It’s taken a while, but the 580EX II flash is finally available in Australia. I’ll be ordering one (or maybe picking it up) tomorrow, to give me time to get used to it before I shoot Emma’s wedding.

Today Apple released the long-awaited (by me) upgraded EMI songs on the iTunes Music Store. These songs are twice the bitrate (256kbps vs. 128kbps) and have no DRM, making them free to change to another format to put on any device you own.

Obviously I wasn’t alone in looking forward to upgrading my songs - I have never seen the iTMS running so slowly. Four of my songs qualify for the upgrade (which costs 50c per song in Australia), and downloading them is torturously slow. Normally any iTMS download will saturate our link (around 160KB/sec), but right now I’m seeing 50-70KB/sec downloads. I can’t imagine how much business they’re doing. Here’s hoping the other labels wake up and see the future.

I need some suggestions for excellent books to read (which I actually plan to get in audiobook format to listen to while I trundle about town). So far I’ve bought Perfume, The Road and Crumpet has Life of Pi. I’m also planning on getting The Kite Runner.

More suggestions please!

Today I hired a few DVDs because it was cheaparse Tuesday. They were The Departed, The Machinist, Saw, and Happy Feet. I’m not sure that combination has ever been hired by the same person before…

Oh, and Crumpet bought me a Cyndi Lauper best-of CD, because the JB site wasn’t working properly last night.

Screw you if you don’t dig the Laup.

When you cut the cost of computers down to the bare minimum, you get customer “service” like this.

Service costs money, yet people still insist on buying the cheapest machine they can find. Oh well, it keeps me employed.

I only just heard about this film on the Penny Arcade podcast. It’s by Cabel Sasser, one of the guys from Panic Software.

What could this be for?

Suck my balls, MPAA.