Hi! My name is Josh and this is my blog. I used to share on social media but decided that my fragility was too valuable to subject to algorithims and assholes.
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I have moved this blog from micro.blog to Astro hosted on Cloudflare Pages via Github and honestly I’m freaking out to try and post this status via Apple Shortcuts …
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How I create a ceremony
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I was asking for a Mac app recommendation from Claude but now I'm a Mac developer.
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An ounce of originality is worth a pound of imitation.
– Orson Welles
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There is only one thing worse than being imitated, and that is not being imitated.
– Coco Chanel
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I sat next to a young honeymooning couple from Guatemala on my flight home to Tassie tonight.
They booked their entire Australia holiday based on ChatGPT planning their itinerary.
I added some local understanding to a few of the routes in Tassie they wanted, but it was a pretty good trip. Hamilton Island, Sydney, Tasmania, covering all their wants in the holiday.
If you haven’t figured out how AI is going to change your business or employment like it’s changing travel then you’re behind the eight ball.
I’d also love to have that conversation with you, particularly if you don’t know how ChatGPT figures out who and how to recommend what it recommends.
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New blog post on my wedding celebrant website: The long and gradual cancellation of Josh Withers
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The way we’re going here we’ll be on ICQ soon and I am here for it: Friendster is back.
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My favourite Charles Bukowski quote is “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts and the stupid ones are full of confidence.” Mainly because when you share it, some people are too confident it's about them.
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Today's another one of those weird days in the best and most beautiful, yet also so strange, wedding industry. Sometime in a few years over a beer remind me to tell you the story about the Tasmanian Wedding Directory
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My only experiences with electric vehicles are in renting them, and I rent quite a few as I travel.
The out-of-home charging infrastructure is bad.
Three stories from today:
- I’m staying at my mother-in-law’s home in suburban Gold Coast and the nearest public charging infrastructure is a 15 minute drive away. It’s got two charging bays, each time I visit there’s a queue.
- I had a long drive today and needed to charge in Brisbane before the drive. I get fee Chargefox charging with my Sixt rental but the best located charging station was at a BP. The app - BP Pulse - is yet another horrible corporate app that forgets logins, doesn’t work well, and the third BP app I have on my phone. The working charger didn’t work, and the second was pre-identified as not working. So once the “working charger” had not charged the charging cable was locked and would not come out of the car. The BYD Atto’s manual is electronic and requires the car have internet access. There are three methods to manually unlock, it took me to the third method.
- Charging station locations on Apple Maps and Google Maps sucks. Tonight I wanted to charge at a certain charger and I started the journey in a no-service area so I used BYD in-built maps which don’t know about an exit that had changed so I missed the exit and almost ran out of battery because I couldn’t charge at the BP charger earlier. Further to that I'm now charging at a charger in Brisbane city that's not on any mapping application but is in the Chargefox app, however in the app it's across the road and a few hundred metres away and apparently in a construction yard.
It's a weird time to be a travelling EV driver.
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Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamoured with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.
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picked up a new cool domain name for my non-personal and non-wedding blogging: thesmh.com.au
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The human spirit is a beautiful cacophony of stupidity and kindness.
If that beautiful mixture of stupidity and kindness is out of balance, well, that’s why we have journalism and social media.
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Our Goldie is four
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I hearby proclaim that from today the opposite of a wanker is a Sam Kerr and all Australians shall now use it as a proclamation of encouragement.
Suggested use: "You're such a Sam Kerr!"
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Received my first (that I know of) AI voice phone call yesterday from a company called Zest.
The founder reached out to let me know it was an AI voice.
I didn't think it was AI when I received it, it was an wodd phone call … so much better than the average telemarketer, but also I could tell the call was on rails in some way. I just thought it was an idiot human on script.
Which as my fried Ori highlights, computers (and LLM-driven AI being just the most recent version of computers), are just (potentially idiot) humans on script.
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How to build a village, Rosie Spinks:
You don’t need friends, you need people. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that most marriages fail because they don’t have enough people in them:
“You should know that when a husband or wife fight, it may seem to be about money or sex or power. But what they’re really yelling to each other about is loneliness. What they’re really saying is, ‘you’re not enough people.’”
He goes onto say that in order to recreate the “like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more” we should “join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life.”
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Laying wide awake, trying to sleep in a Perth hotel, so I thought crunching some annual stats might help me sleep.
2024 has been a wild year of travel. Here’s my 2024 travel stats as of when I get home on December 2:
For 53% of 2024 I have slept in a bed I do not call home. 172 nights away from home, 94 flights, 85 marriage ceremonies, 275 hours in the air, 47 visits to Hobart Airport, 37 rental cars, 27 hours lost to flight delays, 15 airports, seven countries, six airlines, six Australian states, three trains, two boats, one moped.
Qantas Platinum, Virgin Gold, Hotels.com Gold, and Accor Gold, Mitre 10 Silver. No I’m not joking about Mitre 10.
Ask me anything except about the moped.
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Pretty cool to see my work at Balandra Beach in Mexico on Conde Nast's Traveler today.
One day I ought to figure out how to be a professional profitable photographer instead of being an Unsplash dude.
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Let's talk about the disconnect between mainstream media, social media chatter, and reality in Perth's coffee scene.
When Starbucks opened their first WA store recently, both mainstream and social media were full of people insisting Perth would reject it in favour of local cafes.
Well, I just visited this morning... The reality? Over 100 people inside and a 40+ car drive-through queue. Before 9am on a Saturday.
Just a reminder that media opinions and online discussions don't always reflect what's actually happening on the ground. That Starbucks is absolutely thriving.
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I asked ChatGPT “Based on what you know about me draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like”
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Seeing the Rode Wireless Micro release today (another spectacular release from Rode) reminded me how Australian companies and people are driving the infrastructure level of the creator economy.
Rode Microphones, Blackmagic Design (cameras, accessories, switchers and DaVinci), Procreate, Envato, Canva, Linktree, and Fastmail are the big ones I can think about plus Pocketcasts, Whooshkaa, and Omny Studio in the podcast world. Also, Emojipedia!
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Barack Obama:
We live in a time of such confusion and rancor, with a culture that puts a premium on things that don’t last: money, fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves, and then we wonder why we feel so alone. We don’t trust each other as much because we don’t take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other.
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Straight outta JT
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How to know if it’s a legit cowboy hat, a guide
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Lucy Schiller in the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine:
The idea of the airline magazine reaching everyone possible. An in-flight magazine is “for you, it’s for your mother, and it’s for your daughter,” she said. “Everyone has to be able to read it. It crosses generations with its appeal. Most people are aware the audience is broad.” So: the opposite type of product, really, from the personalized digital content tooled and retooled by increasingly specific customer data. “It can’t be niche,” Carpenter continued. “It can’t make people feel separated from it. It’s not going to be political or religious. It’s going to be inspiring, positive. Airline magazines don’t write bad reviews. We don’t interview someone to make them feel dumb. It’s all about putting positivity out into the world.”
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Thomas Hooven on Love:
“By the time I met my wife, I was a changed man and a real doctor. And our love developed differently from any I had experienced before. Less like a crystal vase, more like a basketball, our relationship is made for bouncing — for the good and sometimes rough play that modern professional lives generate. We do have fights (oh, yes, we do), but they do not threaten our foundation. They deepen it.”
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Robert Pirsig the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in this interview in 1974:
If a plant only gets sunlight, it’s very harmful. It needs darkness too. In the darkness, it converts oxygen into carbon dioxide. We are like that too. We need periods of doing, and periods of non-doing.
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Ezra Klein in Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You:
I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.