by cameron | Nov 27, 2007 | Podcast, singularity, Uncategorized
Yesterday, November 26, was the third anniversary of G’Day World and Australian podcasting. What started off as an experiment to see how to record two Skype calls turned into a full-time job. Check out the first show here. I hope that’s a lesson to all the kids out there. If an idiot like me can make a living out doing something fun like making podcasts, what can smart folks like you do?
That said, I still feel like we’re just starting. I’m frustrated on a daily basis with how little I have achieved in the last three years and the road ahead seems daunting and exciting at the same time. Not a bad way to be actually.
I’d like to thank everyone who has listened, commented, provided advice, support and money to the show over the last three years. I especially want to thank my guests and co-hosts. It’s been great to share the journey with you. I especially want to thank my family to allowing me to piss $500,000 of our life savings into TPN without lopping off my nads. And to my TPN partners (aka the ‘hosts’), Mano , and the guys from AnyWebCam.com who have kept us running over the last couple of months – without your continued support and vision, none of this would be possible.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to review some of the 300+ shows that I think have been significant (in no particular order):
#147 – John Romero – creator of DOOM
#242 – Vint Cerf – co-inventor of TCP/IP and hence the Internet
#42 – Dr Aubrey de Grey – life extension researcher
#56 – Noam Chomsky – world’s leading intellectual and critic of American foreign policy
#57 – Ray Kurzweil – scientist and author, prophet of the Technological Singularity
#60 – David Weinberger – co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”
#61 – Doc Searls – co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”
#264 – Dr Peter Ellyard, Futurist (Part 4) – Australia’s leading futurist
#243 – Dr Peter Ellyard (part 3) – Australia’s leading futurist
#238 – Eliezer Yudkowsky – world leading AI researcher and futurist
#302 – Dr John Demartini on overcoming your fears – inspirational speaker and author
#271 – Vernor Vinge, SF Author Extraordinaire – Award-winning SF author, predicted the cyberspace in 1981
#290 – Julian Burnside QC – one of Australia’s highest profile barristers and human rights advocates
There are heaps more but this is a start.
by cameron | Nov 23, 2007 | Melbourne, Podcast
Note: I just realized I introduce this show as #302 when it’s actually #303. Meh.
As you may know, I’ve recently become slightly obsessed about Ned Kelly. While I’ve been interested in the subject for several years, since I realized during a trip to Glenrowan in 2004 that I didn’t know much of the story, a recent trip to the Old Melbourne Gaol prompted me to investigate further.
Here’s the thing people: Ned Kelly was and is a true Australian hero. He wasn’t a “bushranger” – he was a freedom fighter, an Irish Catholic who stood up to the British Protestant authorities and threatened them with a rebellion. He was a political leader, whose life and career was brutally cut short by corrupt authorities. He is a hero who gave his life to make a stand and we should celebrate him as a hero.
My guest tonight, Paul O’Keefe, is a direct descendant of the Kelly Gang, who travels to schools around the country to set the story straight.
Links for further reading:
- Paul’s site: Kelly Gang Educational Services
- Ned Kelly: Iron Outlaw
- Wikipedia: Ned Kelly
- The Jerilderie Letter
The track on this episode is:
Ween
“Your Party” (mp3)
from “La Cucaracha”
(Rounder Records)
Buy at Rounder Store
More On This Album
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
TPN now has a HQ in Second Life! If you’ve never spent any time in SL, jump in, go to TPN HQ (by clicking this link) and add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends (that’s me). I’d be happy to show you around and help you find your SL legs.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
You can show your love by buying me stuff from my Amazon wish list.
You might DIGG the show.
Get the TPN version of Particls.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.
You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
by cameron | Nov 22, 2007 | movies
I just put up a new episode of The Movie Show with some reviews of films I’ve seen recently:
The Movie Show #44 – INTO THE WILD and BLADE RUNNER THE FINAL CUT
by cameron | Nov 22, 2007 | Cuba, Uncategorized
Yesterday I was presented with an early Xmas gift from Nick Hodge – Fidel Castro’s “My Life”, a recently published volume of interviews conducted by Ignacio Ramonet, the long-time editor of the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique, professor of communication at the University Denis Diderot in Paris and founder of Media Watch Global.
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thepodcastnet-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1416553282&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
This has jumped to the very top of my reading list.
Ramonet spent one hundred hours interviewing Castro between 2003 and 2005. Castro then reviewed the entire manuscript in 2006. This, then, is the closest we will ever get to having Fidel Castro’s autobiography.
Ramonet says he wrote it because young people around the world know little of the truth about Castro. After 48 years of American negative propaganda against him and the Cuban Revolution, the perception of Castro is mostly negative. He is perceived as a brutal dictator, a relic from the Cold War. Ramonet, however, paints a very different picture of the man. He describes him as “shy, a polite, affable man who pays attention to each person he talks to and speaks without affectation, yet with the manners and gestures of a somewhat old-fashioned courtesy that has earned him the title of ‘the last Spanish gentleman’.” He is also “indefatigable” – in his eighties, he still sleeps on average 4 hours a night, working through until five or six am every day, with his entourage of young assistants asleep on their feet. He lives frugally, with no luxury spent on himself – no palaces for Fidel. He is a man with a never-ending series of Big Ideas.
Ramonet writes of Castro:
“Moved by humanitarian compassion and internationalist solidarity, he has a dream, which he has spoken about a thousand times, of bringing health and knowledge, medicines and education, to every corner of the planet.
As for Cuba itself, Ramonet writes:
“Although the face of Fidel is often in the press, on television and in the street, there is no official portrait, nor is there a statue or coin or avenue or building or monument dedicated to Fidel Castro or any other living leader of the Revolution.
Despite the unceasing harassment from abroad, this little country, clinging to its sovereignty, has achieved undeniably admirable results in the area of human development: the abolition of racism, the emancipation of women, the eradication of illiteracy, a drastic reduction in infant mortality rates, a higher level of general knowledge…. In questions of education, health, medical research and sports, Cuba has achieved results that nany developed nations would envy.
Despite the persistent attacks by the United States and the 600 assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Cuba has never responded with violence. For forty-eight years, not a single act of violence encouraged or sponsored by Cuba has occurred in the United States.”
Cuba gets (and deserves) criticism from Amnesty International for some of its policies which deny it’s citizens civil freedoms, such as the freedom of association, freedom of opinion, freedom of movement, and the use of the death penalty. However there are no reported cases of torture in Cuba or ‘disappearances’, the murder of journalists or political assassinations or protest marchers beaten by police. There has NEVER been a popular uprising against the regime – in nearly fifty years. To understand why Cuba has some of those civil freedom restrictions, you have to understand the forces trying to destroy Cuba.
The Unites States government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in this decade alone trying to oust Castro, through NGO’s such as the “National Endowment for Democracy” (NED) and the “United States Agency for International Development” (USAID), which alone has delivered over $65 million to anti-Castro groups since 1996. According to Ramonet, hundreds of journalists around the world are paid to spread negative propaganda about Castro. Funding is provided by the USA to terrorist organisations hostile to the Cuban government such as Alpha 66 and to the now-perhaps-disbanded Omega 7.
Cuba has been under a devastating and evil economic embargo from the USA since 1960, severely crippling its economy, and yet Castro continues to defy their attempts to destroy the Revolution. He has survived relentless attacks on his person and his country by the most powerful economic and military superpower on the planet for 48 years while continuing to improve the living conditions of the 11 million citizens of Cuba.
The key to understanding Cuba and Castro is that you have to understand what life was like back before the Revolution when Cuba was governed by a series of corrupt and brutal regimes directly supported by the US government and US corporations. The quality of life for the citizens of Cuba was terrible. Castro changed all of that. He ousted Bastista’s corrupt regime and the US interests that backed it. He has significantly improved the living conditions of the Cuban people, all while fighting off the US government’s continued attempts on his life.
Please – read this book.
by cameron | Nov 20, 2007 | Uncategorized
Scott and Michael have another reason to be proud. The Digital Photography Show just hit the number #32 spot in the US iTunes directory! Well done guys!
by cameron | Nov 20, 2007 | Podcast
Well this is the first real show of Season 4 of the G’Day World odyssey with the new focus on answering the question “how can I make the world a better place?”
I’m very lucky to have a big hitter like Dr John Demartini back on the show to kick off the new season. Before any of us can make the world a better place we need to get out of our own way, sort out our shit, cut the victim mentality and stop buying into the manufactured ambivalence.
Dr Demartini is back in Australia running a seminar called “For Love or Money – Financial Fantasy and Relationship Reality” and I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions of my own as well as a few questions submitted to me over Twitter.
What is his seminar “For Love Or Money” about?
What is the difference between inspiration and motivation.
What does he say to people who say ‘I don’t know what I want to do with my life’
Success isn’t all about material wealth…. what about making the world a better place?
How are inspirational speakers different from religious leaders?
Do inspirational speakers have or use political influence?
John was married to the late Athena Starwoman. What are his thoughts about astrology?
Why is it that only a small portion of the population takes action under their own initiative?
What is his quest / mission?
What he personally do on a daily basis to stay authentic?
I like Demartini’s style. As I said the last time he was on the show (G’Day World 276), listening to him is like listening to a much more refined, wealthier, better looking version of myself. He articulates what I think is a terrific attitude towards life.
As I mention at the end of the show, you can get your FREE DVD of the evening event ‘For Love or Money’ with Dr John Demartini by clicking on the image below.
Tokyo Police Club
“Nature Of The Experiment” (mp3)
from “A Lesson In Crime”
(Paper Bag Records)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
TPN now has a HQ in Second Life! If you’ve never spent any time in SL, jump in, go to TPN HQ (by clicking this link) and add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends (that’s me). I’d be happy to show you around and help you find your SL legs.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
You can show your love by buying me stuff from my Amazon wish list.
You might DIGG the show.
Get the TPN version of Particls.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.
You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
by cameron | Nov 17, 2007 | Advertisers, Podcast
Russell Buckley from MobHappy, who I respect a lot and who has always provided great, brutal feedback when required, emailed me this morning slapping me around the head regarding a couple of issues I want to air here because I think they deserve a broader forum for discussion, as they touch upon issues I haven’t totally got my head around yet.
The first is regarding a somewhat defamatory entry made in my Wikipedia profile recently by someone who chose to remain anonymous – although, by looking at the IP address, I know who it is. The entry reads:
In 2007 Cameron sold out and excepted cash for comments from Telstra which included running shows about Telstra without owning up to the fact he is accepting money from them. He finally let it slip on the 11th Episode of On The Pod with Duncan Riley.
Now this isn’t the first time people (mostly this same person) has chosen to write shit about me in my Wikipedia entry. I’m not sure what the point of it is. Apparently they either don’t understand that Wikipedia is *supposed* to contain accurate, factual information – or they just want to be a dickhead, annoy me and waste my time. Needless to say, the person who wrote this didn’t ask me anything about what I’m doing for Telstra. He just wrote it up there based on a comment I made on Duncan’s show.
For the record – Telstra engaged my services recently to produce a series of podcast pilots for them which will be run off of their website, not TPN, starting in the new year. I haven’t mentioned it in detail because they have asked me not to – they want to “launch it” in the usual Telstra way with a full PR process. Fair enough. Since they have engaged my services, I think you’ll find I have kept my blogging and podcasting about Telstra agnostic as always – I wrote something as recently as this week saying their NextG wireless card didn’t seem to perform as well as Three’s NetConnect card on my testing. If this is “cash for comments”, then they are getting the raw end of the deal. The ironic thing is that they actually engaged my services, I believe, because they knew I would be an agnostic voice coming in and doing these shows, not somebody who is on the Telstra payroll. I make enough money from TPN that I don’t *need* to take corporate work. If anything, it cuts into the time I have to do TPN work. I take it, though, when interesting projects come my way and when I think the client genuinely shares the same vision I have for what podcasting should be about. In this case, the Telstra team I am working with share my vision. So I’m excited about it.
Anyway, here are the two questions I have about defamatory comments in Wikipedia:
1) What do you think the acceptable procedure is when people write shit about you? Should you a) amend it yourself (making sure, of course, that you log in and therefore put your changes on the record, not like this person or Adam Curry would do) or b) alert the Wikipedia editors about the issue or c) blog about it and hope somebody fixes it for you?
2) At what stage do you think people will realize they can be sued for writing defamatory comments in Wikipedia? I know back in February 2007 a pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sued a the owner of an IP address after allegedly defamatory comments were left on his Wikipedia entry. Personally I’m not a big fan of legal alternatives until you’ve tried all other possible avenues, and when I read this thing about me I just though “dickhead” and meant to blog about it but didn’t get around to it until Russell slapped me over it.
The other issue Russell asked me about is my sponsorship recently from Global1Training and the interview I did with Dr John Demartini. I won’t go into details about Russell’s concerns (he can do that here in the comments section if he thinks it’s appropriate) but I did want to mention that I’m doing a follow-up interview with Dr Demartini this Tuesday and would welcome your input into my questions for him. For the record – when I did my first interview with him, I had never heard of Global1Training and they approached me a few weeks later about sponsorship ideas. So if you have any concerns about my interview questions with John the first time around, know that there wasn’t even the suggestion of a commercial relationship until weeks later. And if you listen to that first episode I actually talked with Dr Demartini about getting him back on the show during his next trip to Australia, which happens to be this week. Just in case you were wondering….
The bottom line here is this: I think I’ve been doing this show long enough for regular listeners to know my attitudes towards transparency and integrity when it comes to advertising and commercial relationships. I genuinely value people like Russell calling me out when they are unsure of what’s going on – it makes me realize I need to be constantly vigilant about revealing my commercial interests as early as possible. There is a balance though between revealing them and keeping my mouth shut when I am working on projects for clients who want to reveal them in their own time and way. That’s just business. If I had been writing or podcasting really positive stories about Telstra lately I would feel obliged to reveal that money had changed hands but as I haven’t been doing that, I can sleep at night.
Any questions?
by cameron | Nov 15, 2007 | Melbourne
A couple of months ago I got a letter in the mail attached to a parking infringement notice claiming I had double parked out of the front of my kids’ school one morning and fining me $66.
Now I don’t remember ever double parking. So I sent them a letter asking for clarification. They sent me the above letter. Basically it says “well you did it so pay up or else”.
I just sent them a follow up email which states:
I am unfortunately unable to accept your assertion that I committed the said offense and respectfully request
evidence to support your claim before I consent to pay the fine. I believe in this country we are still considered innocent until proven guilty.
What do you think they will do? And do you think my position is fair? Should a council just be able to send you fines in the mail without providing evidence of your supposed crime? Or does this fit under the Federal Government’s new terror laws and I can be picked up by ASIO and held for questioning for ten days without even being informed of the charges?
by cameron | Nov 13, 2007 | TPN
It’s that time of the year again when we ask you, our most loyal and lovable audience, to spend ten minutes of your life answering a bunch of questions about what makes you tick. We do this in the hope that this information (all anonymous of course) will encourage advertisers to increase their interest in advertising on our podcasts. We love producing these shows for you and we love the fact that they are freely available. However it takes a lot of work, time and energy and the costs of the infrastructure grow every year. We need to generate some revenue to allow us to keep building and getting better. You can help once a year by filling out our survey.
Click Here to take survey
by cameron | Nov 12, 2007 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
Although I’ve been impressed with Telstra’s NextG card (the 7.2 Mobile Card Sierra AirCard 880E), including spending my lunch in a cafe today watching Henry Rollins interview Michael Chiklis on YouTube, running it full screen, it doesn’t seem to always work that well.
The NextG service is called “7.2” which you might think (as I did) means that it runs at 7.2 mbps but apparently not for the BigPond site states:
BigPond Wireless Broadband now covers a massive 98% of the population, making it Australia’s largest wireless network. It’s also faster, with average speeds of 550kbps to 1.5Mbps, and a peak network downlink speed of 3.6Mbps.
Maybe 7.2 is the version number?
As I started to write this post, I decided to test it using a broadband speed test while I sit in the Powell Hotel in Footscray, Melbourne (here’s a link to a map to see how far I am from Melbourne’s CBD) in case you think I’m sitting near Uluru.
Here are the results of the first test:
Telstra Test One
Test run on 12/11/2007 @ 05:39 PM
Mirror: Telstra Bigpond
Data: 600 KB
Test Time: 48.4 secs
Your line speed is 101 kbps (0.1 Mbps).
Your download speed is 13 KB/s (0.01 MB/s).
OUCH!
A quick look at the network monitor shows that the card’s signal isn’t great. See image below for a screenshot.
So I ran a second test and it just got worse:
Telstra Test Two
Test run on 12/11/2007 @ 05:51 PM
Mirror: Telstra Bigpond
Data: 3 MB
Test Time: 339.42 secs
Your line speed is 72 kbps (0.07 Mbps).
Your download speed is 9 KB/s (0.01 MB/s).
Hmmm… getting worse. My third and final test for today was slightly better:
Telstra Test Three
Test run on 12/11/2007 @ 06:00 PM
Mirror: Telstra Bigpond
Data: 3 MB
Test Time: 71.87 secs
Your line speed is 341 kbps (0.34 Mbps).
Your download speed is 43 KB/s (0.04 MB/s).
For a comparison, I plugged in my NetConnect card from Three and got these results:
Three Test One
Test run on 12/11/2007 @ 06:05 PM
Mirror: OptusNet
Data: 600 KB
Test Time: 5.68 secs
Your line speed is 860 kbps (0.86 Mbps).
Your download speed is 107 KB/s (0.1 MB/s).
Three Test Two
Test run on 12/11/2007 @ 06:06 PM
Mirror: OptusNet
Data: 3 MB
Test Time: 14.96 secs
Your line speed is 1.64 Mbps (1637 kbps).
Your download speed is 205 KB/s (0.2 MB/s).
Whilst I’m not going to give up on the Telstra NextG card just yet, this afternoon’s tests haven’t been positive.
The NextG card is available for $349 plus $114.95 per month for 1Gb data (see all pricing plans here).
Three’s NetConnect card is free on a 24 month plan and costs $29 per month for 1Gb data (see full pricing plans here).
UPDATE:
I’m sitting this morning at 35 Collins Street, downstairs from the Telstra offices, and the speed is much more acceptable, although still only a third of the speed I was getting on Three last night:
Test run on 13/11/2007 @ 09:48 AM
Mirror: Telstra Bigpond
Data: 600 KB
Test Time: 7.2 secs
Your line speed is 679 kbps (0.68 Mbps).
Your download speed is 85 KB/s (0.08 MB/s).
