The Book of Ashes

The worlds gone quiet... 10:06PM

...and I'm asleep at the wheel. Its a strange, cold kind of world and I'm yet to work it out.

Lots is happening slowly. I've done a mish up to Palmy recently to sort out my old PC for mum. It was meant to be easy. No one was meant to get hurt. No one did, but setting up the PC just went wrong. For starters we just took up the base, no keyboard, no mouse, no monitor, my mum has all those already, albeit in a funny connector kinda way. The keyboard was a supersize me PS2 and the mouse connector was one of those old style ones. I don't even remember what they're called. A quick mission to DSE sorted that for $23, new keyboard, new mouse and for the price they were still better than the old ones. Yet more problems arose. Was cool though, Tom and I went up and we took our cousins who are over from Canada up. We had fun, even though the computer part sucked.

So welcome Bonnie to the 30 club and Happy Birthday. It was Bonnie's birthday on Sat, exactly 3 weeks after mine. We went out to Great India for a meal and a few drinks which was great. Last week I had my first cold/flu for a year or two. Wasn't too bad, felt a bit run down but didn't need to take any time off work. Unfortunetly passed it on to Bonnie who is now sick at home.

Put an offer in on a house on Monday. Got rejected (as expected) is scary signing away that much money after a relatively short look at a house.

Made Bonnie some skiing tickets for her Birthday so will hopefully be going skiing soon. Apparently theres snow up there this year.

Been thinking alot about ideas for work. Googles homepage is pretty tiddy...

http://www.google.co.nz/ig

Think I could do better tho ;)

So NZ has lost the 5c piece. The 50, 20 & 10 have had a make over. The 50c piece is now about the size that the 10 used to be. The 10c piece is now bronze and the 1 & 2 dollar coins now seem large and heavy. They are cool though, so much more room in the wallet.

So I'm slowly learning Adobe Premiere and putting together a basic movie. Is going to take a while as lots of little things on like still finishing off mums PC. But it will happen. Premiere is good software. I like Adobe.

So the future? 10:17PM

Ahh the future, that involves people being continuously connected, the ability to be "available" or "unavailable", you can talk to your mate while he's at work or at home simply by saying "talk to <name>". You can show him live video of the party you're at or the mountain you've just climbed. He can listen in to your conversation with the competitors. He can allow instant access, partial access or no access to communicate with him. Its do-able now, its not that far away. What does this mean? Live feeds will appear on the web, you'll be able to follow people where ever they go, see what they see, hear what they hear. This will initially create a proliferation of online crap reality feeds just as the video blogging is doing. This will die down to only show the best and eventually will all be contrived or restricted to only the most interesting. Access is going to be instant, you'll be sitting in a meeting browsing some young 19 year olds feed in Egypt or you could be at home cooking dinner and watching life through the eyes of Ozzie Ozbourne. Its going to be a distracting world. And theres going to be lots of advertising there, subliminal or not. The technology will progress and the advertising will become more subtle. They'll create software that can, in real-time, add a person into the background of your video feed. That person will walk past wearing Nike clothes or more likely it will be a woman in a red dress drinking a coke. The connection will be paid for via advertising. You will get a request to recieve video feed from Dodgy Steve, you accept, watch a 5 sec Speights ad then see Dodgy Steve drinking a beer at Zibibos, he invites you down. Its a Friday afternoon, its hot, its been a hard week and its time for a beer, you think you'll have a Speights for a change.