this is my resolve

2011-11-13T18:18:00.002+10:00

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."

Toughness and strength

2011-08-14T22:54:00.001+10:00

I was talking to my girlfriend Hayley tonight about the Live Export Ban rallies that have been happening around the country today, one of which we attended. Some of the descriptions of what the animals had been through were incredibly upsetting; many people in the crowd were in tears, myself included. Hayley got upset talking about it later on, and apologised for not being tougher.

I've had cause to think about this a few times over the last few months and I've come to the conclusion that there is a distinct logical difference between toughness and strength. When meat is tough, it's difficult to eat and awkward. When a game is tough, it's physically taxing. When a fighter is tough, he's good at hurting you and difficult to injure. The more I thought about it, the more I realised this was not a good quality to have.

Strength, on the other hand, is completely different. Steel is strong. An athlete is strong. Strength, in and of itself, is a quality which defines both offense and defence, much like toughness, but doesn't necessarily imply that it is making things difficult for those around it. Strength is a tool that can be used in many ways, for good or bad. Toughness is just being hard around the edges, and while it can be useful in the short term, where there's a choice, I'd much rather be strong than tough. While strength can help or harm as it is used, toughness is just resistive, and does not help anyone*.

*in modern civilised society. if you are a soldier, prisoner, or otherwise fighting for your life, this does not apply.

Weight gain and fitness

2011-05-26T01:30:00.002+10:00

So I'm gaining weight at the moment.

It wasn't intentional at first - I like to ride, and I'm trying to get a local hill-climb (2.3km with a 285m vertical elevation) in under 10 minutes. I have a friend who is into weights show me the ropes of squats and deadlifts. But then while we were there, we did some bench presses, military presses, and clean lifts. Within a week my appetite had gone through the roof, so I started feeding it; a far sight from my previous MO of eating only enough to stop being hungry. Then with more food came better results, more definition, more strength. Within a month I'd gone from benching 40kg to 60kg. Then I started looking in the mirror and going 'holy shit, what?'.

Long story short, my experience has been that strength and size are built in the gym and in the kitchen. I'm doing weights in a 5x5 pattern and it's working out amazingly in all ways; strength, mass and definition. The only thing about such a hyper-caloric diet is that you will be carrying some extra fat - a small price to pay, I think, for making sure the body always has what it needs to keep building. I can always lean out when I'm done, which for me I suspect will be around 85kg (I was 75 when I started, now at 80).

Dietary method is a seafood diet - I see food, I eat it. Haha no, not really. I mostly eat lean meat (generally steak, salmon or chicken) with some vegetables and pasta, and try to eat as much as I can at any given meal. Fucking shitloads, I believe is the metric measurement. I eat roughly double what I used to. I tend to use Musashi protein powder with milk once a day, but especially after a workout. No special vitamins really, just the odd Centrum or Berocca.

All of what I've learnt from this and my previous patterns of weight gain and loss can be condensed to two simple ideas:

1. FOOD. You can't out-exercise a bad diet. A good diet does not necessarily mean small amounts of food, just not shit. The appeal of junk food is surprisingly less when you are full of delicious steak.

2. WORK OUT. Exercise frequently, and hard. Be exhausted at the end of every session. If you are not destroyed by the end you could have gone harder. Work as hard as you can without failing.

So, pretty much exactly what I said in the previous post, but with a different goal.

Weight loss and fitness.

2011-03-07T13:55:00.000+10:00

This may surprise you, but I've actually been through quite a lot of weight loss.

Find some old photos of me from 2006/2007 if you can and I'm about 15kg overweight. Then one day, I bought a bike. I figured that it would be good to get some more exercise. Being able to dual-use my transport time for exercise was pretty good, it was only half the battle.

I remember the day I looked over at the mirror in Hype in the mall and I just looked like shit. Double chin, stomach poking out with the classic late-20s pot belly, man-boobs poking at my shirt. I had to look away, disgusted. I don't know why I hadn't seen myself as I actually looked in the years leading up to it, but I did that time. Not too long after that, my car blew up, my girlfriend broke up with me, my band broke up, one of my friends died and my job turned to hell. I felt like shit, in every way.

So I worked on it, and started riding to and from work. I was doing more exercise, and getting a fitter, but I wasn't really losing weight. I did a lot of experiments to see what did more for my performance (I decided to focus on that, rather than fat loss as I'd decided fitness was a more respectable goal). Alcohol intake, sleep, food, exercise levels, all of them were variables, and eventually I discovered that I could continue to eat less and less with no effect on my performance. I still had the energy required to do all my riding, swimming and gym work whilst continually cutting back food.

And dear god did the kilos shed. I lost 11.5kg in 12 weeks. I've had to go through this whole thing again now since January when I discovered I looked like shit from putting on an extra 6kg. Thanks, woodford.

It's just so simple; eat less, exercise more. Oh, and buy a bike.

a terrifying direction

2010-06-11T16:12:00.004+10:00

As I write this, I'm too consumed by fear of future events to coherently plan a post.

Just weeks after Senator Conroy slammed Google for an invasion of privacy for capturing unencrypted Wifi data during Street View updates, plans to capture your entire browsing history. Let me repeat that in simpler terms:

The Government wants to require your ISP to keep a record of EVERY WEB PAGE you have visited, and retain it for five to ten years.

This all comes within days of the announcement that AusCERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team responsible for identifying and distributing information about online security threats, is to be replaced by a government-run CERT. AusCERT is one of the most efficient organisations in the country, providing an amazing service on a shoe-string budget. It isn't broken at all. Why fix it?

To tie that all together with current Internet issues in Australia, the plan is:
- implement a filtering system which checks every URL entered by every Australian
- implement a data retention system for all ISP's to maintain substantial information about user internet and communication history (including browsing history and emails for many years)
- implement a single national broadband network
- remove funding for AusCERT and establish Government run CERT

All of this is being done in the name of stopping paedophiles and terrorists, but anyone who's had anything to do with network security knows this is not true; these things don't happen online and through public email. Those affairs are conducted through encrypted peer-to-peer sessions in the backrooms of the internet. This is the equivalent of asking every person boarding a plane, "Are you a terrorist?", and if they say no, they're allowed to get on.

It does not make sense. I'm not that bothered by privacy issues generally. I don't care that my information is on Facebook and Google's Wifi dumps made me laugh. But this; this is terrifying. We are being lied to in order to have our privacy stripped. They are systematically putting the pieces in place to take control of the Internet in Australia, and it's being sold to us as a performance and protection upgrade. It's the privacy equivalent of Godwin's Law that eventually the Government will be referred to as Big Brother and a 1984 reference made, but is this not a digital telescreen?

Own the infrastructure -> Record everything we do on it -> Filter what's unacceptable -> Control the threat response = Total control.

We are in trouble. Big trouble. And I'm scared.

ways in which your brain can strengthen you

2010-04-13T12:16:00.000+10:00

I read an interesting article today about how handling money is more effective at pain relief than Aspirin.

"Researchers at the University of Minnesota carried out a series of studies which revealed those who counted money before taking part in an experiment where they were subjected to low levels of pain felt less discomfort than those who did not. The results, published in a recent edition of the journal Psychological Science, showed those who had handled money reported less pain and lasted longer. A University of Los Angeles team of scientists found just looking at a photograph of a loved one can also be a powerful form of pain relief. They recommended anyone visiting hospital for painful tests or examinations should bring a picture to help them cope. And patients who have had major surgery, such as a knee or hip replacement, can halve the amount of painkilling medicine they need simply by stroking a pet, according to tests at Loyola University in Chicago."

What I really love about this is that it highlights what I've been harping on about this entire time - that a great deal of what you can withstand depends on how much of your brains capabilities you can force yourself to use under pressure. It seems that determination and resolve could only be half of the picture. If trained properly, your brain can generate its own pain relief.

(article here).

Thoughts with Devo

2010-03-11T11:36:00.000+10:00

"It doesn’t count for shit if you just sit there smugly, curl up inside your warm glowing sense of superiority, and don’t work to improve your own shortcomings."

- David Powles.

with trends like these

2009-10-30T20:40:00.002+10:00

Who needs enemies? Good pun(k). See what I did there? Probably not. A few people I used to know through the Punk Alliance had a band called Bad Day Down that was kind of a socio/political type affair. Having since split and had a member move south and one disappear, they've reformed as two separate groups - Protest! and Damn The Empire. I went to see DTE the other week when they were up from Melbourne to check out what my old friends had been doing with themselves and it was good, really good. Turns out Bram, formerly of Yidcore, is the frontman. Good times.

Anyway, back on track, I picked up their cd afterwards, cleverly titled "With trends like these". Good listen, especially if you're into fast, well-thought out punk rock with intelligent lyrics. Which I am. Or at least, was.

Growing up, I discovered punk at the reasonably impressionable age of 15 and quickly grabbed hold of it. In a small town where not fitting in meant violence and vicious rejection, I clambered at this new thing that told me it was okay to be different. And by god I ran with it. At 17 I started my first shitty pop-punk band, equal parts social motivation and complaining about girls, had my hair dyed bright red, spikes, wallet chains - all the things I understood as being punk rock. It's kind of ironic that a counter-culture that was so heavily defined by not following trends has so many accepted stereotypical dress fashions, but I guess a minority uniform is still the minority.

But I digress. Back then, punk had some pretty simple ideas for me. Trends were bad. It meant you weren't thinking for yourself, following the crowd - and most likely, not following them anywhere good. I lived by those tenets in my social rebellion for many years, later going on to join Run Amok and start the Punk Alliance, which ran for around three years and produced my most successful work in music.

But I came here today to talk about trends and that's what I'm finally about to get to. We'd defined trends as bad. But earlier in the week, I was looking at Google Trends, comparing search histories and traffic for a few different phrases trying to track the migration of people across social networking platforms, and I realised I was trying to use trends to prove something that I perceived as being good. It got me thinking about the nature of evolution, which we generally also perceive as being the improvement of an organism, and realised that all the bands that I've desperately loved over the years that I still love have been the ones that have continued to evolve. The ones that stayed the same and kept producing the exact same style of music fell by the wayside as uninteresting. NOFX and Lagwagon come to mind as examples of the latter, while Muse and Thrice pop up as the former. I anxiously await every new iteration of their work, but the bands I grew up on have long been forgotten.

As humans, we are predisposed to advancement. It's in our nature to constantly try to improve. One thing that Google, Wikipedia and the Internet hath wrought is a collective knowledgebase that spans the globe. As soon as one person discovers something, they can publish it and it becomes instantly available to the entire world. Whereas a discovery a century ago could take nearly a year to reach the other side of the world, today it can happen in as long as it takes someone to hit post. So we have a culture based around the internet of constant advancement, but development in any direction rarely happens in an independent fashion, isolated, because we're so connected and in touch with what everyone else is doing. Anything that has value will gain attention, and the more people become interested in something, the more people will realise its worth and put resources into developing it further.

And this is why trends exist. People recognise something as good, and want to contribute to it, to be a part of it. And as a society, a race, a civilisation, that's been the driving force behind our culture. So my point, after all of this rambling is that trends are not bad. Bad trends are bad. Trending towards anything only means that people recognise it as having value. Whether that's jeans tightening, punk bands becoming rock bands, CDs getting louder, collars getting popped, whatever - a lot of people doing something just means it's getting attention. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.

All of a sudden I have cause to rethink my automatic assumption that the word trendy is pejorative.

rudeness

2009-10-29T11:30:00.000+10:00

"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength"- Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer was a writer and philosopher in the US in the 20th century. Born 25th of July 1902, died 21st of May 1983. He theorised heavily about mass movement and the behaviour of large groups, and wrote extensively on turning tragedy into opportunity; something he experienced heavily in his own life.

His comments on fanaticism were profound at the time, being one of the first to note that for many people, the content of what they obsessed about was not nearly as important as the fact that they were obsessed about something. This seems all too relevant in our society with its quest for celebrity gossip and fads. What is popular is not nearly as important to us as that something is popular. But I digress.

Among his many quotable phrases, this one has always been my favourite. As a person who spent a lot of time growing up being insulted, I had always just thought that the people treating me in a less than favourable manner were stronger than I was. Whoever said 'sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me' had obviously never experienced the crushing weight of years of verbal abuse.

I remember being a young lad on the Internet and coming up with new and creative insults and thinking I was arguing with people, but I really wasn't. I was injecting tangental negative discourse into the conversation with really no effect except making the other person mad, and even then that was only working because they were able to be distracted from their real points with it. It wasn't until I grew up that I realised that the true nature of taking power over someone didn't involve insulting them, or being rude to them, or being able to talk down to them - it was about asserting yourself with logic and confidence, in such a way that they couldn't fight back by any reasonable manner.

And it works; especially if you're trying to discuss something with someone unaccustomed to the concept, who can't take control over a situation without having to pump themselves up without pushing someone else down. A weak person masquerading as a strong one will take snipes at someone, thinking that because they're able to be rude to someone else, that they're better than them. I've seen a lot of people rip the hell out of people in service industries, McDonalds workers and cleaners, and seen them take it like a champ. I had so much respect for the way they were unphased by the substandard behaviour of others and didn't take it personally.

Being rude does not mean you are strong. It means you are a jerk.

expectation

2009-10-26T15:13:00.001+10:00

A few years back, I had it all. At least, I thought I did. Successful band, long term girlfriend, nice house with good housemates, good job, good friends, working car.

Within a few months, it would all be gone.

Car crashed, girlfriend left, band breaking up, job turning to hell, house turning to worse hell, one of my close friends died. I was devastated. Everything that had made me, me, was gone. I dealt with it less and less successfully as time passed and I withdrew socially. I stopped going to parties, didn't go to shows, stopped going out. And no-one noticed. Facebook wasn't popular yet so we had to keep in touch the old fashioned way, and .. nothing happened.

I was so disappointed. For all my friends, the massive numbers of people who came to parties and shows, and no-one noticed I was missing. It all hadn't meant anything to them. In the years that followed, I met new people, made new friends and became close to people who really matter to me. I was shocked at how amazing life was and have been so grateful for them ever since. But I never got over what happened back in 2007 and I never forgave them for it.

But I realised the other day that I pass people in the street all the time that have no obligations towards me, nor I them. We walk by and go about our lives with nearly no interaction and that's fine. And it hit me that that's what I expect of strangers. It was fine that when I was having trouble with my bike that people keep walking because I have no expectation that they'd stop and help me. After all, I'm not their problem. And that's when I realised that expectation is actually the cause of all disappointment. If that'd been someone I know and cared about, damn straight I would've expected they'd stop and help me.

I thought I had close friends. And sure, we partied a lot and had fun but I had an expectation of them that these people I spent all my time with, were also going to be the ones who'd look after me when I wasn't doing so well. I expected that if I were in trouble, that someone would notice and come and find me. But that didn't happen. And I realised that I'd never communicated that expectation to them. Obviously that's not the sort of thing that comes up in day to day conversation, but I couldn't be any more mad at them for not helping me with my problems than I could be for my ISP not fixing my Internet if I never told them it was broken. I saw them all again last Friday for a friend's birthday party and I remember how things did stay that way so long - life was just fun. We partied and drank and danced and everything was good. I just never noticed that we didn't have anything more until I needed it. All the signs were there that I'd never been part of the core social circle, I just never thought about it.

Now I can enjoy those people for the relationship that I do have with them, because I don't expect more of it. And it's that expectation that gives people the opportunity to disappoint you. I'm not suggesting that we avoid expectation - it's stupidly important to keep people around that you can expect to throw down for you when you need it. But you can't be mad at people for something you expected but never made them aware of. That expectation was under your control - you set the bar. That's something I can take responsibility for. So it's really up to you to make sure that your expectations are reasonable, and more to the point, that the people you have expectations of are aware of them.

subconscious instruction

2009-10-11T15:53:00.000+10:00

When I first started working full time, I was really in over my head. Not just technically either; I had come from a scenario where when I was at uni, no-one really ever had any power over anyone else. The lecturers were there to do their job and didn't care if you did yours or not. If you got in an argument with someone, you could let it go or viciously prove you were right. No real rules to speak of, every man for himself. Moving into an environment with a chain of command and people who, in any discussions, could pull out the fact that they were my boss and I'd have to shut up and take whatever they were giving out was difficult. It took some serious adjusting to, but it was fine. After getting used to that, I thought I was sorted - I was my employer's subordinate and that was that.

What I hadn't wrapped my head around was that that wasn't exactly how it worked. I found myself in a situation where I wanted to do things, get paid more, get more responsibility, and I complained that they wouldn't let me. A friend who had been running his own business for several years told me that I needed to stop asking for things and start taking them. I didn't understand, I said they needed to let me. What I hadn't figured out is that I wasn't actually under their control, I was in their employ. They paid me money to perform a task, and I had the choice to accept or not accept the restrictions they placed on it. If I were to not accept it, I could've handled that in a number of ways. Gathering facts to present arguments, doing research or quitting and finding a new job. But I didn't see those options at the time, I just saw people treating me in a way that I perceived as being bad.

And the guts of it really was that we subconsciously tell other people how we want to be treated by the behaviour we accept. On day one, instead of defining my own boundaries of what was acceptable to me, I took it like a bitch because I thought that's what was expected in corporate life, and in doing so I made myself a peon instead of a respected colleague. It took me leaving the company to pursue other goals, and eventually starting my own company to properly gain the respect of the people who'd employed me. I'd been out in the world enough to know how I deserved to be interacted with, and simply expecting that caused it to be delivered.

Almost every week I hear people complain about their friends, partners and coworkers and how they treat them, but all I hear in the midst of that is that they're telling those people it's okay to treat them like that, because they accept it. They do nothing about it and in doing so, mark that behaviour as acceptable. Then when they finally do blow up about it later, the other party has no idea anything was even wrong, because that's how it's always been. In a way, we almost have an obligation to define the boundaries and standards of acceptable behaviour for the people around us, because otherwise they may not even have any idea they're not doing the right thing.

I need to say it again for effect to finish, because it's the entire point of this post: we subconsciously tell other people how we want to be treated by the behaviour we accept. We have absolutely no right to complain about someone elses behaviour if all we've done is accept it.

role-based interaction

2009-10-08T12:45:00.000+10:00

Generally, on Monday nights I go to the laundromat to do my washing. There are a number of reasons why I don't just buy my own washing machine and dryer, but the biggest of them is that I love laundromats. There's something earthy and involved about having to share a space like that with people you don't know - literally airing your dirty linen in public.

While my washing is being done, I generally stand out on the street with an acoustic guitar, and play/sing to passers-by. This is pretty normal for me, and is a good way to dual-task time. The thing that's unusual about that is that I'm not busking. There's nowhere to put money, and this is kind of unusual for a street performer. I just really like the idea of taking music away from being commercial in any sense and making it something that one person can share with another.

But the thing is that people know how to interact with buskers. There are social norms to that interaction that dictate how you behave. You walk past, if you have change you drop it in the receptacle. That's how it works. You see these kind of role-based interactions all the time - as a customer of a store, you know that you collect the items you want, and then take them to the counter for payment, then leave. As a passenger of a taxi, you just get in and tell them the destination address, then probably have some awkward conversation, then pay them and get out. These roles allow us to interact with people we don't know because we know our roles.

The best part about playing in the street is that people assume you're a busker, and they know how to interact with a busker. They get money out and walk over without paying too much attention to what they're doing. It's only when they get there that they realise there's nowhere for the money to go - and the role is broken, along with the walls between me and them. In that instant, they're no longer a passer-by giving money to a busker; I'm interacting with them, the real them. Not a role, not a defined set of interactions that tell you how to act. Just the person themselves. In that instant, our interactions are honest and personal. Whatever happens after that happens between me and that person, and it's the most effective way I've ever discovered to find meaning in fleeting interaction with strangers.

indestructible

2009-10-05T17:48:00.000+10:00

"Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

- from Looking For Alaska, by John Green (2005).

bring that lesson to the job

2009-09-30T23:02:00.000+10:00

“You know, Westmoreland made all of us officers write our own obituaries during Tet, when we thought The Cong were gonna end it all right there. And, once we clued into the fact that life is finite, the thought of losing it didn’t scare us anymore. The end comes no matter what, the only thing that matters is how do you wanna go out, on your feet or on your knees? I bring that lesson to this job. I act, knowing that someday this job will end, no matter what. You should do the same.”

-- FBI Director James Grace to the Attourney General, in The Kingdom (2007).

life scheduling

2009-09-29T12:58:00.000+10:00

When I was in punk bands I used to know a lot of people. At the time I would've said that I had a lot of friends, but I didn't. I just knew a lot of people. Every now and then I make the effort and catch up with some of them, but it's not the same. Every time we have a great time and then eventually the question gets raised "Why don't we do this more often?". And we all say we've been busy and this and that and the other. And we have, we've had a lot of things to do. It's just that all of those things have been more important to schedule in than seeing each other.

When it comes down to it, everything in life gets scheduled. We say that we have to do things, but pretty much everything we do is planned to slot in in some way - it gets prioritised. Take for example, a request to go see a movie during the day. You can't, you have to work. But lets say that you get hit by a car crossing the street at lunch and break your ankle - all of a sudden, the fact that you should be at work doesn't matter because you're going to the hospital.

Prioritisation is how every single thing we decide to do gets slotted into our lives, and it happens according to scores in three categories.

1. Importance/necessity
2. Benefit/enjoyment
3. Effort/resources required

Importance is a measure of how much depends on that event. It basically dictates how required you are to perform said task. For example, going to work would have a very high value of Importance. Unless you were residually rich from some other source, in which case it would be a very low value.

Benefit is a measure of how much you get from something, how much you enjoy it. For example, eating an icecream or watching a movie you enjoy would score quite highly in Benefit.

Effort is simply a measure of what it requires from you. For example, visiting Ben who lives down the road is easy. It requires no planning, little time, and few (or no) resources. Visiting Michelle who lives in Melbourne is difficult as it requires time off work, flights, money, accommodation, transport, etc.

How these all weigh up can be seen pretty easily when you start comparing things to each other. For example, the scenario I described earlier. Let's use a seven rank scale, from Extremely Low to Extremely High.

Item: Seeing a movie
Importance: Extremely Low
Benefit: Medium
Effort: Very Low

Item: Going to work
Importance: High
Benefit: Low
Effort: Very Low

Then, reconsider again with work vs hospital:

Item: Hospital
Importance: Very High
Benefit: Very High
Effort: Low

Item: Going to work
Importance: High
Benefit: Low
Effort: Very Low

Going to hospital is both more important and of more personal benefit than going to work, and requires slightly less effort since you can get someone else (an ambulance) to drive you. In a less extreme case, think about the friend who lives 45 minutes out of town.

Item: Friend who lives down the road
Importance: Medium
Benefit: Medium
Effort: Very Low

Item: Friend who lives in the sticks
Importance: Medium
Benefit: Medium
Effort: Medium

Given equal benefit, and importance, chances are, you're going to spend your time with your friend who lives nearby. This isn't sad, it's just a fact of life - we gravitate towards things that can integrate into our routines and that work for us. I love my friends but it's just not feasible to go and visit them all the time because some of them are really far away.

If you want to go as far as assigning values to the scale and calculating this algebraically, the formula is S = (2I * B) / E. Test this out for yourself using the examples above or some of your own and see if you can graph why you do some of the things you do. Yeah, there's something really wrong with me, I know.

Unfortunately, the downside of this is that it lets us see a lot of things about what other people choose. When I had to sit back and evaluate why I never saw the people I thought were my friends, I realised that when we had common interests, I had an extremely very low value of Effort. Without those, the Effort level increased, and the resulting equation didn't look nearly as attractive. Either Importance, or Benefit, didn't rate high enough to compensate for the increase in Effort required, so it never happened. That's not to say they're bad people, because they're not.

We just weren't that important to each other.

And in the end, that was for the best. Because now I have people around me who are that Important, with much greater Benefit. So when the Effort required to maintain those friendships jumps markedly, it doesn't matter a bit, because they're Important enough to warrant it.

DT4L.

things we do

2009-09-28T19:14:00.000+10:00

If the things that define us are the things that we do, then to a certain extent we are defined by things outside our control. We're limited to the jobs other people give us, the results we get from exercise, the places we're allowed entry to. So I'll refine it a step further and say that while what we do is important, what we do is really actually defined by the choices we make. Given that everything we do starts with a decision to undertake it, this seems more logical, although it removes the seemingly-all-too-important question of success from the equation. (But that's another matter altogether - is it the thought that counts? More on that later.)

I don't know, I don't have a good answer.

my dad is amazing

2009-09-17T00:31:00.001+10:00

I was singing the middle east's amazing song 'the darkest side' this morning as I was getting ready for work, walking around the kitchen. Eventually it got to a line that said '..just to keep the electricity on'. It made me think about the things I'd done to keep the electricity on, and then in turn, what lengths my parents gone to when I was a kid. Then suddenly I was transported back to the ninth grade, remembering the circumstances. It was just over a year since we'd moved to Mackay on short notice - 12 months earlier, my dad had opted, at our request, to switch companies rather than move to Sydney with his position. The firm went bankrupt six months later, and we were out of money, out of time, and out of options. He took the first job he was offered, an accountancy job at Mackay Sugar. So we were moving.

12 months later, we're in our second sugar-mill-provided house and my dad is travelling for work. A lot, and I mean a lot. Sydney several times a week. It's about this time that his boss realises that he spends most of his time (and plenty of the company's money) in or in transit to/from Sydney, and will continue to until the end of the project, which was nine months away. So the decision is made - he's moving to Sydney for the remainder of the project.

Being 13 and largely unfamiliar with the concept of responsibility for another human being, I didn't really understand what that meant. I don't think I ever realised at the time that he didn't want to go. That was just what he had to do to provide for his family, to keep the electricity on.

That's what a man is, in my eyes. Someone who is prepared to sacrifice just about anything for the people he cares about and is responsible for, no matter what that means or what the cost. I can think of a million other examples that highlight all of the ways I've been shown how to be a man by my father but this is the best one, because the true value in suffering for someone is doing it so silently they don't even know you've cost them a thing. Unbelieveable. Just unbelievable.

That's the kind of man I want to be.

five qualities every person needs

2009-08-25T23:37:00.001+10:00

I've been alive for 28 years now and a lot of stuff has gone wrong in that time. Car crashes, accidents, breakups, fires, failures - you name it, it's probably happened to me. My dad said to me the other day that he still feels 21 inside, but I don't. I feel every bit of my 28 years, and with so much development over the last 8, I can't imagine not having those lessons in me. So, without further ado, the five qualities that I think people need to get by in the modern world.

1. insight

Like most military operations, business ventures and other things that generally succeed through good planning, insight is the first thing that you need to get through life. The ability to look into a situation and be able to accurately perceive the strengths and dangers. Nothing starts without good recon. If you can't see the rocks, you can't dodge them, so make sure you can. Notice the signs with your eyes and ears, extrapolate the rest.

2. wisdom

Being able to see is all well and good, but what's the point unless you do something? That's where wisdom comes in. Just because you can see something, doesn't mean that it's a good idea to act on it. Taking action is not nearly as important as taking the right action. Consider the classic example of an inexperienced driver - their reaction to nearly anything going wrong is to slam on the brakes. That may just be the absolute worst thing you could do depending on the circumstances.

3. integrity

This used to be a big one for me. Knowing who you are, and having the guts to decide to take the right action based on who you choose to be and what kind of person you are. That's a real kicker. Conventional wisdom may say to walk around a stranger crying in the street. Don't get involved. That could be the easiest solution and it may be wise, but as a friend once said, 'I wish not for fewer burdens but for broader shoulders'. Hold fast to who you are, never let yourself down. If you never do anything you're not proud of, you will never have anything to regret.

4. precision

The successful implementation of what you decided in point three is essential - making the right decision doesn't mean a damn thing if you lack the skill to enact it. So when you do act, act decisively. Think about it, be precise. Get it right the first time. There are no second chances in life. This is the real thing. And finally..

5. resolve

No surprise here. No-one ever said this would be easy. Actually, if it was worth enacting the four previous traits to weigh up a course of action, it most likely will be the opposite of easy. You will have to accept that the things you decide to do will not be easy. They will be hard. They will take from you, they will drain you, and you will suffer. And in all likelihood you will endure more hardship than you would've by other means. But you won't regret it. Like most things, the cost is indicative of the importance. You will need to dig in deep and have the resolve to put your back against the worst the world has to offer. And it will hurt. But it will be worth it.

So there you have it. The five traits I think are most essential to the modern human being. Are these things essential to our survival? No, probably not. But if you want to be someone of consequence, you'll need to make friends with them, for we are men of action - look to these when it is time to move.

similar function and a rambling point

2009-08-08T09:41:00.001+10:00

After practise for Million on Thursday, Hayden, Ben & I hung around the rooms a bit with Danique (who had been taking photos for us) and jammed on random crap. After a while Hayden & I ended up having a drum battle, which was awesome fun but it gave Ben a bit of a chance to observe for a change. It's funny because you never get to see yourself doing things like that, so you don't really get to see your technique very clearly, and he picked up something I've been feeling for a while - my movements are incredibly inefficient; I play from my shoulder, and through my whole body.

I've written a bit before on the nature of learning, similar function and translational mapping as a means of adapting old skills as the basis of new ones, but it's never been so obvious before. After studying kung fu, I got better at -everything- physical I do. Skating, hockey, basketball, running, all of it. My understanding of the application of force and the correct ways to do it to maximise output and minimise energy usage had a near-universal effect.

Except on drumming. What Ben picked up is that I'm treating every hit and stomp like a punch or kick. I'm applying force in a power-line that extends back through my wrist, elbow, shoulder, and into my torso. On top of just plain being bad for the drums, it means I'm applying a shitload more pressure than I need to for a successful hit and wasting a whole butt-tonne of energy in the process. Every time I watch a really good drummer it surprises me how little everything back from the wrists doesn't move, but it's always difficult to put that into practise when I go in to play. So maybe sometimes similar function isn't always such a good idea.

Still, it's interesting and important to understand how you learn and the nature of the way your brain wants to be trained. Over the last nine months I've learnt a lot about how I learn and how I deal with and process things, information and life development. I figure, if you don't know yourself and how you operate, then you're going to have a hard time expressing to someone else how you want them to interact with you. With our actions, our attitudes and what we accept, we subconsciously tell other people how to treat us. We tell them about ourselves and who we are, what we are, what we want out of them and out of life. I try to tell people that I can be relied upon. That when I say I'm going to do something, I do it, so that when something comes out of my mouth, it can be trusted. It occurred to me the other day that one day my dad was going to die and that I was going to be the head of my family when that happened. And I know I'm a long way from having my own family and children but I'm so glad for the absolute rock that my father was as I was growing up that I have to be as good, if not better, for the people I love.

So this is my resolve. Never do anything you're not proud of. Make decisions that take you closer to the things you want out of love and life. Don't make excuses for yourself. Move forward whenever you can and don't get disheartened when you have to move back. Anyone who's ever crashed into a pole knows that sometimes you have to reverse up a bit before you can start driving again.

Be someone of consequence.

deaf musicians

2009-07-02T00:14:00.001+10:00

Anyone who's ever gone through any sort of recording and mixing process knows about the concept of 'fresh ears'. When exposed to the same piece of music over and over, your mind does funny things. The brain has a remarkable ability to process and filter streams of input, especially audio, and as you go over and over a track, working on it and refining it, you get lost in the details so much that you can't see the forest for the trees. It's for exactly this reason that it's in your best interests to have a separate mastering engineer from the mixer. After you've spent months tracking, you need to give it to someone who's never heard it before to be able to really hear it for what it is, and do the final bits of work required to polish it up. A number of times over the Run Amok album I brought other people in to listen with me because I felt like I was losing my objectivity. This happened on the EP as well; in fact, I was so destroyed by the process of actually making the EP (which was my first attempt at producing) that when I listened to it, all I could hear were the faults and the problems. I'd destroyed the record for myself, and when other people would tell me it was good I thought they were just being nice.

It wasn't until I listened again a month ago while I was making the streaming site that I actually realised, it was a really good EP. It was quite well done and despite a few minor issues with shitty playing, I successfully edited out 99% of the problems and really came out with something good. But I was so balls-deep in it that I couldn't hear it for what it was. The exact same thing happened again with the album. By the end I was so pissed off with the technical screwups and frustration that they were all I could hear. And I did nothing to promote or distribute what was a genuinely good album.

It happens to everyone in any extended recording process, but even if everything goes right and you end up with a product you're happy with, your brain still hears that and separates it out into its tracks. You hear the different guitars, the tone of the pickups, the compression on the kickdrum, the effects on the vocals, the way the reverb has been EQ'd. There are so many things you pull out of it. This is where things get messy; you hear all those things because you know, you put them there. But what does everyone else hear?

We musicians have no idea what our music sounds like. Not to regular people. And they're our audience. We'll never know what our songs sound like, what other people hear when they hear the layers tied together. We can guess, but we'll never know. Tell us? Please?

killing time

2009-06-16T13:22:00.001+10:00

There's a direct correlation between scarcity of resources and how efficiently we use them. Makes sense, if we know something is rare we use it wisely - when there's an abundance we care not and use it with reckless abandon. Fuel, land, water, you name it we'll waste it.

When I was at university I had 12 contact hours a week. Twelve. Count them. Just over 10% of my 112 waking hours every seven days. Needless to say, I had a lot of spare time. I didn't really study because I didn't need to - most of the course material came pretty naturally to me or I already knew it. Do you think I did anything productive with myself? Hell no. I didn't even really play video games that much. To be honest, I have no idea what I did all day. A lot of internet I guess, IRC was at its peak and so was getting drunk and singing karaoke. I barely practised, none of my music really got written at any reasonable pace, I went nowhere.

When I graduated and got a job, that was where it all started. My 112 spare hours a week became 62 and all of a sudden, time was scarce. It even sounds like a lot on paper, 62 hours a week, but when you spend 50 hours at or travelling to/from work, what's left over doesn't feel like much when you have to shop, clean and cook in it. It works out to about 2 - 3 hours a day during the week left over, so all of a sudden, scheduling and prioritisation play a major part in whether or not you even start doing anything that you want to get done. If you want to do more than a few things in any given week, all of a sudden you can find every single night filled.

Actually having to schedule and work around times to do things like practise, record, play games or see my friends actually has resulted in doing all of those things much more because I know that if I don't get it done in that small window of opportunity, it won't happen. I'm sure we would've never tried to make cars more fuel efficient if petrol wasn't expensive or scarce.

All of this really just says one thing to me, and while it's not the tired cliche of "you don't know what it's got until it's gone", it's not far from it. Until you have limited resources to work with, you don't know exactly how much can be achieved with them. Having very little spare time has had more of an effect on my productivity than any single other development. I've never had this little time and yet I'm doing more than ever. Now when I do get presented with an abundance of time, I have the motivation to actually use it properly as I can appreciate it for the value it has.

Time is the only natural resource that we have any real control over - use it wisely.

released

2009-06-11T16:25:00.001+10:00

I started writing music for nhac nearly three years ago, not knowing anything more than that I had an acoustic guitar that I wanted to play. Now, it's developed into something I feel incredibly lucky to share with three amazing musicians.

The EP is finished and we are releasing it online for free. Please download, listen, enjoy, and if you feel like it, come and see us play.

nhac - save yourself

who are you?

2009-06-11T11:20:00.000+10:00

We ask a lot of questions when we're getting to know someone. Surprisingly enough, many studies show that when people are telling you their names, most people aren't even listening. A lot of information flies back and forth but our perception of ourselves has a lot to do with the information we deem relevant enough to supply.
The other day someone asked me what I am. It was a mildly odd choice of words, but my first response was that I'm a musician. It didn't take long before it became obvious that what she was actually asking was what I did for a job, to which I replied that I was a Network Engineer for a telecommunications company.

Still, when I thought about it later it raised, once again, the very interesting question of definition. It's a topic close to my heart that I've written about before, and one I want to go into more detail about. In a world where people are presented with more information in a day than someone a hundred years ago in a decade, it's only natural that we attempt to summarise things. We use stereotypes and boxes that we understand to lump things together so we can reference them as a group (or a member of a group) without the extra attention required to separate them according to their differences. That's not a surprise, everyone went to high school; we know what it's like. You have your group and that's how people see you. In the past few weeks I've been getting to know a lot of people at work that I've never really spoken to and it's amazing the disparity between what some of them appear to be and the extent of what their lives encompass. Others are exactly what they appear, and it surprises me the massive differences in depth between two people who for all intents and purposes, were identical to me only weeks earlier.

In no particular order, the interests that have been most relevant to my life:

computers
basketball
programming
networking
speed skating
studying
punk rock
hockey (inline, there is litte/no ice here)
video games
martial arts
DIY-ing stuff
music
singing
driving/racing
writing

In high school, this kind of stuff appears very contradictory to a lot of people. It's bizarre to see the computer nerds who get beat up at lunch competing in sports at a national level. Small towns are pretty neat in that way; when none of your regular insults fit, you just get to call someone a faggot and be on your way.

At various points along the way, the focus has been different depending on where I pour most of my time and energy. In high school, I would have defined myself as a skater and a punk. At uni, I was a student that was a gamer and a punk. Afterwards, I was a fighter and a musician. And in the last few years, the focus has turned again. Now, I'm a musician, a writer, a driver and a network engineer. Where people allocate their resources says a lot about them and in today's world, attention is the most hard to come by. Advertising buys and sells millions based on its ability to find it, and with mobile devices at our hips, the money people spend on things to occupy their attention numbers in the billions annually. So when I define myself by these things that I am, I'm spending my attention, a person's only natural resource, on the things that are core to how I perceive myself.

This blog is somewhat narcissistic in respect to the amount that I talk about myself and attempt to define and explain my characteristics, but it's in the hope that you'll take the time to think about yourself in the same detail and see what you can discover. If you don't know who you are, you don't know why you behave the way you do, and without that, you can't ever hope to make yourself any better.

What are you?

finishing

2009-06-09T11:36:00.001+10:00

Yesterday I got the final mixes back from our producer. I listened through them and everything was exactly what I wanted it to be. The record was Finished. I've been doing this for ten years and I've never finished a record before. This sounds like a pretty strange thing to say for someone who's produced and released three CDs, but it's true.

The question of when a record is 'finished' is not as straight forward as it sounds. In a perfect world where we all have all the studio time that we want, all the equipment that we want, and do everything as perfectly as we'd like first time, this would seem to be a pretty simple idea, but it isn't. Even if you do have all the resources that you need, when do you stop editing? More vocal harmonies? Delay, reverb, chorus? Pan the guitars more, suck the high-end out of that kick drum a bit more? At what point do you sit back and say to yourself, 'I am finished'? It's something that you just feel, when the sound in front of you matches or surpasses what you heard in your head when you went in. That's difficult because the recording process itself always changes songs in itself, as you realise that the ideas you had don't sound like you thought they would, or the technical process finds itself suggesting other parts, extra content, new techniques. What you envisaged may not be anything like what you've ended up deciding to create in the mean time. And that's assuming everything you do goes well - when it doesn't, you're left working around tracking mistakes, poor microphone choices, questionable singing, equipment failure and just not using gear that's good enough to produce the sounds you wanted. When do you stop trying to compensate for the things that went wrong and accept the quality you've ended up with?

I had always thought that it was theoretically possible to reach a stage of knowing that a record was finished, it had just never happened to me before. Every other recording that I've done, I've either run short of time, money, equipment, skill or a combination of all of the above, and at that point, had to accept whatever I had in front of me at that point as the finished product. It has never been my decision - the choice was made for me.

This record .. is Finished. I can't begin to describe what that feels like.

modes of repetition

2009-06-08T22:08:00.000+10:00

I find it quite strange the way a lot of musician, including myself, do recording. We generally practise attempting to emulate the environment in which we'll play live. This is something that happens frequently, maybe several times a week; the idea being that when you play live, when it counts, the process will be so automatic that you just do it without even thinking. Makes sense, right?

So why is it that we don't practise recording in the same way? If you screw up on stage, the mistake may go unnoticed by the audience and even if they do, a few minutes later it's gone and you've replaced that memory with others. It may be months until they hear you again and you won't make that mistake again (we hope) so they may not even remember. When you're in the studio, your mistakes are being recorded, and what's worse is that every mistake you make halts progress and wastes expensive studio time. So why don't we practise recording? Because we're stupid, that's why.

Every musician who intends to do any sort of serious tracking needs to be doing at least two things:

1. practising with a metronome
2. doing test recordings of everything they write

Playing with a metronome will get you in the habit of playing along to a click track and will also enhance your sense of rhythm, and doing test recordings will ensure that you're always comfortable in a recording environment. In addition to that, it'll let you know straight away the parts that you're playing sloppily and need to work on. If you don't find out what you needed to practise more until you get in the studio, you're behind the 8-ball to begin with and you're burning holes in your precious optimistic tracking schedule.

(Don't kid yourselves, your tracking schedule is optimistic. It always is. Unless you have a massive record company grant that you're not worried about destroying, you ALWAYS set unrealistic targets, so accept it and move on.)

So. Moral of the story, get yourself a half-decent sound card with ASIO support and a copy of a recording program of some sort. Sure, it may cost you a few hundred dollars now but compared to the cost of the studio time you'll save by being comfortable and at home when you sit down to record.

You should be doing this often! If you don't write frequently enough to be in the habit, then at least every few weeks, sit down and record something, be it a cover of a song you like, or fresh recordings of songs you've already demo'd. Use it as a chance to experiment with recording techniques and get your technical skills up to scratch if you find the act itself boring. Get yourself in the habit now, and thank me on your next record when it's freakin' awesome.

quit

2009-05-28T16:50:00.000+10:00

I realised I never ended up posting "Quit" here, so here it is.

----

I want to grab every one of my coworkers by the shoulders and shake them and scream, "We weren't supposed to live like this !!"

"Can money pay for all the days I've lived awake but half-asleep?" --Primitive Radio Gods

I read this line in a forum signature earlier on today and was so moved by it that all I could do was to immediately stand up from my desk and walk off. Unfortunately I only found my way as far as the cafeteria, yet again fulfilling my daily routine.

Before I start, I -don't- have all the answers. I don't have some magical way to snap myself out of this. Yesterday I changed my Windows theme from the Standard Operating Environment to a background called Crystal with Silver XP theming. That was my short-term solution, and it's not fucking good enough.

"The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out before us. We see the same things every day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us."

I have dreams. I have goals and things I want to do, probably more than most people. I have a ridiculous number of things I'd love to do with my life, and the more I think about it the more I realise that at this rate, very few of those things will ever happen. We wile away our hours in cubicles making other people money, working on other people's machines, achieving other people's goals. We delay our gratification, telling ourselves that when we have more money, we will take the time to do things that are important to ourselves, but the next promotion, the next pay-rise, the next bonus is always just around the corner. Just out of reach. So you work for it. You work harder and longer to get more money. Then your expenditure expands to match your new income and the cycle repeats.

"Death: It's the new circle of life."

The circle of life isn't circular anymore. It's more of a rectangle with sloping, rounded corners. You're heading somewhere and slowly, the route starts to change. Things get in the way, the road starts to divert and you work with the diversion because it's there. But it presents a whole new host of things to deal with which in turn, divert you further. And before you know it, you've turned a 90 degree corner, and you're heading off in a different direction. But it's a direction, and one you put yourself in, so you keep going. And again, slowly, the road begins to curve. You don't notice it at first, but with every angle you turn off, you're tracking in hard, stuck in the problems the curve presents and before too long, you've turned 180 degrees. You're going back in the direction you came from, the opposite of the way you were travelling. You may even go further back than whence you started. But the curve was only small..

"Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump out immediately, however, turn up the heat slowly and he'll happily cook to death."

If you took a 17 year old and dropped them into a cubicle farm, they would go fucking nuts. Every part of their being would scream that there is something extremely wrong with, they would go out of their minds, they wouldn't take it. The reason teenagers don't work in real environments isn't that their not qualified - I know people who knew more about software and coding than most professionals do while they were still in high school. It's that they listen to their emotions. Some might call this immaturity, but I'd prefer to call it "being in tune with one's self". They haven't forgotten who they are, they haven't had to slowly grind away the desire to jump in a hedge or see what happens when you shake up a can for an hour and throw it down a flight of stairs. They get jobs at fast food restaurants and supermarkets because they spend that time interacting with people, talking and having fun while they work. McDonalds isn't the perfect example of many people's ideal jobs, but it's closer than you think. What you call maturity is really just the dulling of the senses that scream at you that deserve better.

"It's not smoking or speeding that kills young people today; it's growing old and giving up on everything they used to say."

I work with a guy whose holiday time is maxed out. Every day he arrives before anyone else and leaves last. His overtime and time in lieu are maxed out. Another guy, when I asked about his interests, said that he doesn't have any. He has a house, a wife and kids. Did they start off like this? Did they wake up one day and decide to forget everything they ever wanted? Granted many people only do want a family out of life, this is a perfectly valid goal and I'd like to have one myself one day, but I'll bet you $50,000 that I don't wake up on the day that I realise that goal and forget who I am.

"It's the last hour, of the last day of work."

..don't fall so far behind now, you'll be another nameless face.. I'm not suggesting everyone should just quit their jobs and go live in a tree. I'm also not suggesting we all quit and go start our own businesses. The workforce needs workers and without people to do other people's bidding, no idea goes anywhere. Startups fail. Businesses go under. Trying to go out on your own has an entire other host of associated problems. Some people find that in trying to start their own business doing what they love, they spend far more time running the business than actually doing it. And that's part of what causes those failures, being sentenced to business instead of action.

"We live in a world so complex, young people are sentenced to 12-15 years of training just to survive."

The word "teenager" didn't exist until the 20th century. Previous to that, you were either a man, or a boy. No in between. This is evident in the Jewish Bar Mitzvah which literally means "Son of the Commandment", whereby at the age of 13 he is deemed a man, and thus obligated to fulfil the Jewish commandments. Knights in the middle ages took on a squire at 13 as he was old enough to be put to good use, but instead we sentence our children to mediocrity, we tell them that they have not achieved adulthood, we force them into a servile state of punishment because we deem them to not be capable human beings, and then we wonder why they do graffiti, make bombs, get in fights and drive dangerously. We force them to spend their most amazing entry into the world a subjugated race, devoid of responsibility, told they will understand when they get older.

"Half the reason I rebel is because I'm not supposed to. The other half is 'cause it's fun."

What's the first thing you do if you've been held underwater? You come up for breath. At it's basic root, rebellion is cause and effect. Don't get me wrong, I highly recommend standing up for yourself when something is wrong, fighting back when you're unfairly treated, but I don't think any of our youth problems would be as severe as they are if we were treating them more fairly. When you hold people back, they fight for freedom. If you educate them and help them towards better and more awesome things, they do better and more awesome things.

"Youth is wasted on the young? Rubbish. Adulthood is wasted on adults."

You don't know what you've got until it's gone - old saying. I don't agree with it in this instance. The problem isn't that you don't know what you've got, the problem is that you don't realise it's leaving. Some people don't notice until it's packed it's bags and is outside on the street hailing a taxi. Most people don't notice until they get a postcard from it living the good life in Tijuana.

"Consider this a postcard."

Wake the fuck up. You have more brains, more resources, and more skills at your disposal than you EVER have in your life. You have more money, more freedom, and more power to achieve anything than you ever did when you were younger. Make a list of things you've always wanted to do then start actively pursuing doing them. I don't have all the answers. I don't have the magical solution to make you see the abundance of every experience the world has to offer. But I'm goddamn sure that the solution does NOT involve rotting away your days, hours, weeks, months, years in a cubicle working harder and harder to get that next promotion, that next raise, that fancy car. I'm not decrying work. You need to work in some capacity to survive, whether it be growing all your own food on a farm somewhere being completely self-sufficient, or distributing the latest small business server patches to clients in the Swindon branch, but what and how you work to get the resources to survive is up to you. Figure out the best way for YOU to live and make NO assumptions.

Make your list of things you want to do, and start fucking doing them. Because if you don't, you're going to fucking die inside, and that's worse than being dead for real.

unplug

2009-05-27T13:42:00.000+10:00

For the first time since I wrote Quit, I’m so floored by a mental realisation that I am no longer able to perform my primary function at work.

I’ve long felt that Big Brother, sensationalised news, and celebrity gossip were a means of control by distraction on the part of mass media and the government. Flashy misdirection to keep us occupied while the real business of running the world happened in front of us, all around us. We sit in the middle of it, oblivious. But that was more of an idle passing thought than anything really tangible or pointed. They were useless crap and that was it.

Earlier this month I took two days off and went to Port Douglas, just outside of Cairns. When I got on the plane, I turned my phone off, and didn’t turn it back on again until I was back in Brisbane three days later. I didn’t take a laptop, or an iPod, or a DS, or my 3G card, or speakers, or a radio. I took clothes, a guitar and a pair of drumsticks. What I realised in that time of unplugging was that without my distractions around me to keep me occupied, I was forced to deal with, accept, and live in the reality around me. There was no digital world I could use to extend my reach and escape from where I was. I had to engage the people around me when they spoke, and open up meaningful dialogue; become interested in the things and people that were actually around me. And it felt real - not disposable, or iterative. I was there, that was my life.

"What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." - Herbert A. Simon, polymath economist, 1971.

The world currently produces just less than two exabytes of new, unique information a year. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. One billion gigabytes. We will produce more unique information in the next five years than has been produced in all of human history up to this point. We live in an information age where bits, not bullets, decide the outcome of elections, protect our money, and keep us safe in transit. This is unfathomable - we cannot grasp exactly how much data is out there. And it’s only going to get more. We laughed in Back to the Future 2 when Marty Jnr turned on 16 channels on his flatscreen TV but it’s not much different to having two IMs, a movie, 10 firefox tabs and your phone on when you get home after work. We are so overloaded with information that we have forgotten the world that’s actually in front of us.

"A body can only react as fast as it takes a signal to move from the brain to its extremities"

In ages gone by, with ships being the only method of international travel, it could take 8 months for any new piece of information that was discovered to reach the other side of the world. The global information pool, the sum of all human knowledge, could therefore only increase at a very small rate. With the laying of undersea intercontinental cables, this changed but they were so expensive to use that every day people didn’t have access to them. You still had to traverse communication channels to get things transmitted. With air travel it changed again, but the real money was optic fibre. Plug in some routers, develop a scalable non-centralised communications protocol and you have information freedom. For the first time in human history, individuals have the ability to quickly and easily add anything they learn to the global information pool. If I figure out a way to use my iPhone as a remote control for my car today, tomorrow it will be online and on Tuesday, someone in the UAE will have done the same and have it playing a video of a dancing cat at the same time. The rate at which we, as a civilisation, as a race, are learning has increased to the point where it can be considered instantaneous.

With an infinite increase in the rate at which information is being added to the pool, so increases the amount of information we are presented with daily. Every day, everyone we know updates their digital presence with new photos, statuses, quizzes, comments. Is this information essential to our survival? No. But we treat it as though it is, and we feed off it incessantly as if it were ambrosia, filling our thoughts and attention with who just ran into someone in the street and Which Jap Car Are You?; and somewhere along the way we have mistaken these things that we add for a meaningful contribution to the world around us.

Orwell predicted we would become enslaved and controlled by things we hated - repression, military force, big brother. However, I have a feeling that it was Huxley who was right; instead we have been subdued by things we love, slaves to facebook, twitter, online gaming, cable television, a different Big Brother. We have become so involved in our own expression of the trivial that we have forgotten what original content is. We praise people for making parodies and in doing so, promote metacontent over actual content - real contributions to the world. We talk in quotes from things we like, references to other things that were funny, and then mistakenly think that it means we are funny.

None of these sites or technologies are evil, or even bad. Information sharing is responsible for the development of the modern world. I probably wouldn’t know any of you if it wasn’t for the capital i Internet. But the way we use them has become something of dependency instead of freedom, like accepting a microwave tv dinner instead of cooking for yourself. We live through them rather than use them to live our lives better. This is not about not using technology - I love technology, it is my job and one of the things that interests me most. Without the internet I wouldn't have contact with a number of people who are absolutely indispensable to me. The meat of my point can be summed up quite simply:

"Do what you are doing."

So unplug. Turn off your phone. Get home from work and go see a friend. Call someone you haven’t talked to in a while and ask them to have dinner. You don’t need to check your facebook, or your twitter, or your tumblr, or your phone, or any one of the other hundred things in your life you’ve become a slave to. What they present is not necessary to your survival. The only thing that matters in your life is your relationships with the people around you. They are what is important, they are the things that will comfort you when you cry, they will keep you safe at night and keep you happy enough to keep getting out of bed and going through the pain of work just to see it through to the weekend.

Un. Plug.

on legal speed, the american way

2009-05-26T14:34:00.000+10:00

As the day lumbers on and my ever-decaffinated state remains stalwart and functional, I'm reminded of a time when I required caffeine to live. And by live I mean, get up and go about my day. I'd have minimum 1 energy drink a day, in the morning to get in the door to work, and then coffee during the day. I never really thought about it, it was just normal, and I don't ever recall having trouble sleeping but I sure as hell had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. The drain, the pain, the headaches, guh. It was enough to drive a man to drinking Red Bull. Well, more of it anyway.

What you don't realise when you're outside the caffeine loop is just how much it has the potential to affect you. When you were a kid and your intake was relatively clean of such things, red cordial was enough to send you bouncing off the walls. But as time passed and you grew up and discovered things like coffee and beer (separately, of course) you got so used to it and the effects that it stopped even really becoming a thing. I never thought anything of coke, I just drank it with most meals when I was out. Red Bull was my energy drink of choice and that or coffee were my staples when I needed a boost - Red Bull for a longer boost, coffee for a quick shot in the face. Or when more endurance was required, a V and a Red Bull; more taurine in the 'Bull for the punch in the face, more guarana in the V which would later be metabolised into energy for the lasting effect.

Times have changed. Since taking caffeine out of my routine completely, including coke, exactly how much of an effect it can have has really been highlighted when I do have it. The other day I had coke with dinner, an unexpected fast food stop after a flat tyre, and it wasn't until 1am when I still couldn't sleep that I realised I was still very much awake.

I remember a girl who used to take a lot of drugs describe to me the slow realisation that how she normally felt before quitting was actually really quite crap and it wasn't until getting clean and healthy that she realised that she'd been feeling run-down and tired for about a year. It reminds me a lot of what it used to be like to get out of bed and go to work. Of course, I still wake up and don't really want to go sometimes, but it's not the brain-grinding labour that it was.

The flip-side of this is the one you all know and love. The work days absolutely fly past. Sure, you can't really think as coherently but you think faster! The pages almost write themselves, and before you know it you're out the door and off home to do whatever it is you would've rathered been doing all day.

I really like not being dependent on it, and I definitely feel better in the morning but goddamn I miss coffee.

music you own now

2009-03-30T22:23:00.001+10:00

I sat down to write tonight and within minutes, everything I'd hoped to write about had become a big confusing swirl of greys. The poignant sentences and well-made points that'd danced around only moments before had gone awry like American McGee's Alice; still there, just wrong. This would usually be the part of the opening paragraph where I'd talk about how that brought up another thought and launch into my main spiel, but you're not that lucky.

Tonight's soundtrack has been NFSU:2, City & Colour, Death Cab For Cutie and now Dashboard Confessional. As the last album draws to a close I can't help but to think of all the moments that these cds have been present for. Like a friend who's always there when things go wrong but is never the cause, you can get a real attachment to music like that.

Need For Speed: Underground, Underground 2, and Most Wanted both have ridiculous soundtracks full of music I would never normally listen to, but I love the shit out of them because of all the good times and emotions that they were present for. Overly self-indulgent rap-metal, hip-hop and cheese of all kinds, and I genuinely love them, not even in an ironic way.

The concept of liking something ironically is so unbelievably stupid I don't even know where to begin. And yet, I do it constantly. I love things that I know are crap. I say LOL because lol is lame. In futurama when they mention the concept of ironically liking things 'rings are cool' "no they're not they're lame" 'did that guy just say rings were cool?' "no he said they're stupid" 'ohh cool' we looked at it and thought "wow that was dumb" and then we do the exact same thing.

This has been another rambling, pointless post brought to you by too much exercise, not enough water, and the lack of enough good sense to not pick up a keyboard.

the rising discontent starts again

2009-03-17T00:03:00.000+10:00

I was watching Star Wars: A New Hope just before and a thought occurred to me. Not terribly original or new to me, but I started thinking about how much trouble everyone would have been saved if the lazy Imperial cruiser gunners had taken the time to shoot down that empty escape pod. This got me thinking about causality and the nature of cause and effect. I've always been heavily interested in tactics and psychology so the nature of these things has been on my mind over the years, and before too long I was contemplating what big things in my life had come from such small things. Tiny decisions or random choices that had influenced so heavily in the long run.

If I'd never decided to go and play minigolf with someone from the internet one day randomly back in 2007 (wow, it really was that long ago) I wouldn't know any of my closest circle of friends now. I have no idea what I would do outside of work. Things that seem inconsequential have this way of just building up into something later.

Some things like that you can't foresee. Others, you can, and it never ceases to amaze me the way that some people will intentionally ignore them. The number of times I've seen people in a relationship have a problem crop up and rather than dealing with it properly, having the argument/discussion and resolving it there and then and ending the issue. Some of these issues might be fixable but in the long run you could argue that if you can't get around something you're better off identifying it sooner rather than later. This doesn't just go for romantic relationships either, this can pop up anywhere. But speaking specifically about them, the goal is to have a good relationship, and you can't afford to just have stuff hanging around weighing on you. So by making things easier and glossing over the issues with a quick kiss-and-make-up you really just sabotage the long-term goal of being happy.

As was the style at the time, this segue'd into another thought about goal-directed behaviour. I tend to find I'm at my happiest when I have a lot of things to work on, whether this be developing music, fixing cars, building things, hacking video game controllers, painting bikes, fixing phones, whatever. Stuff, challenges, goals. Things with a clearly-defined end-goal that you work towards and overcome obstacles to achieve. When we're at school and to a lesser extent, university, we're presented with a life full of goals and heavily focused around goal-directed behaviour. Our parents push us into all sorts of things, we play sport, we get grades, we do tests, our lives are all about achievement.

After you leave uni though, we don't have any tests set out for us any more. The quantitative grading of our every waking minute ceases and our lives get weighed up against a much softer set of qualitative measures that we set for ourselves, and we often don't realise that we're not actually setting them. This is about the time when you wake up and realise you're feeling pretty gorram unfulfilled and wondering what you're doing with your life. This is one reason that video games can hold such a strong attraction - there are levels, rankings, bosses, endings. Venture online and there's a world of adversaries just waiting to take you on, and while we may not have dug sport or tests at school, that element of a challenge that you take on and succeed (or fail) at pulls on something very basic and human inside ourselves.

I am a competitive jerk. If I'm riding on the bikeway and there's someone in front of me, I have to overtake them. If I'm playing a game online, I'm aiming for #1 and if I'm playing laser force I'm probably going to be running around like I'm LARPing Counter-Strike. Ever since I started realising I could overcome problems that came up against me I've been so driven and motivated by competition it's hard to think about what life would be like without it, and for the most part it explains why this concept of Resolve is so important. These goals and targets that I set for myself as motivation, as competition, are often so unreachable that it requires more dedication to achieving than is necessary (in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word).

The inner workings of my fight-addled brain aside, in its most basic form, competition was what decided whether or not humans lived or died, back in the day. The strongest hunter fed his family the best, the best builder had the best shelter from the rain, the strongest fighter could protect his loved ones. Competition, and more specifically success in competition, has been keeping people alive for millenia and although the basic bar for what's required to survive has been lowered (possibly to our detriment - more on that another time), deep down somewhere inside us there's that drive somewhere that says, I could be doing this better.

What could you be doing better?

the earth will shake

2009-03-11T23:55:00.000+10:00

I just watched a short youtube video from a music teacher about students and their attitudes. It's really strange to hear someone talk about people like that because for starters I'm so far removed from music training that I have no idea what people are like (although it DOES explain a lot about some people I know who went to the con .. yes, I am talking about you), and the idea itself is so counter-intuitive to the way that I learn that it's hard to imagine who thinks that they can improve that way.

I've been doing a lot of exercise lately and the same concepts apply here. It's only by pushing yourself up against your limits and failing that your body will actually develop the means with which to overcome them, and it's no different with anything else. You cannot get a better understanding of something by doing it right all the time - you need to make mistakes, do things wrong. How can you even know where the quicksand is if everywhere you step is solid? Over the last seven years I've put a lot of effort into self-improvement and just generally trying to be a better person, trying to be stronger, both physically and mentally. After all that I've come to the conclusion that suffering is the most useful thing that can happen to a person for a number of reasons.

1. It gives you an unescapable condition that you must live with, whether you like it or not. This will force you to get stronger.

2. It shows you the gravity of the situation you got hurt in. If it can hurt you, it's serious and should be treated as such.

3. You really learn where you went wrong when you're forced to pay for it.

In my opinion, these are the three key factors to improvement: understanding the situation, having the strength to deal with it, and knowing the consequences of failure. That's not to say that everything that hurts is bad for you. Sometimes you make all the right decisions and it hurts anyway. That's life, and the purpose is to demonstrate the gravity of the situation. Again, something you have to know and accept in order to learn the right things.

Some people really miss the lesson though. They get to the pain part and regret things, regret their decisions, wish they'd never made mistakes, or if they didn't make mistakes, wish they never tried anyway. This seems completely backwards when you think about it. It's taking something that's good for you (or something that was good for you) and making especially sure to not take anything positive away from the failure.

I don't want to be told how good I am. I don't compliment well at all. For the most part I tend to not know how to respond because I've spent so long steeling myself against the inevitable rejection that comes from all artistry that I find it extremely difficult to receive any sort of praise without shutting down into a little ball of awkwardness. The three best musicians I've ever known have given glowing praise of my recent work and it's been one of the most humbling experiences ever. Seeing songs turn up on last.fm, even in small doses, is gratifying because when you're in bands, people you're friends with say nice things about you to your face even if they can't stand it. That's a fact of life. But finding that people have stuff I've done on their ipods, who actually consciously think to listen to it when I'm not around .. that's as honest a compliment as I think you can receive as a musician.

I'm nowhere near where I need to be, or where I want to be, but right now I feel like I'm better than I've ever been, and I'd be a fool, a foolish fool, to think that I couldn't keep on getting better, because that's what life is all about - recognising your weaknesses, highlighting them, drawing them out and smashing them with a hammer until they're your strengths.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

timr

2009-03-07T00:26:00.000+10:00

The concept of resolve is something that comes up fairly regularly if you follow my artwork, so and given that the nhac album that hasn't been recorded yet, and this blog, are both named after it, I thought I should probably talk about it. The word itself came from some poorly translated shonen anime that I was watching a few years back. It pops up in Bleach a fair bit, and a lot of other similar shows of that style like Naruto.

The protagonists talk of their will to fight almost as if it were a physical thing, a tangible quantity, something they actually possess. The thing that separates them from the other characters, apart from whatever innate physical abilities they have, is an unshakeable determination to go as far as necessary to protect the people around them and achieve their goals. Sometimes, in the face of all odds, against the strongest of foes, all you can do is reinforce yourself so immovably that even you don't question your chances against unspeakable odds.

I don't know whether somewhere along the way I got my life confused with that of Kurosaki Ichigo, or whether I just saw something in the way these lead characters simply get shit done that I thought made a shitload of sense, but there are always common themes to these decisions to carry something through. There's always a goal, an obstacle, and a cost. The goal might be to protect a precious friend, and the obstacle a traitorous warrior. The cost will be the injuries sustained in the fight, usually early on or in the middle, requiring this extreme cost to be overcome to get the desired result.

These themes can be applied to the lives of just about everyone on a day-to-day basis. Every day we struggle with things, we battle with our willpower. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail. I'm not going to quote star wars but the reason for all failures of willpower is a sheer lack of resolve. We give ourselves choices and options that we weigh up, despite knowing the right path from the start. We add shades of grey to a black and white situation. The second you even start to think about giving in, you've opened up a doorway for it. Dig in, dig deep, accept nothing less than complete success. I never understand when people don't stick to diets, or give in to addictions. Don't they want their end goal? Haven't they decided their outcome already?

Resolve, simply, is the absolute assurance to one's self of reaching their goals. That's all it is. Somewhere between confidence, self-belief, willpower, and determination lies resolve, and with it, the ability to put everything you have on the line to do the things you have to. Whether it means pushing your car up a hill on your own, finding a way into your house when you locked your keys inside, or getting tickets to a concert for a friend because you said you would, even though it became way more difficult than you thought it would be. It could be listening patiently to your heartbroken friend while he whines about his ex-girlfriend for the hundredth time, or holding someone's skin closed for hours in the emergency room. If you can't own the everyday stuff the way you hope you'll deal with the disasters, you'll never handle the big stuff when it comes.

So dig in, and dig deep. Push off with broken bones, get to your feet no matter how much it hurts, and get your shit done.

the burning question of definition

2009-03-03T12:01:00.000+10:00

I get a burning in me when I need to write. Like a sudden, yet slowly-growing discontent that starts in my stomach and rises up through my lungs until it's encompassed my shoulders and eventually my brain. It's a discomfort like being too cold and needing a jumper, or being hungry. An almost itching desire for expression. It's bizarre because this doesn't usually happen for music or lyrics, just written word. I don't really consider myself to be a 'writer' in the sense that most people would use that word, in a way that defines them. I see myself as a musician, in terms of what i am, much more strongly than anything that i just do.

The question this raises is one of definition. What makes a man? Is he defined by his actions or what's inside him? I spend more time than anything organising telecommunications services to be installed. Am I a manager? I don't feel like that's what I am, it's what I do. So with that in mind, what are you? What is it that you are? Thrice dedicated an entire album to this concept (What are you called? -> Wie Heisse Du? -> Vheissu) and it's been something that's always been close to my heart.

When I was younger, I defined myself by the things that made me different, by my pastimes. I was a skater, a punk, I identified with these things in how I dressed, by getting piercings or colouring my hair, going to shows, etc. That was important for me back then because I didn't have anything else. I got beat up a lot, I had very few friends, and the only ones I did have were only friends with me because they had no-one else too. It wasn't until I started finding those things that I could identify with others through that I started actually getting some real meaningful social interaction. In a lot of ways I felt as though I depended on those things for the common ground with the people I'd come to spend my time with and it's been a strange experience slowly letting go of them all.

I shaved off my sideburns a few weeks ago. I'd had them since I was 19. I was trying hard not to fit in, but at the same time I was trying hard to fit in with not fitting in. I drove a fast car, and played hockey, and skated, and played in a punk band. But when I wasn't in that car, or in those clothes, or skating, I felt like I wished I had some way to show those people that I was still part of their group, to get at the acceptance I felt when I was decked out in the things that made our connection.

It's interesting to go through these withdrawals all over again - now that I'm selling my RX-7 I find myself thinking that I won't have any way to identify with other racers on the street. I think that's part of the reason I've decided on a Forester GT. I want something that's practical and normal enough to drive around comfortably, but I don't want to lose my racing heritage. I don't want to drive fast anymore except on the track, that's a given. That's the main reason for getting rid of the car. And it's funny to find myself thinking all this, in much the same way that I felt strange getting dressed up in business clothes to go to work every day after finishing uni.

So do the clothes make the man? Or do we aesthetically reflect on our bodies how we see the world? Maybe there's some truth in both. But I feel pretty happy with the fact that I've finally grown up enough to a stage where I don't need to get acceptance from [group] to derive worth and value. I'm finally comfortable enough with just being myself, and I have people around me that care about me because of who I am, not what I do.

After years of preaching about freedom of choice and social freedom, the most free I've ever felt has been after not needing to display it anymore.

what makes musicians tick

2009-02-18T17:06:00.000+10:00

I've been playing guitar for about 12 years now and for someone who's been playing this long, I'm really not anywhere near as good as I should be. "Should" is kind of relative, but I guess what we're talking about there is the rate of improvement when compared with the theoretical possible rate of improvement. By that measure, I'm way off. I should be shredding like a madman, fast as hell, tapping, pulling off, squealing, etc etc. But I'm not. And I have no interest in it. Back when I was listening to a lot of metal I used to practise that kind of stuff and do speed drills but never really that hard, not like the other guys. I didn't enjoy it and the results didn't really make me feel that great anyway. So it wasn't worth it.

As soon as I could read a tab chart I was writing songs. Bad songs, of course - I was 15. High school crushes and what passed for heartbreak as a teenager. But I kept doing it. While Dane and Hayden sat in his garage playing along with Metallica and Pantera, I'd sit in my room writing songs. Of course, I still sat and played along to those bands as well, but just the rhythm parts - the solos just didn't interest me as much. And the amount of work that I had to invest to get good at them vs the reward I got from being able to play just wasn't worth it.

So, as soon as I'd found a bassist and a drummer to play along with, I was jamming, and within a month we'd played our first show. Don't get me wrong, it was bad. 90's poppunk bad. But I was doing it. We played a bunch of shows, and had fun, and loved it, and that's always been what music was about to me - writing songs, then getting up and playing them, and loving it. It's been what drives me and you only have to look at stage photos from the last few years to see that that's really where I'm at my best. That's where I get my drive from. And it's always surprises me to see what does it for other people.

Dead Letter Circus are an interesting bunch of guys. I first invited them to share our practise rooms back in 2004 and for two and a half years they sat in the room and practised. And practised and practised and practised and recorded and practised and practised and mixed and practised and practised. I gave Rob shit for it, we joked about them being the practise room band who'd never do anything, but they had a plan. They worked damn hard in that room and by the time they hit the stage for the first time, they had all the poise, tightness and development of a band that'd been touring for years. In that time they cut the fat from their lineup, refined their songs, and did everything that you'd usually do and fuck up in public, but in private. When they finally started playing, it was flawless, and the attention they commanded showed it. Some songs didn't even have names still, but people were turning up in droves and now look at them.

It was a very different strategy from my punk rock attitude of just getting out there and playing, and after watching the success and rise to popularity of people I used to look down on for their lack of activity, it's definitely made me re-evaluate the way I think about music development. As it stands, nhac has been in serious development for a year and a half, and it's just starting to get ready now. Million could've used the same treatment but we kept getting offered shows, and regardless of that I think there's definitely a certain level that I insist on reaching now before starting to share the stuff I'm doing with the general public.

It's also really interesting to talk to session musicians. For the most part these people are really talented and technically excellent, but rather than writing, developing and promoting their own music, they'll polish, tune and augment the writing of others. This is bizarre for me because I never really feel connected and inspired by what I'm doing to join in with someone elses work. Obviously you make your part your own and create something greater as a whole, and those people really do make a massive contribution in helping other people's music grow up, but I can't ever really imagine that I'd care about what I was doing as much if I was just helping other people tell their stories. Still, you have to respect the kind of talent it requires to pick up music that quickly, get good at it, analyse it and figure out what makes it tick, then bring it to the foreground and help it shine.

These other attitudes are enlightening to look at because it just highlights how different every person is in their interaction with music. And it's all good, just different. But every now and then I'll have the bad fortune to be at a pub with a covers band, and this is the kind of musician I'll just never understand. Not only do most of these people not ever write an actual song, half the time they can't even be bothered to really put in the effort to learn the songs they're supposed to be playing properly. Complex note structures dumbed down to the simplest power chord, syncopated beats squashed flat. And you look at their faces, most of the time they have the biggest rock star hat on - and not only that, they believe it. This is about the equivalent of playing Guitar Hero and convincing yourself that you're a musician. You may as well jump onto Daytona and start telling people you're a race driver.

That's not to say that covers can't be done well - I've seen a few people who've arranged entire sets worth of popular music into their own format, and it's worked amazingly. I remember my cousin's wedding a while back, watching two people with an acoustic and an electric guitar, and a mic each, rework and amazingly reproduce four hours worth of live music. It was great, and if you're not going to present new content, you at least need to spin it, bring something to it. But if you're just going to sit back and take the credit for someone elses writing, then make a mess of playing it, why are you even playing?

The only answer I can come up with is 'money', and to be fair, covers shows do pay very well. How much is your musical soul worth?

the process begins

2009-02-16T12:48:00.000+10:00

I'm in the process of developing a new band at the moment, which some of you know as nhac. It's been a long time coming, and how it actually ended up the way it is is pretty unusual.

Back in 2006, Run Amok was chugging along nicely. We'd just played our first international support with Lagwagon and we were starting to record a pre-production demo called Staple This To Your Face. Life, however, wasn't going so well. I was stressed and burnt out from my relationship, work was strained, money was tight, my car was breaking and all in all, things were not going well. I decided to escape home to my parents place in Mackay to get away for a weekend, I hadn't seen them in a long time and I just needed to go somewhere safe and relaxing. For the most part this was pretty unsuccessful. It was great to see my parents and catch up with what few friends I had left back there, but it was a sharp realisation that I felt no attachment to the town at all as being some sort of 'home'. The only time that I really felt at home during the whole time was when I escaped to Blacks Beach and climbed the cliffs. I used to go up there all the time in the middle of the night with Duncan and Nic, or sometimes just on my own, and just look out over everything. You could see forever and at night, the whole thing appeared a washed out shade of grey, completely transforming it.

Later that night, I retreated to Dane's old bedroom (I didn't even feel at home in my own) and sat down and wrote and recorded Page One. I didn't know it at the time, but I'd taken my first steps into a larger world. I didn't know what to do with it - it was too soft and melodic for Run Amok but it was still a punk song at heart, of sorts anyway. The next few songs that I'd write would also turn out to be punk songs but on an acoustic guitar and I pretty quickly recognised the problem - I was just trying to do exactly what I'd done before but with new tools. This was the wrong way to go about it, and it was exactly the reason that Tony Sly of NUFAN failed at his own acoustic project. I kept slowly writing songs through the course of 2007 and as recording of the Run Amok album drew to a close, I'd had discussions with the producer about doing an EP of the acoustic songs that had been piling up. I didn't have enough for an album and my brother Dane had a similar stockpile doing nothing, so I approached him to do a split record. He declined as he never releases anything he does, but he expressed interest in playing accompaniment on my music.

So, in early 2008 he started work on the five songs I had. As the year moved on I continued to write and around September, I'd finished it - 12 songs. I sent them off to Dane for evaluation and after a few jams and a few months, we sat down and recorded the whole thing in my lounge room as a pre-production. It was amazing to see it all plotted out like that. This was the fourth band I'd been in with Dane over the course of things, but it wasn't even really a band yet. I was primarily writing songs I could play myself on a nylon string acoustic, and then sometimes have him there too. After getting the pre-production done, I sent it to Ben to get his thoughts for album artwork and after some discussion we realised that a lot of the music was really prime for some percussion. I was already in another band, Million, with Ben and Dane so it was kind of funny that we'd ended up doing this, but eventually we had a few jams, and it really worked better than I could've ever thought. It wasn't too long however that we realised the sound was thin in places and no sooner had that thought gone through my mind when I got a message from Hayden asking if I was working on anything and did I want to jam some time. I'd not much gotten the words out asking him to play bass when I realised what I'd done. I'd invited the final member of Million to join my new band. I'd just started another band with all the members of my original band.

The sound, however, was completely different. The method of songwriting in Million was unlike anything I'd ever done before. One person would come with a riff, and we'd jam on it and see where it went. Then it'd get added to, tacked onto other things, joined with other bits and before you know it, together we've all collaboratively built a song. Then one person would write lyrics and we'd all edit them, and then eventually it was done. With this project we took the exact same people and applied them in a different order - I'd write a framework with a guitar piece, Dane and Ben would add accompaniment and Hayden fills in the depth, and look at how different it turned out. It's been such a strange experience, writing in layers - I still write these songs as if they're to be played by one person, and then we all fill in our parts. There's no easy-out; if the song's not interesting on one guitar, you can't just hope it gets filled up by the rest of the band.

This is really the first time that I've ever had to rely solely on myself to bring things together and I think that self-reliance and pressure has brought this all about, because there's no-one there to fall back on and just be lazy in a part because one of the guitarists will do probably do something cool. Like most things, getting thrown from the safety of the nest has forced me to learn to fly, and like the song says, "you can't touch the sun if you can't fly". Wait, you haven't heard that since the album isn't out. Never mind. Soon..

greetings, salutations, excitations

2009-02-16T12:29:00.000+10:00

Hi.

So, I've been a little inspired by the Well Read Rabbit to actually start writing something constructive for a change. We all keep blogs, journals, tumblrs, twitters, miniblogging, microblogging, goddamn insufferable constant status updates on Facebook as to what exactly we are doing with ourselves and for a long time I've wanted to actually make something that might be somewhat more interesting and make more of a point than what I did this weekend and who I did it with. Wait, that came out wrong. Rewind for a second.

I had one semi-serious blog that I used to keep, Mobile Resolve, which was great but when I got rid of my Sony Ericsson W880i that had its inbuilt blogging client for photos, the concept of taking a photo every day and writing a short paragraph about it kind of went out the window. It became more about mobility and the things I use in my life to stay mobile. That's all well and good, and I've finally got an iPhone equivalent client for it but it's just not as easy and to be honest, less interesting things are happening to me. I'm in a period of pre-production, so to speak - there are no revolutionary developments right now, just incremental improvements on the current state.

I've wanted to write about a lot of stuff and traditionally my livejournal has been where this has happened, but it's interspersed there with song lyrics, recordings, conversations, links, and all sorts of random crap.

So, now that I have somewhere to write, it's time to think of something to write about ...

...

..

crud.