Category: Uncategorized

What is Seattle like?

CreativeLive hasn’t just taught me about photography & creativity, it’s also made me curious about what Seattle is like, turns out in terms of population, it’s not that big 600,000 odd, compared with Melbourne 4 million, it seems like a drop in the ocean. Turns out Pampered House Wife packed her and her partners things and moved there and kindly blogged about it. 

https://pamperedhousewife.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/differences-between-melbourne-and-seattle-that-nobody-warned-us-about/

Bed time alarm

Way back when I was younger I had alarm set on my phone for 9:30pm.

It was my bed time alarm.

It turns out Apple decided that more people would like a similar feature.

Unfortunately I’m not always good at following it.

But I do find if I stick to a rhythm of a similar (early-ish) bedtime and a similar wake up time that life is generally better. If I hit the sack after midnight, the next day I am Mr Grumpy pants.

Hope you catch a glimpse of how loved you are brother

Hurray for birthdays. For some reason this birthday felt different than the past couple of years. I didn’t shout it out to everyone, reminding them that this event was coming, nor did I try and hide it from view, I just had it on Facebook like most people, & let it be.

But this odd thing happened, and I’m not sure if it’s part of a culture that I’ve been trying to build, or what exactly it was, but I got a bunch of personal “private” messages (either via SMS or bookface) from a random assortment of fokes. It was really quite nice.

I’m all for the public wall Facebook thing, but after an accidential social experiment amoung friends a few years back, I lost faith in the bookface system. What was the experiment? Person A was changing person B’s birthday to a different random date. No biggie, but the date rolled around and a bunch of people wished Person B Happy Birthday (since Facebook never lies). Then for fun, they moved the date forward another month. A month later a bunch more comments for Happy Birthday pile in, the worst part, a bunch of people had double posted, not realising that Person B surposily had a birthday a month prior. 

Anyway I had a number of birthday wishes away from the public wall. Which means someone had to go to the effort to write and then send that message. Since practically ditching the Facebook timeline 18 months ago, I’ve been trying to actively follow up birthdays using my phones calendar. Unfortunately sometimes I miss. But where possible on the day I send a message. I’m not trying to be different, or anything. Just trying to be genuine in the digital world.

One such friend wrote the following (which is probably why they are the published author, and I’m a hack at the English language with a blog):

[I] Hope you catch a glimpse of how loved you are brother

And you know what, I reckon I did. It wasn’t about amazing presents & big parties. Instead it was about connecting with others, some for the first time in months, others we only spoke yesterday.

From time to time, may we all feel how loved we are by those around us.

Friends

Friends are great. I doubt too many people would argue with that statement. 

Tomorrow is my birthday, and so tonight I organised a gathering of random people from all walks of life, with one common thread, I count them as friends. 

At least for the past 10 years I’ve felt that I’ve had a bunch of semi isolated groups of friends. Some people seem to have a group of friends that they share across lots of avenues, I’ve never really had that. Instead they seem to be seemingly unrelated groups, that I meet individually and I enjoy seeing them interact with one another at events I hold.

My girl friend was asking me to organise some form of celebration, and I struggled for weeks as to how the format of this celebration would happen. The typical thing would be to go to dinner. But my issue there is once you exceed 6 people on the table, it’s starts to get awkward with some on the end feeling left out, etc. plus I’m sick of the local food scene in town (within the dietary requirements I was trying to juggle. I had gluten free, fodmap, vegetarian, lactose free, paleo & normal human). If it was summer I would throw a BBQ in the entertaining area out the back. Unfortunately it’s about 2 oC tonight, so outdoor entertaining is out of the question. So I bit the bullet, and cooked up a storm of Australia Mexican (I’m sure real Mexican is completely different). Basically finger food that can be eaten as a group in the lounge room around the fireplace. No need for tables, or even cutlery, plus it can provide a space of no barriers to communicate with one another.

It’s fun catching up with people and introducing across these silos, so that different people can put a face to each other. The funny observation, a lot of my friends (myself included) are dream big, dream often, start the next project, before the last one is fully finished sort of people, at least half of the room was creative people like that. I hadn’t even connected the dot until tonight.

I want to be able to facilitate building spaces where people can come together and share ideas and dive deep into concepts and dreams. I feel that food and a warm lounge is the perfect space for that to happen.

One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten old, the ability to create friends and meet new people becomes harder, especially if you just carry on doing the same activities and job year after year. I think that makes the current friends all the more valuable.

To my friends who were able to make it tonight, thank you. To those who couldn’t, I hope to see you next time, at the next gathering.

Thanks for thinking big & dreaming up the future with me.

Judgement day

Today I listened to a sermon, 30 minutes long, 27.5 minutes of hell fire and brimstone, 2.5 minutes about love and grace. I think the speaker used more bible verses than I’ve ever heard in 30 minutes (apart from when someone reads a big slab of the bible).
I sat there somewhat confused, somewhat dumb founded. I expected this from a 80 year old tranditional old school preacher from the 50ths. But in 2016, haven’t we moved on and expanded our vision of God, Jesus & the bible? 

I saw two encounters after the message with people coming up and saying to the speaker “what a brilliant message” (or words to that effect). This is actually an interesting contrast to another setting when the pastor spoke each week about the love of Jesus, the common comment he got was “it would have been better if you were wearing a tie”. Do older foke like to be reminded more about hell & judgement day, than love and grace?

Is there something that resonates well with some church people about hearing how they are in and part of the “Jesus club” and the rest of the world is going to a place full of fire and torment? I guess it’s just like mass media, bad news sells, and the church can sometimes be a place where as much as the lingo is “deny the world” (or whatever the Christian ease is these days), sometimes it’s just a carbon copy, just selling didn’t things.

I love this short clip from Jay Bakker’s latest tour: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvgoGvjJXrg
Side note: I shared this clip with a gay friend the other day (who is neither here nor there when it comes to faith, at least from what he has told me), and he pointed it out it’s more Americans that take this stuff literally as opposed to other parts of the world. I have no hard data to back this up one way or the other. 

Now I have no idea what today’s speakers motives around sharing his message for the day was. Whether he was being deadly serious, or just pushing the boundaries of how far he can take a message. If he was being serious, good on him for knowing what he believes and not being afraid to share it. If it was a bit of an experiment, I’d like to hear how he thought it went. I personally tired an experiment when granted 360 seconds to speak in front of 110 once, I told them (a church) that I denied the resurrection of Jesus, then simply sat down (and after a couple of seconds, played a clip to explain what I meant. It was more a shock thing than anything else. Strangely I’ve never been asked to speak or share since).

I would like to be involved in a side project of looking at “what does faith look like in a modern world?” I’d like this to follow the work along the lines of Peter Rollins or Michael Frost (Who spoke in Melbourne earlier this year and I missed out). I have a venue in mind, a local jazz / music venue. To start the ball rolling I need to have a conversation with the owner of the venue to see if we can do a monthly gathering once a month on whatever her slowest night is. Who knows, she might say no, but at the same time, she might say yes. I’m probably working on too many projects at the moment anyway.

Standard disclaimer applies: Most of these blog posts reflexes Andrew’s thoughts at the end of a long day. In hindsight, he only ever agrees with about 90% of what he has written/said. If any material offends you, sorry, but that’s too bad, but in retrospect and growth, some of it will offend the author, and that is ok.”

Potential clients

This morning I checked my email for the first time since mid day yesterday. Sitting there was an email from a name that I know, but I don’t recall ever exchanging via email. Turns out that he had seen some of my design work and wanted some assistance in that area.

I couldn’t really believe my eyes. Someone had taken the time to track down my contact (not overly hard) & was requesting a design service. A service that I don’t actually advertise doing.  (Ok it turns out I do have a single page on my “main” website, which I put up in hopes of getting accepted by a printing press for an account. Not sure if it was required or not, but I got the account after another company turned me away. But the site itself definitely doesn’t scream “hire me to design things, like this amazing website” – given sarcasm can be hard to detect at the best of times, it’ll be best for me to clarify, my website is pretty rubbish, I threw it together in a weekend about 4 years ago & haven’t touched it since. Luckily my skills that improved over this time).

The next challenge….answering the question “how much would you charge?”. I have no idea, I generally get contracted to do a large site, and the web design is a side component, this was the other way round, “here’s a design project, plus a landing page for web”.

It has taken me all day to think of a reply for the email. There’s always an inner battle for me around quoting. I want to quote for the best possible outcome for both parties. Ideally you want to quote the clients budget, plus $10. But sometimes you have no idea what their budget is. (Chase Jarvis and Gary V talk about it in an interview). There is nothing worse than to quote too low, and then get stuck doing 100 revisions. In my mind I fell it’s like a taxi meter in reverse. The quote gets accepted and that’s like adding credit to the taxi meter and then as work is done the meter winds down, and the first revision it starts to go into the negative space, and by the 20th email of changes the meter is half of the quote. Sometimes you can go back to the client (particularly if there is some paper work) and say “hey this is getting ridiculous” other times I just wear it. Unfortunately what I find can start to happen is that bitterness creeps in around the project and the client. Which then can start to have a negative effect on the work. It’s a vicious cycle.

But at last I bite the bullet, sent off a figure with some options. Let’s see what they say when they come back. At the end of the day, it goes back to this weeks theme of pointing your toes in the direction you want to go.

Consumer culture and the desire to buy things on sale

What is it about a sale, or the concept of getting a bargain that motivates us as humans to pull out our wallet and buy things, sometimes even buying things we don’t actually need, nor ever will need?

There must be a science to it, otherwise years of infocommercial broadcasts have just been a waste of time and money. But if they didn’t work, people would stop advertising through them. 

This idea comes about after I just spent $55 on SD memory cards on eBay, that I kinda needed, but they weren’t a burning desire to have. I just noticed recently that I was low on cards, and after shooting more video, I thought it best to get some higher capacity ones. But the only real reason I fokes out the cash today, other than any other day was eBay is having a “hump month” sale and have been running the 20% coupon code CLICK20. So I managed to save a few pound. 

I’m all for saving money, but I found my actions leading upto the purchase interesting. I looked around for other things that I may or may of have wanted to buy. Looking at pages of items, that I didn’t need. If I needed them, I would have probably already gone and brought them. 

The list was a little odd, but it went something like this:

Ooo lets just check out drones, Kogan has a DJI with 20% off, that’s cool. What about an Xrite colour calibrator? Nope no one has one of those. A new camera body that shots 4K could be nice. 

Then I had a look at GoPro mounts to HDMI cables. Just lots of cheap little things that I’d be saving at most $1 on.

The time, is possibly better spent actually working on a project, or resting, or hanging out and playing with friends.

Maybe I need a new rule, no hunting though sales, unless I can make back the time I spent, in the savings. 

Stories

I have never fully understood stories. I knew that they were there, and that some people felt touched by them, but I didn’t really understand stories. 

I heard a sermon once by a guy who shared some stories about his local neighbourhood, they weren’t amazing awesome hyped stories, instead they were good stories. He and his family live amoung a rough neighbourhood and they live amoung the people that they are trying to help and support. I can’t remember exactly what his stories were about, but I do remember the concept of good stories. 

Lately I’ve been listening and exploring story telling. I’m not sure what has triggered my interest in stories, whether it is in part, this project of daily blogging which requires me to be open and listen closely throughout the day, or just getting more mature (whatever that means). Two days ago I blogged about episode 99 of the Rob Cast, a story that was quite moving, I recently watched a movie on Netflix called “The Eichmann Show”, if you haven’t seen it, go watch it, but be prepared to be shocked if it you don’t know the story. Following this, I gave the film “A Girl Like Her”, a documentary style film about the bullying of a young girl and the story telling of both sides of the story. 

These stories have been having an impact on me. I’m loving the beauty of the telling a story with a camera, and makes me want to pursue the path of becoming a film maker. I need a project around this.