Score one for Hans Zimmer

Via Cory Doctorow, this easter egg from the Inception score:



Pretty cool, eh?

A brilliant stroke from composer Hans Zimmer and a great example of how art can reference other works in interesting and creative ways.

Tuesday Tune-age: Apocalyptica

I recently secured tickets for Apocalyptica's upcoming show in 0Toronto. They are an interesting genre-crossing act featured in this week's Tuesday Tune-age.

In the mid-1990s, four cellists attending Finland's prestigious Sibelius Academy met frequently to perform Metallica covers. Their first studio album, Plays Metallica By Four Cellos (1996) consisted of cello arrangements of "Harvester of Sorrow", "Creeping Death", and "Master of Puppets" among others.



While hardly the first act to bring cellos into rock or heavy music, even as lead instruments, it's safe to say the vast majority of metal fans never heard string arrangements of guitar riffs and solos played by classically trained musicians before. As a long-haired adolescent who banged out covers of Iron Maiden tunes on the grand piano in between practicing scales and Kabalevsky pieces, when I first heard Apocalyptica's version of "Enter Sandman" I was both impressed and vindicated. With no drums, no distortion and no vocals (the vocal melody was taken up by one of the cellos), the quartet showed just how melodic thrash metal could be by stripping away its noisier adornments.

Arguably, Apocalyptica was an inspiration for the formation of Vitamin Records, a music label based around releasing dozens of albums of string quartet (and more recently, piano) arrangements of rock and pop music.

The quartet's second album, Inquisition Symphony (1998), contained more covers of Metallica and a few other metal acts, as well as three original compositions by bandleader Eicca Toppinen. This would carry over onto the third album, Cult (2000), which was almost all Toppinen original compositions, except for two Metallica covers and an interpretation of every heavy metaller's favourite classical piece, Edvard Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King". The group started using distortion and other effects for the first time.

Starting with the fourth album, Reflections (2003), Apocalyptica essentially settled on a sound of cellos (clean and distorted), adding a drumkit (Slayer's Dave Lombardo guesting on several studio tracks), and for some songs, guest vocalists including the Finnish frontmen of The Rasmus and HIM, Rammstein's Till Lindemann, Three Days Grace's Adam Gontier and Lacuna Coil's Cristina Scabbia.

Heavy metal musicians have drawn inspiration from classical music from the very beginnings of the genre. Less well-known in the popular understanding: serious composers have always been inspired by the popular and folk music of their day. Carl Orff's celebrated Carmina Burana is a cycle of arrangements of medieval drinking songs, while the hundreds of lieder composed by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and other German composers have their roots in medieval folk songs. It's not my intention to elevate these long-haired Finns to those heights (especially when history is the final arbiter of such things), but only to forestall a reflexive dismissal of their work. As more and more popular music sounds like it's all been done before, creative artists will plumb new wells for inspiration, even centuries-old material. If this helps bring older schools of music to the attention of new listeners, that can only be a good thing, right?

Tuesday Tune-age: Special Mercury Prize Edition featuring Mumford & Sons

As Canada's New Music guru Alan Cross writes today, , including our own Polaris Prize. Today, the short list was released:

BIFFY CLYRO
Only Revolutions

CORINNE BAILEY RAE
The Sea

DIZZEE RASCAL
Tongue N' Cheek

KIT DOWNES TRIO
Golden

FOALS
Total Life Forever

I AM KLOOT
Sky At Night

LAURA MARLING
I Speak Because I Can

MUMFORD & SONS
Sigh No More

PAUL WELLER
Wake Up The Nation

VILLAGERS
Becoming A Jackal

WILD BEASTS
Two Dancers

THE XX
XX

Haven't really had the opportunity to listen to most of these albums, but a friend has been listening to the Mumford & Sons album quite a bit recently, so they're being highlighted on this edition of Tuesday Tune-age. Here's the video for their single "Little Lion Man", from their debut album Sigh No More:

Netflix Streams into Canada

This fall, Netflix expands beyond the USA into the Great White North as noted here.

What will this mean for the Canadian home video market? Certainly struggling video rental chains have no chance of respite. And Canada's broadband penetration is higher than the United States, where Netflix is the leading Internet subscription video service. This Christmas shopping season should be telling for the future of the industry.

Tuesday Tune-age: The Creepshow

In the interest of adding regular features to this blog, and to keep me on track (I work better with clear guidelines or directions), I'm starting with Tuesday Tune-age! Ever Tuesday, I will blog about a musician, band, ensemble or music artist that has caught my attention recently. I'm hoping to focus on lesser-known artists, since the big names already have tonnes of mainstream coverage, but might occasionally mention a major star who strikes my fancy for some reason.

We'll start this off with The Creepshow, a psychobilly/horror punk band originally from nearby Burlington, Ontario. Here's the video for "The Garden" from their debut album, Sell Your Soul. It's a slower, calmer affair than most of their other tracks, but has a charm all its own:



Psychobilly is a genre that arose in the middle of the rockabilly revival of the mid-1970s. Rockabilly was one of the earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, the marriage of rhythm-and-blues and honky-tonk music, and during the punk movement's opposition to the kind of ossified, crafted, self-indulgent arena rock that dominated the music scene in the 1970s, mining earlier forms of rock music became an effective way to channel baser emotions like rage, despair, fun, and lust.

Psychobilly took the musical foundation of rockabilly, kidnapped it at gunpoint, threw it in the back of a black 1967 Chevy Malibu convertible, and took it on a wild ride through Transylvania. With lyrical topics like horror films, pulp science fiction, sex and violence, psychobilly tapped into the subculture of exploitation films thematically and aesthetically. Indeed, costuming, album art and band posters and where applicable, music videos, seek kinship with the lurid kitsch of "grindhouse" cinema.

Similarly, horror punk eats the brains out of punk rock and devotes its image and lyrics to zombie flicks and horror films.

The Creepshow are playing Hamilton later this week so I'm going to try and see them live.

Also check out the "Take My Hand" video for an example of their more rockin' work:

The Creepshow - Take My Hand - For more of the funniest videos, click here

UPDATE (16 July): I did end up seeing them last night, and they were excellent. Great musicians and they really got the audience involved. If they're coming anywhere near to you, I highly recommend them.

Launch the Polaris

The Polaris Music Prize is an annual award given to the best full-length Canadian album based on merit. It was inspired by the Mercury Prize awarded annually to the best British or Irish album. The Polaris' 178 jurors come from the ranks of Canadian music journalists, bloggers and broadcasters, each submitting their top five choices from the year's releases to compile the long list, then submitting their top five picks from the long list to compile the short list. A "Grand Jury" of 11 (I assume to break ties) picks the winner from the short list.

On July 6th, the Polaris Music Prize short list was announced (the long list had been announced earlier on June 17th).

THE BESNARD LAKES,
The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
(Montréal, QC)

OWEN PALLETT,
Heartland
(Toronto, ON)

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE,
Forgiveness Rock Record
(Toronto, ON)

RADIO RADIO,
Belmundo Regal
(Grosse Coque, NS, Moncton, NB, Pointe-à-l’église, NS)

CARIBOU,
Swim
(Dundas, ON)

THE SADIES,
Darker Circles
(Toronto, ON)

KARKWA,
Les Chemins De Verre
(Montréal, QC)

SHAD,
TSOL
(London, ON)

DAN MANGAN,
Nice, Nice, Very Nice
(Vancouver, BC)

TEGAN AND SARA,
Sainthood
(Vancouver, BC & Montréal, QC)

The winner will be announced at the awards gala on September 20th. I'm not familiar enough with all the nominees yet, but I'll tentatively throw my support behind local boy Caribou. Good luck to all the nominees!

Dust in the Wind

Time to dust away the cobwebs and get this place up and running again. Going forward, I'm going to focus on my current professional duties as a collection development librarian with a media/non-print focus, since there seem to be so few of us blogging. I will still occasionally blog about other issues and news concerning librarianship, especially technology.

I will probably be experimenting with the layout for the next few weeks as well.

Back to the grind!

Media Metrics

From Michael Geist, this LA Times article on Canadian indie-rockers Metric on how free online distribution encouraged sales of their new album:

For its first album in four years, electronic-tinged rock act Metric opted to go without the backing of a music label, a move that in the past would have been daring.

But the Canadian quartet's new release, "Fantasies," popped up in the middle of the U.S. pop chart last week. Metric accomplished that thanks in large measure to iTunes and a nonprofit Canadian arts funding entity.

The non-profit in question is FACTOR, the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent On Recordings. FACTOR was set up by a handful of major stakeholders in the Canadian music industry (primarily the indie scene) and manages the distribution of Department of Canadian Heritage funding in this regard. This makes Metric's story another good example of the effectiveness of government cultural spending.

Someone call the Olympic Committee!

There's a new sport on the horizon, and its athletes hail from the unlikely ranks of IT professionals. Its name is speedcabling:

A new "sport" based around unravelling the mass of wires that can typically be found beneath computer desks the world over is taking off in the western US.

Librarian 2.0 Manifesto

A video mash-up of the Librarian 2.0 Manifesto by Laura Cohen:



Some of the commentators at YouTube have wondered, condescendingly, what images from the counter-cultural festival Burning Man have to do with libraries. Well, they have a point, although Burning Man is a regular indulgence of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two Stanford academics behind Google. And you could make the argument that Google represents the leading edge of Web 2.0 (first dot-com and tech company to succeed in the wake of the dot-com crash), or that Google is the most widely-used information retrieval tool of choice in modern libraries.

However, I think the commentators have a point when they note that in all her points, Cohen does not once mention "reading".

Future of movies in libraries

Libraryman brings up a recent BBC article on Netflix:

US DVD rental firm Netflix is to release a set-top box which will let subscribers download movies and other programmes over the net.

Libraryman considers the implications for public libraries:

True, “Netflix has spent about $40m on the development of its streaming service during the past year.” and that of course surely does not include licensing and revenue related math for the studios, etc. True also that money talks, eh? Still, given the mission of the library (particularly Public Libraries) it seems worth noting that:

As an industry, within the larger library-centric institutions that could make important impacts:
-We are not researching this kind of content delivery in any truly significant way.
-We are not planning to, in the future, provide specific deliverables based around his kind of content delivery.
-We do not have organized, direct or significant relationships with the companies that own the largest collections of popular content and manage it’s distribution to approach them as a potential distribution channel.
-We do not have the legal and negotiation teams that would be required to get our patrons access to the content controlled by companies mentioned above.

Some of people in his comments have suggested OverDrive and similar services as the future of providing content for public libraries. I'm not entirely sure these services have a broad enough selection yet. But maybe we've set ourselves up to fail by placing such pre-eminence on circulation and database usage statistics as performance indicators. Right now at my workplace, there are dozens of students studying for their exams who are not checking out books or using our computers for anything. Are we not providing them a valueable, if perhaps unquantifiable, service?

Reading on a Dream

This library musical was supposedly a prank played on the other patrons, but I have a feeling it was at least partly staged (How do you place all those cameras otherwise?).

Still, cute gag.

Hand-eye coordination

This is a really neat concept--a visual display keyboard, on the same principles of the iPhone or iPod Touch:



Typing Mode



Video Mode

Only conceptual for now, but it's a step closer to making the "flexies" (flexible computer screens/keyboards/cellphones/PDAs) from Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice a reality.

Amazon Kindles a new love of eBooks

Amazon's new Kindle eBook reader

Amazon has been getting quite a buzz from its new wireless reading device. Although it would be easy to dismiss the Kindle as just another useless eBook reader, Mike Elgan of Computerworld magazine begs to differ:

Opinion: Why Amazon's Kindle is revolutionary

Last April, I wrote a column titled, “Why e-books are bound to fail.” My reasons: cost, the availability of better alternatives and, most importantly, book lovers love paper books.

I was wrong.

Last week, I set out to deflate the hype about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader and to tell you why it will fail. But while researching this column, I became convinced of the opposite: Kindle is revolutionary and will succeed in the market. Some percentage of book lovers, including me, will buy one to replace their beloved paper books, magazines and newspapers.

Read the rest!

Self-service in public libraries

Found a new blog: A Neo-Traditional Librarian. His latest post has some interesting thoughts on expanding self-service options for library customers:

1. A great deal of library service has always been self-service. Many patrons use the library without assistance and with minimal contact with staff and like it that way. They are not unsocial or dysfunctional. Many shoppers don’t like sales associates hanging around them either.

2. Some core functions can not be provided well by self-service. Reference. Reader’s advisory. Teaching people to use the library’s resources. Arts and cultural programming. Libraries should focus on making staff support of these as available and visible as possible.

3. Some core functions work quite well as self-service. Internet access with patron self-registration. Holds pickup. Wireless Internet access. Community gathering space. Displays. Remote use and placing of holds. These all require considerable work to make them function properly, but not at Point of Service.

Check out the rest!

Looking for Marian

A colleague brought this to my attention. A vocational video on the librarian profession from 1947:



It's actually pretty good how it covers so many aspects of the profession that are still relevant today. The technology obviously has changed, but the basics seem to be more or less the same.

It's also generated some interesting discussion.

Suddenly Seeking Search Engine

Cross-posted at False Prophecy.

At work, I've been asked to train one of the library board members on "advanced Google searching". I'm not entirely sure what he means by that (the training session has yet to materialize), but I suspect he wants to go somewhat beyond typing one or two words into Google's search field.

In the hopes of providing a full exploration of the topic, and to show exactly why I'm worth the (not so) big bucks they're paying, I've been doing a bit of research on the Google phenomenon. Two books on the search engine king were released in 2005, probably to capitalize on Google's initial public offering and some of the fallout in the year following that seemed to tarnish the seemingly-untouchable lustre of the Internet's fasting-rising company and its likeable founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (as of October 2007, both men are tied for 26th richest person in the world, worth about $16.6 billion US each). I read one at the time, that being The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle. Like many non-fiction authors these days, Battelle maintained a website detailing some of his research and writing, and continues to use the site to promote his book as well as blog on internet search more generally.

The other book, which I just finished, was The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time, by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, whose authors also maintain a website.

Both books are valuable for anyone who wants to learn more about the current master of internet search, and complement each other very well. Both books focus on Google and how it used internet search, a feature the rest of the internet industry had dismissed as useless and unprofitable, to rise above the bursting of the dot-com bubble and become the fastest-rising technology company in history. But I would call The Google Story more of a business biography, while Battelle's book is more of technological history.

Vise and Malseed focus on Brin and Page and the business they built, from their fated meeting in the computer science graduate program at Stanford, to the humble beginnings of Google on campus, tracing the company's development to its IPO and some of its legal and public image troubles following that, ending with some of Brin and Page's hopes for the future of search. While the account is thorough, there is a mood of triumphalism that permeates the text, a narrative of two smart kids with a new idea done good. The focus is more on how Google transformed business culture with its very different approach. Brin and Page, academics and the children of academics, run Google more like a college campus than a business (the PageRank system at the core of Google's search technology is based on the citing practices and impact factors of academic journal articles). One of their more revolutionary practices is the 20% rule. In the academic world, professors are given 20% of their time (generally, one day a week) away from lecturing and administrative work to work on their own research and projects. Employees at Google are also given 20% of their time to work on their own projects. Sometimes these go nowhere, but other times they result in new applications like Froogle and Google News. Vise and Malseed even devote a chapter to Google's former head chef, Employee #53, Charlie Ayers, as part of their description of Google's corporate culture. Google is also known for its humour, evidenced by its regular April Fools Day jokes and the Google Labs Aptitude Test, or GLAT, a spoof of the battery of standard tests used by other firms.

Meanwhile, Battelle begins with the history of internet search, tracing the development of some of Google's more noteworthy forefathers, from Archie at McGill University, to the web's "first truly good search engine", AltaVista, to those other two Stanford PhDs at Yahoo!, Jerry Yang and David Filo. While the spotlight of his text then shifts to Google, his overall focus is on internet search and search engines. In the mid and late-90s, other dot-coms were trying to build "portals", which were actually destinations. The idea was to draw in users and keep them on the site, which was awash in visual and pop-up ads. Anyone who remembers Yahoo!, Excite and Altavista back then remembers the slew of ads, internal links and flashy banner ads splashed over every square inch of the site. Search was seen as just another service provided by the portal, along with email, personal ads, weather reports, and so on.

Along comes Google with its bare bones white screen and a single search field, but that simple field offered the keys to the World Wide Web. While others were adding to the clutter of the internet's closet, Google provided the sense of organization to all that clutter, while making billions from advertising that was so unobtrusive, few people recognized the ads when they saw them. In just a few short years, the search engine named for the impossibly large number garnered the greatest brand recognition in the online world, even becoming a verb related to internet searching in the process (e.g., "I Googled him last night").

Both books offer a very comprehensive coverage of Google's rise and dominance of the market, while focusing on different aspects of the company. The Google Story, true to its title, is a biographical narrative of the company's "life", largely holding to a tone of triumphalism throughout. Only in a handful of later chapters, when discussing threats to Google's public image and through the courts, is the clarion call muted. The Search is more illustrative of the search technologies involved, without getting overly technical, and is probably more interesting to my fellow library and information science professionals.

Google continues to maintain a high profile in the public eye, as even the company's former masseuse is ready to tell her story:

Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, Ms. Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.

“I’m happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” said Ms. Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.

Losing our edge...or just more to sharpen?

So I went to an information session at work for Ask Ontario, the new proposed IM/chat reference service the province is starting up under the Knowledge Ontario umbrella. I'll speak more to the service itself when I've actually been trained on it. But among the inserts in the information package we were given by the project coordinator was a print-out of this article from the Toronto Star:

We're quickly losing our edge in the digital world
Oct 08, 2007 04:30 AM
David Crane

The speed at which the Internet has already transformed the world is truly amazing. The World Wide Web, which made the Internet a mass participation network, wasn't even developed until the early 1990s and only began to take off in the mid-1990s.

But the Internet today is an essential part of our economy, our social networks and even our politics and media.

Crane then launches into a discussion about how important the internet is to the economy and new industry, before launching into a diatribe of doom and gloom about how far behind the pack Canada is in providing broadband access:

While about 95 per cent of South Korean households have access to high-speed broadband, and other countries are achieving high levels of broadband penetration, Canada ranks 10th in the industrial world, with only about 50 per cent of households having broadband access.

The downloading speeds for broadband in Canada are also much slower than in the leading nations. The fastest download speed offered by the largest cable operator in Canada last year was 10 megabits per second. This compares with 30 mb/s in Japan, 26 in Norway and 25 in Sweden. The fastest download speed offered by a telecommunications company was 18 mb/s in Canada, compared to 100 mb/s in Japan and Korea.

You can get a clearer idea of the numbers here (2006 figures). Like many statistics, context is important. Crane laments that in Canada, "only" 50% of households have broadband access, whereas others laud the fact that Canada has 50% compared to only 34% in the United States.

Look at the chart of broadband penetration and consider the countries that are allegedly kicking Canada's ass: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, a host of other East Asian nations that are not much bigger than a major North American city with its metropolitan area, and some of the Scandinavian countries. Is there some reason why Canada doesn't have as much broadband penetration as these countries?

Could it be that these are all small nations with a fairly consistent physical geography and generally a single, dominant ethnic or national population? Could it be because South Korea's land area is less than the island of Newfoundland? Is it really fair to compare a huge, continental nation that encompasses mountains, a cornucopia of lakes and rivers, tundra and massive forests with the likes of South Korea and Norway?

To be fair, Canada should be compared to other large continental nations with diverse geography, like the United States, Australia, mainland China, India and Brazil. And we're far ahead of all of them. Our closest competitor in this regard, the US, has some ways to go to catch up. Now there are reasons the US lags behind, both practical (the US has 10 times the population of Canada, spread out across the whole country, while the vast majority of our population is found in a handful of major urban centres) and policy (many jurisdictions in the US have a single broadband provider holding a monopoly over the area, whereas some places in South Korea have a dozen engaging in cutthroat competition to provide better services and prices). Our historical focus on communications may have also served us well here, and our federal government has actually done a good job at leading the way.

Now, I think Crane has a point, that we shouldn't be resting on our laurels. We certainly can get our broadband speeds up, and I think more competition would help: currently, most Canadian jurisdictions have only two broadband providers: the cable company and the phone company. Both of them draw their profits from other areas and might not be inclined to improve broadband services very much. A more competitive market could help.

Who ya gonna call?

Is this what William Gibson had in mind for the Turing Police?

The digital divide

The San Clemente library system has an interesting way of dealing with internet filtering: