A few reasons why the Internet is great

Today I spent my day at home, doing some preparation work for my role in this year's production of South Metro Showtime, the local Scout and Guide theatre production I've been involved with for the last 15 years (shameless plug: Aug 20-28 at the Alexander Theatre, tickets on sale now, www.southmetroshowtime.org.au)

While the majority of my years in the show have been spent on-stage, the last few I have helped backstage, mostly in the lighting area. This year, however, I've been made head of department for the newly created Video department, as we are introducing to our bag of tricks two large plasma screens with which to project extra content in addition to the human interaction on stage.

While a couple of pieces of this "non-human content" (as I have dubbed it) are being filmed, the majority of it are images and video either created by myself or the much more talented Matty B, or sourced from the vast repository of media that is the Internet.

While I was pulling all this content together today, it occurred to me; had we been attempting the same thing in my first show 15 years ago (leaving aside the fact that giant plasma screens weren't around then), it would have been much more difficult, as although the Internet existed, it was a vastly different and smaller landscape back then.

Let's review some of the tools I used this afternoon, and whether they were available 15 years ago:

• YouTube (material for background video montages) - created 2005


• Google Images (still images to use as backgrounds) - created 2001


• Google (used to research video conversion and editing methods) - created 1998


• OpenOffice Impress (creating slideshows for background information) - PowerPoint created 1987, OpenOffice created 2000

If you're any good at all at maths, you'll have worked out that only one of those tools was available for my first show in 1996, and that's Powerpoint (and it would have to have been the Microsoft version). And it isn't an Internet tool anyway (although a useful piece of software if you use it properly - I'll save my rant on bad Powerpoint Presentations for another day)

Had I been doing this in 1996, I would have had to film and edit versions of the videos I needed myself, create the images myself (either by hand, or an early version of Corel or Photoshop), and if I needed tips on how to do anything of this, I would have needed to take a trip to my local library and search the catalogue for a relevant reference book. All of which would have taken a lot more than an afternoon and evening.

So my point is, we've come along way in a few short years. The Internet is a great time-saving (or, sometimes, time-wasting!) invention, no doubt one of humanity great technical achievements. Watching some of my Venturers and how connected they are now, I honestly think they would struggle to exist in the same world I grew up in at their age not so long ago!

Incidentally, to find out the dates each of the tools listed above was created, I used Wikipedia, another great invention, created 2001

A week is a long time in football...

Just got home from a great game of football - great if you're a Blues supporter like me of course!
Carlton this week put the sword to Essendon, sweet for many reasons, not the least of which are that they've had the wood over us for quite a while, and my little bro supports them, so it's always good to get bragging rights over him too!

The really confounding thing about the whole exercise though is - how could we be so bad for the last few weeks, yet so good tonight?

Save for a couple of changes, the list is pretty much the same. The really frustrating thing from a supporter's point of view is just the inconsistency at present; the fact that we can be terrible one week and fantastic the next.

But, at least for a week, the heat is off us and back on Essendon, which is a good thing in my book!

Phones, Phones, Phones

Unless you've been living under the proverbial rock, you'll know that the new iPhone4 is now available in Australia.

Currently, I have an iPhone3G, on a contract that has about 6 months left to run. As such, I'm starting to think now about what phone I might like to get when the contract runs out.
My iPhone has served me pretty well, but it has a few drawbacks. The two biggest ones are:
- it's really slow these days
- it doesn't play well at all with Linux (which both my home computers run)

There are a lot more options available now in the "smartphone" market than there was when I got the iPhone. As well as addressing the issues above, any new phone needs to accomodate the following:
- sync to Google Calendar
- good email access
- Good music interface (my phone is also my portable music player)

With those requirements, I'd probably lean towards getting something running Android, but even within that sub-category, there's plenty of options (and probably even more by the time my contract runs out)

What's probably going to sway it for me is other people's experiences with any phones under consideration. So, I throw the issue open to my readers: what would you recommend?

Where content is king...

I promised something about the current election campaign.
This is something, but only a brief something. I'll have more at a later date I'm sure (probably as pollies from all sides sink to new levels of shamelessness and stupidity).

Anyway, news today is that the debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott has been moved forward one hour from Sunday 19:30 to Sunday 18:30.
The reason? Sunday 19:30 is the finale of Masterchef season 2. And no one in their right mind wants to go up against that juggernaut.

Much has been made of the fact that a debate between two people who could potentially lead our country has been upstaged by a TV show, and what this might suggest about our society.
My thoughts were: what idiots in the campaigns didn't look at a TV schedule before agreeing on a date for the debate?!

Given how important TV has been in election campaigns around the world since it's invention 60-odd years ago, and the fact that you want to maximise your audience (thus maximise your opportunity to influence the electorate), you'd pay attention to what might take away from that.

One look at a TV schedule and all this could have been avoided. That's all I'm saying...

Walking, talking and chewing gum...

Disclaimer: this post is going to be (vaguely) about my work.
I say this because, I don't intend for this blog for me to pontificate or bitch and whine about my work life. This isn't an industry-related blog (although if you want to read one of those, my cousin writes an excellent one). Also, unlike many people, I don't have the delusion that the average person finds the minutae of what I do that interesting. Although (as consumers), they tend to like the end result.

But I digress.

I had a pretty disappointing day at work today. The nature of my job is such that each engineer works on many projects at once (anywhere between 15 and 25 generally, in various stages of development). Today, in my weekly meeting with our project management team, I found that 6 of my projects are running late, and moreover, some key points had been missed on some of them.

One could suggest that I have some time-management issues. One would not be the first to do so. But, after some reflection, I think my issue isn't so much with time management, as with multitasking management. The problem I find is, having to do 15 things at once on a multitude of projects, I'm not able to concentrate on one thing at a time long enough to effectively complete the task.

Obviously this is something I need to work on - when I find a good solution I'll let you know.

Bitter and unfulfilling

Just got home from the footy.
I don't know how it happened, but at some time in the last 6 weeks, Carlton has forgotten how to actually play football.

Here are some tips for my Carlton brethren:
a) Go hard at the ball, but also be mindful of where it's going; make sure you are where the ball is going to be
b) Lay tackles
c) Back yourselves to run and carry the football, and run in numbers (watch the St Kilda game from earlier in the year to remind yourselves how to do this)

If I was Brett Ratten, this week I'd put the Aussie Rules balls away, and get the boys playing basketball and rugby. I realise this sounds counter-intuitive, but basketball will help them with skills such as reading the play, and covering their man in defence, and rugby will obviously help with tackling. What Brett actually does remains to be seen, but whatever it is, I hope it works!

Also, it seems we're now in an election campaign. More on that later...

Time (mis)management

OK, so obviously, I've been severely lacking in the postage department.

There are two main reasons for this:
1) I haven't had time to sit down and write something decent
2) I haven't been able to think of anything to write (this could be related to point 1)

But then I thought maybe I'm being too picky about what I'm posting.

Anyway, consider this post a place-holder, I will post more shortly...