I thought I might start painting some persistent memories.

Update: Interestingly I realised later I mis-remembered this, she was wearing thick black eyeglasses

Apparently LG’s $8000 Internet fridge flopped in 2004. At CES this week Whirlpool have announced their version of an Internet fridge that comes with some “fridge front door simulating” software and a pocket for various computer/display options.

Amazingly this coincides with me realising I needed an internet enabled fridge today while shopping for dinner. I don’t think I’d actually use the Internet in our kitchen, it’s too small for one thing & I’d have to crouch down as we have a bar fridge. However I’d really like to have some way of remembering whether M or I bought some food stuff the day before, or if there’s any left. There were three unopened punnets of tom thumb tomatoes in there when I brought the fourth one home tonight, I just couldn’t be sure whether I’d bought any and I had a particular meal in mind (John Dorey fillets cooked with tomatoes and olives with snow peas and brown rice).

Anyway, I wanted to be able to check my phone and see a still image of the current contents of my fridge. It just needs a web server, a digital camera and a cgi script to turn on the light and control the camera for me be able to retrieve such images. I don’t think I could ever use software to record what I put in there so this might be a crude but effective alternative?

I also don’t understand why, in this day and age, all TV’s don’t have built in wireless connectivity and a web browser.

Update: Later, actually now, I have no idea why i wrote this, perhaps just to keep my writing hand in? In a completely different mood I realise all I’m asking for is small high quality wireless cameras that can be controlled/accessed remotely. Surely these are a dime a dozen by now.

Ages ago, last year on November 22, I went with M to an event at the Bondi Pavillion called Interesting South. I decided to go because it was inspired by an event held in the UK that I read about on blogs and liked the sound of called Interesting 2007. The organiser of Interesting 2007, Russel Davies, said of it:

“The plan is to have all sorts of speakers speak about all sorts of stuff. Not brands, advertising, blogging and twitter but interesting, unexpected, original things. I’m hoping to find fascinating people and to just ask them to speak about something they care about. I want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, musics, jokes and whatever.”

You can get an idea of the result here on Russel’sBlog and at the Interesting 2007 Wiki

Anyway, At the local version, Interesting South, they handed out an orange feedback form which i filled in but forgot to hand back. You can go to the official site now and watch videos of all the speakers. But I thought it might be interesting to test just how interesting it was by reading my feedback and then record any triggered memories to the echo chamber, here on this site.

So, some memories:

• Cheese tasting: Claudia of McIntosh and Bowman Cheese Mongers (I kept her card) was there offering free samples of 10 or so different cheeses. She was extremely popular as it was around dinner time and there was no other food to be had around there. Also the cheese was excellent - I can even remember likeing a goats cheddar but not what it was called.
• Nudie Juice or Smirnoff Ice: Inclusive of the ticket price, courtesy of the sponsors I guess. I liked the Nudie but couldn’t drink the vodka, blurghhh.
• Random book on arrival: Everyone was given a book from a pile under the welcome table, I’m happy with mine, A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs - written in 1912 but with a beautiful 1979 cover by Michael Whelan. I’m enjoying it but not sure I’ll read the other 10 books in the series.
• Lots of attendees seemed to know each other, I didn’t run into anyone I know (I often do at tech/UX related events. The MC Katie Chatfield introduced it as a marketing conference which surprised me, but perhaps that suggests I don’t know many marketers?
• Subliminals in Lauren Brown’s presentation, gorey art photographs.
• Dan Hill’s drawings in his slides. He said they were rough but they looks like ideal interfaces to me hand drawn floating in space where they’re needed.
• Mat Moore, possibly my favourite, a epic poem about bad love and ethnobotany? set to power point.
• Small Town Australia, photos from Martin Mischkulnig’s future book. I think he said we’re lied to about small town’s aesthetics, i’m not so sure.
• Hug Man: He’s being evicted for opening up his home, I wonder what happened. Is it OK to depend on others so completely by choice?
• Dr Adrienne Withall: Happiness: “Not depressed does not equal happy”
• Pia Von Gelder: Dorkbot. I like how Pia read out her prez, like a long essay in monotone, it worked well with the hundreds of images of dorks and their toys - I’ll have to go one day soon.
• Can’t remember what Errol Flanagan said. In some ways I wish he’d just made us all hum with our eyes closed for the whole 3 minutes rather than a few seconds - I was really starting to enjoy it. Also like his gestures, he moved around the stage a lot i think.
• Natasha Lewis was promoting her coffee and managed a to explain half of what Fair Trade is. Was it collectivisation to achieve economy of scale and guaranteed prices?
• John McWhorter described fleeing a charging moose on a dog slead - I can’t remember how he escaped
• Samantha Graham spoke about language, sexism inherent in English
• Tim Baynes talked about conservation, had nice animated sheep in his slides. He illustrated the tragedy of the commons. He had a great chart showing how energy consumption has been tightly following the rise in GDP, reconfirmed for me that it will be hard to save the world and maintain growth.
• Tiffany Kenyan: Tango is about control
• Gavin Heaton, not to my taste, the Clue Train Manifesto through the eyes of his own children, reminded me of dressing up pets in dinner suits. I thought their dolls house was impressive though.
• Tim Noonan was blind and scared us all buy walking too close to the edge of the stage. He says he can tell a lot about people by the sound of their voices, calling it vocology. My favourite thing he said was “In my minds eye your all beautiful sexy people” which struck me as an incredible concept. I cannot really grasp what my minds eye would see If i’d always been blind.
• Rachel Wotton. She said something like “imagine never being touched by another human being except to be washed”, I agree only being touched in non sexual ways would be painful if you retained sexual feeling. I admire and see the value in her work.
• Tim Longhurst spoke about his grass roots campaign to attack Coca Cola’s fake grass roots campaign. I see one of their billboards every morning at Kings Cross St and was tricked into following up the web address. Zero Coke Movement is a great slogan - I liked his point about the canned soft drink business being an environmental disaster

Those are my memories jogged by reading my feedback form. You can go watch the videos to see whether they bear any resemblance to what actually occurred.

I went to the Sydney Festival opening day events yesterday and felt like a stranger in my own town. Which is my own fault because I left some friends in Martin Place when the waiting around, crowds and distorted music got to me and on the way home decided to look around on my own.

Saw weddings on Macquarie St, didn’t watch for long but hearing the celebrants solemn words booming out over the wandering gawking crowds was odd.

Then went to the domain where I caught the last few songs by Paul Kelly. I like his songs but don’t count myself as a fan, still when he and Kev Carmody sang From little things big things grow I got goose bumps hearing the melody and watching the crowd against the Sydney skyline.

The blue fibre optic things everyone was waving were handed out by a bank (one with a blue logo as seen on the stage tent). At one point the MC asked everyone to wave their sticks on behalf of the bank, the concert wasn’t free they expected payment - we were to wave for the camera, everyone obliged. I like that they waved harder though when the MC said “wave if your scared shitless of interest rates”.

I stayed for the first few Brian Wilson songs then walked home. The sound carried a long way and I could still hear him singing from my loungeroom - Good Vibrations sounded good.

I should own up. Yesterday while waiting for others to show up at the pub I finally worked out how to play the poker machines. I put in a dollar and got 100 1cent credits. I worked out that one credit = 1 line and wasn’t very fun, 5-10 credits/lines felt more promising. During about 2-5 minutes play (I got my moneys worth) I “struck lucky” (my word not sure what the real term is) twice and was offered the option to gamble on red or black (or something more complicated on suites) or “take my winnings”. I gambled everytime, at one point I recovered from just 13 credits to 60 (note I never exceeded my starting amount) before losing the gamble, black never looked so black.

When it was all over I kind of understood how it might be possible to enjoy, luckily I had no more coins and the idea of another beer gave me more pleasure.

She’s done it again. We’re back safely from another 2000km+ rd trip (that makes over 240k km now). Thanks J. See photos from the trip

A large and beautiful snake seen on on top of Mt Nardi, trying to sleep off what looks like a pretty indigestible meal, possibly a possum. See flickr for a few more photos.

I thought mum’s ceramics looked great littering their garden.