Sigur Rós made the best video clip ever. It's all naked people running around a forest for several minutes. Totally wonderful. Good song too.

Libby and I are going to Sigur Rós on the 2 August 2008. They are pretty damn good.

A bunch of folk went to see Pivot at the Arts Factory. Nice place. Winner band. They really were super cool. Although major dags. It makes me happy to see bands play who are their own favourite band. Musicians who would rather finish the song then ever have sex again.

When I see good bands, I feel like running around the world trying to find more good bands would be a pretty good way to spend life. Like Sal & Dean did back in the olden days. I think Pivot tonight were the closest I've seen those new-age sythnsters come to jazz.

Libby and I are going to Cat Power on the 9th of March. Hurray for Cat Power. She is a champ. And hurray for jobs that give you money.

The Frames were awesome even before Glen got depressed. I've never properly listened to their early albums. Dance the Devil is just as good as the new albums but exchanges emotive for peppy.

There are so many middle-age women parking in our street tonight.

I am off to join them at the Enmore.

Update: The Indigo Girls were cool. All through the concert a kept feeling rushes of fondness for lesbians and the sorts of boys to stand up and dance at Indigo Girls concerts.

Did anyone know that Muzak is actually the registered trademark of a company from the 1930s who sold the stuff?

We are going to see Sufjan in January and Sufjan is great. Although both Sufjan and our Tassie trip are in "mid" January, so I may have to give my ticket to someone else. Much like I had to do with White Stripes when I went to Tassie last time. Stupid Tasmanian wilderness.

Miles, Laurence and I went to The Basics on Friday night. The rocked good. We'd never heard them really. The support bands were pretty alright but hadn't raised our expectations. So when they came on and blew us away we were really blown away. As a live gig they whooped Gotye's arse big time. And to top it all awesomely off, the tickets were only $16 tiny dollars.

I have spent a bit of thought trying to work out the best way of rating my iTunes music. Most of it I haven't rated, or have rated only by album. It's mostly an academic question, because there isn't much you can actually do with the ratings once you've stuck them in.

At first I found myself rating everything as three stars or more. I thought, if it's rated less than three then why not just delete it. Those were times of precious disk space for me, but it does make sense in general. Scrolling through a whole lot of junk music is a pain, even if you've got endless disk space. Not mention that obsessives like me obtain a great deal of satisfaction from having a neat music collection, with all the ID3 tags in good working order.

So I thought I need to reinterpret the ratings. Normally one star means something is shite. In my case I wanted one star to mean "just good enough not to get deleted". So I started doing that. And it worked pretty well. Most of my playlists drop stuff with one star, but the music is still there if I want to listen to it - which occasionally I do.

I also thought about the top rating - five stars. Should I keep it reserved for only the best, life-changing music? Should I assume that music goodness is uniform and give five stars to 20% of the collection? Or is it some sort of normal distribution (or something non-symmetric but similar)? Tough questions I know. Should I worry about trying to make my ratings comparable to other people's ratings. What about rating inflation? Will I one day need a 6th star? And when I'm in a good mood I'm likely to give everything good ratings. I find that every time I really enjoy a song I end up giving it four stars because giving it five makes me feel like a rating floozy, and giving it three just feels mean. I suspect there's a decided spike at four, and this troubles me.

Another problem is that I never take the effort to rate anything that I don't like. So everything has four stars or no rating at all. Which is totally useless. I've started bulk rating whole albums, hoping that over time I'd use some Bayesian logic to gradually make each song rating more appropriate. I did this just to get some data in there but it isn't very satisfying.

I'm inclined to think that I should maintain some sort of histogram and try to ensure that the ratings distribution sticks to something reasonable. Perhaps just a uniformish distribution. Hopefully, I'll subconsciously adjust my ratings based on short-term distortions in distribution over the long-term it stays reasonable.

Clearly, plenty more thought needs to be done on this. Although I can't help but wonder if my life would be better if I completely removed the whole rating column from iTunes altogether.

The distribution of requests for Big Day Out tickets (and probably most concert tickets) on the Ticketmaster site is quite interesting. At 9:01 the queue was 3 minutes long. I bought some tickets and was done by 9:05. At 9:06 the queue was over 20 minutes long. I'm surprised at how many people must have arrived at 9:03 rather than 9:01. You'd think if you were keen enough to be there at 9:03, you'd try and get there two minutes earlier and it would become a frenzied race of atomic clocks and network latency. But it's not. It's just a traditional old race of some flattish log-normal distribution of human error.

I found a nifty site which lets you [search for albums and artists who aren't distributed by members of the RIAA. Most people probably won't care about the RIAA, but some might.

I've decided that for 12 months I won't download music and I will only buy music from non-RIAA distributors. Luckily The Shins are OK. Bob Dylan, sadly, is not. But then I already have nearly all his good albums.

Update: I should have included movies in that as well. No movie piracy for 12 months either.

Once is a tremendous, beautiful film. I thought I was just going to fall more in love with Glen Hansard, but I ended up liking his little friend just as much. He met her (Markéta Irglová) in Czech six years ago and he slowly got a crush on her, even though she was pretty young. Then they made an album together. Then they made a movie together and this was it.

It's about being a musician and who are the best sorts of people to fall in love with. The girl is a way cool character, and you get the feeling that everything Glen Hansard likes about the actor got poured into the film. She's a seriously friendly, outgoing young lass with the relationship boundaries of a Jedi. And there's nothing sexier than healthy boundaries.

And the music too. Good music. Good Framesy music.

My 40gb iPod arrived today. I was expecting it to be dumped in box and probably to have scratches and stuff on it. "Refurbished" makes it sound second-rate. I wasn't worried though, because for $200 less I was happy to get a second-rate iPod.

But it is beautiful. It has everything you would need. It was all beautifully packaged. Each and every component has several layers of specially designed plastic wrapper. And the iPod itself is lovely. So shiny and sturdy.

I'm putting music onto it now. My whole music collection will fill up about a third of it. But even that is going to take many hours to move on my poor old USB 1 computer.

Update: iPods are truly wonderful devices.

Update 2: iTunes 6 is slow and crap with my iPod. iTunes 7 is better.

Despite being mostly poor, I managed to buy a refurbished first-generation iPod from Apple today. It was $179 and it's 40gb. It will get here tomorrow. I'm very excited.

I still remember my first MP3 player. It was 256mb and had a tiny screen and a large battery and played for several whole hours. It cost me $200 and I thought it was the bargain of my life.

I got a huge music crush on Sophie Zelmani, just from listening to her version of Most of the Time too many times on the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack. But I haven't been able to find an album of hers anywhere. I looked on iTunes and in music shops. It turns out she has a whole bunch of CDs. I downloaded them all with Bittorrent in a couple hours (7 of them). And so far her albums are totally sweet.

So this is a little note to Sony Music. If you would like some revenue from her, please put her albums into CD shops. Or at least into iTunes. How hard can it be.

We are off to Bob now. Totally brilliant.

The Internet Archive has tons of legal recordings of live concerts by a whole lot of good folk. The bands write to the site giving them permission to publish any bootleg recordings they get sent. I have some concerts of these guys now.

• The Smashing Pumpkins
• Michael Franti
• G. Love and Special Sauce
• Jack Johnson
• Elliott Smith
• Matisyahu

Thankfully, Libby, Alex, Sophie, Graham, Sam, Sarah and I all were herded up by Miles to go see Gotye last night. I probably would have forgotten if it had been up to me, like I did with The Shins.

Gotye was beautiful. Although most of his live goodness was due to his lanky charisma, rather than the vibe of the music. So much of the music was presampled that it didn't fully feel like a live concert. But his songs are so good and his lankiness is so lanky that you couldn't help but love it all.

The Frames are playing at The Metro on the 14th August. They are $53. If anyone would like to go with me let me know. Tickets go on sale on the 20th July.

If you like The Frames then you should probably buy Live at Lollapalooza from iTunes. It's only $7 and it's good. Only 35 minutes, but six sturdy, long, glorious songs. Or five of those and one short one.

Takes me back to that fracking awesome concert at Bluesfest 2005. My wordy word they were tidy.

Bob is the only musician I've ever loved who I've never had a hint of being sick of. I've never felt like I'd played him too much or that one day he might not be my favourite. Even guys like The Shins or Nick Cave who I love to pieces sometimes I feel like I've had too much. But Bob is everlasting.

Boardface which is Gotye's old 2004 is really tops as well. Good on him.

I got both his albums posted to me from Melbourne. They're cheaper and Wally seems to post them himself, so he might get more money.

I need to add two more albums to the list of albums I would never have bought if it wasn't for music piracy.

Transformers was the ultimate in awesome goodness. It is my favourite action movie ever I think, and I like action movies a lot.

There was so much US military hardware in action. And I love military hardware. Tom and I were saying that there is no better way to build popular support for military spending than to show us movies of Raptors and tanks blowing stuff up on screen. Preferably blowing up Transformers, because they put up a good fight. And don't bleed. We don't like blood so much. Or humans dying. Although if we have to beat up Transformers with jet-fighters because they made humans bleed then we feel happy.

One of the best extra bonuses of this film is that it was funny. And properly funny. Not like normal action movie funny, which is normally closer to lame than funny. It had a good script and mostly good characters. The love interest was tough and good with cars and tow trucks and kind of made the boy character look dumb. Although there will still a lot of superfluous cleavage shots, and they did detract slightly from her Transformer beating prowess. But it is possible that bountiful cleavage and the ability to help beat up Decepticons is all that any man really hopes for in a partner. I'm not sure what the gay equivalent would be...

So much fighting though. Robot wrestling. And guns and helicopters. And smashing buildings. And that great iconic scene (which you knew they were totally setting up before it happened) where Megatron comes smashing through the old glass windows in the abandoned warehouse.

And Optimus Prime. The hero of heroes. He didn't let us down. What a champion.

The only dumb things were the Sector 7 agent and the overly made-up Australia computer expert. I liked the Sector 7 guy, but he was silly and did make the film less good.

Every person will a healthy perception of joy and destruction will love this movie and should see it.

Cookie Jar, which Jack Johnson sang, is quite a bit like Who Killed Davey Moore?, which Bob Dylan sang. Except that Jack Johnson tells you who killed Davey Moore at the end of the song. Which I suppose is his style.

Update: Bob is well good.

Last.fm has a pretty posh events setup these days. It will look at the music you like and find music events that you might like. It does a pretty good job too. All three of the gigs I'm actually going to in the next couple of months are on the list. And three more of the gigs I'd really like to go to are there too.

There's a good one man band called Gotye and this fellow has a very good album called Like Drawing Blood. Well good indeed.

These are the bands I wish weren't in my Top 50 on last.fm.

• John Mayer
• Ben Harper
• Bic Runga

It's an assignment day, so I have thought about this quite carefully.

David and I (and Steve) are going to the Bob Dylan concert in August. And The Frames. Oh my god. Oh my god. So good.

Somewhere along the way the Cardigans accidentily became one of my favourite bands. I can't even remember how they ended up in iTunes, but now I listen to them all the time.