Hey!

For some odd reason the Sola Panel is forwarding to my blog right now, so this is the perfect time to say:

• Dreamhost, you are one crazy host.
• Need a web developer? Pick me!

Update: Perhaps I should also use this opportunity to correct one of the Sola Panel's most serious lapses in discernment. I refer of course to Paul Grimmond's statement, “If you've never seen [Spinal Tap], you really haven't missed much” from All the way to 11.... Nothing could be further from the truth.

This could be the most comforting blog of all time but reading too much of it does my head in. I've always been confused about the meaning of neurotic which puts my qualifications in psychology into perspective. But this site takes it to mean those weird little obsessive/compulsive things you can't stop doing.

I have plenty of these. Probably the most pervasive one is that I'm constantly searching for the golden rectangle in everything I look at. When I find it, I trace it by tapping my teeth together. I'll do this a couple of times before looking for the next one.

The teeth-tapping happens in all kinds of scenarios, particularly while driving. When I was younger I developed a whole teeth-tappin' system of lasers for ‘cleaning’ the streets. I only remember two of the colours I used. The red laser could be used for organic material but wouldn't cut through metal. You had to use the purple and yellow striped laser for metal. Often the lasers just clean the cats-eyes of the road or I just teeth tap the white dashes.

We had a small dark wooden statue of a man in our downstairs loungeroom. I think it's still there. Everyday when I came down to the loungeroom I would have to turn it around so it wasn't looking at me. Mum would always find it facing the wall and be puzzled and turn it round the right way. I denied it was me.

I could go on all day with these...

One of my favouritest people in the world had a baby today and had earlier appointed me to the esteemed position of labour DJ. Unfortunately things didn't go as planned so I don't know the fate of my lovingly crafted mixtapes but I do know that this would have been a much cooler way to give them to her. (via flukazoid)

Since it may be my last gig as labour DJ, here are the tapes for posterity. They encompass the many (three) moods of labour: Chilly, Beats and Rhythm & Whimsy. It was difficult to imagine what I'd want to hear during labour, but I imagined anyway.

Congratulations guys.

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This quote on the immorality of icecream-licking popped up on metafilter last week:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone—a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions—their reasons long before forgotten—that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street—even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat—displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

It was of interest to the general public because it was written by Leon Kass, who until 2005 was, hilariously, the chair of President Bush's Council on Bioethics. (His book is The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature.)

It was of interest to me because I find his views strangely attractive. The sensibility that wants to mask and deny human bodily functions has a certain appeal. Perhaps it was the man I saw urinating outside the courthouse last Friday night.

I wonder if this stems from being disgusted with our own nature. Our worst curse words relate to human bodily functions. Burps and farts are funny. Toilets have doors. Clothes probably started as protection* but now we're scared of not having them on and have nasty nightmares about being naked at school. We don't want to be like animals who are so bold as to do a poo in front of you and not even care.

Why are we disgusted by our physical nature?

[* completely unsubstantiated]

When I got into the car, Naomi said, “Do you know what this is?” She had quite a few of them.

They dropped me home and I realised I had taken it with me.

I called her. “I have that thing that I don't know what it is.”

“I don't know what it is either.”

“Oh. Does Simon?”

“No, he doesn't know what it is.”

Karen just asked what it is.

Last December, a Macbook and OS X Leopard came into my life. If you're thinking of getting a laptop and think the Macbook is too expensive and get a PC you are a NUTCASE with a capital everything. The productivity boost from moving from XP to Leopard offsets Facebook and Facebook Chat combined. And it's pretty.

Here's the software I'm using (excluding native stuff like Mail, Itunes). I lot of it I picked up from an introductory geek-out with Luke. If you have suggestions on better/more stuff I could be using, then I am quite literally covered with ears.

Free stuff

• Adium - Instant messaging (ICQ, MSN, AIM etc). Soon to include Facebook chat!
• Azureus/Vuze - Bittorrent. Because watching LOST on TV shouldn't be the first time you've watched it.
• Disk Inventory X - Keep track of what's taking up space on your harddrive.
• e-Record - Free ATO record keeping software for small businesses.
• Firefox - Of course.
• Google Earth - Save money on travel.
• Hazel - Keeps my downloads folder organised for free. Will do more if you pay for it.
• I Love Stars - Because you must rate your songs in Itunes. Puts stars in your top right bit so you don't have to switch to Itunes. What's that bit called? I'm not macnerdy enough.
• iScrobbler - last.fm client. Far from perfect, but better than nothing.
• Jumpcut - A memory for your clipboard. Saves me all the time. Microsoft's attempt at this in Office never worked for me.
• MacMP3Gain - Make all your mp3s the same volume.
• NeoOffice - Free MS Office replacement.
• PicLens - Mmm immersive...
• Quicksilver - Faster than spotlight for launching applications and files. Haven't got into the hardcore stuff.
• RadioRecorder - Tape the radio like ye olde times.
• Twhirl - I wouldn't use Twitter without this.
• Vienna - RSS reader. The way the Skip Folder button marks all read and goes to next unread folder sets this above NetNewsWire for me, but I have no need to sync between computers.
• VLC - All-purpose media player.
• Voodoo Pad - “a garden for your thoughts”.

Paid-for stuff

• Adobe CS3 - Ouch.
• Paragon - Lets me write to my Windows NTFS drive.
• Parallels - For running Windows inside OS X.
• Textmate - I use this text editor for all my HTML/CSS/PHP coding. Customisable shortcuts, code colouring, search in project, etc. Haven't tried CSSEdit yet.
• Yummy FTP - FTP client. Cause Cyberduck doesn't have the local window.

Not yet paid-for stuff

• Scrivener - For writing. Helps me structure what I'm writing. Good for novelists, script-writers etc.
• Spanning Sync - Sync Google Calendar and iCal.

Moments of serendipity in one's own home are rare. Everything becomes so ordinary.

I remember the point in my life when I realised that I knew everything that was in my bedroom. There were no more mysterious corners to explore. Everything was known.

I didn't like that feeling. I wanted to feel like there was more to discover. So I enjoy finding surprising things in my house. Marriage tends to facilitate that.

Today I was surprised by apples.

There are so many of them.

It has recently come to my attention that there is some unusual teaching in Sydney regarding the ministry of puppets. As a member of the Sesame Street generation, this is an issue close to my furry heart.

I'm told that certain (and I honestly don't know which) puppet masters are instructing their youth ministry learnees that in the puppet/guy-talking-to-the-puppet scenario the puppet should not be in the teaching role. I presume this is because the puppet is make-believe and so when the kids eventually realise that the puppet is not real, they will also discard the teaching of said puppet.

This boggles the eyes.

Have the proponents of this puppet doctrine considered that the guy-talking-to-the-puppet is—how to put this delicately—talking to a puppet? If not, have they considered the kids like myself who have not dismissed the alphabet as the ravings of a puppet on television?

Have I missed the deeper theological issue here?

I suppose confusion on this issue may arise from the lack of puppets in the garden of Eden. If even a single puppet had been present we could quickly identify the proper order of creation and thus who should be teaching whom. But alas, the serpent was not crafty enough to sew some googly eyes on some fluffy fabric. And even if he did manage to do that, he had no arms with which to operate the puppet.

Given the Bible's relative silence on the issue of puppets, I turn this over to you: are you willing to sit under the teaching of a puppet? May puppets be allowed to co-lead a Bible study, so long as there is a non-puppet leader also present? Should they be responsible only for the other puppets in the group? May they preach to a mixed congregation, such as the residents of Sesame Street?

Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing. And sometimes other people do too, which is nice and all. So here it is, on the internet.

At the beginning of the year I was all set for 4th year at Moore Theological College. 4th year is like an honours year in that you can graduate as a bachelor with or without it and can choose to do a thesis. I'd changed my mind a number of times on whether or not to do it, and two weeks before session I changed my mind again. I'd decided already that working as a minister at a church was not for me, and the 4th year was increasingly looking like “not the best use of my time”. The reasons to stay were the time to think about the many issues regarding theology and philosophy that perplexed me, and the great friends and lecturers to do it with. But in the end I couldn't justify the enormous financial cost. So I chose to graduate.

What to do then? I now had two degrees in areas I wasn't interested in pursuing as a career. Such a Gen Y problem. The fact that the future was unknown was another reason to stay at college: what else was I going to do? In fact it was only when the possibility of web development work started coming my way that I felt confident to make the final decision about college.

I've been making web sites as a hobby for around 10 years and was paid for it for the first time during 2007 at Matthias Media. They were happy to keep me on this year and two good friends in the industry suggested they could pass some work my way. So I thought I'd give the freelance game a go. We weren't expecting any income from me (at college) this year besides my (puny) Matthias Media salary, so whatever I earned would be a bonus. If, by the end of the year, I thought it wasn't going to work, not much has been lost. There's not much in the way of start-up costs, besides software, and hopefully the year would work out less stressfully than the horror of 4th year—from classmates' reports—which would be good for my health.

So what do I do? It's kinda hard to show you if you don't know anything about web development. When you look at a website you see the design, and often the design is not what I'm involved with. But I work on websites, I do it mostly from home, and so far I like it a lot.

I set up this website at the start of the year mostly to write notes about my 4th year project which was occupying my thoughts at the time. I haven't had time to turn it into the swanky business portfolio it now needs to be, but the business has been coming in nevertheless, and I'll get around to it eventually...

Hopefully there'll be something resembling a blog here, so grab the rss feed and see what happens.