West Coast Ramblings

Catch Up To My Step Up.

2010-06-14T03:00:00.000-07:00

So, I've left this place fallow for quite some time now. I've been writing for a friends project, it's called the Hyperbole Machine. But I have neglected the few people who read here and not there, so I'll be double posting the stuff I put up there [where appropriate] and try and keep this as my self indulgent space.

Here is my latest piece of works over at the HM.

Travel Log - Prague - The Search

Murdoch Qualms

2010-04-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

Some times I forget exactly how pervasive the internet has become. Case in point: I've been contributing to a friends start up blog The HyperboleMachine, on it one of the contributers [a fellow murdoch student herself] had a bit of a rant about West Coat Blues and Roots in which she took both sunset events and Murodch to town for a few different reasons. You can read the post in question here. To Gerry's article you can see that I left a fairly scathing reply which focused exclusively on Murdoch and where I think it's been assing up. It went something like this...

Murdoch really really really need to stop trying to “capitalise on the new media opportunities” and “speaking to young adults on their level” and realise that they are a fucking university. I don’t want you on my god damn level, murdoch. I want you to be the shining beacon of everything I’m not, I want you to be the institution that chews me up and spits me out, if I’m lucky, with a degree that’s worth more than the paper it’s printed on. I want you to make me admire you, not suckle at the teat of whatever new ploy your young marketing staff has come up with this week.
If you want to capitalise on the “new media” I’ll let you in on a secret, you can’t make it work for you. The new media is us, it’s this, right now, what I’m doing here, what people are doing elsewhere. It’s said that markets are now conversations, and I’m under no illusion that a university is a market driven entity, but here’s the genius part about markets now being conversations, you can’t direct them. You can’t fool us, the new media, with gimmicks and shiny baubles. Sure, you might catch what vestigial features are left of the old school mentality, but the bright minds, the committed thinkers, the people you should be wanting to attract, all you are doing is leaving them with mud to throw, buckets and buckets of it.
Pick up your game, lead by example, stop pandering to the lowest common denominator. You are a higher education institution, start acting like it. *IF* you do, we the media, will start saying nice things about you again, but I won’t lie to you, it’s going to take a while

Now, the reason I started off by saying that the internet is pervasive is that a member of the marketing team at Murdoch, one of the same ones that chose me to be an endorsed blogger. The same ones who have given me cool free stuff like tickets to blues and roots. They emailed me because they had seen my comment on this other blog, one I have never linked to here, and asked me, very politely, if there was anything in particular I had issue with and that the team felt they were doing the best they could to give prospective students a window into uni life. So I thought I'd take an opportunity now to clear up what I meant in my criticisms.

My issue isn't with the marketing team at Murdoch, online or otherwise. In fact I have a fair amount of respect for them, both professionally [thanks to t.v. ad campaigns like the "I want to try" ad, which I can't find a video online of unfortunately] and individually [the online marketing team that I've had the most to do with actually seem to care about stable of bloggers and students they've got helping them out, something that is pretty hard to come by in the industry, believe you me]. No my issue with Murdoch is not with the marketing team, it is with the upper management directing them. For too long now Murdoch has become the last thing in the world is was ever envisioned being, a degree treadmill. This is especially hilarious as Murdoch isn't even a predominantly teaching university, it's a research uni, and of the two, research uni's make significantly less money.

Now, the upper management will go to the grave saying that it is for this reason that Murdoch, as an institution has had to make some of the hard decisions that it has over the last few years. I know this because I conducted an interview with one of the bigger mucky mucks about the executive's side of the story in last years pay dispute. He said that Murdoch is run extremely close to the line and that there is very little surplus money for things like paying teaching staff more. A very useful excuse to use when the financial operations of the uni are not transparent, meaning open for scrutiny. Now, I'm not an idiot, I am fully aware that a company should not reveal it's financial decision making process to it's stakeholders because stakeholders have NFI how to run a business. The only problem with this is that Murdoch is a Public University, and as such, not only does it in part belong to the staff and students who teach and attend it, it belongs to the community as well.

This is the crucial facet of the approach the Murdoch Executive has towards conducting itself which I feel is essentially flawed. Yes, Murdoch needs to be financially ship shape and able to support itself. This however does not mean maximizing profits and receiving the best return on your investment. Especially when part of that means selling false promises to prospective students. Your marketing campaigns are wonderful at invigorating people and stirring up their social motivations and desire to not be a part of the crowd, unfortunately I've studied here for three years and I am yet to see the innovative thinking and outside the box approaches that you sell.

At the end of this semester you will lose two of your best and brightest from the media department to Monash, a crushing loss for those of us in the media school. A friend of mine started uni as a mature age student this year and despite being a switched on self reliant young lass I have had to wade waist deep into the quagmire of bullshit that surrounds simple tasks like, enrolling, or, signing up for tutes, the administrative staff being unable to offer her the solutions to her problems because they were either over worked or had no real experience with the online systems. Murdoch has a policy of not allowing fliers or posters on columns of bush court or the poster pillar near the main car park [which funnily enough is called such because it's sole purpose in life is to act as a home for posters] which they claim it to keep the uni neat and nice looking... it's a university you morons, it's supposed to be covered in fliers. Couple this with the fact that students are not allowed to set up food vending stalls and tables outside of very strict guidelines for fear of unfair competition with the food hall, [us crazy students having the proclivity to partake in activities that provide services without generating profit] are just two of many examples of measures the executive has undertaken which, deliberately or not, leave the Murdoch student culture a malformed still-born year after year. The list of failing goes on and on, and while I would dearly enjoy being self indulgent and listing them all [it is a blog after all] I fear I'm already starting to lose your attention so I'll anchor all of these symptoms to the root disease.

Murdoch is being run as a entity with it's financial prospects as the huge and overwhelming priority, other benefits such as quality of education and staff conditions are externalities and considered as factors in an economic equation. I have an alternate view to propose, what if students, staff, and research where the combined goal, and financial sustainability merely a way to best maximize returns to that goal. As I said in my quoted comment from the other blog, markets are now conversations. We are reaching a point in social organization where anything BUT quality product [and your product in this case is a vibrant, healthy, and happy university] will get you nothing. You can still try and run the ship with the old school headspace, and that will most likely work right through to the end of your respective tenures, but what then? You will leave the next round of administrators with a university with no student life, dissatisfied and underpaid staff [if there are any good ones left at that point] and shitty research culture, and in this future, when a shiny media campaign has become irrelevant, how the fuck are you going to sell Murdoch to us then?

P.S. once more to the marketers at Murdoch, I really have no beef with you guys, you've always been super lovely to me, despite me being an arrogant douche bag, which is really rather nice of you. And like I said, I got the mad respect for you, having successfully polished a turd.

P.P.S. If you like what you've read here, quote it, link it, and spread it.

Nationalism. Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love my country.

2010-03-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

I’m in Helsinki. I’ve been here for about 2 and a half months now, and I don’t miss Australia. You know those people who know the second verse to Advance Australia Fair [or hell, even all of the first verse for that matter] and who actually care about the medal tally or whether Mark Webber is doing good this season? Yeah, I’m not one of those people. In short, I don’t love my nation, I am neither patriot or nationalist. But this does not mean that I think either of these things are bad, or evil. Oscar Wilde may have said that patriotism is the virtue of the vicious, but I don’t think that’s a declaratively true statement [and besides, he was like, totally gay]

In the course of “education” I’ve had more than a passing interest in politics, and by politics I mean political science, you know Totalitarianism and Democracy, the role of ethnicity and god, that sort of thing. Nationalism is a prominent feature of almost any conversation about change within a nation, because time after time we can see that the quickest way to mobilise a people is to stoke the fires of their nation-love.

But why? The idea of the “nation” and by extension “national identity” are fairly new concepts, they’ve only been around for a few hundred years, and lets not forget that until about 150 years ago [give or take half a century depending on who you look at] small lineages for fairly inbred people controlled most of the world through empire rule. Yet stand in the deep south of the US or on the river foreshore on Australia day for that matter and utter the phrase “fuck this country” and you will attract some violence pretty quick.

How have we become so caught up in the idea of the national family that we will attack members of that “family” for criticizing it? And why, in Australia at least, does it seem to be a province of the young [younger than 30]. I will allow that in the Australia day scenario booze would play a large factor, but when Alan Jones whipped that merry band of savages into a frenzy over in sydney, most of them weren’t on the piss.

The answer, for here and elsewhere, seems to be anomie. Anomie is a cognitive dislocation, a kind of social disconnect that leaves an individual rudderless in a storm. Anomie can be born of many things but from what I have observed one of its principal causes in western society seems to be the rift between expectations and reality. We expect to be successful, we expect to be rich, we expect to be famous. I’m not saying everyone is deluded enough to think that one day they will be Paris [or even Perez] Hilton, but the fact remains that we are sold on the idea of moving into the class above us at some point in our lives. The realisation that this probably isn’t going to happen, that dairy section manager at the local supermarket is about the best that’s going to come your way*, results in an anger, a formless, unexplained dissatisfaction that an individual is not aware of and cannot solve.

It is into this spiritual and emotional hole that some of the “answers” float. These answers might be God, Drugs [In Australia Booze, Weed, Meth. In order of impact] Love, or as is pertinent to this article, Nationalism. It gives us comfort knowing that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. It makes us feel victorious when members of our family beat members of rival families in contests. And it makes us feel righteous when some of these other families behave in monstrous ways. We can say to ourselves, much as your actual family may have done when you were little, “I’m glad we don’t behave like that”. I am glad our women have the right to vote, our citizens don’t have their ethnicity on their passport/identity card, and our citizens are free to criticise. These features of our country are good features, but I am not proud.

I am not proud because the facets of my nation that should arise pride are not representations of my families elegance or intelligence. How many of these qualities that I hold so dear would still be around if left to the constantly shifting discretion of my “family” members, rather than enshrined into law? Our nationalism revolves around a schema of exclusion, that is, we feel good by comparing ourselves to others. This I feel, is a crucial mistake. If we look at ourselves critically we will see a population of commodity driven worker bees. We make a big song and dance about people coming and trying to get in on the good life that we’ve all works so very hard to build, but Australians haven’t worked hard to build anything, other than our own personal fortunes. We think that because we’ve contributed to the economy in some kind of thrice-removed abstract sense that it not only absolves us of further effort but entitles us to claim the whole nation for ourselves?

What about this, what about we actually live up to the slogans and the t-shirts. What if we actually, as a people rolled up our sleeves and gave a shit. We stopped trying to accrue our sad little piles of stuff on patches of sand where every house looks the same. I’m not saying that the everyone has to become some kind of social welfare zealot, that’s the true absurdity of the situation, all people would need to do is to look around themselves and see the mechanisms in our society that are already in place but could use another set of hands once a week.

Australia is already not half bad, I mean, given how useless it’s population is, it’s kind of surprisingly good. Imagine what it could be if everyone actually started caring. Imagine if our nationalism revolved not around “this is ours, not yours” but around “We’re working hard, you’re welcome to work beside us”.

//Ben

*Note. I do not for a second think that being the dairy manager at the local supermarket is a degrading or “low” job. Two reasons, first of all because I don’t think it matters where a person works, you can always bring pride and sincerity to your job, and secondly, sometimes I really fucking need a man who knows his cheeses. KnowwhatI’msayin?

Uni Lessons

2010-03-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

So, the good people in the Murdoch chancellery [aka. the kremlin] were all like "you should totally talk about stuff you know now which you would have liked to have known back before you started uni. I thought on this a bit and didn't really come up with a whole lot, so I asked some of my mates to think of some things as well.

As you guys may or may not be aware I'm on exchange in Helsinki at the moment, so I thought I'd record my suggestions with the city as a backdrop.

Powaaaaaah!

2010-02-24T03:44:00.000-08:00

So apparently all of our emmisions based power problems have been solved! Basically there is a company called Bloom which has created a fuel cell technology that uses combustible material, and a bunch of oxygen, to make power... sans emissions. Now that's a pretty tall claim [not as tall as the routine claims that people have broken the laws of thermodynamics] but no small accomplishment none the less, assuming they've actually done it that is.

If legit, this tech will address one of the biggest hurdles left to clear in order for our societies to transition to emissionless communities, base load. The idea between base load is this, throughout the day, in a given cities power network, demand for electricity with fluctuate throughout the day. In Perth for example [and most of the rest of Australia] our peak usage tends to be in the afternoon in summer, when people come home, turn on the computers, tv, electric ovens, and most importantly of all, and air conditioners [one of the most inefficient technologies around], where as in the early hours of the morning, when all the lights and appliances are off, the demand is significantly lower. Base load is the amount that a power company must supply to a customer, on the fly, so that things don't go dark.

The upshot of this is that most of the large scale clean production systems we've got at the moment [read: wind and solar] are simply fantastic as long as it's not a windless night. The way that our societies are organised, if the power just suddenly goes away it's more than merely inconvenient, it can have disastrous effects. On this point a lot of the hippies will cry out about how our behavioral patterns are the variables that need to change, and then everything will be honkey dorey. While I agree that our society could be a lot more engaged in the cause and effect involved in every day behavior [people who keep their houses at anything below 27 really shit me off] unless the hippies have figured out a way to mobilize a whole society into drastic behavioral change, we're going to have to go about it in a different way, and that means base load.

This is where the Bloom energy servers come in. The company spokesmonkey purportedly hopes that in 10 years homes will be able to buy their own fridge sized bloom box for about 3 grand USD. Supplying energy from anything that's combustible [like say, house biowaste and sewage]. 10 years is a long way away though, and if it's available in 10, that means that large scale adoption wont be in for another 10-15 so we're looking at somewhere in the 30's before the tide actually reverses direction. Which, by almost all accounts, is a probably a wee bit late. So what options do we have in the mean time to reduce our reliance on emission based based load generation? Well, we've got a few options.

Augmentation. This means pretty much what it sounds like, and to a certain extent, is starting to be rolled out at the moment. This is things like the traditional wind turbines and Photovoltaic solar panels. These are fairly easy to integrate into the existing power grid simply working the opposite to what happens when you turn on a blender. Instead of the system registering that a tiny bit more power needs to be supplied, it registers that a little less does. You've also got solar-thermal, which simply heats the water used in the power stations [which are normally just steam engines, essentially] which then has to be heated up less by the coal or gas or whatever, meaning less emissions. "But Ben, why have we not already started augmenting our grids?" I hear you ponder. Good question. One reason for the lack of take up of wind generation has actually been the green movement, believe it or not. There has been many a bearded man and dreadlocked lady the world over that have stopped wind turbines sullying their rolling mist laden vista's [personally I think wind turbines are very pretty and kind of hypnotic, like zamboni machines.] As for the rest, it's expensive, and we live in a society where the "benefit" in cost benefit analysis needs to also be measured in dollars. Social benefits having notoriously low dollar values.

Nuclear. I just heard the collective gasp of every one of my enviro mates, but hear me out. Nuclear reactors, as we are familiar with them, are a joke. It takes more money to refine and transport the fuel for them than they actually produce, and in terms of how long they need to run to produce the amount of power used to build them [a standard metric one can use when comparing power generation methods] we're looking at a time scale of around a decade; wind turbines are about 2 years.

BUT

There is a new kind of reactor that has been developed. It's called a pebble bed reactor, and it addresses the bulk of the issues that are raised with conventional nuclear reactors. The basic principle behind the difference between the two kinds of reactors [there's actually about six kinds, but I'll try and keep this simple] is that in conventional reactors all of the safety measures and technology is in an effort to stop the nuclear reaction from running away and causing a melt down [most of the handful of reactor accidents or near accidents have been caused by a broken water pump, or cracked pipe, or something else that normally stops the nuclear reaction from melting through the floor]. Pebble bed reactors are exactly the opposite, all of the systems are in place to ensure that the nuclear reaction is maintained, so should one [or all] of the systems break, the nuclear fission stops, and the plant [and one would presume everything it's hooked up to] goes dark. The material used to power these plants are the "pebbles" mentioned in it's name. They are graphite balls about the size of tennis balls with particles of fuel material [like Uranium] in it. The balls get stacked together and their proximity [in really large numbers] to one another creates the nuclear fission. Because the balls are immensely less potent they are passively safe, meaning you can be near them without you body melting, which also means they are much less of a headache to move around the place. Since they don't need to be cooled down with fluid the plants don't produce anywhere near the amount of waste that conventional ones do.

But all of this is a moot point, because I said the word Uranium, which is enough of make any argument to the left completely moot. I give mad props to the green movement for bringing all these issues to the public's attention over the last 30 years, but man it'd be really cool if they could get out of their own way for a while so we can actually get some stuff done.

So we come back to these Bloom energy servers. The basic principle behind them is a technology called solid state fuel cells. I had not heard of this method of power generation before now, and I'm not sure I can simplify it adequately [not helped by the fact that bloom is being very hush hush about how they work] but essentially, it seems to be like a kind of ceramic battery that takes a fuel, and turns it into electricity, with significantly less emissions. But here is the kicker, in the same way that an electric motor [which if spun by an external force] is also a generator, so to if you feed power into the bloom boxes [say from your house's solar panels or wind turbine] that power can be stored, like a giant battery. This is the truly significant implication of the Bloom Energy Server. Never before have we had a viable way to store enough power to keep things entertaining us into our social coma's when the wind and sun go away for a while.

We have possessed the tools to be a lot further along the road to sustainability than we currently are for quite a while now. The real crime is that when the stakes [and water levels] rise, the rich whiteys like my and most of you will all be fine. We have the money and resources to adapt to whatever comes our way [humans being far and away the most adaptable creatures] but all those poor uneducated schlebs... well, if any of you watched the film "chlidren of men" you'll know where we are heading.

Linkpost!

2010-02-21T03:21:00.000-08:00

When times be slow, I serve up the finest finds in my slow traverse of the digital frontier.

lets start out with some light entertainment.

Via clusterflock

Via 4chan

So, something that I learned from reading Jurassic Park, and then later studying Biology at Uni, is that evolution is kind of a lot like life in general, everyone always struggling and inovating to stay in exactly the same situation. In biology this is called the Red Queen effect. The example used to explain it to me was giraffes and African thorn bushes. Now a few thousand generations ago, giraffes didn't have long necks and tongues, and the thorn bushes were low to the ground and thornless. To avoid getting eaten by every wandering herbivore the bushes grew up out of reach, so the giraffe developed it's long neck. The tree's were all like "awww hell no" so they developed some seriously bad ass thorns, to protect their leaves, to which the giraffes were like, "pfft please, I'll just evolve myself a bitchin' tongue."

Anyway, the thing that got me thinking about it all was this article over at engadget that was talking about how the UK cops [read: custodians of the most surveilled country in the world] caught a perp with an automated flying drone equipped with IR camera. How long do you suppose it will be before some nefarious people hack that drone the way they did with the Predators used by the US military, you now, the ones with missiles.

So it turns out that the anti-piracy peeps have shut down what would have to be one of the only law abiding music blogs around. Yet another savvy move sure to win you the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised market who already have no moral qualms about stealing your product.

A very very cool article about a middle class family that sold their home, bought a smaller cheaper one, and donated the rest of the money to charity. Maybe there is hope for a post-consumer culture. Now, when's the iPad come out?

Speaking of radical fiscal moves, read this article about a rogue economist in New Mexico and his ideas. He's my kind of crazy.

On the topic of social activism, feel like helping people be private on the internet? You should run TOR. It's a kind of organic proxy server network that will help hide people from anyone trying to find them. Such as Iranian bloggers speaking out against their government, for example.

I have to go through Heathrow on my way back home, and will have to use the full body scanners.

Well, I feel safer already. Via Boing Boing

So, this could revolutionise the world. I like it when that happens.

It's not often you have access to genuine emotions here on the morally parched and forever cynical internet. But this photo essay about various peoples "one's that got away" bucks the trend. Both beautiful and sad, like so many things.

For all you cats who like sex, drugs, and combinations of the two. Here is an incredibly detailed feature article written in the 60's that details the sexual experiences of one woman havign sex on 7 of the most prominent drugs at the time. Now that's romance lit I can get into [Via Dangerous Minds

Finally, a new tradition, I'm going to end each post from now on with two pictures, one will be the album that I'm listening to at the moment, and the second will be some random pic chosen from my "interesting pictures" folder.

Amon Tobin - Foley Room

Freestyling

2010-02-19T03:30:00.001-08:00

So, I'm catching the subway [aka, metro] here in Helsinki for the first time, and I get this brutal sense of deja vu. I'm looking around myself thinking 'have I dreamed this before, is there a movie or something that has scenes down here. And then it hits me, like a bright orange train.

I'm a muh-fuh-ken freestyler, yo.

For those of you too young to remember world and its pop culture way back in 2000 [A historical epoch where one had to maintain constant vigilance for Sharptooth]. Freestyler was a number one hit around the world by a band called Bomfunk MC's. Trust me when I say that if you had a TV or radio in the year 2000, you know this song. Trust me further when I say that at 13 and in possession of a fresh love of electronic music, [a worse combination than antibiotics and booze] these guys were the bomb.

I now present, for your nostalgic pleasure, a series of stills from the videoclip, with a corresponding photo I took this afternoon

The Great Internet Firewall

2010-02-17T03:27:00.000-08:00

I don't normally indulge in serious analytical discourse here on the blog [no, that's saved for warm nights with friends on the porch] prefering instead to offer snide, well timed, witticisms of no real value beyond entertainment. The topic of the Rudd government's proposed internet filter and more importantly, the discussion in the public fora surrounding the proposal, is so far from the mark, and so loaded with misleading ideologically driven misinformation [which is likely nothing more than ignorance masquerading as authority] that I felt the strong urge to contribute my tiny voice to the fray. Hopefully raising the level of debate at least a little bit.

Lets talk first about the main actors in this cascade failure of policy. The man at the front of the plan would be Ye old' K-Rudd. As much as I'd love to pause for a moment, and take stock of all the wonderful things that Mr. Rudd's government has done thus far since taking the scepter from Johnny Howard [which I was rather chuffed with at the time] that will have to wait for another blog post. Suffice to say that Kevin has had a stint at the helm of a government so obsessed with using the spin mechanisms of the media to make it look like they're achieving something that they actually forgot to achieve anything.

Lets not forget the other melodious weasel in this charade of authority though, Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digial Economy Stephen Conroy. This is a man who follows in the fine example of so many in his position before him of being an almost farcically ignorant person at his job, the crucial difference being though, never before has his ministerial portfolio been so important. If our nation is to come even close to moving onto a post-industrial society, his job is at the forefront of that change. There are certain aspects of governance that require a person must have more knowledge than how to simply be a politician. We tend to expect the finance ministers, for example, have a bloody good working knowledge of economics. Why then, do we entrust the communication portfolio to people you just know would be calling someone else up about how to program their new DVR.

That's not to suggest that Conroy is merely inept. Oh my, no. This is the man who just recently had a lovely ski holiday with Kerry Stokes before handing the networks back a cool $250M [Thats a quarter of a billion dollars in lost government revenue, just so we're crystal clear] in decreased license fees... it's not often I will back a Liberal call for investigation, and even less likely if it comes from the mouth of Tony "Shit Eating Grin" Abbot, but seriously, double yew. tee. eff.

But let us forget, for just a moment, that these two stooges are bad at their jobs, and focus on why this plan is, for lack of a better phrase, wrong in every conceivable way. The implementation of this supposed firewall wouldn't be easy for a government with the resources and control of... oh, lets say China, let alone the laughable capacities at the disposal of the Australian Government. Lets have a look at some of the results of the 2008 filter trials by Australian Communication and Media Authority [ACMA], an institution I've spent my entire media degree being taught is laughably inept.

Of the six filtering systems tested, only one [the least accurate] had what was deemed an acceptable level of performance [speed sacrifice], only cutting access speeds by 2%. The rest of the filters decreased speed by 22-86% and one dropped the speed by a fifth when it wasn't even turned on. Significant problems were found with both under-blocking [letting sites on the blacklist through] and over-blocking [blocking the wrong sites]. Most crucially of all though, the tests only simulated a client trying to access sites through the filter one on one, however the governments plan is to have two tiered filtering, one blacklist for the kiddyporn and what not, which no one should be able to access, and then a second one that will protect all the fragile young minds in Australia, that adult users can [supposedly] opt out of. If that's all a bit confusing for you, think of it like this, decrease your internet speed by between 20 and 80 percent, then take that decreased speed, and decrease that by further 20-80 percent. All for the low low price of $81 million. Jeez, Bargain right?

And all of that was just for the average folk, Joe Q. Citizen and Jane R. Public.

Let me be very very clear here, people who want get around this filter, will be able to.

Very easily.

Let's take the example of child pornographers, this is not a group of people who indulge in their fantasies by googling "kiddie porn". There are very few web portals that will happily point you to a nice website offering you up a bunch of child porn for free, this is not how the system works, friends. The people who trade the overwhelming majority of this material do so through communication channels that have absolutely nothing to do with web sites. I'll explain what I mean.

The world wide web, and the internet, are two wholly different things. The WWW is websites, as we know them, hosted around the world, Yahoo, Google, Facebook etc. The internet however is much, much, bigger than that, it encompasses all communication across this global network of interconnected computers. Things like IRC, Usenet, FTP, the list goes on, I assure you. All of these systems allow for information transfer that can get around the proposed filter with minimal effort.

All of which any dodgy internet dude worth his salt will already be doing, to speak nothing of proxies, IP spoofing, TOR's and all the other hacking tools one can use to really get up to mischeif.

Then there is the list of sites itself a list which the government has openly admitted it has no intention of ever sharing with the public. Fortunately for us, and prophetically for this whole moronic scheme, the list was leaked, twice. I don't know how many of you looked at the list when I was originally leaked in '08, but I did, I also saved it [just request it in the comments if you want to have a look, I'll email it to you] and while just over half of them are child porn portals, that which is left is mostly pornographic, I don't really understand why we're blacklisting them.

BDSMfetish.net? since when is being into bondage, an activity between consenting adults, worthy of censorship? Bodyjapan.com, this one is less surprising I suppose, I mean we did refer to East Asia as "The Yellow Peril" on the governmental level in the post WW2 era, it's only been two generations after all, you have to give that shit time to settle, right?

Ishotmyself.com!? For those of you unfamiliar, Ishotmyself is a "porn" site in which Australian girls are given a digital camera to take home and told to take some sexy pics of themselves, in exchange for this they are given a modest sum [from what I recall it's a few hundred dollars]. Now I know this because some of my friends have done this. Hell, some of the people reading this have probably done this [I'd love for you to leave a comment if you have]. On what level is the government saying that this should be protected from the public? The photo's are taken by the girls themselves, or by someone they feel very comfortable with, and they have complete control over the artistic direction and composition of the shoots. Fuck people, this is head and shoulders healthier than the pornographic material available in the bloody service station.

and of course, the addition to the list that has stirred up more animosity for the government than any other, 4chan.

I wont bore you with the finer details of the site and it's ethos, but you know how the government's websites were attacked a little while ago? That was 4chan organised under the collective "Anonymous". These are the same people who helped make Scientology illegal in France. Make no mistake, the attacks on the government so have been a very simplistic and hastily put together affair by their usual standards. "Anonymous" is a group who's technical limitations and hacking capacities have no leash, and can never really be known. This is not romanticisation either, this is a group of decentralised individuals who have no leadership what so ever. Anyone can "join" or start a movement, be it an attack, protest, or MEME. If this filter plan gets implemented, it will be forever plagued by an unending stream of low level, essentially untraceable [because of how these measures work, each individual contributes to little, they cannot by persecuted or prosecuted] attacks and maladies, put forth by people who derive more pleasure from sticking a wrench in the works of institutions they deem unsatisfactory than they do from viewing the very material they are being ineffectively restricted from.

These sites are the really prominent ones that I know and have picked out of the first 10% of the list as I scanned it. Extrapolate from that and we're looking at many, many sites that are blocked because some conservative person doesn't like them, and we'll never know about it cause the list is secret.

Really? is that the kind of place we're going to be in?

A quick summation. If the filter is brought in, it will not stop the people who want to view material from viewing it, it will inconvenience the Australian internet population [all 17 million of us] when they are not trying to view restricted material, it is technically flawed and allows material through that it should not, and stops material it shouldn't, and finally [and by far most troublingly] the blacklisted material is to be kept secret, unavailable to the public, and in no way open for review at any time.

I beg you, I implore you, please please please do everything in your power to stop this happening. We are essentially instituting a kind of thought crime prevention filter, the fact that it wont work is a moot point, the fact that we as a public are willing to sit here and complacently take it is far too much for me to bear. This is worth protesting, there will be actions in every major capital city soon, you can find information out about them here

I will leave you on a hugely prostituted quote that nevertheless holds merit in this situation.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

It is only through the inaction of the intellectually active community, through it's self assured knowledge that surely surely that sort of thing could never happen here, could never happen to us. That we will lose more than we ever wanted to.

//Edit: If you've liked this, thought it helped you understand what was going on, or indeed anything else, please push it out to as many sources as you can, friends, news aggregators, other better known blogs, etc etc. This isn't about increasing my profile but about making people aware.

//Another Edit: A commenter on this left a very very cool link giving much more depth and scope to the issue than I have, if you still have questions, I would make your way here

We Danced For No Reason But To Dance

2010-02-14T00:21:00.000-08:00

So it's Friday afternoon, I'm sitting down in Soc&Kom eating lunch, minding my own business, when Felix comes over to chat. We had a typically male conversation.

"Hey, Ben."

"Hey Felix"

"What are you doing tonight?"

"No plans man."

"You should come out to a rave with us"

"O.K."

about four hours later, I was here

As you can see, and kind of hear [sorry about that by the way, I couldn't be bothered lugging my DAR there to get good audio] it was a pretty wicked affair. On the bill were 2Many DJ's, who like most mashup acts, are a boatload better live. They were supported by a few other local acts including Huoratron [Seriously, click on that link] who pretty much slayed the dance-floor by the end of the night.

Friday night helped me remember why a person goes out. When you live on the western side of Australia, it's very easy to forget why seeing music live is fun. Most good international acts will be playing in a festival setting, and if you don't have backstage passes being at a festival kind of sucks. You have to contend with a Mardi-gras-esque parade of people on the train-ride to unconsciousness, with all your favourite stops along the way. Weepy-girlsville, I-Think-I'm-A-Standup-Comic-But-I'm-Actually-Just-Annoyington, Messed-Up-Solo-City, Teenybopper-In-Thongsworth, and probably my very favorite stop I'll-Fuckin'-Smash-Youseleigh.

Lets say though that you do go to a dedicated event for electronic music in Perth, no festival atmosphere there right? Well, yeah, you don't have the legion of Southern-cross-sporting centurions, you've got a different breed of criminal, underage crack head ravers. Now, I should make it clear that "ravers" are not a sub-culture I have any significant beef with. I refer specifically here to the methed out 14-22 yearolds that have used so much crack their faces are starting to give up the battle.

Now I know it might seem like I'm casting judgement from my ivory tower here, decreeing that only I, and people like me, should be allowed into events; that shabby paedestrian riff raff? Well they can just stay out side thank you very much. Nothing could be further from the truth though. What I'm looking for in my ideal crowd is a bunch of people who are there to enjoy themselves and contribute to the atmosphere by doing the very simple task of not being a complete jerkoff. You wanna come, take drugs, and shake your booty like it's going out of fashion? Sweet. You wanna roll in with a bunch of your home boys and roll around talkin' shit and laughing, power to ya. You wanna stand in the corner all night saying nothing and chin-stroking? straight up dawg. It's when your shit, starts being someone else's shit, that you should really re-evaluate what's going on.

Friday night was was like some kind of dancehall utopia after what I'm accustomed to. The tragically hip kids were dancing with the ravers, the big macho ice-hocky players funking down next to the queers, and not in the whole night did I see a single fight, nor a rough expulsion by the bouncers [and trust me, I was looking]

I wonder how we can port this to a west Australian audience?

anyways, here's the pics I took that night that I like. Click on the slideshow to be taken through to the picasa album. [I'm the one with the beard, for all the cat's reading who don't know me personally]

Step One: Become A Murdoch Endorsed Blogger... Step three: Profit!

2010-02-11T00:33:00.000-08:00

Woo!

The fallout from being involved in the Murdoch blogging competition of last year [which that horrid wench Jess Eaton won (a note, I'm a friend and fellow radio dork with Jess, so I'm allowed to call her a horrid wench, also, a slattern, trollop, scarlet jezebel, and a fast young woman)] is that I'm now an "endorsed" Murdoch blogger. This means I get traffic to my blog and a $200 voucher to the Murdoch bookshop...

I'm so going to buy a lifetime supply of the greatest pen in the world.

Now, I don't normally indulge in "rants", but I gotta vent on a particular issue. Like so many issues in a students life, it has to do with Centrelink [Australia's welfare organisation, for my international homies]. I'm in Finland at the moment, on a special international exchange, a situation that makes Centrelink more than a little antsy. I had to get the chair of my program back home to write a letter about what the GEJI scholarship is to be used for. Once obtained, I called up Centrelink on skype to see how I can email it to them. The following conversation is virtually verbatim.

"Hi, my name is Ben Ainslie, I was wondering what the email address is to mail you guys a document that you need from me"

"You have to fax it."

"No but it's been given to me via email. So if I could just send it to one of you guys..."

"We don't do that."

"But... why not?"

"Because it's so easy to forge things on the computer."

"..."

"Sir?"

"I'm sorry, I was just thinking about how to respond to that. You guys want me to print out this digital document, and then fax it, because that will be more secure?"

"That's correct."

"*The sound of my brain doing a backflip and then exploding* may I have the fax number that I can call from Finland?"

"Oh, uh, I don't think there is an international fax number, just try the normal one."

"Thank you for your help"

So now I've got to track down a fax machine in Finland. To put this in perspective, the fax machine was created in a time when the graceful pterodactyl still gyred in the skies. From what I understand it was invented sometime after fire, and some time before the concept of universal suffrage.

Now, I've never used a fax machine before. Ever. Do you put the document in first and then dial, or the other way round? Do you have to listen for an automated message that will ask you a series of riddles, of progressive difficulty? And where am I going to put the virgin blood that no doubt powers these arcane devices... not to mention that my voodoo dancing skills have really lapsed in the last few years, ya know?

And I have to find one of these machines in Finland. This nation is the home of the most successful mobile telephone manufacturer in the world, Nokia. Ancient telephonic instruments don't exactly hang around in this country, I'm basically looking for a telegraph bipper in the headquarters of Google.

What I love most of all though, is the mental image of some dank, pipe laden, basement in the bottom of a shabby building. Dark ranks of hulking facsimile machines spewing out an unending stream of documents attesting to the voracity of the work ethic of Branden McGee's and Dwayne Paulsons's. Shuffling gholum like attendants ripping off segments of feed and filing them in some kind of cavernous storage centre.

I found one though, and a man [who no doubt has his own industry specific honorary title, like Deacon, or Headmaster] tasked with the negotiation required to manipulate this foul device, and we managed to get it humming and whirring to our collective bidding, the parlays with the ancients having taken place.

Seriously, fax machines, you guys are dicks.

Impressions

2010-01-20T22:02:00.000-08:00

Got some more photo's to share, the first few are of this spooky abandoned train rally yard. It's got some way cool stuff in it but unfortunately I left the iso way high on my camera and didn't realise... GRAIN. I need to buy some snow boots if I wanna take more pictures of it, it's down to -14 in the day now.

So, I have nothing but respect for the dudes who busk in below freezing weather.

And finally I realised that I'd taken a lot of picture of the fancy schmancy buildings in Helsinki but not many of just the street. So to give you an idea of what the downtown area looks like, here they are.

They have to constantly clean the snow off the tops of buildings and break off the stalagtite's [stalagmite?] of ice that form on the gutter, so people don't get hurt.

Finlandia! - The arrival

2010-01-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

So. I realise that it's been kind of a long time since my last blog update. I return now with both humility and suplicance to the ether to bring you more interesting news from my life. As one might have inferred from the title of this blogpost, I'm in Finland. Don't believe me? Well then take a look at This!

My arrival in Finland was preceded by twentysomething hours in the air from W.A. to here. Some things of note: airlines have video on demand now, Paris was getting snow as I went through [I'm pretty sure that's unusual], and I managed to spend 14 hours wedged between two rather attractive French girls and not talk to them at all. When we touched down it was a blamy [not being sarcastic here] -5 degrees, this relative warmth was rather good as Finnair had managed to lose not just my bag, but my entire flight's [and the Finn's are supposed to be so efficient...].

The bus ride into town made me aware of two things. Firstly that there wasn't a car older than 6-7 years on the road, and that although they might have lost my bag the Finn's really do like being efficient. The traffic lights here have this little feature where if you're waiting at a red light the yellow will flash for one second [while the red is still on] before they both turn green, kind of like a watered down drag strip starting light array. This is so there isn't that little lag between the light turning green and the front cars actually taking off. Imagine how much time that saves in total. Not to go off on a tangent but speaking of cool efficient things, the crockery cupboard in my apartment is another cool idea, instead of it all being on wooden shelves, the shelves are made of dish racks and the cupboard itself is built above the sink. So you wash the dishes and put them where they live to dry, very cool.

Not so cool things, the price of stuff. Everyone goes on about how expensive everything is in Europe, but I wasn't prepared. I spent 50 Euro's in what I inferred to be Finlands equivalent of Red Dot [that's a shitty "we import the cheapest products from China" store back home in Aus] on a single fitted sheet, doona [duvet], and smallish towel. A hot chocolate in a cafe was 3 Euro and take away Chinese was 11 for a standard sized take away container and rice. Basically everything costs what it does back home, except the currency is supposed to be worth almost twice as much. I think I might see if some bar wants to employ an English only dude for three months, I think I'm totally in with a shot :/

The place where I am living is nice if simple, It's pretty reminiscent of boarding school. Most of my fellow housemates seem nice and friendly and open, which is good. I missed orientation week and the first day of school thanks to doing the radio thing at southbound so today is a serious catch up day. My sleeping pattern is a little out of whack [I started this post at 6 in the morning] but it's almost time to start getting ready for the day so I shall leave you now with some more pictures of my humble abode.

A promising entrance hallway to my building.

The stairs are like the best bit of the whole building.

This is shot from the front doof of out apartment, those grey doors you see are the bedrooms [I'm number 1!] that central block thing houses the bathroom, lavatory, and kitchen, I think it also carries all the infrastructural up and down the building [like the wet wall in the first matrix where Morpheus gets snatched.]

Our appartment is unisex, which will mean that this kitchen will probably get pretty rank [as John Birmingham rightly observed, "there is something about a bunch of guys living together which unleashes the beast"]

And this little dog box is my room, it's not fancy, but it's comfy and warm, and that makes me like it just fine.

Assignment Three - 10 things. [ - I hate about you. Man, I love that movie.]

2009-10-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

This assignment was the opportunity to share the things I dig about Murdoch. When I first started here I was a very cynical young man, I never thought I'd grow fond of aspects of the campus. Over time I've come to really love some parts of the Uni, like the sunken garden for example. Other little eccentricities have always tickled me, like the soviet hallway [if you don't know the soviet hallway just have a watch.] and there was even a hidden thing or two I've found, some I'll share with you, and some I'm still going to keep just for me.

Fortunately for me I'm good friends with Nigel Fopmorth III, one of the world's foremost documentarians and host of "Urbane Naturaliste" one of the premiere webtv shows on the internet. I invited Nige to come and use Murdoch as location for his latest episode, and share some of the gems I love about the place.

Here is the episode he made.

Dying hurts

2009-10-11T23:32:00.001-07:00

Profuse apologies for the extended radio silence valued readers, I've been sick.

The word sick doesn't really seem a fair description to me. I wasn't sick, I was dying, I was hunched in a foetal position on my bed in a puddle of my own sweat, cradling my bleeding ear and nose, praying for death.

Sickness is never welcome, but when you're like me, a total moron who's commited himself to far too many things, it really really sucks. Cause the only thing that happens is you end up either letting people down who are relying on you, or letting go of things you don't want to let go of [such as blogging]

As of today I'm feeling a lot better though, I mean, I can't hear out of my left ear, I have an infected pink right eye, and breathing through my nose is labourious at best, but I feel like I can actually get things done.

Which is rather handy really as it's one movement this weekend and I have interview duties. I'll be interviewing Ashley Sellers, CEO of Inertia. I'm looking forward to the chance to talk to one of the major players in the Australian [good] independent music scene. He'll be talking at 11:45 on sunday at a panel on lisencing in the digital age. You don't need a ticket to go check out most of the panels, so if you consider yourself interested in the world of music, here's your chance to go learn even more.

Time for links!

This was a Tee worn by a Norwanese [Norwegian] librarian to the Internet Librarian International in London. Apparently it was created in response to the US patriot act, the latin reads, "We know what you're reading, and we're not telling." Don't mess with the Librarians man. [From Boing Boing]

So apparently there is this awesome animator called Nick Cross, who's style is deliciously old school, reminiscent of the start of the cartoon Renaissance in the early nineties [think Ren and Stimpy] He has done a really dark political animation. Check it out. [From Boing Boing]

Yellow Cake from Nick Cross on Vimeo.

Staying with wicked sticks animation this is from a cool little outfit in melbourne-town. Voice by Nick Cave. [From Clusterflock]

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

More from my ongoing linkroll to prove that we do actually live in "The Future". This is an amazingly informative video on how you make a remote control blob do what you want. [From Boing Boing]

Sticking with stuff from the future-now, this is some pretty amazing work into robotic balance. [From Engadget]

Two related video's in a row here. They are interesting because they both seem to bring the playfulness out of people. The first is a really really cool installation art/A.V. Piece in london. [From Clusterflock]

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

The second is a interactive staircase in Sweden designed to get commuters off the escalators. [From Boing Boing]

Staying with musical stuff, this guy is the business, and he'd want to be with a name like Final Fantasy [not the game] [From Clusterflock]

Coolest House ever? I think so. This guys is some kind of Lumber and Construction tycoon in Russia. [seriously] [From Kottke]

Coolest massive sculpture of a bull fart rocketing a man into a wall, ever. [from August Animals]

It really doesn't get any cooler than this [From Clusterflock]

Link Post

2009-10-05T01:57:00.000-07:00

Just a few of the rad-tacular things I've found this week.

First off I guess I'll throw the link up to the podcast I'm listening to, D-sides and Glitchmob? Daddy like.

Staying with thing electronica, Dancecult is a new online journal [like, peer reviewed academic-esque journal] on "Electronic dance music culture". Volume one is available, some good reading in there if you're in too deep like me.

I want to work in a place that paints stuff like this on the walls [from Boing Boing]

So, we actually live in the future now. Soon these will be mounted on the pilotless drones so that a man sitting behind a desk in tennessee can fire a laser at a tank from kilometers away in an unmanned remote control plane thingy. Jesus. We're too smart for our own good. [From engadget]

OMG. New feature from Paul King, director of the mighty Boosh. Squee [from Dangerous Minds]

Lol. Married to the sea are great.

I love chess. I'm also a [closet] car nut. This chess set is the absolute win. A rad tinkerer who has a flickr account knocked it together. [from Lifehacker]

The digital devide to which anchorwoman Leah refers, is a very real problem, one that the OLPC movement looked to address [incidentally, netbooks also came out of the program, don't let people ever say that aid can't have positive externalities]. It's efforts like this that remind me that while we have a long way to go, we're making progress. [From Rocketboom (why the hell are all of rocketbooms presenters hot young women? I thought we were better than this now?)]

Sometimes I forget that the states has an absolutely amazing public broadcaster. PBS, which gave the world Sesame Street, has compiled an hour long web video for kids to help them come to terms with the economic recession [which believe me, is pretty rough for a lot of people in the states] These are kids who were accustomed to a lifestyle of videogames and toys and now their folks might be struggling to pay the rent. It's a big ask to get a child younger than 10 to understand that sort of shift. Bravo PBS, Bravo.

Man. Not many things stir my emotions. This did. There is hope. The person I nabbed this link from sums it up best

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it’s another thing altogether. It’s nothing short of monumental.

[from boing boing]

This one courtesy of imgur

Found on 4chan

Blogging Assignment 2: Slogan

2009-10-03T23:06:00.000-07:00

So, for those of you unfamiliar with this one, it was a challenge to come up with a little quip, slogan if you will, that I would have liked to have been told when I was considering my choices for uni [and I went out on a limb and extended that to life in general, post high school]

Despite the inherent cheese factor of reducing any advice to the length of a slogan, I liked the premise of this assignment. While I don't think any one liner is going to offer help in life direction, what they can do is promote thought, and hopefully, a conversation about it. I gave thought to this one and at first I'd settled on a very simple "work hard." and while I mentioned this in a previous post as still probably the most valuable piece of advice for a uni student, it doesn't in any way help those who don't really know what they want to do, and where they want to go in life.

Back to the drawing board I went, this time actually thinking about me back then, fresh out of high school, bright eyed and bushy tailed. Without going into what is an interesting but unrelated life story, the long and the short of it was I did a fair bit of humming and haa-ing after school. Periods of backpacking interspersed with resitting year 12 at a senior campus, as well as a year of a science degree at UWA means that there was definitely advice I could have used.

What I realised eventually, the thing that made me settle down and stay on a course, was that there are things in this world that I'm good at. Whether it's natural talents like my people skills, which I've just always had, or acquired traits such as my penchant for performance or my abilities with a lot of tech, there were things that I did and do well. Essentially, what I did, and what I think other people should do when trying to decide where to go in life, is to "play to your strength"

My slogan and how I presented it are a testiment to playing to your strenghts. In the assignment it said that we should decorate the letters of our slogan. The problem with this for me, is that I am not arty in any way. I learned what the primary colours are literally 4 months ago. I'm 23 for gods sake. I knew I wasn't going to be able to compete with the no doubt significantly more creatively minded kids I'm up against. What I do well though, is working hard, and techy things. The idea came to mind that if I painted my slogan on a wall [where no one would mind, nothing annoys me more than idiots who munt up peoples houses and businesses] I'd be able to create a short time lapse video that would look great. I played to my strengths and I am incredibly proud of that came out of it.

It must be said that all of this would not have been possible without the the aid of my housemate and rogue photographer josh, who had the mind numbing job of doing nothing but pressing the shutter every 30-40 seconds. Fortunately he, like me, loves where I was planning to do the work. He snapped off a few more great shots that I'll share with you to highlight why I choose where I did.

The second part of the assignment was to put up my slogan somewhere that was significant to me. I chose the abandoned powerstation in South Fremantle. It's one of the most magnificent places on earth for a number of reasons. Frist of all, it's huge, like really really huge, it's size can be somewhat comprihended in the following shot.

Up the top there you can see another reason the powerstation means so much to me, those are two young schoolies we ran into as we were doing our project. There is this perfect golden mean of knowledge about the station, enough people know about it that there is some of the best street art in the state there, and you're always likely to run into some cool crew [we ran into 2 other pairs of people with camera and tripod] as well as some more young explorers like the ones we met above, but it isn't filled with heaps and heaps of tools looking to cause trouble for anyone.

Playing to your strengths has worked for me, whether it's for this assignment or for life in general. If you're one of those people who doesn't think they have any strengths all I'd say is don't compare yourself to others. In this networked world finding someone who is better than you at whatever you think you're good as takes about 2 seconds on youtube. Have some confidence and use what advantages you have.

I'll leave you now with some more of the shots Josh took while we were on this mission

Passion?

2009-10-01T04:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my peers at uni depress me. Not in an, "oh my god everyone sucks and man that new album from Third Eye Blind speaks to me." kind of way. More of a queer bafflement really, a kind of bovine lack of comprihension, about what motivates a lot of the kids I see cruising around the place.

It's always kind of interesting to me, as assignment deadlines approach, how often I'm asked for help. It's not the asking that interests me, but the questions. If, for example, it was a question about the implications of one of the theories brought up in a recent lecture or reading, and how that might relate to an almost finished essay? Not only will I give you what help I can, I will probably thank you and talk to you far longer than you would have liked. This is because the overwhelming majority of the questions I fence are not questions of this nature. Instead they are to do with elementary things, things that transcend a mere lack of understanding and sit squarely in the realm of ignorance.

Now, allow me to be abundantly clear here, I am in no way a perfect student. I usually have a number of side projects on the go, be it my radio show, this mental blogging comp, a girlfriend, and a social life. All these things must share a finite amount of brain power and it's a zero sum equation, if I put more effort into one thing, other things must loose out. And studies don't always come first.

However. When I'm at uni, it's on. On like Donkey Kong. I am interested in picking up as much as I can. Addmittedly I'm doing a very practically based degree [Bachelor of Mass Comm] so learning tips and tricks about the industry will serve me much better than say... someone in neuroscience. Even when I was doing a science degree though, I was surrounded by people who weren't into it.

Wait, that's not fair, I was one of those people. I was slack, I passed notes in the back of lecture theatres, I had horrid grades, and was infinitely more interested in my girlfriend of the time. The crucial difference between me then and the contemporary analogues I see around me, is that I dropped out. I realised that continuing a degree I wasn't interested in, and wasn't trying for, was purely absurd.

Now, armed with this knowledge I consider perhaps that the people I see around me now, the ones who seems lost and disinterested, might merely be like I was. This seems unlikely though, I'm in second year, doing a few third year units. I'd always been led to believe that, like myself previously, people would naturally drift away from that which they did not put effort into. I'm not handing judgement here, I don't condemn the people for being slack, I just don't understand.

I feel like shaking them, fight club fantasy style, and yelling "Don't you want to be great, aim to be the best, to take joy from the thing that you do, and try and push that thing further than it has before?!" I know this reeks of idealism, rich fetid waves of pungent naivety. The paradigm goes; the realities of life in the big bad world will over power this [clearly immature] desire to do something you're passionate about.

I would encourage everyone to challenge this. I'm not talking about breaking down cultural walls, dropping tools and seizing the means of production, or any other revolutionary tosh. All I mean is don't be ok with just getting by. Don't study something because you like the idea of it, because some source of authority said you should, because your friends study it, or indeed for any reason other than it fascinates you. Nothing facinates you that you've found? Don't go to uni. Find something, anything, that you love, and chase it.

There is a misguided conception that holding a mediocre degree will get you somewhere in the world. The sad reality is that we don't need more professionals in our society. When we leave uni we enter a competition based market in all but a few select professions. How well do you think you will fare when you're up against someone who is passionate about what they do. They will get the corner office, or industry specific analogue, and you my friend, will be in a very drab cubicle.

Earthdance 09 Redux

2009-09-29T01:41:00.000-07:00

Alright, now that I've had a chance to shower, and sleep [literally for about 20 hours] I can make a nice big post about Earthdance this year and share some of my favorite pics.

This year went incredibly well, we had an enormous turn out [a few hundred more than we were expecting] and it was insanely hectic, with most of the organisers pulling 36 hour shifts at one point or another. My official job was "gate coordinator" which essentially meant that I was here

for the overwhelming majority of the festival, administering entry to the party.

Come Saturday night thought, when the gate had slowed down enough to allow me to stick some volunteers on it, I had a shift at running the festival. We broke it down into shifts so that we could all finally get some rest. It had the added advantage for me of giving me the opportunity to actually see the festival, which I had not had a chance to do yet. [other than seeing Oxygens set on friday night, which was rad]

It's easy to forget when you're an organiser that you're surrounded by people having an incredible time. All we tend to see are the problems that need attending to so that everything travels smoothly. It's kind of like a duck on a pond, it glides along serenely, but under the surface it's kicking like mad.

To combat this I made a point of going around asking punters how they were going and if they thought there was anything that needed seeing to. The overwhelming majority of people were happy, and having a grand old time boogying, or chilling with mates, or going for a bushwalk.

This does not mean, however, that there were no problems.

First of all, I'd like to register my supreme distaste for people who cant handle their drugs, illegal or otherwise. Now I recognise that I helped put on an electronic music festival, and as such, there was always going to be people getting sideways at the party. But seriously, to all the people who have ever gotten so drunk, high, stoned, ripped, zonked, or whatever other contemporary nonmenclature you wanna use, that you can no longer a] control yourself, and b] have any higher level knowledge of what you're doing. Take a good, long, hard, look at your motivations for doing the things that you are doing. I hate the fact that people simply retreat into a land of substance abuse to avoid dealing with the world without asking why first. I've mentioned anomie before, it's a concept I've come across only recently at uni, but it's one of the very few things I've learned that seems to be hugely applicable to the problems of the world. Booze and drugs seem to be one of societies go to fixes for anomie.

Another issue I had with the weekend as a whole was the police. Now, up until this weekend I'd always tried to maintain respect for the fuzz. They're one of the professions in this world that should get the most respect [alongside teachers and nurses]but seems to get the least. After last years Earthdance the police informed us that they would not support us coming back, this year they did everything in their power to ensure that we will not return next year. Roadblocks into and out of the festival [which they did not inform us of, a courtesy normally afforded festival organisers] with sniffer dogs and drug checks. There were also roaming squads within the festival itself randomly searching people for drugs and age checks for drinking. They also endeared themselves well to the private security we hired, yellow stickering their car on the way in [again, not hugely professional to do that to the men who you'll be liaising with all festival and who are your first port of call for behavioral troubles all event]. They also did things like drive their cars around the dance floors with lights on, just to really intimidate all our punters. The thing that troubles me the most though, is that I can fully understand them not wanting a bunch of tripping city slickers in their neck of the woods, but their behavior and organisation was not designed to minimise impact, or keep as many drugs in the city, or anything of that nature. It was to bust people, as many as possible. After the behavior of the police this weekend, I have lost ALL respect for the members of WAPOL, and going forward into the future will do my utmost to undermine their authority and thwart their plans.

On the plus side though, the security I mentioned previously... amazing. The guys we hired for this event, although stretched over their limit, did an amazing job, professional, understanding, severe when the need was present, but otherwise concerned with avoiding trouble rather than stopping it. Something the police could have taken notes on.

Finally I'm going to share some of the pics I took that I really enjoyed.

This first one is of my amazing friend Justine [left] and my amazing friend and partner Alia [right] around the campfire late on Sunday night. They were incredibly patient with me asking them to hold really still for the 4 second exposure it took to get them this clearly.

This is of Al Star, old school member of the doof scene and a pretty awesome sonic engineer, it was his system that we used on the second stage. He's also a mad good DJ/producer.

Lol, this one was taken after Alia [who is a barber by trade] had given me a shave with her cuthroat razor in the bush. The water is all blown out and over exposed, which adds to the look that I'm being redeemed by some kind of whack televangelist minister.

This final shot is of bad quality, but the composition pretty much perfectly sums up the feel of earthdance.

That's all for now folks, if you like the shots you can see more at my picasa page

And remember guys, if you like this stuff, vote for me like mad. I can win an internship at sunset events, something this post should prove I'd be pretty keen on.

Con the fruiterer hasn't got nothing on my house.

2009-09-21T03:59:00.000-07:00

Everything on this table, sans the fruitbowl and pumpkin in the top left, was purchased for 20 dollars. That huge box of tomatoes was 2 bucks. They're not even manky or anything.

Stock rd markets on a sunday. Freo markets, you aint got malarky on those guys.

Media!

2009-09-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

I made a video of me reading the news for my unit "Radio News". This is radio broadcasting in all its glory my friends. The funny faces I am making is because my teacher is sitting behind the sound proof glass frantically telling me to slow it down. I'm a fast talker.

On the left I have made a little box to always maintain the links of the latest edition of my show on Radio Fremantle. I'm on 5-7 friday nights playing new music as well as a live artist each week. My taste is pretty diverse, so have a listen, there is bound to be something you like. Unless all you like is commercial stuff, in which case there will be nothing you like.

And now... LINKS

This little Pearler Comes courtesy of Brains? I. Ducking. Love. Tilt Shift optics. How they work is a bit of physics jargon that goes mostly over my head, but the end result is that normal sized things end up looking like minatures. Make sure you watch for the trains around the minute mark.

Tilt Shift Test #1 from jaemiem on Vimeo.

On the topic of cool optic stuff. Check this program out. Photolapse, in conjunction with a tripod and a niceish camera allows you you make time lapse sequences. Which if you aren't familiar with, look like this [this totally uses HDR photography as well if you're wondering why the colours are so awesome]

Twin Peaks San Francisco Sunrise (HDR time-lapse) from Chad Richard on Vimeo.

What would time lapse and tilt shift photography look like when combined I hear you ask?

Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Radical.

For the nerds in the crowd, this is a cool development in motherboards, hybrid systems. Basically you can run a low powered atom based server as well as a decent spec gaming/media rig at the same time. Want.

The kids'll be alright

2009-09-20T03:24:00.003-07:00

So, on Friday night while I was at work a bunch of people I know went down to the beach. I joined them later in the evening. Here is a selection of shots Josh took. Josh is also my housemate, and I guess sort of the resident photographer of my, and a few other friends lives. He takes some pretty alright photos too, just d
on't tell him I said so. You can peruse his flickr at your leisure

A night of lolygaggery and ballywho

2009-09-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

So last night we had some peeps over, and as always seems to be the case, the funny hats went on and the cameras came out.

I work at the Newport right, which if you've not heard of it, is kind of renowned for being the bar in freo for young crew to go to and get messed up, it's busy, it's popular. Now, I'm 100% down with the need to blow of steam, unwind, and generally just escape the pressures of life, be them uni, work, family, or anything else. But what I don't understand is why people need to cut loose in such impersonal, gross ways. Let us use clubbing as an example, although it's starting to get better, there are very few clubs in Perth with good music, which at 100 decibles, is pretty much the only thing you're going to get from a club. They are too loud for genuine social interaction. Have that particular sickly sweet scent of dried vomit and spilled booze. Are possibly the most inconvenient places to get to, and from, in the universe. And are, without exception, filled with more frowns that smiles, at least past 11pm. Every weekend, I see hundreds of people in this city's nightspots staggering around anomic as all hell. I put if forth to you world, that we need to recapture friendship and social interaction centred around respect and [without being too hallmark here] love, rather than convenience, and an archaic notion of being true to your mates.

Now, I don't want it to seem like I'm some kind of reculse shutin that looks down from atop my mighty peak of pretension on the peons below me who could possible want to go clubbing. Not at all, I've had some great times in clubs getting my freak on out on the dance floor, or making smokey eye contact with that sexy someone across the room. These are things that I'm more than willing to own up to enjoying. What baffles me is how people willingly get so sideways that they either don't have a good time, or can't remember the awesome falling and vomiting and passing out that they might have really enjoyed at the time.

The point of all this waffling is to say, it don't gots to be this way, yo. You can get some good mates, some good tunes, some good food, [last night's example of this were some bomb digity goood cookies from Faye for fixing her computer. Big ups Faye, they were tasty] and some silly clothes, and have damn near the best night possible.

So without further ado, photos from a really awesome night last night.

The First set of pictures is an ode to all the lame assed cam girls out there who still think they are fooling people about their weight by doing overhead shots. Also, showing your titties, not attractive.

Gerry

Brennon

Sascha

Josh

My Badself

James

While we still had our funny hats on I demanded that we sit for family portrait, my glorious, ever patient friends indulged me.

Finally, a few notable mentions for some scraggly shots that don't really have friends. Awwwww.

OMG TAKING THE REVERSE SHOT FROM THE PORTRAIT

Put two glasses down this boy and he's anyone's.

Complete Accident. Flash and digital, no fun.

I may or may not have a hole between my nostriles big enough to fit a finger through [note: not from cocain use.]

-22.706, 128.898. September 20th 2015

2009-09-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

Good morning internet, it's a bright and lovely mid-morning here in Lake McKay. According to the GPS I'm still in WA technically, but to be honest out here it's hard to care for such things. The last week was moderately eventful. Since my update a week ago I've covered about 250 km's. The terrain has been a little rough on Ephos in parts, camel feet really don't like the super rocky terrain, they's all about the sand yo. We saw [yes I refer to the camel and myself as a “we”. Contrary to what you think, it actually shores up my sanity rather than eroding it] that pack of feral dogs again yesterday. Now far be it from me to rag on the canine's natural capacity to hunt or anything, I know these dogs are plenty dangerous, but seriously guys, you might want to try this whole silent stalking thing a little bit better. It's reminiscent from that old scene in family guy where the mum springs the child snatcher with an admonishing “oh you almost made it!”. I honestly think half the reason they're following us isn't to eat us but just cause we're interesting and noisy, there is still a lot of dog in there. It's cool though. Ephos doesn't take no guff from them at night, so I just get nice and close to the big girl.
Now if you've been following my daily updates throughout the week you'll have seen *this link to the guy who made his home aquaculture setup under his house, with clear perspex windows in the floor... I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but that's basically the coolest thing I've ever seen, ever. The best thing for me is, I hate seafood, so when I put a similar thing In my dream home [which I'm totally going to] I can have something purely decorative, like Koi. This is where the future of sustainability lies people, it's the same reason why wind turbines don't ruin views, there is beauty in the augmentation of the world to save it.
In other news, tonight's podcast is shaping up to be killer. I'm here on the “shores” of Lake McKay, so I'll just wander a kilometre or so into the salt pan. If you can find a better place to record on earth, I'd like to hear about it. We might be lucky and get the dog's howling to the moon again as well. I've found some fantastic new tunes this week in my online meanderings. Mike Patton's new project has dripped a song or two into the ether which I've got for you. I swear, after the apocalypse there is going to be cockroaches and Mike Patton, the guy is unkillable. I've also grabbed an interview with Matt Pollack, leader of a new political party in Brisbane called the reformers. They're ambitious goal is to transcend election cycle politics and subvert the spin cycle of the media with boder line realtime information through the intergoogles. This guy is much more than your run of the mill crackpot, so be sure to have a listen.
Also, I got a voice message from my little brother yesterday. For those of you who aren't familiar I mean my “Bigger Brothers, Bigger Sisters” little brother. I'm not allowed to identify him obviously, so I use the pseudonym “Gaz”. It's fantastic that the top brass over at BBBS ok'd Gaz retaining me as his Bigger Brother for this trip. Normally kids need a bit of structure in their lives, and that's what BBBS provides, so I'd have been replaced with someone else. But it would have taken Gaz a fair while to warm up to a new person, he sure did with me. But I digress. Point is, the footy team he plays for is in the grand final, I wont name the team but what I've done is opened up a new comments page so if anyone wants to wish him and his team good luck I'll link him to it before his game.
I'm sit by the smouldering remnants of last nights fire, my trusty desert ship off foraging for her breakfast while I make mine. It occurs to me that I basically have the best job in the whole world. When I was sitting in the Murdoch news room all those summers ago, I was stressing about making the cut for the ABC cadetship. I've now used the skills I learned in my degree, not my degree, to build the greatest job I could have imagined. I'm paid [by all you lovely people] to trawl the world's information and present it to you for your enjoyment. I get to listen to all the new songs, see all the new movies, and have a finger on the pulse of news, the fact that I'm doing all of this from atop a camel in the middle of Australia via wireless broadband means that the moniker “Culture Cowboy” is all the more applicable [which is awesome cause that moniker is wicked] I guess what I'm trying to say is, cheers.
I'm running low on meat my fellow netizens, so I'm off to hunt a Roo. If I can get one today I'll make a “how to smoke your own meat in the bush” guide and put it up for you. Remember that the podcast goes up tonight so tune in live from Lake McKay or listen to it later [although that's heaps less cool] otherwise kids, I'll see you Monday.

Awesome Chai Recipe!

2009-09-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

chaichaichaichaichaichaichai

2009-09-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

Reminds me of this guy

2009-09-18T05:34:00.000-07:00

So we pretty much live in the future.

2009-09-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

Agreed.

2009-09-17T05:04:00.000-07:00

Link Post.

First up we've got some pretty bullshit Guitar playing. It's a pretty impressive set of skills that can keep an electro head like me enthralled for 7 minutes.

ALL GLORY TO HYPNOTOAD

The merchant vessel ghost fleet moored off Singapore.

Parkor on a bike!