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.
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.”
Only the Paranoid Survive
I ticked over 15 years as a marriage celebrant this year and I’ve realised I’d grown complacent.
I’m reminded of wisdom around complacency by a former employee of a formerly massive computer company whose lunch has been eaten by the current first and second biggest companies in the world by market cap. Former Intel CEO, chairman, and employee number three, Andy Grove, in his autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive wrote:
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
This is the curse of the small business operator.
In trying to find that sweet spot somewhere in the unexplored wasteland of business, that demilitarised zone between growth-at-all-costs and death, you also eventually become complacent.
Mine snuck up on me while I was distracted transitioning from Best And Most Awesome Year of Business Ever to a living hell, around March 2020.
The wedding industry is made of two basic elements:
- gathering people together,
- most if those people are not local.
Gathering non-local people was quite frowned upon from March 2021.
I then got so busy recovering that I didn’t realise that I’d neglected:
- simple website design decisions which negatively impacted my SEO, like page speed and accessibility,
- creating helpful, useful, interesting, local blog content,
- being open-minded about social media’s maturation (which is to say I was quite closed-minded),
- adapting our business as the market changed,
- and updating my clients’ customer journey.
How do I recover?
I’ve been learning how to do websites that aren’t Squarespace, WordPress, or Wix again - I’m a big static site generator/Jamstack/Astro boy now. I’m paranoid about getting 100/100 on Google Pagespeed and correcting all website errors on Site Console, and in Moz.
So, I’m making a list, checking it twice. It’s time to find out if I’m naughty or nice.
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.
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.
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.
Being a friend
John Gruber tells the story of Bill Atkinson’s battle (that has not finished yet) with cancer:
“In addition to being a genius programmer, he’s by all accounts a kind and generous person. Everyone was (and remains to this day) in awe of his skills, but they remember him best for being a friend.”
As a human, a man, a husband, and a father, I often (let’s be honest, almost always) get tied up with the worry and fear about work and business, earning money, and making good financial decisions.
Keeping a good professional reputation in the desperate hope and prayer that another couple would find me and book me for their wedding.
Staying in the good graces of wedding venues, wedding planners, the different algorithms and industry blogs and publications.
But I swear if I get to the end of my days and you, Britt, and my children can’t remember me best for being a friend then it was all for nought.
I’m sorry if I’ve missed the mark on our friendship, it’s honestly all I really want from these few fragile moments we have together on this pale blue dot in the universe.
I asked ChatGPT “Based on what you know about me draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like”
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!
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.
"One day you’ll be the last person writing words on the web"
Ryan Broderick with the power quote of the century from his piece, Nostalgia will not fix this:
I’m sure plenty of Bluesky power users will read this and say, “Who cares. I’m happy with a tiny site that feels like a memory of how I used to use the internet.” Fair enough. But one day you’ll be the last person writing words on the web and wonder where everyone went.
You can easily replace Bluesky with Mastodon, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Medium, Blogger, Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok.
Straight outta JT
Still have found what I'm looking for 🌵 Joshua Tree
When we were living in Baja California Sur a real hippy-looking bloke told me that the reason we felt so calm and at home in Baja was because it was a blue zone.
Wikipedia says of the evidence-poor but good-vibes terminology:
A blue zone is a region in the world where people are claimed to have exceptionally long lives beyond the age of 80 due to a lifestyle combining physical activity, low stress, rich social interactions, a local whole-foods diet, and low disease incidence.
I feel the same way in Joshua Tree which is why we came back this weekend after taking Luna to Disneyland and before flying home to Australia.
You might even take away from the name of this blog that I don’t mind the album either.
How to know if it’s a legit cowboy hat, a guide
Testing iMessages via Satellite in Joshua Tree
So earlier today I was takin the family around Joshua Tree National Park. I took my phone out and realised I had no service but that little satellite icon was there and that this might be my chance to try Messages via satellite on my iPhone, a new feature in iOS18 available on iPhones 14 and later.
So you tap ‘Use Messages via Satellite’ after choosing Satellite from Control Centre list of modes you can enable and disable, the same list that wifi and bluetooth are on.
I neglected to time it but I’d estimate and say it took two-ish minutes to find a satellite and connect, whilst encouraging me to move around, move left and/or right, and perhaps find an area with more open skies.
The app gives you notification that you’re connected via satellite and you have four options:
- Messages
- Find My
- Roadside Assistance
- Emergency SOS
I’d not used any of the satellite features previously available so I tapped in to have a look out of curiosity.
But the new one was Messages so I sent the obligatory text message to my friend, Scott, and we had a semblance of success.
And although the connectivity isn’t good enough for photos, group chats, or even on-to-one chats in any large quantity, I feel confident that if I was out of range in a country supporting Messages via Satellite - currently only U.S. and Canada - that I could deliver emergency text messages, or if nothing else, ask someone to double check that I didn’t leave the iron on.
We don't have to live this way
I’m reading Kirsten Power’s Substack on how life in the USA is not normal, whilst visiting the USA, and I can not only agree, but say that many parts of the thesis apply also to Australia in a uniquely Australian way.
Kirsten:
I began to notice a learned helplessness in the United States, where people don’t revolt at the notion of a college education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wondered why so many people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to help people pay for life-saving medical care that their health insurance won’t cover.
I watched as people on social media claimed it was “pro-labor” to tip a person for ringing up your order at a food or coffee chain rather than demanding the multi-millionaire (or billionaire) owner of that company pay their employees a living wage (as is the norm in Europe, where tipping is not expected and the owners of the restaurants and stores are typically not among the uber-wealthy).
I realized there are other places in the world (not just Italy) where life isn’t about conspicuous consumption and “crushing” and “killing” your life goals, where people aren’t drowning in debt just to pay for basic life necessities. There are places where people have free time and where that free time is used to do things they love — not to start a side hustle.
I started to have a dawning awareness that we don’t have to live this way.
Australia might have a semblance of public health care, and tipping was not the norm (how tf is tipping becoming normalized in Australia is beyond me), but Australian society automatically assumes that everyone wants to be in a race to the bottom where we’re overloaded with debt and ambition whilst setting our children up for a life of therapy.
We don’t have to live this way.
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.”
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.”
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.