A trip to Sydney may be in order in June to the Darling Harbour Jazz and Blues Festival. One of my favourite Australian bands from the 90’s, Directions in Groove (Dig) will be playing a set in the festival. I last saw them play 9 years ago in Brisbane. Can’t remember where, but it was near South bank, with local, and just broken through band George playing as support. I saw them back in 1997 as well in Brisbane Jazz club on Roma street. I don’t know if its still there.

There live act changed over the years developing a more electricona sound with a heavier use of synth sounds, scratching, samples and a vocalist. I was trying to find some clips from their 1999 Live album to contrast but was unable to. I did find a YouTube clip of the band playing in 1994 around the time of their first album release. Check out the playing by Terepai Richmond on drums, especially the left handed percussion groove he has going on during the second half of the song.

Still excited to see them play considering they rarely play together any more. Last show was in 2003 I think.

Am checking out what else to see at the festival. The John Morrison (not me, but curse his google ranking!) workshop would be cool to attend. Any suggestions on what to check out?

Just came across an Entertianment Weekly gallery of 31 Shows You Loved, Lost. Grosse Point made the list even being 8 years old with:

Grosse Pointe was ahead of its time and on the wrong network — witty and razor sharp, I think it would be a great addition to the HBO/Showtime lineup, where it could really let loose.

Did I mention Tom Jones sings the theme song? What else could you want?

An awesome short lived series that aired back in 2000. I picked up a copy with my most recent Amazon.com order. Unfortunately it is still not available in Australia.

The premise of the show is that it is the satirical view of the drama that goes on behind making a high school TV drama. Created by Darren Star who is responsible for a lot of the series it takes off (90210, Melrose Place, Sex in the City etc) and many of the story lines were based around going ons behind the scenes of those shows.

The show follows the going ons of the cast, (including the requisite 30 year old playing a high school student, the sweet innocent girl and the popular cheerleader who are completely opposite to their characters and the new cast member that is new to show business.) and the writer/producers that are stuck in the middle in having to placate the stars and keep the show going whilst deal with the network ever changing minds, “We love what you are doing with the new character on the show but we are also really nervous about it.” One the character highlights is Dave, one of the stars “stand ins” who has to deal with his best friend success and living in his shadow even though he is possibly a better actor. It also has a very nicely done “show with in the show” that shows part of the end product.

On a deeper level the show also looks at some of the hollywood conventions such as weight. When one of the actresses gains weight the producers talk with her: “Its not that we don’t want you to gain weight, its just that we don’t want your character too” as well as a funny episode about women being objectified on TV.

A few of the jokes are starting to get a bit dated: i.e. Felicity cutting off her hair, or the Monica Lewinsky scandal but the show is still none the less hilarious. A wide range of guest stars too including Jason Priestley and Joe E. Tata (Bevelerly Hills 90210), Kristin Davis (Sex and the City and Melrose Place), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Elizabeth Berkley (Saved by the Bell) appear adding to the fun of the show. One episode also guest stars a younger Lisa Edelstein from House M.D.

All in all great fun if only for a brief 17 episodes.

TED has a put up a short talk by researcher Johnny Lee on his Wiimote projects including the creation of cheap white boards and 3D screens.

Talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/245

Plenty of other interesting videos and ideas on the TED site.

According to the official documentation date_create was added to PHP in version 5.1. It creates a date object which makes working with date/time a lot less painful then it needs to be. And it really is painful. Like how many changes between unix time, string formatters, unix time and vice versa it takes to take a date/time string and change the minute component to an arbitary time of the day.

But after spending 10 minutes wondering why I was getting “Call to undefined function date_create()” I finally stumbled over a comment that said:

“date_create and other DateTime related functions are included by
default only in PHP versions equal and greater than 5.2.

In PHP 5.1.2 this functionality is marked to be experimental and has
to be enabled at compile time.”

Why put in the documentation its available since 5.1 then? When you need to compile your own version to make it available and its not even guaranteed to work. Gah.

Update: Wow and look the date_parse function (available since 5.1.3) isn’t really that available. Why don’t I go create my own documentation for functions that don’t exist and add them to the manual? Oh wait, this isn’t Wikipedia.