General

(Buffalo) Well, today is my busy day here in Buffalo - with a workshop after lunch and my guest talk in the evening. I met some of the students here as Trebor Scholz showed me around yesterday, and I'm looking forward to the events. Some other interesting developments: I received an email yesterday from former La Trobe University MA student Derek Lackaff, whose thesis on heterarchical moderation schemes in Slashdot and elsewhere I had the pleasure to examine recently - turns out he's now based here in Buffalo doing his PhD... Also, an email from Mark Tribe at Brown University - he's invited me to do a guest lecture there as well, and I may be able to take a day trip to Providence during my week in New York City. And I phoned David Marshall at Northeastern University in Boston, who is also looking to set up something. More soon!

(Buffalo) Well, after 24 hours on progressively smaller planes I'm finally here in Buffalo, arriving late last night. An eventless flight on Qantas and American Airlines - a nice sunrise over the Californian coastline flying into LAX, and luckily none of the landing gear problems that occurred so dramatically and telegenically on a JetBlue flight at the same airport just a few days ago. Flying across the U.S. by daylight for the first time I was struck by the vast and barren expanses of land still left more or less untouched especially in the West (this would have been Arizona in particular, I guess) - perhaps its just me, but you don't think about America in such terms these days... Of course I also couldn't help but think 'Google Earth' at the same time - will have to revisit some of the sites along the way later (was that the Las Vegas or Phoenix speedway I saw from the air?).

I didn't yet get around to mentioning that I spent the last weekend in Darwin, visiting my old friend Ron who currently works up there. Just a quick weekend trip (on Frequent Flier points accumulated through conference travel last year), flying out Friday after work and returning Monday morning directly back to work - and I think I'm still backing up for the sleep I lost in transit. It was great to get out of the Brisbane cold for a while and warm up in very balmy conditions - and interesting to see Darwin for the first time, with Ron a a tour guide.

What struck me was how much more, well, Australian Darwin seemed - perhaps that's just the wide open streets, or the greater amount of red dust everywhere, or the ant hills on the outskirts of town, but I really felt more like being in Australia again than I do during my everyday life here in Brisbane. In fact, Darwin now reminded me of how Brisbane felt when I first came here on holidays in 1990 - so perhaps it's the familiarity of having lived in Brisbane for 11 years now or the fast that this city has gone through some massive changes since then and become more cosmopolitan (and crowded): more of a metropolis in its own right, and less part of a national image.

OK, I really have to get back to blogging again. I suppose I blog the most when exciting and interesting things are happening, but the last few weeks, filled with chores between the end of one semester and the start of the next, have been difficult to say the least. I have tried hard to keep my weekends free from work-related tasks at least, though - with varying levels of success. Will try and post a few updates on current projects over the next few days.

One thing I have been able to do is to compile Iceworld, a CD of some ambient soundscapes I've tinkered with over the last few months. These are mainly improvs very much in a 'drone, bleep, blurt' mode, recorded live and edited into a series of individual tracks. The CD clocks in at just over 70 minutes and generally has a somewhat antarctic feel to me (hence the title); I've made it available here in MP3 format under a Creative Commons licence. Having listened to them a few times today, I'm quite fond of these tracks - "The Factory Ship" in particular has some very impressive bottom end on a good sub-woofer... Any comments are very welcome. (I might write a little more about how I've recorded these at another time.)

I got caught in the massive hail storm that hit Brisbane last night. Things looked pretty dark on the way from work, and as I reached the Toowong area all hell broke loose and evening traffic was simply swamped with hail. From all I can tell I was probably lucky as I was on my way south from Toowong before the worst of the storm hit - the ABC studios there were damaged, and even this morning all the way up through to Milton and up to Kelvin Grove there were still melting piles of hail stones in the gutters and on the footpaths. The storm meant that I did miss the guest lecture by ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel at the University of Queensland, though. By the way, the award for best photo from the storm so far clearly goes to Michelle & Heather for their utterly Australian response to an abundance of water ice.

OK, I've updated my Drupal installation to the 4.6 RC version. Looks like most things are working - still waiting for an updated weblink module to appear, so the links to the Robert Fripp and Sid Smith diaries are gone for the time being. On the upside, trackback should work again. I've also taken new action against a persistent online poker site which has kept spamming me both through their frequent accesses to this site (presumably to get themselves listed in the site logs, even though they're not public) and through a couple of bouts of trackback spam. Well, their IP is banned now, so we'll see what happens.

Hmm, reading about blogs always makes me want to write another entry myself. Unfortunately I don't get around to it nearly as often as I should.

I've had some very good news in the meantime: my series editor for Peter Lang, Steve Jones, likes the manuscript for the Gatewatching book that I delivered at the end of November. A few minor corrections and additions to be made, but things should go smoothly from here. I'll try and I've updated the relevant pages on this site, too. I've also received a nice endorsement for the back cover from John Hartley:

It's journalism, Jim, but not as we know it. "Gatewatching," "multiperspectival editing," the "produser." Strange new terms -- but as Axel Bruns shows in this impressive account of online news media, the underlying issues remain very much as Herbert Gans described them a generation ago. In a democracy everyone has a right to practice journalism. Users are beginning to shape the oddly named collaborative instruments on the internet into a new chorus, giving a new voice to democracy. Axel Bruns shows us why and how we all need to learn the tune.
John Hartley, Queensland University of Technology.

One ugly hack: drives in the left machine are hotwired into the right...Argh - while I was away in Canberra, a massive storm in Brisbane seems to have affected my server. I've patched things up so I can go online and the mail and Web servers are operational again, but it's not pretty.