Benjamin Hourigan

Expedia is running a competition to win an AFL Grand Final weekend in fabulous Melbourne (my beloved home city), valued at up to $9,600. The competition closes August 31 and is open to Australian residents. Click the image below to enter.

Good luck!

Whereis thinks Melbourne’s Chinatown is on Little Collins Street. It’s not.

As anyone who lives here, or has a copy of a half-decent map of the city, will know, Chinatown is in fact on Little Bourke Street.

Just a short post to indicate that yes, both I and this blog are still alive and operational. I’m still settling into Melbourne, having been back from Japan almost a month now. I found myself a cheap city apartment, and have been doing some transcription work as an office temp, while I look for something more interesting and more lucrative. Given the ludicrous situation that one usually has to wait weeks for an ADSL connection in Australia, I’m stuck on dial-up access, which is no inducement to blog. Expect the site to become more active once I have real internet access again.

Being in Japan for the last 8 months, where I’ve been not just isolated from the world, but cut off by language from most of the people here, has increased my sense of the importance of family and friendship. In the past I kept to myself, turned down invitations in favor of quiet nights at home, stewed in loneliness, and kept at bay the people I ought to have been close to. I wasted time on media escapism, time I should have spent on conversation, dinners, drinking and dancing.

When I left, I’d been stuck in life and love for a long time, and the only way of breaking free that I could find was to cut loose, to leave without a plan for coming back. Had I chosen a place worth living in, maybe I’d have stayed. But my old home is, from what I hear, among the best of cities. I chose my destination poorly, but my action wisely. Eight months in what may as well have been outer space cleared out my complacency, despair, and my reluctance to live boldly.

There are people I didn’t pay enough attention to while I was in Melbourne, and people I didn’t say goodbye to properly. There’s no excuse, but I’ll try to make amends. I’ll be back next Friday: expect to hear from me.

iTunes Australia is finally out. But tracks are $1.69 each, and albums are at least $16.99. When I lived in Melbourne, I used to buy CDs from Dragonfly Discs. There, I could buy classic CDs like David Bowie’s Low for $15. On iTunes Australia, Low is $17.99.

Now, why would I buy Low from iTunes Australia?

At Dragonfly, for A$15 I could get a CD with track listing and booklet that

• I could rip at 320kbps, in any format I want
  
• and copy or burn to CD as many times as I liked
  

on iTunes, A$17.99 would buy me an album of DRM protected files, sans physical CD and booklet, that

• only come in a very lossy 128kbps bitrate
  
• can’t be copied freely without stripping the DRM
  
• can only be burned a limited number of times
  

Why would I want to buy music from iTunes Australia, then?

I understand that this is probably the record labels’ fault, and not Apple’s. Come on, music publishers! Wake up! People won’t pay for digital downloads if they can get the same thing or better from a discount CD store, or by going to a peer-to-peer service to get a non-DRM’ed file for free.

It’s worth noting that in the United States, iTunes users pay a lower price in Australian dollars. The present iTunes pricing of US$9.99 an album comes out at A$13.32 at today’s exchange rate. At that price, I’d consider buying from iTunes Australia. But for now, it’s out of the question.

At least now I can use my Australian credit card to get an iTunes account so I won’t be constantly nagged to sign in while listening to previews on the iTunes music store.

The Age: News of the Decade.

Poor Bill Clinton! Looks like all the controversy surrounding his affair with Monica Lewinsky nearly ended his pregnancy. That sure is News of the Decade. So, at least, thinks Melbourne’s broadsheet newspaper, The Age.

I’m wondering now, though, since his pregnancy didn’t end, what happened to the baby? Was it a boy or a girl? Did he adopt it out? Maybe he abandoned it in a hospital waiting room.

Thanks to Tim Wilson for telling me about this.

Not that this information is of public interest, but since no-one is reading my blog yet, I might as well mention that the aforementioned “best friend Annette” (see Taxnami) was yesterday given an articled clerkship at Brian Ward & Partners, which is a commercial law firm in Melbourne. Congratulations, you rich lawyer, you!