tales from an ordinary world

1999-09-22

Lunch. I wander down to the Glenhuntly shops - it's been a while since I went there, and it's somewhere else to go...A lot of people with prams here. The mothers seem older, or maybe just more worn out ?

Apparently it's school holidays, but I haven't noticed the usual mass of kids wandering about - perhaps they're all in the city, or at the Royal Melbourne Show...

The newspaper stands tell about the upcoming Grand Final this Saturday, and the continuing saga of last weekend's state election. The caf� faintly plays the music of a probably long-forgotten bluesman (it seems a bit out of place to be hearing blues in the middle of a sunny afternoon...) Regardless, life goes on.

I just plugged the headphones into my monitor so I could listen to the latest Prototype Chan. Haiyan has an oddly intriguing voice, because certain aspects of it remind me of a lot of different people and things. Take the way she says "box", for instance. It reminds me of something that's on the tip of my tongue, but just won't come to me. As a person I've never really met apart from the odd "I think you're who I think you are" kind of nervous wave when I was still working at Monash, I find her disembodied voice itself rather interesting, which isn't really something I find with people I talk to (as in, voice, not words on a screen). It makes me think of various singers - once you listen to enough of their singing, you can imagine exactly how they'd sing certain phrases. I should stop deconstructing my friends like this - I don't know if it's polite :)

But I stray from the main point, about the headphones in the monitor. They pick up a delicious random interference, that's affected by what I'm doing on the computer. As I type, the interference chatters away with almost animal-like sounds. I scroll a Netscape window up and down, and it responds. Different amounts of data on the screen changes the pitch of the white noise. It's beautiful. People do actually use this to make music. If only I had a short-wave radio...I remember having one as a child, and spending heaps of time wandering up and down the bandwidth, finding all sorts of cool random noises and broadcasts from far, far away....