I was picking the subjects for my second year in university (studying Computer Science) today, and it really prompted me to think about my future.

I realised that I should be utilising my university time as best as possible by studying subjects that would best help me in securing and performing in a career I would most enjoy. This is obvious: the dream of doing what you love for a living. I know that I really enjoy using computers, especially the problem solving aspects of computers – which has historically consisted of fixing the damn things and getting them to work properly.

I could definitely see myself working in some big software company happily coding away, or designing the new database data structure, or the new standard in wireless networking. But no matter how many computing professions I think of, something nags at me and pulls me away from them.

Music.

There is a great PASSION that I feel for music that seldom is matched by my enthusiasm for computers.

In my spare time I like to waste time on the net, watch downloaded TV shows, and occasionally read novels. But most of the time you would find me listening to music, and/or singing and/or playing along with a crappy guitar. I’m not a great singer, but the act of expressing the feelings I get from listening to music by singing along with it is just amazing… I wish my voice would never get tired and I could reach any note I wanted, and that I could keep singing forever – in these moments everything else in life simultaneously doesn’t matter and also matters an order of magnitude more.

Have you ever listened to music that you enjoyed so much, that you could actually feel the endorphins coursing around you body? Music can be so powerful that it carries you away from reality, somewhere where your ears and your brain and your consciousness resonates with the sound. You get carried away, you rise and fall as the music reaches its highs and lows. You can sense the climax of the song approaching, and when you get there you can even experience a kind of audio induced”orgasm”.

One of the other awesome affects of music is to transport you to another time and another place which you associate with that particular band or song. Sometimes memories you didn’t even realise you had will come to the surface just from hearing a certain song again. As it is with memories, you not only remember it like a visual image in a photograph, but you remember the state of YOU in that moment – you might remember what smelled, or heard in the moment. You will probably recall your mental state in that time – what you were concerned about, your loves and hates and your mood. Even if it was decades ago, memories triggered by music can make you feel again the emotions you felt in the memory. That can be confusing: having the consciousness and emotions of your past self re-appear in the present. This is nostalgia. We can realise in these moments just how much time has passed, how little or how much we have changed, and all these thoughts are mixed up in a big mess with that seemingly unimportant one-hit-wonder that just came on the radio

The most  powerful aspect of music is how it conveys emotion. The intricacies of the English language allow beautiful poetry to be created which can tell a story or make you laugh but can also attempt to make you feel what the writer is feeling, or at least give you a sense of it.

But even without being able to understand the language the lyrics are written in, or listening to one which has no lyrics – emotion is still conveyed. This is because music has a language of its own. Most people would describe the same song accordingly, whether it me lighthearted and bouncy, or sensual and powerful, or intimate and painful, or furious and erratic etc. Through the language of music – tempo, texture, voices, melody, harmony and keys – we can convey emotions to people who take the time to listen. They will have some sense of what the writer felt when he/she wrote the piece. Through the use of lyrics, music can also give us context, meaning, explanation and lessons to go with the emotions.

These are some of the reasons why music is great. These are some of the reasons why it is worth it to dedicate to and fill your life with music. Sometimes, I am so inspired by music that I write things like this instead of studying for Foundations of Computer Systems or Integral Calculus and Modelling. But music draws me in and causes me to dream more than anything else, and I wonder how I should proceed to make it a bigger part of my life?

My enthusiasm for music often peaks late at night, when I spend time really listening to music and giving it my undivided attention. However, I was stimulated enough to write about music just now at a time when I can’t even find my headphones.

This is primarily because of 2 factors:

1. Max Bemis almost talked to me on Twitter
2. The Big Day Out 2010 line-up was announced

Say Anything is in my top 3 favourite bands, and when I helped Max Bemis and supplied him with a YouTube link on Twitter, I thought he was going to reply to me and make my day! Alas, he did not @reply. But I can take solace in the fact that I saw him and Say Anything live in Sydney, and was so fucking close to the front I touched his hair when he leaned in to sing with the crowd! (I’m getting so worked up already)

Muse (first of all, how epic is The Resistance, right? Exogenesis ftw) playing at the Big Day Out is a big deal for me, because I’m planning to see as much of them live as I can while they are here in Australia, and just their sideline show will surely not be enough to satisfy me.

Plus, I just got this great feeling that is kind of tied into the Big Day Out and Soundwave etc, which is that summer is coming. I don’t associate hot weather with the beach anymore, I just think of Big Day Out 2009 and how awesome it was, and how music festivals – nay, music itself is just fucking awesome.

I’m just full of basic complimentary adjectives like ‘awesome’ and ‘great’ tonight… Later, I’ll write something more specific on my passion for music. Preferably some time between now and at least 50 hours of sleep

So I moved to Sydney to study Computer Science and Technology at the University of Sydney.

I stayed with my generous uncle for about a month while I found a job and a place to stay.

I have now been living in a share accommodation house with 3 other great people. But my current dilemma is NO INTERNET! That’s why I am writing this post from the university 24-hour access computer lab – while I am meant to be working on my programming assignment, or my group website, or my engineering speech.

I have no interest in using the landline at home to make calls, and neither does any of my flatmates. But in order to sign up for Naked (without dial tone, and subsequently, no Telstra line rental) ADSL2+, I need to have a current active Telstra phone line.

This is one indication of the stranglehold Telstra currently has Australia’s telecommunciations industry in: Say, for example if you don’t use your phone line in your house and you have it disconnected – you need to have it reconnected, and pay a minimum of 1 month’s access and at least a basic Home Phone line plan to Telstra before you can sign up for Naked ADSL with another company. This is due to Telstra’s ownership of telephone exchanges and the way other companies identify local loops in the database with phone numbers.

If you look at Naked ADSL prices at ISP pricing tables, the normal “dial tone” version of this teir is usually $5-$10 cheaper. This is because the cost of your phone line rental to Telstra hasn’t entirely vanished – the ISP supplying you with Naked DSL still must pay for this Unconditional Local Loop: currently $16.75/month, which they pass onto the monthly Naked ADSL charge. Still, this is better value than having to pay for a dial tone to Telstra, plus a normal ADSL plan.

But Telstra has been trying to increase its ULL charge to $30 a month. Luckily, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission rejected this application, as it was deemed uncompetitive. Of course that’s anti competitive! Telstra will do anything it can to hold onto it’s precious copper network, even if than means deliberately driving out competing ISPs by increasing charges like this.

I can’t wait until the whole country is blanketed in tasty optical fibre that’s equally available to all businesses, as proposed by the Federal Government’s National Broadband Network. But by then I will have probably moved to California anyway, so I can only dream.

I just started my 3rd week at the University of Sydney, and it’s pretty awesome.

Undertaking a degree in Computer Science and Technology is pretty tough. I’ve barely had time to sleep at night. For example – in 2 weeks I have learned

• How to plot imaginary numbers on the imaginary plane
• The beautiful inter-connectedness of the dot and cross products in vectory multiplication
• How to use styles in Word
• How to search Google
• How to use tables in html
• The difference between a local C: drive and the network attached U: drive
• How to make a pyramid of *’s on the command line with java
• That computers work by switching on and off really really fast
• and how to circumvent the undergraduate download limit

Down here in Australia, we are subject to awful prices on our telecommunications technology like mobile (cell) phones and broadband. If it weren’t for Comcast introducing their 250GB cap in October last year, I doubt many Americans would know the meaning of a broadband cap.

Telstra is the largest telco in Australia, and owns the majority of copper phone line in the country. Many Australians assume Telstra is the only choice as a broadband provider, as they own the phone lines and run lots of pretty TV ads. Thus, Telstra has been able to exploit their brand image by charging their customers obscene amounts for their internet access – customers who either don’t know about the competitors supplying ADSL, or are locked into 2 year contracts with Telstra.

Here is an example of one of Telstra’s price tiers for ADSL2+ (20Mbps theoretical maximum): $69.95 / per month, which is roughly 45 USD. Seems expensive, but that’s not all. This plan has a download cap/limit of 600 megabytes! So what happens if you go over this limit? Telstra charges you an extra 15 cents per megabyte, which equates to $150 per gigabyte! (96 USD as of 24/02/09).

My grandparents related a cautionary tale to me about how their neighbour’s nephew stayed over for the weekend and racked up a monthly Telstra broadband bill in the thousands. I told them not to worry, I know a thing or two about the internet.

broadbandchoice.com.au is an excellent impartial website which gives comparisons and returns results based on search criteria for broadband plans in Australia. You’d have to be crazy to pick Telstra for your internet access after visiting that site.

My plan, while not the best now, was the best I could get in my area for ADSL2+ some time last year. It gives me 15GB/month plus 30GB/month in the times between 2am and 12 midday. When going over either of those limits, my internet speed is slowed to a slightly-better-than-dialup speed of 64Kbps – or rather, it is supposed to be.

I replaced the modem that my internet provider sent in the mail (Linksys AM300) with a Speedtouch 536, connected to a Linksys WRT54G which handles the PPPoE authentication and provides wireless and NAT functions. It seems that this combination has somehow thwarted my ISP’s attempts at slowing down my internet access speed, as I have exceeded my limit the last 2 months but did not get slowed down.

My theory is that the modem needs to reconnect to the ISP for the slower connection to be established, but maybe since I am not using the stock modem, my ISP cannot remotely reset the modem and force a reconnection. So I guess I have unlimited downloads now? (as long as there’s no blackouts) Pwn’d.