tales from an ordinary world

1999-09-26

Maybe it was just that I got up early on a Sunday morning for once, but by the time Terry and I found a park miles away from the Brunswick St festival and had walked over to it, I was really tired. 4 years ago, the festival was a lot of fun when we went. There was lots of stuff going on in all the side streets, with random odd parades and music and such. It was definitely a younger crowd this time around. Up the north end of the street, the local dance-music radio station-sponsored stage pumped out deafening doof doof music that sadly drowned out the Flamenco performance a bit further down. There were a few food stalls along the street, but there didn't quite seem to be as much going on as last time - it just looked like a whole lot of people trying to get past each other as they moved along the street, presumably looking for something to do. I guess it was good "walking in crowds" practice, if nothing else. Given that I'd ended up entirely in black clothing again (more or less by default), I seemed a bit out of place. If I'd thought about it, I might've worn one of those random bright orange tops I had sitting around at home, but it's not like it really would have mattered in the end. I felt invisible, and given how lethargic I felt, this wasn't an entirely bad thing.

We ducked into one of the random art object shops, and I ran into Scott, who'd just got back from his Tripod gig at the Edinburgh festival (like, in Scotland). "yeah, the gig was pretty good, but driving around the highlands afterwards was much better".

I gave into random impulse at the computer swap meet (badly named, since no actual swapping goes on, it's more just a good place to buy cheap hardware from slightly dodgy retailers) and bought a TV card for my computer. Given that I don't watch much TV, I can't see myself using it to watch TV, but I might sample random bits for amusement. Or something. Oh, and it does FM radio too, which might be fun. I was hoping to be able to pipe stuff into AudioMulch with it, but that doesn't appear to be as easy as I'd hoped, since the software that came with it doesn't seem very general-purpose...