that it might attract some attention and become one of those ‘feel good’ viral emails that you see doing the rounds. I know that often that are PPS files that get sent around but I thought it would be good to have it up at Youtube too in case people start looking for it.

Anyway, I tried a few places I was told about but in the end decided doing a Google search might be as good as anything else and I was surprised by the number of royalty-free music sites that showed up. Guess I shouldn’t be really, should I?

Result is I did find some really good pieces and now have to make a decision as to which one I want to use. The site I really liked was Freeplaymusic.com because of the way it was set up, you could do searches on types of music and when you went into each category it told you the music mood, the instruments used, the style of music and the length of play – you can do a ‘preview’ before you download it to use it. However, it is important to read the Terms of Use before choosing a piece of music and it would seem that my planned use would require payment and I’m still to work out exactly what that amount would be.

Another site was Royalty Free Music and you can choose to subscribe or pay for a single track or purchase a library of tunes.

And then there was Music Bakery where you can pay once and use the piece forever and the price was very attractive.

It is important to note that ‘royalty-free’ does not mean FREE music, but music that is free of royalty charges for its continued use.

If you have a favourite place for downloading royalty-free music, I would love to hear about it!

Two weeks into the most recent incarnation of Big Brother, the eighth, and the show might have actually turned a corner for the best. This is the first series with a new executive producer, replacing Kris Noble, who, in the time he was there, turned the show from an interesting social experiment into a launching platform for models and people just seeking fame, with more emphasis placed on looks and age rather than on personality.

This year, we’ve actually seen a range of housemates from 18-year-old Bianca to 50-something grandmother Terri, and there’s actually a variety of personalities in the house, other than the “I’m here for fame” types. Let’s take a look at some of the housemates up close. Just so you know, I’m writing this before having a chance to screen the eviction show. However, the Friday night show had the bottom three as of then, and they’ll be the first ones looked at.

• Alice: The vet from the country who hasn’t had that much airtime during her stay so far in the house. She’s committed to exercising and has earnt a reward from that, with a bye in the first round of this week’s Friday Night show. Whether that does anything to influence the vote, I don’t know.
• Rebecca: Another person who hasn’t featured that much in the daily shows up until now. The only notable thing that she has done is wanted to go home, but then slept on it and decided that she’s a soldier and she’d fight it out…
• Saxon: A council worker who is chock full of tattoos has shown himself to be a bit of a decent fellow, which is something he’s decided to change consciously, and I gotta say good on him for that, but I think his “old” ways are coming back somewhat. He’s also noted as part of the Spa Mafia, but that phrase didn’t really last all that long…

As for the rest of the housemates, this is what I think of them, in no particular order:

• Ben: Law student who is trying to, well I don’t know. My impression of him is that he’s white bread – pretty plain and not that interesting. He just kinda hangs out and is staying pretty much on the down-low.
• Bianca: 18-year-old who is probably a bit like me in the way that she is much more mature than her age would suggest. I like her mind, but one big negative for her was that she got a bit hung up over the whole Corey thing. However, she’s actually finding out that he’s not that bad of a fella, but I think the jury’s still out on that one. I’d tip her to get a lot of votes from the guys
• Brigitte: Dumb blond pretty much sums her up. Though she says she’s smarter than she appears to be, there are questions about that from me at least, and a lot of the housemates. She’s a good girl, but I think she’s also kinda plain.
• David: Cult escapee turned cop turned firie. I tipped him to be in the running for the win, but the voting is going the other way it would seem, with him in the bottom 5 the last couple of days now. They haven’t mentioned it on the daily shows, but I wonder if he’s going to mention his past to the house at any time. It’d make some interesting discussion.
• Dixie: The first of the Dubbo girls, and also a proud Aboriginal. She works as a coulsellor, but it seems that she’s needed some consoling over the time already, with the lack of food in the house, and then losing Rima to her injury. The latest is that she wanted out of the house, but after Rebecca chose to stay, she decided to stick it out as well.
• Nathan: The surviving housemate voted into the house by the public (after Michael and Barney were evicted by Terri at sunup), he’s won the Friday Night Games, but wound up not having any ability to use the main prizes, except maybe for the assignment of chores and the other duties. His popularity on the web could be useful when he goes up on the block for voting.
• Nobbi: What a pain in the rear end! He’s got probably the best sleeping arrangement in the house, even if it is in the unheated Kombi van, and he can’t seem to stop whining about one thing or another. The upside is that his constant requests to be allowed into the house get repeatedly turned down. It’s making him think of ways to ask, and making the producers think of ways to deny him his request. It’s pretty cool, even though he is prone to the occasional dummy spit. I’d expect him to go some distance in the show.
• Renee: The other Dubbo girl, and probably the coolest of the girls, as she is always happy and having fun. She’s definitely a tomboy, and she’s had an interesting past. I can’t say a bad thing at all about her – I like her. She could actually have a shot to take it all, but that’s just me.
• Rima: A professional belly dancer who, in the time she was in the house, has proven herself to be very worthwhile as a housemate, even if she can’t reach the windows in the garden. Unfortunately, the accident during FNL last week which broke her legs, has sidelined her for the time being. Rumor is that she’s going to return to the house.
• Rory: A Geelong brickie who has gone and probably ticked off half of his town by describing his part of town as a slum. I think that he still could go on and be in the running for the final win. At least that was my thought after I watched the launch show.
• Terri: A bit of bait-and-switch was done with her status, but it will work out in the end. She’s the nanna who was booted out of the house (predictably) after just one night. Then she was brought back as Corey’s chaperon, a job which she did with some aplomb, even climbing up a tree to try to find him. She was reinstated as a housemate, however, after taking up the task of removing two of the web housemates (though she thought it was two from the whole lot). I think that now she’s fulltime there, she’ll go quite some distance. Unless the voters are predictable like the housemates were.
• Travis: He can make his voice deep, but he still always talks in a voice that can only be described as fingernails on a chalkboard. His mannerisms are also very interesting, and have led to questions about his lifestyle. I gotta say that those questions aren’t baseless, considering that he hugs just about everything in sight. It will be interesting to see how he uses his twists to affect the nominations. If I were a betting man (and I’m not ), he’d probably save one of the girls if they wind up down in the bottom 3.

As far as other aspects of the show go, the best addition has definitely been the inclusion of a new show to replace the adults only show, which actually features discussion about the program and the goings on in the house by relatively intelligent people – Big Brother’s Big Mouth. It’s a show that started out in the UK fronted by Russell Brand, and has moved down to Australia. Somehow, I don’t think that this show will run into the same issues they’ve had with the Uncut shows in the past. If anything, it should be given acclaim for being able to give frank opinions of the house and the housemates. Not necessarily Logie acclaim, but maybe a nice writeup in The Australian or something.

Changing the hosts to Kyle & Jackie O has certainly created a different dynamic in the studio shows this year – I don’t mind them all that much, but there is something strange about them together. I’m not sure just yet…

If you’re interested in more discussion of Big Brother, there’s a thread ongoing in the forums: Big Brother 2008. Also, you can check out the official site for news and updates directly from Dreamworld. Lastly, the site with the most buzz about the show is Behind Big Brother – it’s been around for a few years now, and has made itself probably the best source for rumors and other news about the show, housemates, and even the constant ongoings from the live stream in their forums.

My overall impression of the show is that it’s definitely much improved over the last few years. I also think that the new eviction process (a hybrid of the old and the way it’s done in the States), will lead to more intriguing decisions about who goes and who stays, especially if the housemates have to specify a reason for why they’re giving so many points to each housemate. Also, unlike the past, I’m actually keeping an eye on the show every day now.

I don’t much go in for Australian authors, it isn’t really a rule more of an observation. There isn’t a huge selection in my favourite genres to choose from, actually that’s not true, there aren’t a lot of authors in my favourite genres from Australia that I’m drawn towards, so it was with pleasant surprise that I found myself reading Nylon Angel.

Nylon Angel is a post apocalyptic cyberpunk science fiction action novel by Australian author Marianne de Pierres. It and the two sequels: Code Noir and Crash Deluxe have two things that differentiate them from a lot of the other science fiction that I read, a woman is the main character for one and it’s also set in Australia. Neither occurrence is unique, however together nor amongst my normal sphere of reading are they common.

But are they any good?

Well that’s the real question about anything we read or watch no matter its origin or setting. I think often I personally can be a little more critical of something produced in Australia, for reasons that I have no idea of. I am beyond happy to write that in this case they are indeed good, if not awesome (please forgive my fanboy’ish enthusiasm).

The characters are well written, especially the heroine of the piece: Parrish Plessis (or would that be anti-heroine?). Punches are not pulled by the character or the author. De Perres describes an awful world with great attention to detail and graphically takes us through the underbelly of this post apocalyptic Australia where the media govern and gangs rule the “Tert” (the wasteland ghetto we find our heroine in).

I love the fact that there are an abundance of Australian references throughout the novels, but even-handedly enough so they don’t become distracting or too clichéd. This isn’t a town that could be based anywhere, it’s most definitely Australian but I can’t see non-Australians not being able to relate. In Australia we’re certainly used to reading about foreign places!

If you want to support an Australian artist, you like a bit of post apocalyptic cyberpunk science fiction action and you’re not too squeamish when it comes to violence and the unpleasantness that life can throw at a woman just trying to forge a life for herself in the burnt out ruins of Australia then run, don’t walk to your local library or bookstore and grab a copy of Nylon Angel.

Tell them Lee sent you, they will stare at you blankly as they have no idea who I am but what do you care?