Get this - just got an email this morning from moneysavingexpert.com saying that my favorite on-line music store has been told by record companies that they are too cheap!!! They have been told that they have to increase the the price of their CDs by 2 GBP by 24th January. So not only am I not allowed to know if I will be able to listen to a CD before I buy it, but I now also have to pay more money for that privilege!

I wonder when all this is all going to end...... I'm off to bleep to get me some legally downloaded wibbly wobbly woo tunage.

CDs are cheaper here than in the UK, but not by much.... at least for the recent releases. (30 to 35 NZD equating to about 11 to 13 GBP) After spotting a good deal at my favourite on-line CD store (well, for the less obscure stuff anyway - 6 squid a CD anyone?) I decided to send off for a few. After a wait of about a week, the first of the bunch arrived in the mailbox this morning. With great expectation, I unwrapped and listened to the Strokes (hmmmm, pretty much the same as the first 'un) and the new(ish) Belle and Sebastian album - 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' (nicely hum-along-able). So then it came to The Thrills, a band I know almost nothing about. Stick the CD in the Laptop, and..... um, what???? It won't play or rip to MP3 (I'll spare you the dull technical details)* On the front of the CD is a sticker proudly proclaiming that the CD is 'copy controlled'. A quick search on the internet shows that I'm not the only one to suffer from this. It looks like this has been waiting to happen to me for some time.... I only listen to my music on my laptop and/or my IPod, so this CD is completely useless to me. A disgruntled mail to the retailer results in a very prompt mail back, an apology and offer of an exchange, and the relevation that the record companies are 'extremely reluctant to advise as to which titles are copy protected, which in turn, makes it difficult for us to notify you'. Grrrreat. So I don't get to know whether the CD that I am paying for is actually usable until it arrives?????? Even if the retailer would like to tell me?? I'm going to be verrrry careful which CDs I'm buying now (although it seems to be EMI and their subsiduaries that are doing it the most). What do the record companies think they are doing?
* - yes, I know there is probably a technical solution to allow me to rip it, but I'm not sure that there is one that'll run on my laptop.... I've tried dbPowerAmp, IsoBuster, CD-EX and Exact Audio Copy and frankly I can't be bothered spending any more time on this - it's going back to the shop.

Yesterday we were at the Big Day Out - probably New Zealand's biggest and best music festival. Highlights were:

• The Darkness (much entertainingnessosity)
• Basement Jaxx's storming set
• The great weather (sunny, but slightly overcast so not too hot)
• Kings of Leon
• The sound system in the Dance tent
• Concorde Dawn - storming NZ D&B
• Killer Ray (Ray Ray) - an old bloke who MC's over a DJ playing funky house

Lowpoints:

• The huge queues for the bars
• Being allowed to only buy 2 beers at a time
• Having to drink your beers inside fenced-off areas far away from the stages
• All the bars running out of beer at about 9pm
• The terrible sound at the hip-hop stage - it was so close to the dance tent that you couldn't hear a thing

Metallica were OK for the ten minutes that we watched, but I wasn't really in the mood so hit the dance tent instead. The Strokes were pretty good, although Julian had obviously been hitting the happy juice quite hard before coming onstage ("I bzzreaaaallly love all yyoooo guys"). We didn't watch Peaches, as we saw her on Thursday at the Kings Arms. She was very entertaining, I wish all kareoke artists put as much into their performance as she does :) All in all, it was a really good day out, apart from the funny alcohol rules. But it did make me feel grateful for the huge choice of live music festies we have back home.

spent New year in Paihia with Kim, Nicola and Mark.... we got an apartment for the five of us, filled the beer full of fridge and did our best to empty it. A lovely few days relaxing in the sunshine - we spent new Year's eve itself sailing the bay on a tall ship. Also managed to get some diving in and Helen did a day's horse riding too.

Helen went back to work on Monday but no such luck for me - took the chance of a couple of days free of work to play civilisation do a clean-up of the alvo site, the backend is now running wordpress and in case you are interested, you can now see what I've been listening to, courtesy of a funky plug-in for Windows Media Player and some nice PHP code borrowed from here. It seems to work nicely, I'm going to have to make sure I don't listen to PJ & Duncan while my laptop is on the net though or all my street cred will be in tatters....