Wood and Wire

Who would have thought that an almost complete lack of features could make an application so useful?

WriteRoom is a new Mac application that does word processing

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

I’m doing a whole lot of writing for The Pure Drop at present, and the lack of features is helping me focus on the main game — stringing words together. The only downside is that the green-on-black interface shows up all the dirt, so I’ve had to clean my monitor

Oh, and there’s a port for Windoze too.

I just realised it’s been quite a long while since I last wrote about The Pure Drop, despite the fact that it’s been the project keeping me busy for most of the last few months.

We’ve been busy filming interviews and performances around Australia by The John Butler Trio, Zulya Kamalova, Silvia Entcheva, Linsey Pollak and Trouble In The Kitchen. Later this month we’re off to Toronto to film Tanya Tagaq, then Stockholm to film a piece about Garmarna, Yorkshire to meet up with Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, and finally Byron Bay to interview Mandawuy Yunupingu.

In the meantime, the thepuredrop.com.au page has a sneak preview of Reg Mombassa’s fabulous site design.

UPDATE: The site is now live - check it out!.

I just started a Nick Drake group on Flickr, since I noticed I had a few photos in my collection that would fit in such a group, and I wondered if anyone else might. Having set it up I was surprised how many images on Flickr had connections with Nick. Anyway the group is starting to grow…

Things I did since I last posted:

1. Got enough sleep for the first time in 2005
2. Ate too much
3. Hung out with the people I love most
4. Enjoyed air-conditioning (the temperature in Woy Woy where I was staying on xmas eve hit 41°C)
5. Saw The Chronicles of Narnia — for the most part this helped me catch up on my sleep (while enjoying air-conditioning with the people I love most), but I did wake up in time to see how hot the White Witch was. By the end of the movie I was barracking for the wrong team.
6. Marvelled at the web-standards compliant beauty of the Kutztown University Communication Design Department web site
7. Marvelled at the stupid-brilliant audacity of the Million Dollar Home Page and tried to come up with a similarly naff money-making gimmick of my own
8. Came up with a similarly naff money-making gimmick which I might get around to trying out next year
9. Had a good play with Wayfaring.com’s very slick interface to the Google Maps API, and wondered if it might actually be useful for something
10. Played the guitar
11. Played the mandolin
12. Wished I had an Irish bouzouki
13. Spent an hour pondering the Long Emergency
14. Started reading Good Morning Midnight by Reginald Hill
15. Compulsively watched every additional feature on the 2-disc 24 Hour Party People DVD
16. Decided I quite like the Happy Mondays after all
17. Tried not to think about 2006

It’s a great relief to be back in production on The Pure Drop, after a hiatus of about a year. We’re hoping to have a first (skeletal) version of the site online by Christmas, and aiming for launch mid-2006.

The best news is we’ve just signed up Reg Mombassa of Mambo, Mental As Anything and Dog Trumpet fame to do graphics for the site.

Reg is a wonderful man to work with — probably the least precious artist I have ever met. And he lives just around the corner!

Just uploaded another 30 or so snapshots from last year’s Pure Drop film shoot in Europe to my Flickr account. Most of this batch are from Iceland, including some good shots of Sigur Rós in concert. The guys were very accommodating, actually letting us film from the side of the stage, so we got some good angles.

By the way, if you want to see some truly great photos of Iceland, go to Pascal Fellonneau’s wonderful Iceland Image Bank site. Pascal has managed to perfectly capture the bizarre combination of funky scandinavian design and frontier town that typifies Reykjavik.

I’m already fully addicted to Audioscrobbler/Last.FM, but Pandora looks very cool as well. It actually did a pretty good job of navigating through my very particular (and sometimes peculiar) tastes in music.

It originally attracted my attention because the team that makes it is called the Music Genome Project, which is very similar to the tagline we occasionally use for The Pure Drop — “the world music genome project”.