If one-hand clapping had theme music, this would be it.

So if you’re an ex-puppet, cowboy, or midget waiting for that one super review to sway you one way or another; let this be thine masked harbinger of good tidings.

Looking for love: Same bat time. Same bat channel.

happy in my hoodie by *S-D-R on deviantART

Recently, I had a burst of artistic inspiration. This was a rare event for me – the last one was almost 3 years ago, but as with a majority of my artistic endeavours that didn’t amount to anything particularly worthwhile.  As many people in the past have found, sleep deprivation can offer significant motivational impulses towards artistic endeavours. A simple Google of the terms “sleep deprivation inspiration” will highlight some documented personal accounts of this phenomenon (if you’re after some further insight).

This particular case of personal ‘artsy’ began to emerge on the end of an all-weekend long study session into the mathematics and physics of mechanics. Nothing too complex for a maths whizz, but that is something I’m certainly not. Besides, the most complex maths that my brain process these days is along the lines of addition and subtraction of logarithmic values and even then rules of thumb dominate my methods (eg. 2 noise sources with power of equal magnitude simply give a rise of 3dB to the power of one of the sources by itself -> 90dB+90dB = 93dB!).

Wow.. that shit is hard huh… (sarcasmsarcasmsarcasm).   (For some reason people think highly of engineers? I feel those thoughts are often misplaced, although this doesnt account for the massive levels of stupidity of the general populace – as constantly documented in my fellow fingerpuppetmafian’s blogstreams. RE: The great internet censorship debacle)

Bending my mind around complex Laplace transforms, natural frequency modes, system stability and automatic control again after a 3 year hiatus gave it a severe shock. A sort of wake up call for those sleepy neurons to start firing vigorously in all directions. Now, couple this with high levels of coffee, guarana, lots of pacing back and forth, and patchy / minimal sleep – the interesting and unexpected result can possibly be described as a chaotic sense of clarity. My mushy brain was able to sort and select some of the best photographs of my vast (mostly terribly vacant of artistic merit) collection. The end result being a worthwhile gallery (to toot my own horn, Toot!) of photos that funnily enough were mostly taken when my levels of sleep were not particularly high.

The first set, which I’ll present in this first of hopefully many posts, is relatively narrow in its focus – A country road 2 hours drive from civilisation in one direction and 3 hours in another. (you can’t really call many places, even towns and cities in Australia civilisation, but for my purposes here I’ll use ’somewhere that sells petrol’ as the defining factor). It doesn’t really matter where these shots are though, as the only context you need is ‘ remoteness ‘.

I’m not particularly sure who is going to actually read this drivel that I’m typing, but if you are, you can stop reading now and start looking.

Armidale-2 by *S-D-R on deviantART

Armidale-3 by *S-D-R on deviantART

Armidale-4 by *S-D-R on deviantART

Who are we, and how will we be remembered? Where are we headed? Is this now the digital age, or the information age? And is that an oxymoron given the medium? Have we converged on the time where information and the means by which we deliver it, define us?

Text, bulletin boards, chat messengers, social networking sites, email, SMS, pictures, digital video – you can hardly say we’re a universal society that’s recoiled from interaction with others. If anything, it assaults us at every turn. It’s inescapable.

Have we then, assumed the mantle of information couriers? And hidden beneath the writhing surface of those methods, have we unknowingly embraced a lock-step culture of enforcing that mantle on others?

And is the design of this mesh merely a vehicle to convalesce ideas? Or is it more? Is it our entertainment, our news and a part of our daily planning? Do we share that wealth of knowledge with others? Does the medium encourage us to do so knowingly and instinctively?

And yet, what is it?

It’s a system of signals and waves that delivers the thoughts and ideas of many; so that many might discuss matters in unison – breaching geographical restrictions.

Is that not a hive mind in its infancy? And at what point do you draw the distinction? Is this the cusp of technological revolution that we’d otherwise call fiction?

Discuss.

If there’s one thing that stands out as you “mature”, its the succession of days that it takes to recover from a big night out on the turps.  It’s only now, for example, on the dawn of the aftermath of a wedding reception on Saturday night, that the synapses have started firing on more than one cylinder.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, so says Keats.  And while Keats is the man, clearly he hasn’t been to a Vietnamese wedding.

A Vietnamese wedding, let it be known, is a pretty surreal occasion to attend.  Especially when you don’t speak a lick of unAustralian.  And it’s not just that everyone else is four feet shorter than you, which makes you feel like you’re dining at the table alone, no.  And it’s not the bartering for your bride that sets it apart – No, I, too, think a basket of fruit seems a fair trade for a slice of the opposite sex.

No.  The real McCoy is that somewhere between that eighth beer and the tequila shots that began shortly after the little hand reached nine, you start to realise you can actually understand Vietnamese – and you’ve disseminated this from the broken pieces of pigeon-English that are tossed in as filler between real Vietnamese words.  And these scattered remnants of language form together in your mind to tell vast and bewildering tales of the events unfolding before you.

And somewhere in that tale, between the hordes of ninjas pillaging the village of scantily clad women; where rice wine seeped like golden honey from the comb-layered mountainside in thick streams; two people finally tied the knot.

The real kicker about a Vietnamese wedding however, is that the karaoke at the end of the night is in English. So it’s like the whole event was some foreign and elaborate masquerade. A marathon of a practical joke, which ends with the thumping punchline of: “My Sharona!”.

For anyone who’s familiar with Zatôichi – this was totally exactly like that.

The Australian Government has today issued their request for expressions of interest for ISPs who would want to participate in the live trials of the Government’s ISP-Level Internet Filtering scheme.  So far, there has been no further information released by El Senor Senator Conroy, his office or anyone else in the Government for that matter.

The fight is still continuing and raging, while the Government continues to run away with their fingers in their ears tralalalala’ing that it will still work. Even the countries that Conroy have claimed that Australia would be emulating are going WTF.

Actions taken by the online community have been mostly met with standard policy lines and template emails from the L&L parties that are normally based around “We value the protection of the children” toe-lines. That’s understandable given pretty much every member of the House of Representatives or the Senate has no previous history in a technical field.

Except perhaps one Liberal lower house rep who has responded with his own email saying that “The bottom line is that mandatory filtering does not work and it is up to the individual to protect themselves and their families.”  It was expected though as his own experiences in the big old technology world include a decade-plus history for the military in Intelligence and Security, a Masters in IT, Masters in Business Administration, Graduate Diploma in Information Analysis and founded an IT services firm who featured in BRW’s Fast 100 list.

Then there’s Malcolm Turnbull, new Leader of the Opposition – ex-Chairman of ISP OzEmail. (Who remembers them?)

Seems there’s lots of little fires that have sprung up in recent. Adult classification for games teasing the public with a let’s talk then scrubbing talks before it even began; The National Broadband Network is getting sucked under the waterfall as poor requirements and lack of decision makings bite back; and then the Government is determined to make Australia the first country in the world to protect the children from the big bad Internet.

Which brings me to the point, how can people who have absolutely no understanding themselves of the things that they are bringing into effect “in representation” of the Australian population have the final say?

Bring on the engineer politicians.

UserFriendly.org has some advice for the Australian Government.

Further reading:

• ? OCAU Wiki on Australian Internet Filtering
• ? Mark Newton, Filter advocates need to check their facts

Left 4 Dead is really really awesome.