Category: Technology

The spin doctors were working overtime on this one. Scored a write up recently in the Sunday paper: deals with four major recording labels offering free and legal music downloads. Thought I’d check it out. Went to the QTrax site and discovered you had to install special software but it wasn’t even ready to download. How rude.

The software became available today. Now it turns out the downloading is disabled because someone forgot to tell the four major labels they were supposed to agree to the deal! But I notice already, in less than 24 hours there are over 24,000 members – at least that was the number reported online at the time I was there, it could be more (or it could be less).

It was hailed in the Sunday paper as the new iTunes rival, but we’ll see. At the moment it is a bit of a flop!

• Big four music labels deny QTrax deal, Sky News
• Of QTrax and broken dreams, ZDNet
• Qtrax entry on Wikipedia

It is kind of surprising that this kind of thing is happening during a Labor term but I am probably displaying my lack of political nouse. Certain political allegiances and the price of power?

I couldn’t give a toss about pornography but I am concerned about the whole civil liberties issue. I mean there has been rating and censorship of movies, television shows forever. Will the “clean feed” employ similar standards? who determines what is “clean” and what is not? And the fact that you are allowed to “opt-out” of receiving the clean feed, will someone who does this have their name added to a national “sicko” list?

Poor sickoes, what will they do – if a xxx-rated movie wasn’t allowed in the theatres in the past, at least they could download it off the Net.

I had to reinstall my blogging software because of an upgrade issue and decided to go for a new look. I know I said last time that I would design my own theme, but I couldn’t go past this one – Neoclassic by Chris Pearson.

I like the clean look of the design, achieved through the lovely typography and lots of whitespace. This theme features a random header image, which will be fun for me; I think I will be browsing through some photographs this weekend.

There has been a series on the ABC about the worst jobs of the Victorian age – lovely jobs like vomit scooping, manure collecting, leather tanning. I reckon one of the worst jobs these days must be ISP support.

I’ve dealt with some very nice and gracious people in my time on an ISP helpdesk, but unfortunately the mean and nasty experiences tend to overshadow these. The abuse, ignorance and absolute bulldust that some people come out with!

I discovered this thread on Whirlpool with over 30 pages of helpdesk horror stories.

It’s not that long since I last changed the theme here, but I happened across this new template and really liked the colours and the layout – an extra column to fit my news feeds, yay!

The only annoyance is a CSS issue, changing the colour of my feed headings (far right column), stubbornly refuse to change from blue to white and wouldn’t work no matter what I tried. I’m sure I overlooked something dead simple. I’ll get it eventually.

This new theme was created for Smashing Magazine readers by Elena from Design Disease. I like it, but I am aiming for the next new look to be based on one of my own designs.

I was checking out Ansearch.com.au today, it used to be one of the bigger search sites in Australia but like many others is now hidden in the gigantic shadow cast by Google. It was several years since I’d last been there, I was quite surprised at the transformation of the site – from complex portal to Google simplicity. Then I noticed some rather different options next to the search box – you can select gender and age range. What the?!

So apparently it is to help you locate results which are more relevant to you. It is an interesting way to go about it. Some of the examples given by the site include:

• A 19 year old male purchasing a car for the first time may focus on plasma lights, speakers and Nitro Boost whereas a professional female in her 30s is likely to consider decent boot space, heated seats and leather interior;
• Young girls under the age of 17 will be more interested in locating music performed by Britney Spears than Frank Sinatra which would be of more interest to females over 55 years;
• Holiday locations and preferences will differ between the 18-24 and 35-44 age group;
• ‘Education’ will vary in meaning between youths accessing primary school websites and adults with a desire to further their education.

I suppose it is sensible, but it is very consumer focussed and I wonder if it is really all that useful. I mean wouldn’t people who were looking for Britney Spears music just type the singers name?