The Rest of Your Life (v3.0)

So … I updated a little earlier this year, or maybe near the end of last year (never say never !) – the first time in a long, long time. I think someone noticed, because this site was subsequently hacked !!! Naughty ! Sooo … this has been restored from an old, old backup. Hopefully that means any spurious files are goneskis. One can only hope I guess …

Hi there friends and fans. So … more than six months between updates again. Just between you and me, it’s just not working anymore, is it ? I started this blog almost five years ago, trying to tap into the same creative vein I started squirting vino prodigiously from close to a decade ago when I was part of the whole self-indulgent, pseudo-literate, trying-desperately-to-be-reactionary Melbourne ‘zine scene’. It’s been a great ride – I’ve (virtually) met many great people, heard some great stories, pissed off more than my fair share of punters, and shared very publicly my own evolution from vacuous shallow (single) party-fuck into vacuous shallow (married) boring fuck.

I called this blog “The Rest of Your Life” – I don’t think anyone bothered to ask, but it was actually a completely obscure underground UK comics / graphic novel reference (don’t even ask me what the publication in question was called – I have no idea anymore) to a single image from a story set in a prison, in which the protagonist’s cell block features a poster that says something like “The Rest of Your Life Begins Here”. There’s some kind of tres-fucking-ironic subtext right there, innit, although I didn’t know it at the time

So yes, it’s been a great ride steering the good ship TROYL over the last 5 years or so. I’m in no way bitter about where it’s taken me, nor indeed should you guys take this as ending on a bitter note. It’s not that I don’t have anything left to say either. I just don’t think I’m in the whole “my life is a sterile English cell-block, full of doom and gloom, self-loathing, hard drugs (when you can get ‘em past the wardens), and the occasional bout of angry prison-style sex” mind-set anymore.

As such, and given the appalling lack of anything even resembling attention I’ve given this blog over the last sod knows how long, I think the decent thing for me to do is to finally, officially, and with a sigh of relief no doubt for all concerned – CALL IT A DAY FOR THIS BLOG !

I’m going to be trying some new things in the next little while as I keep promising (fuck knows I need to, or I really AM going to have that much-touted breakdown and lose my biscuit completely … all work and no play makes Johnny a homical effing maniac with an axe to grind and a serious hankering for stronger head-vacation than alcohol provides – but I’ve been down THAT road before and know it doesn’t lead to anywhere good) and WILL post links to those as I get my shit together. The first of these is a new blog I’m planning called “Zero to Hero” which you’ll find at http://im8dit.com/0

But as far as any more ‘official’ content here is concerned, I’m sorry to say this is it gang

Thanks for listening to my psycho-babble, and in the immortal words of Jerry Springer – “Take care of yourselves, and eachother”.

Too long between updates … yeah … sorry – been busy reliving 2004 (the whole looking for a new job at Xmas thing !) *le sigh*

All good now though – more details (and potentially a new blog) to come soon ….

Doing a quick ‘blog post’ like the cool kids – vblog stylee, before we piss off overseas for a few weeks !

EDIT 17/07/08: Currently offline – moving it to a different Youtube account from my ‘movie’ stuff !

Whoever said I don’t give away stuff to my loyal readers (all 3 of them hehe) ?

Well, they were wrong !

Here for your designing pleasure is a free (hopefully cool) font I made all by myself from scratch in Illustrator and Fontforge. Kind of trying to evoke that ‘old school’ Designer’s Republic aesthetic (hence the reason the font is called Sheffield).

Here’s a quick preview of what it looks like -

And HERE’S where you can download it !

For those playing at home, this font is free to use in all personal (i.e. non-commercial) projects, and remains the copyright of yours truly. For commercial use, please contact me.

Let me know what you think guys !

DB

UPDATED 11/02/08:
I’ve got a Mac OS-X compatible version up now as well – download is HERE’S

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for a fantastic year, and all your comments and encouragement, and continuing to read my drivel ! Big things planned for 2008 (but I say that every year haha !), but for now I just want to wish you all a Merry Xmas and a fantastic NYE, and I hope I see you again next year !

Party safe, and have an awesome time, gang.

Cheers
Pete (DB)

Gotta love the name of the nightclub too … “Throb” … only in Brixton, eh ?

Hey Gang,

So I thought I’d take this opportunity to plug one of my many extraneous creative outlets in addition to this blog.

It’s called

Bulletproof Streetwear

That’s right peeps – you can now buy T-Shirts from me, and they’re pretty damn good (if I do say so myself).

Check it out at http://www.redbubble.com/people/bulletproof

Listening To: Hard NRG 8 : Various Artists (MOS)

Current Horn Factor :

Quote of The Day
MyBumMyChum please describe web 2.0 to me
MyBumMyChum in 2 sentences or less.
mynameizzzEarl you make all the content.
mynameizzzEarl they keep all the revenue.

If you can’t tell already (by the fact I haven’t posted anything for the last few weeks), BB07 apathy has well and truly set in for me now dear readers. I don’t know if I can see it through to the end of the series, and I definitely can’t be arsed blogging about it at the moment. Besides, this blog is about so much more than just Big Brother, isn’t it gang ? So instead, I’m going to tackle a completely different topic for today’s enthralling TROYL installment, namely that of “collecting”.

Whether it’s stamps, football cards (baseball cards for our seppo friends), comic books, those poxy porcelein figurines off the back of the TV guide, or explicit polaroid photographs of their numerous sexual encounters, most people have at one time or another, kept a ‘collection’ of some sort. I myself started out collecting Tintin comics when I was a young lad (still have the whole set somewhere in storage), before moving on to “Australian Plastics Modeller” magazine, and a brief flirtation with philatelly (although stamps are a lot less exciting than your average Tintin, which is why the latter was a ‘passing phase’ at best). I also went through a stage of collecting scars in the latter half of my “difficult teens” and early 20′s, but thankfully the appeal of that eventually wore off also.

Now, some would argue that these days what I mostly collect is pornography and parking tickets, but I beg to differ. “Collecting” would be far too methodical a phrase to describe the chaotic nature of my prOn stash, and the parking tickets are not something I purposefully amass, they simply come to me as a consequence of being too lazy to ride my pushbike to work, and choosing to drive instead. Rather, I like to think of myself as ‘collecting’ something far more ephemeral. This particular “pashion” (or compulsion ?) for ‘collecting’ has been with me since around the mid 1990′s, and is a direct consequence of my being a (bedroom/part-time/amateur) musician.

You see gang, the “thing” (or things) I spend a fair bit of time collecting these days are – SOUNDS !

Hold up, hold up ! Before you shut down your browser in disgust (“Sounds ? You purple-haze, hippy, motherf$ka !”), let me explain.

Back in the mid 90′s, when my friends and I first moved away from our guitars and drumkits to PC-based music production, the ‘tech of choice’ for the bedroom musician was something called “software trackers”. I can see a grin of fond memory spreading across some of the faces in the crowd (“FT2″ … “Pro Tracker” … “MMedit” …. ring a bell ?), but for the rest of you I’ll give you a very quick run-down. A software tracker (A.K.A “grid-based, sample pattern sequencing program”) was a way of arranging ultra-short snippets of sound (samples) into meaningful compositions. The upside being that the resulting music file would only save a copy of each “sample” once, along with a very simple record of the order (and pitch) at which all the sound snippets were strung together to make the actual song.

Think of it as a very early version of the humble MP3. Just like MP3′s, a lot of the resulting ‘compositions’ were nothing more than simple ‘rips’ of popular commercial tracks, streamlined for quick downloading and music piracy on the (pitifully slow … 3 hours to download a 300kb file @ 2400 baud) pre-internet data networks. However, just like ‘ground-breaking’ hip-hop and electronic musicians + DJ’s such as The Beastie Boys and The Prodigy could with their ‘hardware’ studio gear, some of us used the “tracker” software to produce original tunes. We’d grab samples from far and wide (a drumloop from an old disco record, a single note from a mate’s Juno synth, 5 seconds of dialogue from a 1970′s ‘Blaxploitation’ flick), and … viola … a cheesy 90′s ‘underground’ techno track to share with our mates in Helsinki, via the wonders of Fidonet.

Being in this ‘scene’ for a few years, I think it’s inevitable that everyone starts to build up a ‘collection’ of their favourite samples (sounds), which they tend to use more than others. There’s a whole array of ‘classic’ samples from that era now, like the so-called “Amen Loop” (a drum loop used on a plethora of 90′s break-beat hits), various TB-303 acid-bleeps (coz not every uneployed teenager could afford a 303, even back then when they were still relatively cheap), and so on. Yeah, I’ve got them all, just like every other man and his dog. MY big thing though was dialogue samples. Too much time listening to obscure bands like Cabaret Voltaire, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult & Ministry, and before you knew it I was raiding the bottom shelves of Blockbuster for all the Z-Grade Roger Corman and horror movies with titles like “The Demon Bimbos from Planet X”, just to get my hands on the same original sample sources they used.

This was before the days of DVD as well kids – much harder to get decent sound reproduction when you’re recording at only 16-bits from a vintage early 80′s VHS player using a coax cable and your crappy 90′s (unshielded) soundcard. Just like other groups of “collectors”, my muso friends and I would trade samples between ourselves, try to ‘out-do’ eachother with particularly “good” examples of sampling, etc. To this day, I still remember feeling really cut when one particular mate of mine used a great sample I’d taken from “Return of the Living Dead”

(the line was “I love you, and you’ve got to let me eat your brain”)

in one of his online tracks, before I’d had a chance to use it in a song of my own. It was gold dammit (!) … one I’d sourced entirely myself (instead of being inspired by one of the aforementioned obscure bands). To add insult to injury, he’d only swapped me a bunch of crappy 8-bit 303 sequences for it

I could go on and on about samples like a true obsessive, but as we all know – nothing stays the same, people and technology evolve. I got out of writing music for a few years, then started slowly moving back into the fold. Used samples & trackers again for a while initially, before discovering the newly evolving “modular studio software” technology epitomized (at the time) by “Buzz Composer”. No longer limited to simple samples, instead for a while there I was collecting “Buzz Instrument (and effect) Plugins” – which were basically little bits of independent software code that you could “plug-in” to the Buzz environment to generate sounds in REAL time (like little software versions of physical studio hardware). Buzz plugins are the pre-cursor to today’s VST plugins, basically. I’m not strictly collecting sounds (as such) at this point I guess, but sporadically gathering sound-producing tools.

Finally then we come to the present (or near present) day, when my 10+ year participation in that ‘orrible thing called the “workforce” finally starts to reap measurable ‘rewards’, and therefore my budget for spending on music production gear (not counting electric guitars, effects pedals and four-track recorders … I had THAT shit when I was a teen … over it hehe) actually becomes more than non-existent. Ergo, I finally start buying real music HARDWARE again, instead of just producing with software (and the occasional midi-controller keyboard, like the EVO mentioned in an earlier blog post). I buy my first ‘proper’ hardware synth on Ebay – a venerable 1980′s workhorse called the Korg-Poly 800. Shed-loads of tweakable parameters, lovely 80′s Depeche Mode synth-pop sonic possibilites. Unfortunately, the programming is a bitch (bugger all physical controls, just membrane buttons and lots of scroll menus). The synth comes with oodles of patch programming sheets the previous owner had squirelled obsessively from the ‘net … and

suddenly I’m back to collecting sounds again, but now they’re not samples, they’re rows of LFO settings, VCO routings, and DCO waveforms.

I get rid of the Korg after a few months of fiddling, but the ‘collecting’ bug has well and truly bitten by then. I go through a few bits of gear on ebay (the Korg, an Alesis-SR16 drum machine), lust over some brand new synths (and sounds) while I’m overseas, and eventually settle for a classic 90′s techno BEAST called the Roland Alpha Juno (gotta luuuuurve ebay !). Just like the guy who sold me the Korg, by this point I’m madly downloading patches and sysex editors for my ‘new’ pre-loved synth off the ‘net, the user groups, wherever I can find them. I’m making my own patches (the Juno being easier to program than the Korg), organizing the ones I’ve already got into “sets” … basically obsessing about all the phatt SOUNDS I can get out of this baby.

Some time after THAT, I get my Novation X-Station. Suffice to say, if i was drooling about the sonic possibilities of the Juno, I positively cream my jeans when I get my hands on the X. It’s not actually that easy to find patches/presets (i.e. sounds) for THIS baby on the ‘net, it’s only been out a few years after all … but believe me, I ALWAYS keep an eye out I’m so tragic now, I actually publically scoffed at the recent ‘new’ patch-set the manufacturers made available on their website (programmed by the keyboard player from Jamiroquoia supposedly) in one of the bigger user forums because “there aren’t enough NEW sounds in there – we’ve heard most of these patches before”.

And THAT, my friends, is my story. YOUR TURN NOW TO FESS UP – WHAT’S YOUR SECRET ‘COLLECTING’ SHAME ?

A few years ago now, when Adobe Systems first bought up Macromedia, some of you may remember I had a small rant concerning the topic in this very blog. From memory, I remember being concerned about a number of things, such as the implications for ‘competition’ brought about by this merger, the inevitable loss of ‘choice’ for designers, and the very real risk that Adobe was going to run Macromedia’s previously-competing flagship products into the ground.

With Adobe’s announcement of the imminent release of Adobe Creative Suite 3, I think it’s time to revisit this topic, and look at some of the (exciting) implications this new release brings to the table for designers. Regarding the first issue i.e. the question of ‘competition’, I’m only going to touch on this very briefly. In so far as my original post is concerned – I was right on this point. The intervening period hasn’t really seen any ‘new players’ of note come to the market place for top-notch design software. 

If anything, we’ve just seen Macromedia/Adobe consolidate their dominance of “Rich Media” with the ubiquitous Flash format, and it’s various extensions. They’ve also made considerable headway establishing Flash Video as a compelling alternative to the defacto streaming ’standard’ of Quicktime - after all, how many ‘killer’ video sites do you know that use Windows Media or the even-more-archaic Real Networks format ? Photoshop continues to be the standard for raster graphics, especially given Corel’s post-Jasc-acquisition hobelling of the once-promising Paintshop Pro line. Illustrator has regained the crown that Freehand once threatened to steal when it comes to vector illustration (Freehand being the first and thus far only ‘real’ Macromedia casualty of Adobe’s buy-up; but we all KNEW that one was coming), and there is still no credible top-flight alternative to Dreamweaver when it comes to web design.

Is all this a ‘bad’ thing ? It probably would be, if the Macromedia/Adobe stable of products wasn’t so damned good ! Naturally, there are going to be those of you who disagree with me. Yes, The Gimp is coming along nicely as an open-source raster graphics app, but for my money it’s still trailing behind the level even the last Jasc incarnations of Paint Shop were at. Yes, there are still some poor suckers out there using Coreldraw for illustration. Sure – SwishMax is a cheap, reasonably mature, Flash ’alternative’ – but it outputs in SWF format anyway, and has a limited feature-set compared to the original. The point is though, easily 95% of designers would have chosen Adobe or Macromedia products prior to the merger (if we discount ‘price’ as a factor, of course), and that hasn’t changed. With the up-coming release of Adobe CS3, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that’s even less likely to change now.

Now, this may seem like a pretty bold statement. Indeed, if you told me two years ago I’d be writing this, I would have probably looked at you like you were a nutter. That’s largely because for a little while, it did indeed seem like Adobe/Macromedia were in danger of losing the plot. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you ? That’s right, I’m talking about the first major release from the combined Adobe/Macromedia stable, the oft-maligned Macromedia Studio (& Flash) 8 A.K.A ’8-Ball’. So let’s talk about 8-Ball for a minute, shall we ?

Flash 8 take-up was always going to be a little slow, like any major overhaul of Flash. Some features, like the advanced alpha channels, filter effects, and blend modes put a particularly large performance dint in the player, and it’s taken some time for the hardware specs of ‘Mr & Mrs Average’ to catch up. It also sported an improved video codec, which Adobe have done so well to capitalise on in the interim, especially thanks to the growth of sites like Youtube and Myspace, all of which utilise FLV. At the time though, Quicktime was still king, and Youtube was still around the corner. Given this, it’s natural that a lot of designers decided to stay with their old versions of Flash.

True, if you’re working for a BIG developer, you could get the boss to pony up for the upgrade – but if you’re an independent, the new version of Flash alone wasn’t going to swing it, especially since you knew you’d likely be exporting your SWF’s for backwards-compatability for a few years to come. The other components of Studio 8 were no great shakes – ‘incremental upgrades’ I think is the kindest way to describe them. At least Flash 8 had the above new features to attract the ‘deep pockets’ and ‘early adopters’. The Dreaweaver, Fireworks & Contribute upgrades on the other hand were no great departure from their predecessors. The Studio offering was rounded out with Flashpaper 2, a somewhat awkward attempt to bridge the PDF-Flash portable document space.

Unlike previous Macromedia-only versions of Studio, version 8 also saw the notable exclusion of Freehand from the bundled product line-up. A sure sign, to the ‘die-hard’ Macromedia fans (like moi), that our merger-inspired fears were in real danger of coming true. In addition to all the above, when it comes to 8-Ball, the PRICE SIMPLY WASN’T RIGHT ! From memory, the upgrade to Studio 8 from Studio MX 2004 was anywhere between AUD $580 – $650. When you consider that the original version of MX ’04 cost around AUD $1500, the upgrade path was ONLY available to MX 2004 owners if I remember correctly (earlier versions being restricted to a full purchase), and as I’ve already mentioned, Flash was the only SUBSTANTIALLY upgraded app in the package (with Freehand being dropped altogether), for independents like yours truly, the upgrade to 8-ball simply didn’t represent good enough value.

So instead of upgrading to 8-ball, I stuck with my MX 2004 version of Studio, happily continued using Freehand, and stayed with Paintshop Pro 8 as my raster graphics app (coz ponying up another $1.2K for Photoshop on top of Studio + my $2.5K version of Director MX 2004 was something I just couldn’t do). Apart from the aforementioned ‘deep pockets’, and large studios, I know I wasn’t the only one.

This all brings us rather neatly, then, to Adobe Creative Suite 3. This is the new release from Adobe/Macromedia, slated to hit the stores mid April, just in time for my birthday. Guess who’s buying themselves a little design pressie ? For this release, they’re pitching a few different versions, which represent different bundle offerings. I’m going to concentrate on the “Web Design Premium” incarnation, because in my opinion, this represents the best value, especially if you’re a web designer. If you do a fair bit of print, the “Design Premium” bundle may be more your thing (it includes a new version of InDesign, and ommits Fireworks + Contribute), but the upgrade price is steeper from Studio. There’s also a rather exxy ”Production Premium” package aimed squarley at the video buffs (includes version of AE, Premier, among others), but I’ve already got some decent video editing software, and useful video functions have also found their way into the new versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks, all of which are included in the “Web Design Premium” bundle of CS3.

Let’s talk specifics then, shall we ? For starters, the ”Web Design Premium” package naturally includes a new version of Flash Professional. This once again has a host of new features, including a new version of Actionscript. It’s also closely integrated with the other Creative Suite components – which is a big drawcard, when you see what the other components are. Naturally, any sensible designer will still be exporting his/her SWFs for backwards compatibility (so Actionscript 3.0 won’t actually be getting a major look-in for a few years yet) , but ”backwards” now encompasses Flash 8 as well (the takeup of the relevant player starting to filter through pretty decently by now), complete with ’Tube-alicious FLV streaming.

Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Contribute have also been upgraded, and it looks like the upgrades are more substantial this time. There’s better support for standards like XML, XHTML, CSS, and Spry/Ajax – all the important ‘Web 2.0′ tools basically. ’Integration’ is once again the buzzword, and once again this is a great thing, when you know what they’re integrating with. S, without further ado, I’ll stop teasing, and let you know what the other big draw-cards of this bundle are ….

Two words - (1) Photoshop & (2) Illustrator !!! That’s right peeps, in one fell swoop, they’ve put non-Flash vector illustration back in the picture to make up for dropping Freehand, and they’ve upped the ante by throwing THE ‘gold standard’ raster graphics program into the bundle as well. Not only that, it’s actually the ‘Extended’ version of Photoshop CS 3, with the aforementioned video-centric enhancements, plus various web-related ones.

Sensibly, they’ve also decided to drop the farcical ‘Flash Paper’ idea from this release, and all the packages (except “Production Premium”) are also rounded out with Acrobat 8. *Bam* – there goes my el-cheapo registered version of PDF Creator Pro So … the BIG question … is the ‘price right’ this time ?

You bet your arse it is, kids ! There’s a much more comprehensive ‘upgrade eligibility’ matrix, covering previous versions of Macromedia Studio right back to MX, and the cost for upgrading from MX 2004 is just AUD $865. For that you get Flash CS3 Professional, Dreamweaver CS3, Fireworks CS3, Contribute CS3, and Photoshop CS3 Extended + Illustrator CS3 + Acrobat 8 (as well as the helper apps Bridge, Version Cue & Device Central).

That is already a SERIOUSLY good deal – the full version of the package costs almost 3K (AUD $2,775) … so the upgrade is a definite money saver, and certainly worth it (it’s a saving of around four hundred bucks, for the literal minded).

However, when you also consider that buying Photoshop seperately would set you back AUD $1735 alone, and Illustrator is AUD $1039 – in REAL terms you’re saving FUCK-LOADS more than the $400 I just mentioned above, since you’re upgrading your existing ‘Studio’ software AND picking up PS + AI as well.

That my friends, is why Adobe has FINALLY got it right