More free music?

In case you haven't heard, Nine Inch Nails has done it again. Their latest album, The Slip is now available for download on the group's official website. Get it here.
























Of course, when I exclaimed this aloud in my office, Eevon turned around and asked rather sarcastically: "do you even KNOW who Nine Inch Nails is?" To her great surprise, I did. Ever since they did the soundtrack for Quake (does anyone even remember this?)

My two cents on free music: I love it! Keep up the good work people.

I have super powers.

Since yesterday's post about Iron Man and how awesome the movie was, I got into a little discussion with a fellow PR consultant over MSN and we realised... PR people have superpowers too! Like:

1. Super Eyesight - (Granted I wear spectacles, but) PR people can and will churn through 13 newspapers daily within an hour, scanning for important client news with trained eyes that can spot BMW from BWM at a range of 2 - 3 feet away.

2. Subsonic and Selective Hearing powers - Needed for filtering out the background chatter from the real 'juicy' bits. Helps when you need to take notes of everything your client / client's boss says.

3. Iron Guts - May or may not come into use depending on whether you have booze clients or not. An ex-colleague used to tell me to drink one mug of beer a day to ensure I developed my Iron Gut. I failed. But if you have liquor clients, then you'd better make sure this superpower is very well developed.

4. Accelerated Healing - Like Wolverine, PR people can shake off the after-effects of a late, late night and be up for an early, early morning without aching bodies. Of course, on the occassion, this usually results in the said consultant going missing for a couple of days thereafter so use this power sparingly.

5. Flight / Super-speed - As with every service industry, every once in a while you make somebody angry - your client, some media, or some random bloke across the street. In these instances, it's pretty amazing to see how fast PR people can distance themselves from the aggro'ed character.

In the words of Nick Fury (right at the end of Iron Man, the Movie): "You think you're the only superhero in town?"

Iron Man: Did you see the subtitles?

Iron Man is GREAT! Yeap, I predicted this way back when the Iron Man suit made its debut at CES. If you haven't watched it yet, please feel free to watch it now and contribute to the more than US$ 100 million it's grossed already.













And while you're at it, pay attention to the hilarious Malay translation. There's this one scene when the character Stane tells Tony Stark (Iron Man's alter ego): "Tony, now we've got the board right where we want them..." (referring to intrigue with Stark Enterprises board of directors)

Our happy Malay translators helped subtitle this phrase: "Tony, sekarang kita sudah letak papan itu di mana kita mahukan." (Tony, we've put the plank where we want it.)

Context people, context! And Iron Man becomes Orang Besi?

Finally, yes, I'll confirm it's real. That final one minute of footage after you've waited through the seven minutes of credits when everyone's left the cinema? Yeap, it's real. You can probably find it on YouTube somewhere if you succumbed to peer pressure and left the cinema too. Although the link I found yesterday night seems to be down now.

I... quite proudly....despite Lydia's protests... made my wife stay back alone in that empty cinema to catch Samuel L. Jackson's appearance as Nick Fury! Which was awesome.

Random Nokia stuff

The client's keeping me busy with work, so I might as well post these here.

Firstly, in case you haven't heard already, there's a Nokia Independent Artists Club (IAC) gig happening this Saturday. Scroll down and click on the scans of the flyer for details. Given that I'm obviously no expert in the local music scene, I'm told that the acts are actually pretty good. So do drop by and have a listen.





Secondly, the smart people over at the Nokia global marketing team have come up with a fun aside to help us spend some more time in the office. It's actually a teaser for N-Gage , Nokia's new gaming platform / service. Go check it out by clicking this link: www.get-out-and-play.com.

Oh, and... the arkanoid clone is not the teaser, it's just to help you kill time while the flash animation loads. So play a while whilst you wait.

Say hello to the new Malay Mail

Were you Malay Mail readers welcomed by this new masthead today?



Just got back from the launch (or re-launch) of the Malay Mail - that well-loved tabloid with a 112-year history.

As background, in case you haven't heard, earlier this year, The Malay Mail was sold to publisher BluInc by the Media Prima Group. Tonight's event is the the second time the paper is reinventing itself in the space of two years, but I'm glad to report that under the hood, it's the same, familiar faces (with new notable additions) pushing the paper along.

The big change: The Malay Mail is going back to becoming that afternoon paper we all know and love. The key operating word being afternoon.

Getting to the venue, I was pretty impressed with the setup - a corridor muraled by previous editions of The Malay Mail. Sort of a mini-history lesson for me.



And the hall was packed with people:



But getting to the content of the evening, the person sitting next to me could not help but mention to me: "Why is Mr. Ibrahim mentioning "bloggers" and "internet" so much in his speech?" Actually, I couldn't help but notice that too. In my humble opinion, that's a good thing.

I sorta picked up that Mr. Ibrahim also talked about how The Malay Mail's heritage as an afternoon paper meant they were delivering people more current news than the rest of the market (remember reading yesterday's World Cup results off The Malay Mail because The Star didn't have any?) According to the man, The Malay Mail's emphasis on its online site to deliver current news was going to mirror this role it used to serve.

Flipping through the actual printed paper, the changes are quite apparent. There are quite a number of new columns - one even covers the blogosphere - from fairly opinionated people (I think I spied Amir Muhammad on the list). My favourite section - the complaints section - is back with two full pages. What's The Malay Mail, after all, without customer complaints?

Overall, I'm going to have to say that I'm slightly disappointed with the lack of lifestyle pages. Still, the focus on commentary and news is certainly welcome - if the paper can deliver on Mr. Ibrahim's promise to give us the "alternative opinion / viewpoint" that Malaysian readers today crave.

On a totally un-related matter, I also realised at the event that if you stick a huge enough logo anywhere, you can get people to camwhore in front of your logo. I'm just wondering if this is an idea that could be turned to a stunt:



On another TOTALLY unrelated matter, did I mention that the SWAG bag was stuffed with goodies. I think it puts some of us PR people to shame the sort of SWAG we give out. Here, have a look -the silver box is a 1GB USB drive:

Playing to the Tune of Green

Was catching up on Buzz Out Loud episodes from the past couple of days in the car just now when Molly Wood made an interesting comment that wasn't part of the actual story.

Commenting on the Crave blog's story on HDTracks, a new music service that allows downloads of full-CD quality, uncompressed digital music files, Molly said something about "this is green too."

Being the (savvy?) PR practitioner that I am, my ears pricked. How does green music sound as a catchphrase to you? Would you buy more digital music online if I told you you were helping save the earth?

You know, on a second thought, it's probably quite an obvious connection. But why hasn't this angle ever been picked up by the good folks of already established online music stores (which I'm sure you'll have no problems naming)?

Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever read an article covering green music and how much greener digital music tracks are compared to pressing CDs. I'm sure there's still an effect on the environment (heat release and energy consumption from keeping servers switched on 24/7 etc.) but compared to running factories pressing CDs, I'm sure the numbers will show some savings.

What would the impact be if the whole world went digital? And not just for music, but for videos, games and other digitally distributed content as well? How much greener would we be? (Sounds like a theme for next year's Earth Day?)

So, yeah, a thought-provoking topic to think about and I'm actually hoping that someone picks this up and goes run a study.

In the meantime, go home and ask yourselves - is my music green?

Considering Ubuntu

I finally did it, on the night of Labour Day. And the whole process took approximately 53 minutes to complete. On my Dell Inspiron 8200 (yes, it's old).



As far as test runs and familiarisation projects go, this went fine. At least my great (now proven unfounded) fear of Linux is quelled. Really.

All I had to do was go download Ubuntu's latest distribution package (the 8.04 Hardy Heron), burn the .iso into a CD, pop the CD into the laptop and get it to boot, click install and Wah-Lah! it's done.

If you don't really want to destroy your Windows installation, you can even select a "try Ubuntu while keeping your current OS" option.

Really, I'd even consider this a simpler job than getting Windows (XP or Vista) installed.

Once installed, you don't even have to hunt for additional apps to install as the distribution comes with OpenOffice (think open-sourced Microsoft Office, well, StarOffice actually), FireFox, integrated Anti Virus and Firewall.

I think I've pretty much settled on installing Ubuntu on my Eee PC and will probably do a more in-depth review on that when I get it.

Meantime, if you've considering Linux for a long time but have been, like me, afraid of "complications", then I say "Fear no more", Ubuntu is really as simple as it gets.