As far as the evolutionary ladder goes, we’re by-and-large a social pet.  Most of us enjoy the company of others, flock together for special occasions, and spend a large part of our lives grooming one another.  Throw a barbeque, or “mates night in”, for example, and the hunter-gatherer takes over, foraging to bring together a selection of tasty treats to be shared among the tribe.

Different people, however, enjoy different things.  I, for one, am not the socialite that my mates are.  I can go long periods without contact and catch up again on weeks, months, or even years at a time within a few sentences, with that familiar feeling that the conversation has simply picked up where it left off.  I don’t dine on the prospect of idle chatter; hugging it closely as if to struggle some nourishing morsel from the practise.

In that sense, after much drunken debate, it was determined that I am the savannah pride lion, or the gorilla.  Living out my days in the urban wilderness, piecemeal with my surroundings as I contemplate matters, being social for the love of my pack and mostly content to survey the borders of my dominion while grasping at the loose straws that bind the nature of the universe.  This much is probably true; and I think I took that in good stead.

So everyone else was, in my opinion, a hyena – bickering over tid-bits and morsels, circling their adversaries with cruel malice, and brandishing their pointy white teeth while baying their woes at the moon.  Sadly, lions and hyenas don’t seem to share the same sense of humour, and the finesse of that observation wasn’t as amusing as I, allegedly, seem to think it was.

Which animal are you?

If you had asked me 12months ago if I ever thought I’d be doing what I am now, I would have laughed at you.

You see, approximately 12 months ago, I was sitting at home, basking in all the glory that is unemployment. No responsibilities and all the free fucking time I could handle. Life just doesn’t get any better.

However the dream was shattered one day when my housemate (Pastheus) comes home and says, in all his usual eloquence, ‘Are you going to get a fucking job or what cunt?’. The profoundness of the question made my inner ethics start to stir. The dream had to die.

That afternoon I looked through the job advertisements in the local rag. One catches my eye straight away; it’s a position for a Casino Surveillance Operator. ‘That could be interesting’, I thought to myself, ‘Should give that a whack!’.

That one fatal life decision put a halting fucking screech to my leisurely life-style. Now faced by 40 to 70 hour working weeks, serious amounts of over-time owing and more responsibility than a 3rd world leader, I look back with envy.

It’s not all Doom and Gloom (or Death and Decay perhaps?). I have recently earned my Motorbike license, bought said vehicle, on a handsome salary, respected by my peers (Pencils up-ended in a steaming pile of shit is just a sign of affection) and a bright future in international travel. It seems I’ve done a 180 from my last profession.

You see, I hated being in I.T. It’s a dead end game. Perhaps its I.T. in the Northern Territory, perhaps not. But the only way I could see myself getting ahead, was actually giving head. That’s not quite my forte; even though my boss was actually quite attractive, if not a complete back-stabbing fucking whore. *kisses*.

So what’s the point of all this dribble? I hear you ask. Well, it’s kind of a retrospective of my life over the last year. It may sound like I cut myself every night before going into a self fueled hate induced coma; but it’s not. I’m actually happy doing what I do and how often I do it. In short, life’s fucking dandy for me right now.

My next biggest hurdles include losing weight, making more friends and finding a female who has low enough standards to fuck me for a lengthy period of time (It’s Darwin, it can’t be that hard).

Tally-ho!

(and merry fucking Xmas).

And a happy New Year!

How you even being to wrap a year like that is beyond me.  If you were simply to look at tabloid headlines, this was the year that turned everything on its head.

China holds the games and Tibet, success.
They did a pretty good job really. Few billion people crammed into the rafters and yet they still managed to clear the place out, throw a set of games, put on a good show (lip-synced or otherwise) and keep everyone alive.

Monks complain about their occupation, get some publicity, China says “leave them out of this” and blacklists anything remotely connected to Tibet (again).  Moral uproar ensues, but as usual, people let the topic fade into the twilight.  Notoriety in news, after all, is a fickle thing that depends on what sells the papers – and no one wants to be on China’s bad side and miss a slice of that economical pie.

Martian lander finds water, love, and some kind of fecal matter.
So we sent technology to Mars.  Go us.  We managed to maintain a radio wave link that could control the thing from.. how far away are we again?  We landed the bastard, played with our interplanetary remote control car for a couple of months and used its Tonka truck arms to dig for stuff.  There’s some ice out there.  Nice.  Maybe, it was once even habitable.

We taught it to build blocks out of our trash, and when the aliens landed and started shooting lasers at us and stealing our last surviving plant, we made love to them – while throwing off our evil robot oppressors.

Aussie dollar plummets amid a world in financial turmoil.
But what’s to be expected really.  We don’t make anything any more.  We’ve sold all our shit to someone else, and all but closed down our manufacturing sector.  Bar a few commodities in mining and farming, we’re now a service based industry and therefore a risky capital investment.  On the plus side, we can offset that risk a little via our banking sector, which  isn’t permitted the same loose rules systemic in the US.

It’s one of the weirdest crashes you could possibly imagine.  Because the first people to suffer their fate were the people at the top.  Tall poppies, really tall ones, that actually felt the pinch.  That almost never happens.

Now, as inflation plummets and Joe-battlers enjoy their free government handouts, petrol prices are almost half their indexed price and banks have been quick to pass on the mega-low interest rates to customers. Win.

And there’s just three things.
There’s also:

A new US president, and he’s black. Woah.
There’s the almost internationally accepted need for environmental reform.  Again, woah.
Japan’s own ministers admit whaling is a dying practice.  Woah.
And many more.

But, really, however
No one wraps up a year based on headlines.  Hopefully, you’ve had a rich year with friends, family and/or loved ones close by.

Hopefully, you’ve said, done and accomplished what you set out to.  That’s the real testament to success and happiness, I think.  Having some goals, struggling to achieve them perhaps, maybe re-evaluating how long it might take you, but getting there none the less.

Stay safe on the roads.
From the dwindling days of the year 2008, we wish you all the very best over the holiday season and many, many frosty amber suds in the new year.  Peace out.

A person in the know, a technical person, an engineer perhaps even gets asked a question. They recommend that it’s a bad idea. Oh okay. Then the person asking the question asks for some numbers. 0.4% failure rate. OH THAT’S NOT SO BAD THEN. And so it goes ahead anyway.

Talking scaling, 0.4% on a sample of 50 is pretty much nothing.  However there’s a reason some companies try and maintain a six-sigma process control that considers even 3 defective parts per million opportunities a minimum. Something that NASA goes above and beyond in their stuff.  Once you’re handling something that scales up, that “oh that’s not so bad” starts to become a big number.

Looking at one end for nice numbers can look good, but until you’re looking at the other end of things and side-effects which perhaps may not be so numberly which is where things can happen down the track can get predator-face ugly.  If it was a simple as pulling a test and taking some numbers, we’d be building tanks out of glass, and have chefs being replaced by robots.

That’s why the people in the know when they’re asked a question already know that something’s a pretty bad idea in the first place, before the somewhat small numbers begin seeming insignificant.

What does a number mean when the people making the decisions don’t understand or comprehend the weight on a value?

What’s the chances that this Internet filtering thing in Australia has been brought so far based upon the misunderstanding of a few ’small’ numbers?

Apparently I do.  Or so Bernadette McMenamin, CEO of ChildWise says. She probably cooks these ideas up in between counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars she’s collected from the Government using either false or unverified statistics and facts.

Chief executive of child protection group Child Wise, Bernadette McMenamin, said most of the criticisms levelled at the internet filter scheme were founded on misinformation.

“It’s disturbing that people are getting hysterical about all the misinformation that is being spread about the internet filter,” Ms McMenamin said.

“Instead of hearing hysteria from the minority we need to hear from the Government and exactly what it intends to ban.”

Ms McMenamin was equally critical of the past weekend’s protests and the DLC’s plans for future action.

“Let the 300 people march on Canberra because it looks pathetic,” he said. “It looks pathetic and shameful because most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child p-rnography.”

Sign the petition below if you like your Internet. In fact, sign if you believe the Government is better off spending our money trying to boil the ocean.

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.