Music and movement

About 6 years ago I joined a comedy goldmine of a gym not far from my place of work next to Tower Bridge in London. Situated at the point where the financial district joined Tower Hamlets it was a place of extraordinary contrasts where East London wideboys and stockbrokers slugged it out both in the weights room and the squash courts in an oddly jovial manner - they had much more in common than I had expected.

When I left the world of regular exercise some 4 years ago the gym soundtrack was the kind of "popular dance" music that is played only in gyms and the 'pack 'em to the rafters and sell 'em rubbish" meatmarket chain nightclubs - one of the songs is even called "I'm a cheap drink kind of girl". On returning to gym membership I have discovered that little has changed, except maybe the girls in the music videos now wear even less. The music itself combines a repetitive synth track with with minimal repetitive vocals in a high register (normally female). In the intervening years the only thing that seems to have changed with this kind of music is the use of a vocoder. It's not an improvement.

The comedy at most gyms is to be derived from the extremes of humanity on display and just how oddly people behave in a situation that is essentially public but where selected social mores are ignored. This is probably more pronounced to me because ai find that the Aussies tend to be quite a private bunch however uninhibited and easy going they may seem. In the gym in London the showers were communal and it was all the rage to flop about the changing rooms wearing nothing but a cheeky smile until actually ready to leave. In the very nice newly built gym I go to here there are separate cubicles and the towel round the waist is the post-shower garment of choice.

There is one very notable exception; a body-builder so large that looks like someone shaved a silverback gorilla and didn't quite finish the job. The gorilla likes to stretch out post workout in the steamroom. To do so he stands on the first platform, which is about 75cm high, in the nude. This puts parts of him that no-one in their right mind would want to see at eye level. There is a large mirror opposite and simply nowhere to look when he's doing this. Having finished stretching out he then stands in front of the mirror and performs a variety of flexed poses. When the "fitnesss manager" called me the other day - his name is Brad, obviously - and asked me about my goals I told him that one of them was to be able to tell this freak what I think of his eye-watering behaviour and then be able to run fast enough to survive doing so. Tellingly Brad didn't laugh.

Phone indecision

My phone, which has served me well enough for about 3 years, is starting to show it's age along with a few battle scars from too many long drops onto hard surfaces. Essentially I am rationalising the profound urge to buy a shiny new toy.

The shiny new toy in question might well have to be an iPhone but there's another contender the HTC magic which is nearly as sleek and beautiful in design and comes with the added bonus of being much easier to connect with all the Google services I use constantly. However my spies tell me that the new iPhone coming out next month will actually replace sliced bread in the most hackneyed of cliches.

Hmm, this is a wait and see moment but I really don't want to have to wait longer than I absolutely have to. Documented below, and largely to get them out of my head are my reasons for each one:

HTC Magic

• Oooh shiny
• Google services very easily
• Open source software means better long term techno hippy smugness
• Touch screen
  

iPhone

• Oooooooooh shinier
• There's an app for that
• Multi touch screen
• iTunes etc.
• Every other bastard has one and I want in even if they are over-designed toys for posers
  

By the way, yes I do know that all you use your phone for is sending text messages and phoning people and that this makes you happy enough. I don't care gimmethtoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoy!

Sydney Comedy Festival

I've been to a few things at the Sydney comedy festival. A video of one of the more offbeat ones is below:

(some) Puppets can tell the truth without getting flustered...

Change hurts

4am thought

It's strange what can trouble one at 4am. Woken up by work thoughts my brain rapidly decided it didn't want to stick with the topic and wandered off on a random digression:

Normality is more extreme than you imagine, this is why the news is almost always bad.

Normality is consensus concept and so is maintained by general perception and is not a tangible or given, neither is it measureable, evenly distributed or universally available. People's experience of normality is vastly different based on location culture and life experience.

As you live in a mediatised culture your expectation of normality is most likely set by a mixture of media representations and social expectations/experiences. Unfortunately media content is saleable and is largely sold on the premise that it is news or new information. This selling needs to takes place even when there is little or no news or information and so minor information is hyped as important and even when it isn't. This is much easier to do with bad news than good news as our innate survival instincts have a greater push away from risk than they do a pull toward benefit (risk might kill you but a benefit is likely to be marginal except in rare cases where it could provide a competitive advantage - this would refer to basics like sex and food really).

Note to self: This is an incomplete thought and needs work.

Hot stuff

Turned all of these into chili sauce last night. The sauce is so hot it has symptoms.

Less interesting but more useful

There seems to be a general trend on the internerd summed up by the title of this post. As technologies and techniques come to the mainstream and gain general acceptance they start to look less like toys and more like tools. This means that (some) people start using them well and that people that don't use them so well either stop using them and switch to a more appealing medium or just go away and do something else.

Since the rise of FaceBook and Twitter - 2 services on a collision course - there has been a marked downturn in interesting writing on the internet. Why write a 200 word blog post when you can do 140 characters 7 times a day and achieve much the same thing? The move of applications like word processing and spreadsheets into the online space and the sheer amount of time people spend using software as a service applications (I use 2 fairly constantly at work) has meant internet use for fun is also regarded less as a toy even though more people are spending more time using it this way than ever before.

There also seems a general acceptance that online interactions now have consequences and aren't harmless. Everyone seemingly has heard a story about a FaceBook status setting or picture causing trouble, both apocryphal and true. However both NZ and Australian lawyers can now serve court documents via FaceBook and only last week a man was acquitted when his defense lawyer used as evidence data collected from the arresting officers online social networking activities.

The overall effects are by enlarge to make people quality filter what their published online actually activities are, even though they may be doing more, and make sure that there actually are filters in place both incoming and outgoing - activities suitable for a select minority have security settings that restrict them to that community. The incoming filters are also more accessible and more widely applied - if I don't want to hear about your latest move in scrabulous or your last.fm plays I don't have to.

However the easy sharing and filtering of information and social activity in established services has meant that the blogosphere is noticeably quieter and startups are more obviously useful. Those who have been doing it a while and doing it well are still around. Those who didn't do it so well or whose heart wasn't really in it seem to have found another way to express themselves that is closer to their hearts. A time of economic downturn is probably going to heighten this effect with money and time being concentrated by service providers on building things that people use and that providers can make money from. The downside of this is that the random elements, the runaway esoteric successes are going to be short lived or quickly assimilated into a bigger entity. The internet is going to be a bit less interesting but more useful for a while, but it really was time for it to grow up again anyway.

Moleskine

Why did I wait so long to get one of these?

In fairness to myself it's because they have really wanky marketing which is borderline misleading. I've always resented the way that they are so obviously appealing and disliked the fact that they cost an absolute fortune for what they are, that people that do use them tend to bore me about how good and how useful they are. They are also fetishised by productivity geeks who write in them in different colours for different things and separate them into sections with tabs.

What changed my mind? I realised how many notebooks were getting shredded by just being carried around and that was wasting ideas and important notes. I haven't carried or used a paper diary/organiser for more than a year, though this seems to be a cyclical thing. I have had to admit that a Moleskine plus a cover for it has resulted in a big rise in retaining thoughts and ideas - I'm even considering trying the multi-coloured ink thing to see just how annoying it actually is or whether it's a good idea, though I suspect the personal and work aspects of my life would argue about who got the black ink and who got stuck with blue (my neuroses might be too deeply seated to cope with that). The pocket at the back is so damn useful once you get used to carrying the notebook around with you.

So here I am moleskined up so the inevitable list of productivity hacks that must come last:

• Business cards in the file pocket - run out of business cards in your other stylish accessories? Oh look a spare!
• File cards/spare paper in the file pocket - you wouldn't want to tear a page out would you?
• Symbols - I haven't got much past my normal @ for action or task but I'm rapidly also getting towards $ for items to go on my wishlist and an information symbol for things to look up or research. I might need one for ideas too...

Byron Bay

Gottaluvit. Full of hippies, self included.

Downtime

Normally I spend 3 hours a day traveling to and from work. This is essentially dead time in which I do nothing; I listen to podcasts, I read books. I recognise that these are possibly luxuries that other people would struggle to make time for but the point is I can’t do anything else. Also I exhausted my fairly small library quite quickly, I don’t spend much money on music and whilst the internet has made it easier to find things *cough* quite cheaply *cough* I still haven’t really bothered.

The solution seems pretty obvious i.e. buy a car. However [insert environmental whinging here] and [insert ongoing cost whinging here] so I wasn’t that keen. Until I did the following bit of thinking.

Everyone values their free time but they never put a metric on it. Everyone says they wish they had more time to spend [insert activity or in the company of family here]. So I thought about the spend part of that sentence and actually put a cash value on it. For the sake of argument I valued my time at a reasonably modest $35 an hour. This means I spend $105 of my time each day traveling. Owning a car would give me back 2 of those hours on average saving me $70 of personal time per day. That’s $350 of personal time a week, or extrapolated to 48 working weeks a year, nearly $17,000 of personal time. Getting a car now seems like quite a good idea, an investment even.

Caveat and note to self: This is a gross over-simplification and does not mean that getting a car will make you richer in cash terms unless you can convert those hours into money, which you won’t. Rates are subject to change without notice.

Residual thoughts: What other effects might giving your time a cash value have? How else might I value my time? Given this value what would I do with the extra 2 hours a day?

Pathological

Strange experience for this week:

Sat in the waiting room of the path lab waiting for a blood test. Lots of people sat around trying to keep the worried look off their faces looking through glossy magazines full of glowingly healthy people.

When I arrived I was the only man in there. This I suppose is down to women's far more intricate and complex plumbing, wiring and maintainence cycles.

Waiting rooms are always peculiar liminal spaces that are neither one thing nor the other and engender a limbo state of mind. Go here, wait. Be tested, wait to find out your results and then find someone to tell what it means.

Photos from Borneo

Well January was a dead-loss as far as this website goes but to get me going in February here's a quick slideshow of the best of Emily's photos from Borneo.

View Album

Get your own

Drumkit with a view

Offline

This is going to be interesting. We are headed to Borneo for a 3 week Christmas holiday that includes jungle treks and boats and all manner of adventures into caves and up rivers. We badly need a break but I don't think either of us has really absorbed the fact that we won't have or be looking for use of the internet for close to 3 weeks and most likely won't be using mobiles for that time either.

I don't think we really appreciate how much we use these things an an hourly basis. I've immersed myself much more deeply in the internerd this year, though I haven't written too much about it on here (I will, honest), I'm not sure what effect it's going to have. Perhaps make me more independant of things with flashing LEDs on them!

I will post things to various services from the mobile when I can. So anything worth finding out about will be on Jaiku (get yourself an invitation to Jaiku here). I've got this set to echo to Twitter which everyone else in the world seems to use. I don't use it because unlike Jaiku Twitter doesn't currently support text-message replies outside of the US and Canada. 

What I'm saying is that I'm not around for a bit and I might get withdrawal symptoms and then feel weird back at a computer on my return. That's not the least of my worries, I have a severe coffee habit and the withdrawal symptoms from that are an inability to concentrate, blinding headaches and irritability. Just what you need treking through the jungle...

95:5 Tempered

I've got a bit of a temper me. I try to get round it, I do my best to hide it, normally with fairly limited success. I have recently discovered that if I don't drink so much  - specifically on an empty stomach - things are not so bad. Also cutting down the coffee and eating at regular intervals seems to help.There are a few things that still get my goat no matter what. Pedantic jobsworthery and self-importance will undermine almost any good mood. Bad driving, my own or anyone else's, is also guaranteed to ruin a good day.

I am trying to rid myself of many aspects of being a grouch with varying (read minimal) success. I have always operated on the 95:5 rule i.e. 95% of everything is rubbish and often people will go out of theri way to ruin the remaining 5%. I tend to regard people who don't share this worldview with suspicion and contempt, the bloody hippies. However I am having to contend with the fact that when I go out of the door in the morning thinking I will have a good day more often than not  I do. When I leave the house thinking I have a bad day the story is much the same. This has got to the point where I now have to concede that the biggest factor affecting what kind of day I have is the attitude I approach it with.

As a lifelong 95:5 cynic this apparent affirmation of positive thinking is a little, er, challenging for me as it disproves the ratio (unless of course 95% of my opinions are rubbish (actually that sounds about right, ignore me I'm just doing a bit of belated growing up here).). I have no desire to become a detestable hippy but it seems I'm well down the road. Never mind, it could be worse, at least I won't get as angry!

The pint of no return...

...is the name given to the drink after which you will drink until drunk. Or number 3 as I like to call it. The phrase seems to come from a book by a recovering alcoholic.

Debugger

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Ticket

I really like the minimal 2 colour design of my weekly travel pass

Beware Unsavory voyeur

Down on the upside

Oh, I see what you've done...

When you start looking for them the world is full of odd things like this.