Monthly Archives: July 2012

Endlessly Connected With Everything

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Last year I needed an unlocked phone and rashly went with the cheapest option that presented itself – a Huawei phone from the local Woolworths. For the price it seemed a decent smart phone and worked well enough while traipsing around Belgium. As I complained back in March the devil in the deal showed up when my least favourite ex-politician in the universe popped up to defend Huawei’s right to spy on build Australia’s IT infrastructure, and to be flying over Liberal politicians for ‘friendly’ talks.

The temptation was to use the traitor phone in ballistics testing, but I’m not that wealthy. The iPhone had gone to Her Majesty and was not coming back. Gold medal for China, until a week or so ago when Telstra sent a letter something like this:

Dear Valued Customer,

Seriously what is that shit you have hanging off our system? You been dumpster diving or what? Word up – the mutt is about to drop off the network. We are going 4G, you are going maybe .5G if the wind is blowing that direction. 3G is going bye bye, so get it put down and get your sorry ass to the mall.

Yours, the Telstra Support team.

OK, so what’s the SECOND cheapest place to go? JB HiFi. If you’re not from Australia feel free to compare to any local electronics wholesaler that uses comic sans and screaming food colours on every available surface. JB are OK, but not the place where you expect the just-out-of-school underpaid minions to care that much about your ‘shopping experience’. So I was surprised that the phone minion was a good sort that steered me to a slightly older 4G model known to not suck. Slight problem when I admitted I didn’t know my own mobile phone number.

“Do you know your home phone number?” Thank god for a question I could answer.

Furious tapping on the computer. “Right, so you have a home phone and two mobiles registered, you’re out contract, I’ve got your address, your tax file number, inside leg measurements and some photographs taken in through your eyes“. He looks at me.
“I used to work at Telstra”.

Back to the computer. Tap tap. “OK so the deal I can give you is unlimited texting and $600 of phone time a month.” How does anyone use up $600 of phone time a month? I was having trouble using up my $30 a month. “Maybe ring overseas?”

And thus it came to pass that I assisted Samsung in their epic battle with Apple.

To be fair I have assisted Apple with their epic battle with Samsung. All over the place are reviews of Mountain Lion that reach the same conclusion: it doesn’t suck as bad as Lion. I don’t know why they bother with the other 199 new features when the main one is so compelling. They could double their sales straight away with the slogan “The World’s Most Advanced Operating System That Isn’t Stoned Off Its Conk”. It’s only when you stop using Lion that you realised just how many cones that cat is pulling.

Like, am I opening a folder? That’s heavy.

Apart from that it’s a .1 upgrade that changes just enough to break compatibility with all the sound cards again. I wonder if there’s anyone still working at AVID to fix that.

There’s some kind of nagging bar down the right hand side that looks awfully like the one that Microsoft Outlook already throws at me. Fuck knows why that’s a new feature. And you can get it to tweet your trash to Facebook or something, I kind of lost interest at that point.

Time to ring overseas to try consume some of this phone contract…

Chooks

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It’s hard to keep chooks these days what with the price of real estate. Your average chook shed would use up a few million dollars of inner city espace and besides the neighbors are ready for protest, fresh from shutting down every live music venue in earshot. My grandad had chooks, I do not. This is a sure sign of the decadence of our age.

Here you see Grandad Ellard, eldest brother and chooks. Cat is optional. When viewing chooks, you wear a hat. I was not even born, and saw no such chooks.

Even by the time I was born, you were hard pressed to have chooks. You made do with less interesting substitutes.

Even the quality of image has decayed since the golden age. I can assure you that these were not good layers. Of eggs, that is.

Pigs are about the closest things to chooks that the 70′s had to offer, in fact when I think of the 70s pigs are prominent in the vision, along with fondue and Woody Allen. You could still have a shed, and they were about as bright but no one was really fooled. I’m extremely jealous of the missus who was close friends with a hen all the way up to the 1980s. Apparently you didn’t have to wear a hat to view chooks in the United States, this is probably something related to judge’s wigs.

My parents had a really weird idea of household pets.

When I go back through the family photos and see pets like ‘Slimy’ and ‘Instant Death’, I’m always aware that other kids had pets you could hug. My first pet was a turtle. I think it got absorbed by one of the others.

But at least I know about pets. When you ask the kids these days about chicken wire they tell you it’s for reinforcing sculptures. That would be sculpture wire. I ask them why it’s called chicken wire and they get that look like you unfriended them. They think chicken is something that comes in korma and why is it in their sculpture o.m.g.? One even sniffed the plaster to see if it was chicken flavoured.

I might be off the mark but it seems to me that part of the problem in the world is that as the number of household chooks has declined, the number of bad things in the world has risen (you could draw a graph). This causes things like the Batman mass murder shooting, Tony Abbot and YouTube comments. If people had a hat and chooks to look at they wouldn’t be so upset all the time. I’m going to write to Melinda Gates and suggest this could be a cheap way to make things better.

WE HAD FAIL

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Update installed!

UPDATE ON FAIL – MOST FAIL IS SCOOPED UP – CEASE LAMENTING

Update: pulling all the entries back out of the WP database succeeded and so we are now good to go. I’ll have to refind some images. No major drama.

Unfortunately something spinning at a great speed decided to collide with itself and send data into the multiverse. This took down both tomellard.com and sevcom.com for a short while. All of the static pages were back again later that morning Australian time. Unfortunately both the blogs have some structural damage that is more tricky to figure out. The articles are intact in the database – I can see them all. But the published structure is messed up and links don’t work and all that jazz. It’s going to take a bit of time to rebuild this one.

But the scanning goes on!

Dead Calm

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You’re in a ship and it’s slowly sinking. And you listen carefully to the burbling of the water, the creaking of the boards to figure out which part of the vessel will be the last to go under. But instead a strange tumult of sounds, none of which seem to add up to a clear escape.

Right now the restaurants are dying, or so the papers tell me. Places with French names or IndoSpanish chefs, of the sort that place one grain of rice on your plate and squeeze a drop of sauce flown in from Tuscany; these are becoming extinct. Can’t say I’ve eaten at such places too often, but for some reason the dread is there… first they came for the musicians… then they came for the chefs…

Like bees and frogs, two animals that won’t be here for your grandchildren, upmarket restaurants aren’t as cuddly as koalas but their demise is indicative of the general mood. As much as the newspapers, which are also dying.

Many shops are shuttered on the main drag near where I live. Dress shops mainly, but also cinemas, restaurants, newsagents – the music stores closed long ago. Probably some of them have migrated to the suburban malls. Not all of them. I keep being told that the change is evolutionary, that we are becoming more efficient. Efficiency will come when Apple, Amazon and their kind are the last ones standing. There’s only one life raft.

The organisers at the VIVID presentation kept talking about The Creative Industry. Something that you could do here better than China they kept insisting. Not being able to actually make anything. The Lord Mayor has set aside money for start ups around Sydney; in my own Surry Hills I’m surrounded by Lord Mayoral Seedlings, in the cheap real estate once sweat shops for the dead fashion industry.

You know that bit in Dead Calm where Sam Neill is working the bilge pump in the ghost ship, but the water just keeps on rising? Yeah, the Creative Industry.

Homoeopathic remedy that one – there’s a process that concentrates wealth with a few individuals, so what we’ll do is pay people to join in. Then maybe it will trickle down.

It’s better here than anywhere else. Boats keep arriving full of desperate people mixed with the few that sent their cash ahead of time. Our Prime Minster elect has vowed that he personally will don budgie smugglers, swim out and drag them all back to Indonesia. Boats are coming faster knowing that he’s crazy enough to do just that.

(There’s easier ways to climb on board if you’re cashed up enough, just study ‘The Creative Industry’ at Kunst Kamp for long enough and you get your visa. That’s my contribution to the whole dampness.)

The part I’m curious about is when everything has closed down to the extent that people can’t order anything from Amazon no matter how much the price is squeezed down. That is, what happens when you have a super efficient trawler and all the fish are gone. You’re fucked, just as much as all the smaller businesses that you wore down. What I’m interested in is at what point the conglomerates realise that is the final outcome and if and when they will start ‘fish farms’. That is, some kind of ‘trickle down’ or private dole system (depending on your religious convictions) so that there’s some customers still left. If I was running one of these cyber trawlers, I’d be starting NOW.

The creaking noise is coming from up ahead, just to the right.

Reclusive and Colourful

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Part 1: Colour.

Having complained about the lack of colour sense in most synthetic video I’m doing the required reading. Colour is a rabbit hole, deep and treacherous. I know Johannes Itten, grew up with his Art of Colour in my parents house like the family bible.

He has blue, yellow and red sitting there looking as if they mean business. I don’t know how Itten could run this fallacy so long when ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’ don’t actually make ‘green’. Not using pigments and not in any printing process I’ve used, where yellow, cyan and black are required (and a spot colour more likely). I haven’t yet found where the idea started. I’m halfway through Gage’s Colour And Meaning and he’s not yet decided. He has however dug into an issue that concerns me by blaming Newton solidly for wrapping the rainbow into a circle simply because it recapitulated the octave. And there it is in Itten’s colour wheel, neatly broken into 12 ‘notes’. Newton is looking the cause of centuries of bullshit by that one conceit.

Gage is thankfully free of most philosophical musings although he does jump back and forwards in time to make a point. He turns out to be have been a visitor at my work, but died this year. (Worse still, there was a showing of Ralph Balson’s paintings at my work in the first year I was there and because I am a dumbfuck musician I didn’t know who it was about).

Working at an art college is damn fine for big glossy books about colour theory. But the best book so far turns out to be a very simple and practical one by Hilary Page. She takes you from diagrams of the retinal cells to mixing watercolours in an economy of pages and touches on everything you need to know about the psychology of colour and how to tweak it. This is the text I would force any video artist to read before they start wobbling their rectangles.

Actually it makes me think about interfaces that can get away from Red, Green and Blue faders. Something like Kuler should be the front panel.

Part 2: Reclusive.

A … funny? sobering event – distant family in the USA needed to contact us urgently. Apparently that was difficult and annoying because I’m visible but not easily contactable. By current norms I’m not ‘social’ enough. A recluse.

Vimeo and YouTube and GMail and Windows Live and Linked In (which ended up being the venue) 7 email addresses and a whole host of specialist sites isn’t enough. Being ‘social’ is as programmatic as the days of presenting your visiting card in the drawing room. In lieu of FaceBook I have invites showing up at Linked In that are obviously not about locating next year’s employment damnit.

Look, you spend 20 years with some kind of net address (OK so some of that was fidonet but it still counts) and then you’re not social enough. Screw it. DO I HAVE TO BE ON FACEBOOK?? ADVICE? (If you are one of my creepy stalkers don’t answer that thanks).

Baggage

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Eh, I was supposed to work on the game this weekend but a mounting level of

filled up the two days. Projects have weighted urgency and unfortunately the time had come for polishing the antiques.

I’d promised to restart the old scan section on sevcom.com which is kind of like promising to clean the fridge that broke down 3 years ago, you don’t even want to open it – just nuke the entire folder and start again. The best way is via yet another WordPress install but rather than annoy Stephen I figured out a template and cut n pasted pages for every year. Each page is a bunch of JavaScript droplets where I can load images and make the thumbnails automatically. Some weird stuff with the tool caching wrong pictures but eventually working.

Next problem is that I’d made all the scans into PDF which is sensible in that Acrobat does OCR and adds metadata so a more complex library could be based on searches of the actual text. Overkill for this job but good for possible employment skills. However the PDFs won’t thumbnail and all have to be made into JPEGs. Despite the leap second – by midnight on Sunday I’d only got pages for the first few years, some 90′s stuff and 2010 done. And that’s it for the museum for a while.

Heh, you wish.

The fantiques are the loudest pressure group and would gladly have me do 1982 until death. Scans will need to be renovated at a decent pace to avoid emails with the same tone as your grandma discovering you’re no longer going to church.

Videos are another problem. When moving to Vimeo I made an agreement with Stephen R Jones that I’d work from masters or at least good copies, but there’s not always one available until he’s managed to cut together all the dubs he has on file. Sometimes I get asked why this or that isn’t up and the answer is the YouTube version was off VHS and we’re trying to go back to the original. It takes time. I’ve currently got A Million Angels in my request bin, but no good copy to work with.

Only two weeks ’til term starts again and I get washed under students. Course design is back on the agenda, as is the damn annual exhibition. This was a year where I was supposed to take it easy. All this workaholic stuff must mean I have some kind of psychological