The Null Device
2001/8/17
Today, I went down to Collectors' Corner and found a copy of Trembling Blue Stars' Her Handwriting (they were a solo project of one of the Field Mice). I found it a bit underwhelming; it's relationship-breakup angst, but done in a relatively ordinary way. Anyway, I've posted a review of it to Records Ad Nauseam. (I also managed to pick up Single Gun Theory's Flow, River of My Soul, which has apparently been deleted for ages.)
Apropos of nothing: the 3RRR Radiothon is on now, so those Melburnians in the audience who listen to said station should think of subscribing and helping to keep them on air.
Never send a desktop OS to do a handheld OS's job: Palm to buy Be, who could have been the next Amiga, had it not been for Microsoft, and Linux, and MacOS X, and everybody else with an OS with actual applications stealing their reason to exist.
I've still got a few BeOS CDs somewhere, including a few Intel ones which are rather picky about graphics cards (in most cases you get slow, minging, 800x600x16 shades of grey) and (needless to say) don't run under VMware, and (I think) a PowerPC one that only runs on really old Power Macs. (I once ran it on a Umax Mac clone I had at Monash, which puts it in historical context.) It had a UNIX shell, and you could compile text-based GNU apps, but because of its revolutionary design, it wasn't anything like any OS in popular use, and hence had only a handful of uninspiring shareware apps. All in all, nice swing, no follow-through.
Now the question is whether Palm will attempt to shoehorn BeOS onto their palmtops; if they do, it could be awkward (witness Microsoft's ill-fated forays into PDAs. OTOH, PalmOS could get rather cramped and unscalable, much like the old MacOS (which it resembles to an extent).
Tonight, I strolled down to the Empress Hotel to see Sydney postrockers Sealifepark, who were in town. They played a great show, tight and full of energy; playing some tracks off their recent album Wildlife Documentary and some older tracks, to rousing applause. Afterwards, cajoled into an encore by the audience, they launched into an energetic performance of what I think was a Clouds cover. At one stage (just before Straight Roads Return, I think), one of them said that they feel almost at home at the Empress as they do at the Hopetoun (one of Sydney's better-known interesting live music venues; incidentally, where I saw Prop, who are playing tomorrow night).