I Feel Love

Here are all my posts from the TypePad years. Sorry about all the broken image links and so on; I couldn’t be arsed transferring them all. Anyway, it’s the words that (hopefully) matter.

While I let all this lie fallow for a while, I’ll be instablogging over at Posterous when I feel the urge. Very Gen Y! And I have my professional blog right here.

Thanks for being here. Oh, and there’s one image I want to make sure I don’t lose…here’s Mr eel’s banner that served me so well for so long:

I understand faceless advertisers will sometimes fail to see accurately into my soul, but you have to wonder when your friends do it too…

I love that "SCARILY accurate" – is it scarier to find out you're a lesbian when you thought you weren't, or that you're not a lesbian when you thought you were?

A certain little-known label from Cologne has just arrived at eMusic. Who cares if they've jumped the shark, there's still that amazing back catalogue. More to come, apparently.

eMusic is officially amazing these days. I'm not even signed up for their affiliate program (I'm in a paperwork bottleneck) so you know this is a non-mercenary endorsement. But, I mean, R&S! Or, equally drool-worthy, BIS! Dolly! If you can't find 30 tracks a month you really, really want to download in their vast catalogue, then I'm afraid I have to tell you that you actually don't like music.

I've decided to put the 52 songs project – and probably this blog as a whole – on hold for a few months while I concentrate on other things.

In the meantime, please check out my new blog. BRB.

Infinite Thought has just concluded a magnificent series of posts about her (or is it his? I think I once knew and have forgotten) recent trip to the US. Some of the most nuanced and non-barrow-pushing writing about the States that I’ve read in a long time.

You’ve probably already heard of the rather excellent muxtape site; well, here’s my effort. Something a bit different from my usual; in tribute to winter’s very sudden arrival in Melbourne it’s a collection of tracks that give me chills (in one way or another).

The site has a lovely interface and is a real joy to use. There seems to be a glitch with some of the timings: a couple of my tracks show up as 0:00 (they still play fine). But apart from that everything works beautifully. Even though it’s very “now” the site feels kind of retro, and not just because of the mixtape metaphor: it doesn’t (yet) have any of the social networking doodads we’ve come to expect as normal features of this kind of site. I find myself wondering how I can let people know I like their mix if I can’t leave comments? Where do I see a list of people with similar tastes to me? How do I “friend” people? Where is the ranking system, the Facebook integration, the TypePad widget? (There’s RSS, that’s about it.)

Apparently some of these things are coming, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the pared back simplicity and the fact that there are only two ways of finding mixes: following a direct link from an outside site, or clicking on one of the random links on the homepage. I’m hoping to experience a bit of serendipity; my random clicks so far have generally turned up a whole lot of indie rock but I can still hope. It would be nice to be able to leave comments, though; that’s one social networking feature I’d actually go for.

Um, I really have nothing to say except the fact–which will be old hat to most of you–that I’m posting this from here. I’ve had my laptop for over a month but bizarrely this is the first time I’ve taken advantage of free wi-fi. It’s nice. I just wish more places had it. (Australia is apparently very primitive in this regard).

Anyway, I’m here until my battery runs out (supposedly I have 35 minutes left) or it just all gets too happy-houry, when I will re-emerge into the stifling embrace of Melbourne’s Indian Summer. So in the unlikely event that anyone (a) is nearby, and (b) reads this in time, come and say hello!

As some of you know, I’m been planning a career change: I’m attempting to do what people rather gruesomely refer to as “monetising my skills” by going into freelance copywriting. A major part of promoting myself as a writer will, naturally enough, be a blog. Not this blog, because this is more of an ideas dump (ie what a blog actually should be) than an advertisement by the pithiness and on-message-ness of my writing. So I’ve started a new blog, called (pithily enough) Textual. Don’t read it if you’re not interested in copywriting (or marketing and language more generally), but well, if you’re interested, it’s there. For obvious reasons I would particularly love some people to leave comments over there, preferably nice ones along the lines of “Hey, what a great post! You must a wonderful copywriter! Can I hire you?” etc. (I’m interested to see that one of my long-time blogging role models, Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger, has also started a blog about his “day job” in a field not far removed from mine…pure coincidence, I promise.)

One more thing, I need some help with my market research: If you’re an Australian small business owner, or know someone who is, I’d be ever so grateful if you or they could answer a brief online questionnaire about marketing. It will take about 5 minutes, it will all be confidential, and I won’t be adding anyone to my mailing list without their permission. I have two questionnaires, one for general small business owners which is here, and one specifically for web designers and developers which is here. I’ll be forever grateful!

Absolutely brilliant storyline on Neighbours at the moment about the mutual emotional dependence between, er, longtime companions Harold and Lou. The subject of their relationship has been broached before, but tonight Karl Kennedy actually referred to Harold as Lou’s “soulmate”! Fascinating stuff.

Just two quick notes:

1. Some of you may have this blog bookmarked as “[www.]angusgordon.com”. Well, within the next couple of weeks I’m planning to use that domain for something different–something that actually puts the “com” into “dot com”, of which more shortly–so if you can change your bookmark now to “angusg.typepad.com” that will save any confusion. Many thanks.
2. I realised the main blog page was loading very slowly because of all those embedded songs–the standard TypePad solution for streaming music, which if you ask me kind of sucks, being to use QuickTime players that load the whole song as the page loads. As a result I’ve moved to a Flash-based solution hosted elsewhere that seems to work a lot better and also looks prettier, and I’ve updated the existing posts. So I hope none of you have Flash disabled or you will have to live without ever hearing Narcotic Syntax–although I don’t know if you can really call that living.