If we're brutally honest, the Hollywood film machine isn't exactly known for it's creativity. Sure it manages to make a great film every now and then, but as far as I can figure when you throw that many knives, at least one of them is going to hit the target. It's the success via shotgun approach.

As a result, movies tend to go through trends until you get such a colossal failure that the studios won't touch a film like that for a long time. A superhero film went well? Let's license every comic property we can! Sci-Fi film just made some money? time to raid Philip K. Dick's short stories again. Someone just get a smash hit from a sequel? I'm sure we've got something lying around here ...

You get the idea. So when the latest Star Trek film made good, it logically follows that we're going to see a flurry of "remakes". These are making the studios salivate even more, because if they do get a hit then there's not just merchandising to milk; why, you could start a whole TV series as well!

Which brings me to my point. News comes out today that they're looking at making a Whedon-less version of Buffy, in an attempt to reboot the series. A part of me just died inside.

It came to my attention a little while ago that Centrelink are finally going to start recognising same sex relationships from the 1st of July this year. My brain has trouble coming to terms with how incredulous it is that this hasn't happened a long time before now. When the military have already beaten you to the punch on a moral issue, you know you've been dragging your feet.

Part of me is continually surprised that we didn't work all of this out last century. Cue the Washington Examiner, whose recent opinion piece on how Obama's popularity score are biased due to race reads like something that should have been published by a newspaper in 1950's Alabama. Byron York postulates that ".. his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are". Really?

Ubuntu issued a new release last week, but with the release of Windows 7 hanging in the air I can't help but feel underwhelmed. Gnome still feels like it did five years ago, and the version of KDE4 that comes with Kubuntu is so buggy that I find it unusable; if Microsoft released something that crashed this often they'd be slammed all over the media. Straight Ubuntu seems rock solid enough, but given this isn't a Long Term Service release I'm not really judging it as a server platform.

I arrived home to find that Oracle have bought Sun. While I knew that Sun were facing their demise, I can't say I saw Oracle being the one to buy them out. IBM still seem like the more obvious choice, and I would have preferred Google bought them out, but alas it wasn't to be.

I'm a little unsure what this mean for Java. I'm really hoping the Oracle software culture doesn't permeate into the Java platform.

I toyed with writing something about the Rudd government's announcement to go it alone with our national internet infrastructure, after a controversial but I believe justified abortion of the tendering process. I had decided against another boring blurb about technical details that people should care about, but really don't. Then I read Kenneth Davidson's idiotic rant about the Government's plan which got my blood pumping, so here's a rebuttal to his article that should hopefully start to explain Government going alone on this project is the right idea.

( Flame on! )

To summarise: *facepalm*

So day two of Stixcamp didn't go quite as planned. I woke up with a headache early on the second morning, which I put down to the wine from the night before. Then the vomiting began. I ended up spending the second day quarantined in noisymime's car feeling very sorry for myself, and haven't really felt much better since. Turns out there is some kind of gastro/bug going around and my immune system being as slack as it is, I got it in spades.

This in turn reminds me about how I really don't look after myself. If I'm feeling better by this afternoon I am totally going to go and join the gym.

I'm also quite jazzed to see that my dreams of an Apple tablet device actually look like they have a chance of coming to life! Rumours of Apple placing a large order for 10" touch screens mixed with the news of changes coming to the app store to allow for "premium" applications make me think a tablet isn't just wishful thinking anymore. I would so be pre-ordering one of these bad boys.

There's an apple event tomorrow morning at 4am AEST to show off the iPhone 3.0 features, which is going to just feel weird without Steve jobs at the helm. I do miss him.

I'll preface this by saying that I have never been to an unconference before. The idea appeals though; a group of like-minded individuals all arrange to meet in the one place to have a discussion, with the exact topics to be decided upon on the day. I described it as a flash-mob think tank when people asked what I was doing this weekend, and it's about a succinct description as you could hope for.

So what exactly am I doing this weekend? I'm hanging out at a small winery in rural Victoria with a group of 59 other people, where the only thing we have in common is an interest in technology and how it can improve people's lives. In many ways it is probably like any two day conference, except the conference program consists of pot it notes stuck on a whiteboard, and just outside the door behind me is a tent city where most people will be spending the night. Around me are a mismatched crowd of high paid consultants and high school students, way-out hippie types and fat guys who are thirty and still live with their mother. Strangely enough none of that matters here, and a miasma of conversation fills the room that a normal person would find suffocating, but these people expel and inhale like air. The guy next to me has fallen asleep on his laptop, his screen filled with a mixture of XML and Java. In one corner there is an impromptu LAN game of something that has that look of being made by Valve. In the kitchen people who would normally be labeled 'shy' chatter eagerly as they take turns working the knobs and levers of the espresso machine.

And in amongst it all I'm sitting here typing all of this for you, having worked my way through most of a bottle of 2005 Shiraz. I am alone in a crowded room, but I have never felt more comfortable.

The talks have all been excellent. There's a more relaxed, almost conversational, aspect to them. It probably helps that everyone is here because they want to be here. There are no academics presenting as a requirement to getting published, and nobody here is shilling for their company. Every talk is given by someone who cares about what they're talking about, imparting information because they are compelled to by their passion for that particular topic. Things like web standards and electronics come alive as their narrators explain why these things are important to them, and in turn the speakers are rewarded by a wave of interest from the audience as they get caught up in their enthusiasm.

Add to this an ideallic bush surrounding and some incredible food. Dinner tonight was pizza, but made with fresh local ingredients and cooked in an outdoor wood fire oven. Since the event is being held in a winery, where the vines are hand-tendered and the wine itself made by hand, a good portion of the attendees are enjoying a glass (or three) of the local drop. The entire thing has been flawlessly organised, as much as an event designed to be unorganised can be, and I struggle to think of a way that this weekend could have been done better.

The thing that I find completely unbelievable is that the entire weekend is free. It just doesn't seem right.

Every year I listen to Triple J's hottest 100, and every year there are fewer and fewer songs that I know and like. This year I scored a mere 5 songs, which is my worst score yet.

The most obvious answer is that I'm getting old and losing touch with "kids these days". I'm struggling to accept this, since I have always made a conscious effort to try and keep up my exposure to new things, especially music.

And I listen to new music that I like all the time. It's just that the music I like doesn't seem to match with what the 18-25 demographic is enjoying. What does this mean? Have I fallen into a rut musically? Is most modern music really unimaginative and mediocre, but the kids like it that way? Or has the sub section of people who vote in the Hottest 100 changed in some way that the results are skewed? I keep asking myself these questions but I am yet to arrive at a conclusion.

What I do know is that Kayne West having a song in the Hottest 100 brings shame upon all Australians.