by cameron | May 19, 2007 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
So… who is going to challenge my top score on Spinword? My best score on Spinword Eternal is 11860. My best word was “dilute”.
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Today is day two of the fast. My weight yesterday morning was 95.2. Today it’s 94.2. I’m feeling it today. Headache, feeling fuzzy. Every food smell seems enhanced. It’s not so much feeling hungry, just like you’ve run a marathon. Slightly cranky and not quite with it.
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I sat in on Ewan’s live Rock Show this morning. Very cool. Had a group Skype IM windows open with about 6 or 7 people in it, commenting on the tracks he was playing, making requests, asking for shout outs, etc. I’d love to have G’Day World set up like that. Live. Will have to find out how he did it.
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My movie recommendation of the week: The Wrong Man aka Lucky Number Slevin, depending on which country you are in. Terrific gangster black comedy starring Bruce Willis, Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Sir Ben Kingsley and Lucy Liu. Directed by Paul McGuigan. Someone on IMDB described it as “Layer Cake meets Kiss Kiss Bang Bang meets The Usual Suspects” and I’d add in a bit of Pulp Fiction. Fast snappy Sorkinesque dialogue. Good plot twists – not completely invisible, I saw them coming, but still fun nonetheless. Smarter than most films I’ve seen recently.
DON’T bother seeing Spiderman 3. Apart from the Saturday Night Live homage (and, of course, the awesome Bruce Campbell cameo), it’s a terrible disappointment on many levels, not the least being the weak portrayal of Venom. Where is the tongue? What happened to the tongue?
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Eddie Everywhere McGuire has finally been boned from the top job at Channel Nine. While he claims he hasn’t been boned, it’s obvious that he either was pushed or realized he had to fall on his sword. My guess is the latter. He’s no idiot and he has to realize what a disaster year he has lead them through. I admire Eddie, he’s built himself up nothing to become a major power player in media, politics and sport at a very young age, through sheer hard work and schmoozing. But I never thought he was the guy to turn Nine around. If they want to become leaders again they need to make leadership choices. Do something bold, exciting, innovative, not just take the same bullshit formulas that have been destroying television for the last ten years and do more of the same. Eddie has hosted some of the worst examples of television in history. They need someone in the top job who understands that television in this country is currently just a race to the bottom and the only way out is to re-invent and re-imagine, not more of the same.
I love the way the Melbourne papers are sucking up to him today. No-one wants to call it like it is. They are all afraid of him. Eddie – you’re a winner. No doubt about it. But you fucked up the Nine job mate. Boning Jessica. White-anting Jana Wendt. Cutting the News staff. Making 1 vs 100. Pretending the Beaconsfield mine was worth more than a 5 minute story.
The only good call was putting Sarah Murdoch on the screen every morning. That was genius.
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by cameron | May 18, 2007 | TPN
Ewan hitman Spence is taking it to the streets less than 12 hours to produce TPN ROCK LIVE!
Who: Ewan Spence & TPN Rockers (that means you)
What: TPN Rock Live!
When: Friday, May 18 (see below for times)
Where: Listener’s choice
Why: Is there a better way to end the week?
Attendance is mandatory for TPN Rock fans. You’ll not want to miss Ewan live, in-studio as he produces The Rock Show live from Leith FM in Edinburgh. To join the party, go grab the file needed to plug into your media player, add Ewan to your IM, tune in at the designated time and prepared to be rocked.
Time Conversion
# GMT: 2100-2300
# Central European: 2300-0100
# USA (East Coast): 1700-1900
# USA (West Coast): 1400-1600
# Australlia: 0700 (Saturday)-0900
# New Zealand 0900 (Saturday)-1100
I will be there with my rockin’ boots on baby.
by cameron | May 18, 2007 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
I’m starting another fast today. So if I go a bit wonky (more wonky than usual) you know why. It’s time for a winter cleanse. Focus the mind. Heal the body. Renew the self-discipline. Hardcore. A little bit of self-denial.
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Christopher Moltisanti RIP. Holy hell, what a scene.
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I’m on a panel (with TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley and SEO guru Jim Stewart) at the evolve 07 marketing conference next month in a session called “Content Anarchy: Lunaticsandasylums”. Should be fun. If you’re going to be there, come and say hi.
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I recently ordered some new business cards from moo. What a great service. Fast, cheap, sent to my door, faster than the cards I normally get printed here in Melbourne! Definitely a keeper. They have the G’Day World album art on the back.
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I caught up with the Managing Director of Rubber Records recently and he gave me a CD with some of their recent tracks. They have some GREAT bands: Offcuts, Andrew Morris, The Exploders, GB3, The Casanovas – I’ve played this CD a bunch of times and these are some killer tracks. Good to hear some good Aussie rock. We really need an Aussie rock show on TPN.
****** Hi mick.
by cameron | May 17, 2007 | Podcast, science, singularity, technology, transhumanism
Forgive me Father – it’s been at least two weeks since my last podcast.
I figured you guys needed some time to digest my last run of shows. Ready for more yet?
Another show on the coming of the technological singularity today. My guest is Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder and research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in California.
I have been aware of Eli for ten years or more. He was featured fairly prominently in Damien Broderick’s book The Spike and was a contributor to Natasha Vita-More’s Extropian mailing list in the mid to late Nineties.
An autodidact prodigy, Eliezer wrote the first version of his Singularity “call to arms”, Staring Into The Singularity, at the age of 15 and has been re-working it continually since then.
On this episode I’ve tried to capture Eliezer’s vision for the different forms that the Singularity might take, the timelines for it, and his motivations for trying to make it happen as soon as possible.
I hope you enjoy it.
If you want to hear more interviews about The Singularity or AI, try these previous episodes of G’Day World:
Dr Aubrey de Grey
Ray Kurzweil
Roger Williams
Dr Ben Goertzel
by cameron | May 17, 2007 | media 2.0, Melbourne
I had a terrific time at The Domain event in Melbourne last night. Full congrats to Sally and Deb for putting it on and to Brad “Best Technology Industry Journalist†Howarth for his interview with Aussie digital media pioneer Domenic Carosa from Destra. I’ve known Dom for quite a few years now but have never really had the chance to sit down with him over a few beers and hear him talk from the gut. It was great to hear his passion for his business and for digital media come out. I admire greatly what he has done since he and his sister started the business in 1993 when he was only 18! He said last night that neither of them took a single cent in income for the first 7 years! They were living at home with their parents. Now THAT’S a start-up baby.
The only worrying moment of the night was when I went up to say g’day to Brad and he said to the people he was with “now here’s the one person I am afraid of”. Little ol’ me Bradley? Oh buddy. I’m sweet as pie. Why afraid?
Scienta was there. Jeremy from Skylook was there. Paul McKenna from Computer Trader was there. And his partner in the SMS business, Carl Krumins from K.A.S. The three of us talked long and hard about how to use SMS to help Father Bob raise money and how to use SMS as a feedback mechanism for podcasts. I finally got to meet the famous Kerri Lee Sinclair after hearing about her for many years. And James Tuckerman from Australian Anthill magazine was there. What a terrific story there guys have. I can’t wait to get him the show to tell you about their history. Brilliant start-up story.
I hope MODM is half as good as last night was. It’ll be our first real event (the last one was more of a planning event for this one) and, like all good things, I’m sure it will take a while to find its feet, but with Dr Peter Ellyard there as our guest, we’re off to a flying start.
by cameron | May 3, 2007 | Uncategorized
Finally – the Do Not Call register opened in Australia today and takes effect at the end of the month.
According to News.com.au:
Demand to register for the donotcall.gov.au website was so great today that it crashed after receiving more than 50,000 applications.
You have to ask which monkeys were hired to build it if it fell over so easily.
by cameron | May 3, 2007 | Podcast, science, singularity, technology, transhumanism
by cameron | May 3, 2007 | Uncategorized
Oh I hope I’m wrong. Please tell me I’m wrong. It’s quite possible. It’s 1am and I’m still kind of drunk. But as I was trying to get to sleep, this question bugged me:
“How many people lived and died for me to be here?”
In other words, “How many direct ancestors do I have?”
The reason this is an important question is because I know that I am the legacy of those ancestors. In most cases, the ONLY thing they left behind to show they were here, were their children and grandchildren. Their DNA. I am their legacy.
So how many direct ancestors do I have?
I know I had two parents. They had to live for me to be here. They each had two parents. And so forth and so on, back in time. Let’s say that, on average, each set of parents procreated the next generation when they were about 30 years of age. How many ancestors do I have?
This problem bothered me enough that I had to get back up and knock out a simple spreadsheet to work it out.
I got as far as 10,000 years (approximately 8000 B.C.E.) and gave up.
If I go back 60 years, I have 6 ancestors – my parents (2) and my grand-parents (4) = 6.
If I go back 90 years, I have 14 – the above plus my great-grandparents (8).
Now… if I go back 500 years, I have 262,142. Feeling the burden of responsibility yet??
Go back 1000 years – 34,359,738,366 (aka 34 billion).
Go back 2000 years – 295,147,905,179,353,000,000 (295 quintillion).
Go back 10,000 years – 34,996,011,596,528,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000 (yeah.. whatever. But it’s 3.4996E+100).
Now… how old is the human race (fundamentalist Christians need not answer)? According to Wikipedia
“The most widely accepted view among current anthropologists is that Homo sapiens originated in the African savanna around 200,000 BP.”
I don’t think Excel could handle those orders of magnitude.
So unless I’m wrong (PLEASE tell me I’m wrong), this many humans lived, scratched out a living in the dirt, fought desperately against the elements, and then died – all so I could be here. So YOU could be here.
WE ARE THEIR LEGACY.
Here’s the question I am asking myself – WHAT AM I DOING TODAY TO LIVE UP TO THAT RESPONSIBILITY?
……..
Here’s my spreadsheet.
Please tell me I’m wrong.
I’m going to try to go to sleep.
by cameron | May 3, 2007 | Uncategorized
As you know, I have had a particularly tricky virus on my PC which, apart from popping up sites all the time, had disabled my ability to restart, shutdown or hibernate my PC.
I tried AVG, Windows Defender and Ad-Aware. None of them got rid of it. Tonight I finally installed Spybot S&D and guess what! It found the little bugger, healed it, and when I re-booted (manually shutting the power off) – the problem is solved. I can shutdown again! Hooray! Thank you Spybot S&D.
by cameron | May 1, 2007 | Podcast, Uncategorized
Wow. I just had one of those whooooooo moments, when the world spins. I was reading Brook Turner’s article on George Miller from last week’s Australian Financial Review magazine. Anyone who knows me well knows how much I admire George. MAD MAX and MAD MAX II are obviously the greatest Australian films ever made and two of the greatest films ever made full stop. On top of that, I’ve always admired Miller’s auteurness, the way he has avoided the Hollywood system, followed his own vision, done it his way. That appeals to the rebel in me.
So just imagine when I read these paragraphs in the article:
“Miller’s first big eureka moment came when he attended a lecture by the maverick American thinker and polymath Buckminster Fuller at university in the late sixties.”
And then, a few paragraphs later…
“Miller’s second great epiphany came when he heard the American writer Joseph Campbell speak on a rainy night in Santa Monica after he had made MM (Mad Max).”
Again, anyone who knows me well knows that Joseph Campbell has been a major influence on my thinking for 20 years. And recently I have been obsessed with Fuller. So weird. I also know that my friend Peter Ellyard has been heavily influenced by both of them as well. As, I guess, have lots of people. It’s just weird when you find out that someone you’ve admired for a long time has had very similar influences to yourself. If the article had said he was also a fan of Napoleon, I probably would have choked on my cereal.
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Rage Against the Machine reunites! It might have only been for a one-off concert but we can only hope that the boys will put the band back together. God knows we need them now more than ever. I am a HUGE fan of RAtM. I haven’t heard that kind of anger or genuine passion in music since they left us 7 years ago (can it really be that long??). Even Lou and Bruce can only summon a fraction of the heat and intensity of Zack. And now you do what they told ya….
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I said to a friend of mine today “I was watching a great speech by Vint Cerf today”. The friend replied “Should I know who that is?”.
This person is a webmaster for a pretty big company. When I explained that Vint is the co-inventor of the internet, the friend replied “Does that have anything to do with the term “surfing” the internet?”
Which lead me to think…
Vint Cerf has to be (with Bob Kahn) perhaps the most successful inventor in history, certainly if you measure the success of an inventor as ‘adoption of the invention over time’. Since they invented the internet in 1973, it has grown to over one billion customers. Even Microsoft doesn’t have that many customers. If you stop the average person in the middle of any street anywhere in the world and ask them “Have you heard of the internet?”, I think the response rate will be pretty high, even if they aren’t fortunate enough yet to be a ‘user’. However, I wonder – if you ask the same person “Who is Vint Cerf?”, they probably won’t be able to answer you. I wonder how that feels? I should get him onto the show and ask him. I’ve been watching this speech he recently gave to Hungarian “TV University” and he comes across as a nice guy, a regular human being. Can you even begin to imagine the impact he has had on the future of the human race? Bucky Fuller would have loved the internet. Talk about being a future maker!
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The Silverlight demo that Microsoft announced last night at MIX07 is pretty cool. Sean Alexander, the product manager, is coming on the G’Day World this week or maybe next to talk to us about it in more depth.
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I was getting very excited last night about the HUGE increase in audience to my Napoleon podcast during April (400%) until I got the full TPN stats today. It looks like we’ve had a few very naughty people trying to DOS my servers during the month. Fortunately they failed but in the process they completely screwed my stats. Either that or it’s innocent and someone inadvertently tried to download a couple of our shows tens of thousands of times over a couple of days. Either way, it’s ruined my day.
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Marshall Kirkpatrick and the folks at Splashcast today launched their new application which looks like a very cool media player. Unfortunately, they have chosen to brand it “MyPodcastNetwork”. Obviously I have issues with that. So I have sent them an email requesting a discussion immediately. Hopefully we can resolve this in a polite fashion.
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