Mike wrote up another post over at Life In The Fastlane

Posted from Perth, Western Australia, Australia.

How It Was

1. On the Telstra website
2. “hey we have a new app click here to have us sms you a link”
3. *type in phone, select android, hit send*
4. *SMS ARRIVES ON PHONE*
5. “The 24×7 App for Android is available for download at telstra.com/app”
6. *click link*
7. *browser opens*
8. *page slowly loads*
9. “Telstra 24×7 App for Android, click here to get it from Google Play”
10. *click link*
11. *play store opens*
12. *click install*
13. DONE.

How it should’ve been

1. On the Telstra website
2. “hey we have a new app, choose your device”
3. *clicks android*
4. “you can download it from the Google Play store here”
5. *clicks link*
6. *clicks install*
7. *app arrives on phone*
8. DONE.

Posted from West Leederville, Western Australia, Australia.

It started early, in my head it plays out that my dad had just purchased a new hifi system.  It was an AKAI unit it was the late 80s and i’m pretty sure he may even still have the amp section somewhere, the rest is long gone.  With this came music, but I wasn’t allowed to touch it.

That thing (or another version of it, i stole that image from some canadian internet guy), started the journey of music in my life.  There’s a turntable up top, an EQ, a Tuner & a dual tape deck with dolby NR and a vinyl rack down the bottom.  If I had kids now I wouldn’t let them touch it either, but pretty quickly I was allowed to play tapes and radio.  As I now understand vinyl is gold, you don’t let your kids play with it.  I’m pretty sure I was packing a walkman (it wasn’t an ACTUAL sony walkman) by this time and it all began.

The first few tracks I remember really enjoying was the theme to the Footrot Flats movie (mum dad had taken us to the drive in to see it a few times), Dave Dobbyn’s Slice of Heaven and then the Choir Boys – Run To Paradise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQT0t2s1MoE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWrW3qJ2HOA

These are both stand out tracks from my early child hood, they were boths hits in 87 when I was 5 and to be honest I don’t remember much before that.  For years I would go on thinking Run To Paradise was by ACDC, later to find out it was actually the Choir Boys.  I feel stupid, but their entire album was produced by George Young ( from the Easybeats and a producer for AC/DC) so I just see it as my first great musical observation.

Posted from West Leederville, Western Australia, Australia.

Sometimes wish I could teach ppl to stress less, people always getting into a hole and they’re so wound up they cant see the ladder out

— Greg Tangey (@ruxton) August 6, 2012

I really wish I could teach people to stress less. Usually they’re just caring too much about things that don’t matter or things they can’t change. Move on! Anyway, I got a couple of great responses from some smart guys and wanted to share them!

@ruxton A little stress is a good motivator.A lot of stress is a goal inhibitor.

— FG (@FG_beats) August 6, 2012

@ruxton Experience makes more ladders visible.

— Jordan Maguire (@jordan_maguire) August 6, 2012

Take a step back, relax and size problems up for what they are. Learn why you stress over them, then work out how to be better than it for next time.

I used to sit on a local Perth IRC network back then, a lot. My family probably think excessively, but I was meeting new people and finding new things. One day I met a few guys on IRC and some how we got to flicking Fast Tracker II stuff back and forth between each other. These guys (Clawdor & DjZero?) were way above my grade then and probably now too ;P I never made anything with Clawdor, but he’d always blow my mind with these amazing trancey arrangements! I did start making a few things with Zero under the name Indeztruktabl and I just found some of that, so I figured i’d share it.

This one kicks arse and is my second favourite we ever did.

And this one just does my head in now, in a good way

We had another that I really liked called Vulture which was something Zero had done entirely on his own, I still hear that track in my head at least once a month. There are people out there who have it, if you are one of them, I want it. There’s some covers for a tape lying around somewhere in my cupboards so maybe I’ll try dig that out.

I’m not entirely sure what happened to Clawdor, he was pretty talented and I still wonder where he got to. Zero is still to this day making my jaw drop with insane music under various names that aren’t DjZero.

It’s all over the place lately and by it I mean life.  I thought finally living alone again would  be awesome and it is.  The freedom of living alone kicks arse, do what you want when you want because you want to; but it’s expensive and trying.

Mid last year I moved house to live on my own. The idea was that 3 bedrooms and a house all to myself would result in more time and room to do music.  The reality of it all was learning a new untreated room to mix tracks in and getting used to a different sound again.  I figured I’d get some reflection panels up, but landlords, life and banks don’t always agree because rent+alone = $$$$ (the lone factor).

It was pear shaped from the start but I remain(ed) optomistic; Most things are pear shaped in this world, it’s best to stay positive.  On inspection of the house it smelt like cat piss, i was assured it’d be fixed.  I moved in, it smelt like cat piss and the shower was blocked.  I complained, put nil odor and baking soda (or was it bi-carb soda? I dunno!) around the place and they sent a plumber to unblock the drain.

Slowly it smelt less of cat piss and one end of the house smelt as i described it “like hydrochloric acid is burning carpet or something”.  I’m not sure how long that hung around for but a few weeks after the cops arrested my then neighbour for making methamphetamine it went away, SURPRISE!  I guess if you smell acid in one end of your house and you know its not yours, you should probably holler to someone.

After all that things settled down for a while, I started mixing some tracks and making some music and then just before Christmas things started falling apart. I was watching T.V. one night when *POP* the right channel of audio dropped out on my TV.  Turned it off, Turned it on and hio it worked! Until the next time it did it, for a few weeks I pissed around turning the t.v. off and on every now and then because I don’t watch a lot of T.V.  It got more frequent so I sent it in for repair and long story short, 4 weeks after sending it in they’re sending me a new T.V.

Not long after that the started happening the right channel in my Beyer DT-250′s crapped out.  I sent them in for repair and waited weeks for them to get back just in time to record on Christmas break.  Tracks were recorded, tunes were edited, things were mixed.

Then the computer crapped out.  I was in the middle of a Goonbag Radio show when it just froze on me.  After power cycling it was OK for a few days and I’d been mixing a new track of ours.  I fired up another compressor and *BLERT* the computer froze, i rebooted and it never came back to life.  Money was tight because I’d just purchased a Group DIY 51x Alliance rack kit and then the computer died, GREAT!

Anyway, I scraped together my butt and bought a new low spec motherboard, CPU and RAM and threw it all together with a spare HDD I got from my boss.  It was faster and better than the old computer and after a week of bullshit I was back in session.

That’s when I notice my DT-250′s have a really dull left channel in comparison to the recently replaced right.   So back for repair they went, 2 weeks have passed and I’m still without them today.  Headphonics have been handling it well though there just seems to be a lot of wait for parts.

3-4 days after sending the headphones in, me and Luke notice somethings not right about the left speaker in my studio, panning L-R you can hear completely muffled tones out of the high side of the Left speaker, and the Right is perfect.  Now i just think I’m going insane, i’m scrutineering everything I hear with anal retentiveness and thinking “is that channel out?”.  I’m confident somethings just dead in the crossover for the speakers, so it should be a relatively easy fix.

There’s a positive side to all of this though, everything that was old and shit got upgraded and everything that was new or good is getting repaired at little or no cost.  I’m happy it all happened, i felt pretty shit about all of it at the time but in retrospect it’s worked out.

As a developer I’ve always subscribed to a couple of theories and one of those is something that was drilled into me in Maths in high school; Show your working out. It’s all very well to have the answer, but if you don’t understand how you got there, you have failed.

This is the number one thing I hate that software developers do, they overly abstract/dry code up until it’s no longer easily readable. They sacrifice all their readability, for dry, abstracted code.

The inherited_resources gem is a prime example of this, your controllers are left looking empty; It completely reverses the expected convention of having to define those restful methods. So when Newbie Programmer A arrives at your controller, there’s a whole heap of things going on he just doesn’t know about or understand.

By all means write dry, abstracted code, but think twice before abstracting every last inch out. Just like a lot of things in the world, abstracting and drying up your code is great when used in moderation.

Here’s a couple of track we’ve put up on soundcloud for demos, both are still far from finished and will be revisited more over the course of the year:

The Short & Curley

HELO servername
MAIL FROM: sender@adomain.com
RCPT TO: receiver@adomain.com
data
From: The Man Who Sent It 
Subject: A Test Message

This is a test message to ensure your mail is working on the mail server end.

You can safely disregard this message.
.

The Long Explanation

First you need to identify to the SMTP server, the helo command takes care of this. Most mail servers do a lot of anti-spam checks and for this reason it’s suggested the servername you provide should be a valid mail server. That servername should also resolve to whatever IP address you’re connnecting from (another antispam measure).

helo servername

Next you provide the email address you’re sending from. It doesn’t have to be a valid email adress, but many servers will use SPF to ensure you’re allowed to send for that user/domain.

mail from: sender@adomain.com

Follow that with the email you’re sending too. If an error is thrown after this, pay attention to the message as it generally means you’ve got something wrong or that mail can’t be accepted by this mail server for that email address.

rcpt to: receiver@adomain.com

After this we follow with the data command, this tells the email server that everything after this and up until a single line with a lone fullstop (.) is part of the email message. Some exceptions to this are things like the Subject and From lines, which are each used for pretty presentation in e-mail clients.

data
From: The Man Who Sent It 
Subject: Test Message

This is a test message to ensure your mail is working on the mail server end.

You can safely disregard this message.
.

Following all of this, hit enter again to queue the message for sending. A full stop (period) as the first and only character on a line informs the SMTP server that the message is finished.

Posted from Perth, Western Australia, Australia.

So what’s happened in just under a year that’s kept me away from ITALM and other things?

Wrote about music

Back in March 2009 I started Rhythm & Poetry, solo; It’s all me. I don’t think I realised how hard a task that was until I started doing it and I’ve been trying to enlist help ever since.  It’s fun to write about hip hop music in Australia, it gives me a new respect and appreciation for the art-form and for writing in general.  I never proclaim to be any kind of writer, but I try my best to do a thorough and correct job.  Writing reviews has always been a sore point, but I’ve created a way to keep it fun an interesting for me without destroying the joy of listening to a new album.

Wrote some music and started something

Myself and a mate Luke setup a small hip hop group called Selekt Few and we’re working on a lot of stuff.  We don’t profess to be some kind of amazing, we’re just doing our thing and speaking our minds.  Thanks to Luke and Matt-F we’ve setup a small room out the back of my place where I’m writing beats and we’re recording.  Things just fall into place sometimes and the setup was one of those moments, I had no DAW computer and Matt just happened to have a spare computer he wanted to get rid of .

Did some Landscaping

The Landscaper never dies, he only gets stronger.  For a while for me, it felt like The Landscaper was going to die but thank god it didn’t.  Chris is deep into Issue 3 at the moment and i think it may be approaching some kind of epic finale.  The Landscaper comic has by far been the most fun online stuff/thing/experiment I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing.  Chris just does stuff, talking is great, but he tells me doing is better (i should listen more).  We had another comic, we put out at the same time and The Landscaper got a lot of traction so we focused on that.  Also the other comic relied a lot on me writing things for Chris to draw, sure it’s easy, but hey.. I haven’t posted here in a year either.  There’s other comics on the backburners from other people we know that may very well come to Visual Assault this or next year, so keep your eyes out.

Launched Wantsi

Wantz.it is cool, but writing my own Rails app (Wantsi) was better and proved to be a fun exercise.  I’d debated about (and built) a project that never saw it’s real light of day for various reasons and i’d always argued that the best target market was actually something different.  It turns out someone else in another country was on my thought train and they built Wantz.it (hi guys, things are looking good over there!), I found wantz.it about half way through building Wantsi but wanted to keep building my own thing.

Got a new Job

Around 2 months ago I left PerthWeb to go work at The Frontier Group and I traded my PHP/Windows toolkit for a Ruby/OSX toolkit.  PerthWeb was a great place to work, but an opportunity arose to take on a new language and work in a bigger team, so I jumped at it. Thanks to all the crew at PerthWeb for 4 awesome years.  While working at Perth Web I wrote a lot of code into a core system myself and Ben designed and built over the years.  In a weird way I wish I didn’t have to leave my code baby behind to be nurtured by someone else, we built a framework/cms system from the ground up and after building with it for a few years had to leave it and it’s idioms behind.  Most people will never get that opportunity and I’ll probably never get that kind of opportunity again, but it only happened because we made it happen.

So what did I take away from my year long blog break?  Shit only happens or gets done when you stand up and do it.  What’s that, what about Tomorrow? I guess I’m gonna clean my room or something like that? It does feel nice to write this though, I guess we’ll talk again soon random internet people,  for iTALM 0.6, if not before.