Josh Withers, the group chat

Entering the Paul Kelly stage of our Europe adventure …

Arriverderci, au revoir, aufwiedersen, hasta la vista. Yeah, every fucking city’s just the same.

CDG ✈️ LHR ✈️ SIN

Michael A. Fletcher reports for ESPN that the real life story behind the Sandra Bullock movie, The Blind Side, was based on a lie.

Retired NFL star Michael Oher, whose supposed adoption out of grinding poverty by a wealthy, white family was immortalized in the 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” petitioned a Tennessee court Monday with allegations that a central element of the story was a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense.

Every day I think about the fact that so much Of our culture today is built on lies. Where do we go as a people? Do we lean in to it or revolt?

Richard Rohr in Things Hidden:

It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean its exact opposite: into a tradition of certain knowing, presumed predictability and complete assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like.

We have 48 hours left in Paris. I’m I’m curious what your one awesome thing to do, see, eat, or photograph in Paris. We travel slow, don’t travel like tourists, don’t really hit the common “top 10 things to see” lists, and we’re travelling with two kids, so sometimes we miss things that everyone thinks is awesome. Give me your one recommendation.

I think I’ve spent too much time in Paris this year.

I just got into an argument with another dad about which Parisian playground is the best one.

The American fool thinks the Lourve playground is the best.

Bearly made it home last night

Will the Australian government send in an SAS extraction group to save Britt, the girls, and I when France loses to the Matildas in the World Cup quarter-finals today?

Did some A-grade marrying in the rain in Paris today

A Modest Proposal; For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick, by Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1729:

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl, before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value. I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I’d forgotten how nice Facebook Paper was. What was the last great UX you experienced?

My daily steps over the past seven months

I think it’s beautiful that the one thing that binds us together as a global community, regardless of colour of skin, religion, where we were born or where we live, or wealth or lack of it, is how our days old street urine all smells the same everywhere.

Resume the conversation

My only regret from my radio career is that I never once said, whilst on air, the line that inspired my career:

Tank fly, boss walk, jam nitty-gritty. You’re listening to the boy from the big bad city. This is jam hot. This is jam hot.

An element of the wedding industry which offends so many inside and out, the part that eventually pushes many insiders out and back into the normal world where couples kissing in front of you all day at work is not normal, is the unreal nature of so many weddings. That for a single day people dress up and play pretend.

I can tell you that although I’ve witnessed it over my fifteen years in the business, I also push back against it at every chance. I’m also lucky that my clientele aren’t indicative of that side of the wedding industry.

Which is why I love film photography. It’s so raw and honest. Often imperfect, and perhaps with error, it’s a plain and simple recording of the light that entered the lens at that time.

So here’s some film photos made by my friend James at the two Italian elopements we had together last week in Tuscany.

Elopements planned by my girl, Britt.

Sari Azout’s “letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new” is beautiful. As Sari subtitles it, ‘if you are thinking of leaving your job to start a company or passion project, this letter is for you too.’

1. Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?
2. How will you avoid insecurity work?
3. Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
4. Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
5. Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be an original?
6. What tools will you use to quiet your ego and see reality clearly?
7. Do you have clarity on what kind of financial value you aim to create?

If I had a beef to pick with anyone in the world today it’s how so many of us let life happen to us instead of us making us happen to life.

I hope you get to know your inner world. I hope you thrive financially while living your values. I hope you focus less on what you achieve and more on who you become. I hope you learn to be kind to yourself. I hope you fall in love with the process. I hope you see the point of pursuing passion work is not to drain yourself to create work that eclipses your life, but rather to create a life you are proud of. I hope this new venture takes you far away from conformism and enables you to make a life and a living on your own terms, with your spirit and creativity unhindered.

With any luck you’re reading this article well after I first shared it in August 2023, and if this is the case I felt the need to find the link and send it to you as you consider embarking on something new.

Make this process mean something so we have a cool story to talk about in a decade’s time.

Why do airlines communicate a flight’s departure time instead of a “be at the gate” time? Every airport and every airline has different timings and many of us live in flight anxiety because of the lack of information.

Is there a good technical reason why departure time is communicated but not gate-deadline time?

Pro tip for flying out of Vienna Airport: you walk past a Starbucks before check-in, and you think, “awesome, a not-Austrian coffee! If there’s Starbucks at check-in there’ll be a Starbucks after security,” but there isn’t.

There is an epic kids playground though.

Over the weekend I wrote a piece about the fluff coming out of commercial radio in Australia, referencing my own time in a commercial radio station in very remote Western Australia, and considering going back last year but the wage had actually decreased.

Anyway, it was poorly written, so sitting at Gate F6 in Vienna Airport just now I edited and fixed it.

Any other errors or omissions are the faulty of your web browser.

The PR-wing of the commercial radio community in Australia is getting everyone excited about a new report - that they commissioned and is weirdly in their favour - about how commercial radio in Australia is turning 100 years old this year on November 23rd.

The report tells a compelling story, which I don’t consider to be the actuality of local and regional commercial radio in Australia.

A few takeaways from the report include:

• About three hours of locally significant content per day is broadcast in regional communities - which is pretty much just obeying the law.
• 74% of Australians surveyed answered “sure, why not” when asked if they think commercial radio and audio build a sense of community.
• Over 1/3 of the jobs in commercial radio are in about 1/3 of Australian society (that being, regional Australia).

And it was on the jobs issue I wanted to rebut the argument that Australian radio is “booming”.

It might be easy to try and point out that anyone born in the last 40 years doesn’t know what the antenna on their car is for, or how the Australian commercial radio industry has very poorly stepped foot into podcasting and internet distribution, especially in regards to local and regional content, one of the biggest voids in the sphere of content available today.

But instead I’ll share a personal story that might tell you how booming commercial radio is in regional Australia.

Late 2009 I accepted a role that I was so unqualified for that it was a joke. Twenty-seven years old, with only volunteer broadcast radio experience on my resume, having only even stepped foot in Western Australia once before at the other end of the state in Broome, let alone the small town of Esperance found on the far western side of the Great Australian Bight on Australia’s southern coast, 720 kilometres from the most remote city in the world, a forty hour nonstop drive from home.

The population of over 13,000 people had just shrunk a wee bit after the shock closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in January of that year, but on a freezing cold Saturday morning this young buck who could not name song by The Travelling Wilburys found himself on the corner of Andrew and Demspter Street sitting at an outside broadcast studio in sub-zero temperatures (possibly).

I fell in love with the town of Esperance and its small population. It was a crime that I didn’t know who the Wilburys were considering one of its members had holidayed there, and it was a shame that 14 years on I appreciate the then Radiowest, now Triple M, playlist a lot more than that 27 year old did.

I moved on from that station to Star FM Port Macquarie just over a year later with many great friendships and a much more robust understanding of how to be a leading voice of a local community.

I bring up this anecdote because through COVID things were rough in the wedding industry and Britt and I considered changing many things in our life. One possibility was moving somewhere regional and quiet, somewhere far away, somewhere like Esperance and when the job advert for my old job as breakfast radio host popped up I got in touch. I loved the town and would have cherished the seachange, now with two daughters and now married to the girl I wrote letters to the last time I lived there.

Thirteen years on, with the Esperance population slowly growing, with industry slowly building, and the possibility for remote work in Australia slowly increasing thanks to the NBN and Starlink I thought things might be a little brighter for a modern family moving to the Great Southeast of WA.

• The cost of goods has increased 36% since I last worked in Esperance. If you paid $60,000 for something in 2009 you were paying $86,000 for it now.
• The average wage locally in Esperance (according to the ABS - 2021 to 2006) has increased 65% over (about) the same time period.
• The cost of renting has actually doubled.
• Esperance-Goldfields property purchase prices have increased about 13%.

But the wage on offer for the same job had decreased 7% and was most likely in a smaller team even though it was only a local staff of seven for two radio stations (I was the sole local programming hire) when I was there in 2009. There was the possibility of increasing the wage by also doing radio advertising sales but I’ve proven in the past that an advertising salesperson I am not.

The same role, for a slightly larger audience which would be begging for local stories and content in an ever-globalised content world, was paying $938 a week after tax - $177 more than the minimum wage.

The premise I’m making here is that the very heartbeat of commercial radio is creating a compelling story for an audience and inserting as many ads around that as possible. The fact that a community so bereft of local stories, news, and media personalities cannot support a good wage for someone to fill that role speaks to the weaknesses in the local media market, and the unwillingness of the corporation operating the media to invest there.

I remember a time at Radiowest Esperance where the technology that connects the telephone line to the broadcast console - which was already the simplest of radio technologies, old and very very simple - broke down and there was real deliberation as to whether it should be replaced. I posited the question: are we planning on taking phone calls and broadcasting phone calls and interviews on the radio station in the future? Were phone calls being broadcasted important to the job? I believed they were, but at all levels of management they weren’t sure it was worth it.

A 2009 era iPhone panorama photo of the low-tech Esperance studio

Maybe Esperance was never going to be a profitable radio station, and if so, hand the broadcast license over to a community radio organisation and let the community run it, like they do the fire and ambulance services.

Talking about the Esperance community spirit, we raised thousands (I think it was about $20,000) for the Perth Children’s Hospital when businesses could push their boss off the Tanker Jetty into the subzero Southern Ocean winter waters if they raised or donated $1000. If any community was going to excel at a community radio station it would be Esperance.

If a national commercial radio network can’t afford to pay a local content creator more than $177 a week over the minimum Australian wage to create and broadcast about 24 hours a week of local content by themselves without local assistance, then I cannot believe that commercial radio is soaring in popularity, or even breaking even financially as a business. Instead, commercial radio in Australia sounds like an industry that has ignored advances in civilisation, in communication, in broadcasting, and how societies work in 2023 and is just hanging on by the threads of people who haven’t got CarPlay yet.

Rest in peace, commercial radio. You were my first love, but at one hundred years old maybe it’s time to pass the batten to someone who understands how to be an integral part of a community.

This article has been updated because I’m a better podcaster and radio presenter than writer, plus I’m writing all this on my phone as I travel around Europe and the new autocorrect in the developer beta of iOS 17 is good but buggy

Not everything is forever. Some things are just internet onions.

This website, the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com, will live from July 26th through August 30th, 2023 — about 5 weeks total, the average lifespan of a non-refrigerated onion. — Laurel Schwulst

It’s beautiful.

The “_______ is typing” dots are unencumbered by the politics of social media because they’re a passive signifier of attention: the tech does it for you, so it’s an unusually honest message that “_______ is alive and mentally present for you.”

Things I can remember:

✅ My couple’s names in a wedding ceremony
❎ Which of my children has which name
❎ My credit card PIN
❎ How old I am?
❎ Which side of the road to drive on in which country I’m in at the moment
❎ Who our insurance is through?
❎ If the h in hola is silent?
✅ The lyrics to Wonderwall

Father of the bride yesterday asked me who’s father I was. I’m now that old.

This is your annual reminder that there is a pager emoji 📟 please don’t forget to use the emoji for all of your pager-themed conversations.

My favourite part of the wedding ceremony is when we show each other our best memes

Things I learned today:

1. When you drive many kilometres past beautiful sunflower fields in Tuscany full of big and ripe sunflowers ready to be in a florist’s shop window, five days later when you go back to photograph them they’ll be harvested and in shop windows.

2. Sunflowers follow the sun, so when you go out to shoot them at sunrise, they’re all looking down like they’ve been listening to Nothing Compares 2 U on repeat since they found out about Sinead.

3. “Sunflowers at sunrise in fog” isn’t the epic photo I hoped for.

I wonder if Mariah Carey ever regretted collaborating with Ol’ Dirty Bastard?

Adi Ignatius inteviewing Karim Lakhani for the Harvard Business Review:

Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition.

And he comes in with the zinger, which I believe to be true:

What I say to managers, leaders, and workers is: AI is not going to replace humans, but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI. This is definitely the case for generative AI.

Two applications I used daily in the 90s/2000s but don’t exist today and I haven’t sufficiently found replacements for are MS Money and MS Access.

Thanks for ruining everything, Bill Gates.

For couples that book my David Copperfield package I do a cool magic trick and make your guests disappear.

Take & Leanna this afternoon in Tuscany.

WinRAR

Three years ago today I called for a new Saint to be named in Melbourne. turns out Aussies are super compliant and boring so nothing happened.

Saint Valentine of Rome was martyred on February 14 in AD 269 after he continued marrying people when marriage was banned. Weddings are banned in Melbourne from Thursday. Will there be a Saint of Batmania?

Jake Meador in The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church in The Atlantic:

Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

If there was a major crime cast on society in the last generation it was this. The simple idea that professional and financial success reign.

I love my email. Not because I love my email but because due to the swings and round-a-bouts of modern life needing email, and because writers and publications I want to hear from send emails, I’ve figured out how to have an email account that I love. Which according to my friend Steven, isn’t possible. Perhaps it is not dissimilar to training a demon to do the housework.

But one day, I can only hope I am so unimportant, so unneeded, so unplugged from the swings and the round-a-bouts, that I can profess what Don Knuth wrote in the nineties:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.

His very-90s blog post is seemingly popular for advocating that the hyphen be dropped from e-mail, but I am so inspired to reach the stage of life that Knuth quotes in the post:

`I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' – Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

A former boss told me that as you become more important in a job you start getting more keys, and you seemingly start on a path to have so many keys. Keys to the front door, back door, your office, someone else’s office, the stationary cupboard, the storage room, etc etc.

But then you reach a stage in that job where you are so important that you start handing keys back, and all of a sudden you have no keys.

Being that important sounds lovely, but I’m more excited about being in such a position that my importance in the world is not an ongoing concern. Instead, my friendship, my love, my efforts would be so valuable to my friends and family that none of us would be measuring importance - or likes, views, follows, or subscriptions - but that we would be in that beautiful utopia of just being a friend.

I was today years old when I learned that the word ‘homographic’ didn’t mean what my brain assumed it meant.

homograph - noun each of two or more words spelled the same but not necessarily pronounced the same and having different meanings and origins.

Like the word bass means a fish, an instrument, and a sound range.

Not recorded images or photos of certain people doing things.

50 years of …. celibacy

Doing God’s work over here, keeping the Gold Coast honest about it’s Super Mario koala

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the All Saints sung, “flexing vocabulary runs through my head”. Not, “sex and the vocabulary runs through my head.” Not like I’d thought the latter for the last 26 years or anything.

📷🇮🇹 Siena, Tuscany

Tuscany for a week or so

Look, all I want to do with my life is make enough money so I can afford to buy Yahoo! which owns AOL which owns Netscape so I can once more have a web browser that has an animated N in the top right again.

Shane Parrish on fs.blog with, Hanlon’s Razor: Not Everyone is Out to Get You, is such an encouraging read today. I was only thinking about how we more often than not think that everyone is looking at us as I was on a beach in Puglia yesterday considering very quickly stripping out of my swimmers into dry pants. I almost did until Britt suggested that everyone would see me. I still wonder whether they would have, and I think not. Most people don’t notice me, don’t see me, and don’t know me. Even less read this blog.

What is Hanlon’s Razor you may ask?

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.

The fs.blog article stretches the razor out to some real world artefacts:

The media:

Modern media treats outrage as a profitable commodity. This often takes the form of articles which often attribute to malice that which could be easily be explained by incompetence or ignorance.

Not everyone is out to get you.

Years from now the people of Puglia will still talk of the strange man who came from the land down under, where women glow and the men have takeaway American coffee with cold milk. I said, “Do you speak-a my language?” and they just smiled and gave me an espresso with a cold milk drink on the side.

About 20 years ago, somewhere early 2003 from memory, I learned the most important lesson I’d ever been taught in broadcasting and business, from Stan Hillard:

(When you’re broadcasting) imagine the audience are the stupidest people alive, but treat them with the upmost respect.

It’s an axiom employee daily. Assuming the audience doesn’t know the backstory, they don’t know your reasoning or motivation, or they simply haven’t been listening. It’s about inclusivity, with the upmost respect for them.

On a side note, in trying to find where Stan was at today, I stumbled across this piece I wrote for Radio Today ten years ago. Looking back it feels rude at the time but still true today.

I reinstalled the Twitter app when X first appeared just so I could experience this firsthand, in the flesh

Leaving Puglia today and I’m struck by the thought, after having experienced about thirty different international communities and societies over the last year that there is an opportunity cost to every society.

I’ve left every community thinking “this was great, but …” identifying trade-offs and compromises made to build that society.

Like Puglia for example, I love it here, but there’s no breakfast culture. In fact most of the world doesn’t celebrate breakfast like Australians do, and weirdly enough that’s possibly important to me.

Perhaps utopia is impossible because it would simply be the longest list of compromises ever made? Perhaps getting a good breakfast means you have to live in a society where everyone bottles their feelings and pretends to be polite in traffic, as opposed to Italy where you find out how the driver feels straight away but they won’t road rage you?

Is that the price I want to pay for eggs Benedict and a long black with cream?

11:27pm Italy time and I’ve been slogging away for hours at the stupidest CSS thing that changed in the most recent version of the Shopify code. Felt good to feel like it was 1999 and I was a web developer again.

Any how, sugargathered.com is now open for business on Shopify, I’ve just spent the last (far too many months) amount of time moving it from Squarespace and implementing lots of cool things for my friends who run it.

If you want some donuts delivered to, or at an event on, the Gold Coast, I can recommend a great website.

ABC Radio National’s Andrew West interviewing Ian Buruma on in The religious and spiritual ethics of wokeness:

It’s when a movement to improve certain social conditions, whether it’s about race, gender, or whatever else, turns from an active effort into a rigid ideology, then you have a problem.

Ian originally wrote about wokeness in Harpers Magazine:

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is the word itself, which has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals.

Looking forward to a future where being woke is a clearer idea and status. I’m sick of wondering if I’m a sheeple or a wolk folk, and by who’s definition.

Update on the book writing: I wrote a lot and I thought it was ok, I ran it past some friends and it wasn’t as good as I thought, and on further reflection it was worse.

Then I read this in Stephen King’s On Writing:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

So I’m currently reading a lot. I used to read a bit, now I’m reading a lot.

A photographer at the water park we were just at asked a family to say “Mozzarella” because I guess formaggio doesn’t make a smile?

In Western Australia yesterday

Amanda Holpuch in the New York Times in June 2023:

South Koreans became a year or two younger on Wednesday after a law standardizing the way the government counts age took effect. There are three common ways to count age in South Korea, but the government has changed its civil code to recognise one: starting from zero on a person’s date of birth and adding a year at each birthday. This is the age-counting method used most often around the world, but it is a departure from the country’s most popular method, often called “Korean age.” Under that system, a person is considered 1 year old at birth, and a year is added to their age each Jan. 1. This meant that an infant born on Dec. 31 was considered 2 years old the next day.

Every extra square metre I experience on this planet I find new and wild ways that humans have figured out how to exist. Korean Age isn’t the weirdest, but it’s up there.

The deeper I traverse into life on Planet Earth, into fatherhood, business, weddings, photography, and friendship I am ever further interested in art, making art, and making great art.

So Matt Ruby’s deviation from his normal comedic quick wit and observation Substack into this interesting read on George Michael, his coming out, connecting Freedom with Wham and his later Freedom ‘90, captured all of my attention today.

This whole read was just really interesting.

Sometimes the clothes, indeed, do not make the man

Michael couldn’t handle the combo of massive success and mockery. He did everything he could to make us love him, yet we still didn’t respect him. He wanted us to admire his mind, but we just wanted to stare at his butt. And that set the table for his cri de coeur: “Freedom ’90.” 

Keith Richards, April 1962:

Mick (Jagger) is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don’t mean maybe.

I’ve been having problems for years where my iPhone would have no space left, yet seemingly actually have space left. I’ve always felt like it was an iCloud photos library problem. So I finally downloaded originals to my Mac and I am now convinced Photos is the problem.

📷🇮🇹🏊🏼 Luna looking like she’s not having fun in the water when she’s truly having a ball.

Lefineder:

The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), “drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.”, looking at reconstructions of beer consumption from the middle ages to the pre-industrial era this was only a slight exaggeration. When estimating consumption from the amount of beer provided to soldiers, convicts, and workers or reconstructing consumption from tax revenues on beer we see that the average person consumed about a liter of beer a day, this is around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.

Better times, ya know

Do I get my eye scanned by Worldcoin when I’m in Paris in two weeks or do I just share my genitalia size here in public instead?

Anthony Agius in The Sizzle

The ATO is cool with scammers ripping off $557m in MyGov identity fraud. A whopping $557m has been stolen off the ATO and people entitled to a tax refund by scammers in the last two years.

If the Aussie Tax Office is ok losing half a billion dollars, I’ve just realised that I have spent about that on uniform laundry last year.

Reflecting on Matt Mullenweg ten years ago reflecting on Steve Jobs/Apple’s courage to release products, I’ve been on an early morning walk down memory lane - perhaps because I woke very early and the kids are still asleep - thinking about my first few weeks with a drone camera, the original DJI Mavic Pro. It was delivered on the 28th of April 2017. I was fresh off a red eye flight from a Perth wedding the day before and straight out the door to a Tenterfield wedding that afternoon. Britt came for the drive and we put the drone up at the Airbnb.

I didn’t read a manual, or the civil aviation guides. I just turned it on and thought I’d see what it did.

I didn’t know about aperture (or lack thereof in the original Mavic), ISO, white balance, or shooting in RAW.

I just put it up in the air, mashed my fingers into the remote control, and started creating.

It always has been and always will be not only my first camera, but my favourite camera.

I’ve crashed a few drones, thank god for great insurance and DJI Care, lost one into a wave, and another into Queensland’s Great Sandy Bay. I’ve even had one fly away in Iceland due to magnetic interference!

Since these early photos - seriously, all a fluke that they’re ok photos - I’ve been so blessed to have my work experienced by so many. 24 million views on Pexels, 201 million on Unsplash, commissioned work in a handful of places like the Sydney Reece showroom or the Hilton Gold Coast boardroom, and in a gallery in London.

I’ve got my own fine art prints gallery online that’s sold about three photos, and the commissions I’ve received have probably covered the cost of the drones I’ve purchased, but regardless it brings me so much joy.

I hope my photos over the last six years have meant something to you. It makes me smile looking back at these first few photos. I had no idea what I was doing, I was just making.

Matt Mullenweg on Apple and 1.0 products back in 2010:

Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise! I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.

This has rocked my day. Re is its own word. It’s not short for regarding.

Matt Levine on “Leon Smuk”, from X:

I guess my question is, what was he paying for? Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away); he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did!

I’m looking for an erratic egotistical billionaire to trust my savings and family’s future to, if you can recommend anyone, slip into my DMs

📚 After backing and reading Renai Le May’s The Frustrated State it felt like Australian governments had completed, achieved the highest level of information technology incompetence. COVID proved me so very wrong, but then today Anthony Agius writes in The Sizzle:

Services Australia has cancelled a project to create a calculator for Centrelink entitlements, after spending $191m on it over 3 years. Incredible incompetency for such a basic thing the government needs.

How many millions of dollars can the Australian government flush until we actually get real upset?

When people talk about how the 80s were better I want to remind them that there was a character on TV whose name was Gordon Shumway, called himself Gordon Shumway, but everyone called him ALF because audiences and cast stupidly needed the reminder that the alien looking dude was an alien life form.

This is terrible branding, design, and UX. How am I going to remember where to go to be an insufferable prick now?

Michael Bierut:

No one will remember that it was on time, everyone will remember that it was bad.

Starting to feel a little bit alone over here in Italy. Trying to get some Aussie work done and it looks like Telstra cuts you off from WiFi calling after your SIM card hasn’t been on an Australian Telstra tower for seven months. Google Fi was three months.

I’ve just finished reading Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P. W. Singer, recommended by my favourite Cybersecurity Guard, @qldnick 📚

It was a compelling and enjoyable read, and honestly, a refreshingly human conclusion that somewhat settles its disturbing and frightening chorus of a society a few years ahead of where we are today struggling with the effects of advancing technology.

Never go into battle with a bot you can’t trust and never trust a bot you don’t know how to snuff out.

The largest truth in this fictional read is that fear always takes the wheel, especially for those who have apparently been listening to the guy who said not to fear.

Love will save the day

📷🇮🇹🏖️ Torre Canne, Puglia

One day we’ll have to explain to our grandkids that we all dressed daggy now because of Elon Musk.

Big news crew, new gender droppin

Doing the right thing is always the right thing

If you're interested in learning more about Tony Bennett's activism, take a look at this story from NBC, which covers his civil rights work. Bennett walked at Selma beside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., having been invited by the late, great Harry Belafonte.

https://flip.it/zaSY.F

#TonyBennett #Entertainment #Activism #History

This might be a silly question for an old nerd to ask, but for those that know the answer, why is the book he famously write in prison, ‘The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick’, not really listed as a book by him on his website etc? Also, the only eBook version I can find is on Kindle. Why?!

Derek Sivers in The past is not true:

Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present. We think of the past like it’s a physical fact - like it’s real. But the past is what we call our memory and stories about it. Imperfect memories, and stories built on one interpretation of incomplete information. That’s “the past”.

No matter how hard they try, the modern web can’t escape Wordpress.

I shared these words from Craig Mod a year ago today. But since then we made the choice to uproot our life in Australia, move to Mexico, then leave Mexico, travel around the USA and Europe for a while, and come home to Australia in a month’s time.

I can guarantee I’m coming home changed, but like Craig, I’m also more confused than ever about why some people travel. I mean no judgement towards any of you, but I’ve been in Italy for a month now and it seems such a waste to leave in a few weeks. Even considering my feeling that I’ve barely seen or experienced anything, I still have a deeply resonating feeling that I’m selfishly taking in the culture here, and to do what with it? Just to give the girls a childhood photo album that was cooler than mine?

The romantic ideal of travel is to leave as one version of yourself and return another, changed, ‘better’ version of yourself. This trip changed me, but not in the ways you might classically expect. I’ve returned suspicious of travel, more confused than ever about why so many people travel. Unsure if most travel of the last few decades makes sense, or has ever made sense or justified the cost. It feels like some consumerist, uncurious notion of travel was seeded long ago and, like a zombie fungus, has mind-controlled everyone to four specific canals in Venice. To a single painting at the Louvre. To three streets and a square in Manhattan. To a few rickety back alleys around Gion. An eminently photogenic set of torii in Kyoto.

Regardless of my, and Craig’s, trepidations of travel being an unjustified expense or impact, I’m forever changed by 2020-2022’s travel-related traumas and 2023’s travel adventure.

I think this would be an awesome idea: a mashup of a reddit-like voting system with events calendar and geotagging plus some Atlas Obscura.

Basically a “cool things near me and/or happening near me soon” web app.

Will the 2026 Commonwealth Games, originally supposed to be in Victoria, Australia, be the first ones to test the “Vancouver should be the permanent Olympic Games city” that Jonathan Fischer reignited seven years ago in Slate, of course but for the Olympic’s little sibling, the Comm' Games:

That’s why the Olympics should relocate to a city that won’t just relieve the rest of the world of hosting duties for the Summer Games but of the Winter Games, too. It would have to be a place with the right climate. It would have to be a place that could afford it. It should possess something of an international flavour. It should have a proven track record. It should be located in a democratic country but not a hegemonic one. It should be Vancouver.

A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace:

Closed Fiefdoms of the platform world, you weary giants of stocks and small talk, I come from the Pluriverse, the new home of the Heart. On behalf of the future, I invite you to join us.

Apparently, it’s wise to let people know you have things available if you indeed do have things available … which I have neglected to do about my piece “South o' Talle” being licensed to Priints in London. It looks great on walls if you have any, any walls that is.

I really like the tiny awards

Much gratitude to @Mtt for designing a really nice and extremely useful Micro.Blog theme in Tiny Theme. I woke up this morning with a blog refresh on my mind, and the theme is great + he’s been so helpful! In addition, thanks to @vincent for Tinylytics bringing the stats and click-kudos to my blog.

I feel like not a day goes by that I don’t witness an even more Italian thing than I had witnessed previously. Today’s most Italian thing I’ve ever witnessed is an Italian driver beeping at a parked Italian ambulance to get out of the way as the medics attend to someone.

It’s always easy to differentiate Italians and tourists on the streets of Puglia. Italians are in the street yelling at each other, tourists are in the streets scrolling.

Looks like Canon is doing five blades

Aliens have come to Australia. When they ask for our leader, who do we call? Chuck, Albo, Sandilands, or Murdoch?

Wild times back in the forties

Diver

Swimming in the ocean and in ocean caves with your four year old is a workout right?

This week ahead sees the Australian celebrancy movement celebrate its 50th anniversary.

50 years ago 0% of Australian weddings were lead by a civil celebrant, today over 80% are. And the entire movement has driven the Australian wedding industry forward to a point where we lead the world’s wedding industry in product, service, brand, professionalism, and creativity.

For a movement that’s grown from Canberra to the world, thank you Lionel Murphy, Lois D’Arcy, and my celebrant colleagues for making a way for me to make a job that takes me aroundd the world.

Read my whole article on the Celebrant Institute website.

I sure hope these peeps who make somewhere between $150,000 USD to multiple millions a year are going to be financially ok through this strike.

If I can be really frank, does anyone else “have parents” but honestly really doesn’t have parents relationally/socially/spiritually and when you have a down moment in life you just feel super alone? Or is this just adulthood? Or do other relational orphans just develop thicker skin?

Italian kids get way more realistic puzzles than Aussie kids

The most terrifying thing I’ve seen in Italy so far was ten Italian youths aged around 12 years old loudly chanting “gay!” and aggressively geaturing in a way that was a little bit too familiar for this Sarina High School alumni, taunting this young lad who was just laughing in their face!

He’s either gay and joyfully proud, or not gay and impervious to the bullying that brought earlier generations to their knees.

My favourite/least-favourite thing to do when travelling Italy is go to these million year old classical Italian osterias (restaurants) run by the village’s most heralded humans, and ask for takeaway.

The first reaction from the staff is a blank look on their face, as if I’ve just asked them to murder the weakest member of the wait staff.

The second thing they do is ask permission from someone in a back room. I assume it’s the pope.

The third is agree then go searching for takeaway boxes or dishes. I’ve seen them run across the road and get some.

Finally, after all this I’ll ask for a glass of vino “while I wait” and the same thing happens every time. The young wait staff member comes back and explains that they can’t do takeaway glasses of wine.

I just wish I could explain to them that we’re dispassionate about disciplining our two and four year olds in restaurants and the world’s just a nicer place if we takeaway.

But thanks to the magic of Apple Translate and hand gestures we get there in the end.

Does anyone else have weird iPhone storage glitches? I’ve had this problem for the last maybe 4-5 years where my iPhone doesn’t actually know how much storage it has. I’ve been on a 256GB iPhone for a while now, and Apple Store staff have asked me to backup and restore, I’ve even started on new installs recently.

The only thing that normally fixes it is doing a backup to my Mac.

My gut feeling tells me that there was a time maybe 4-5 years ago where I was loading in RAW images from my camera into iCloud Photo Library and editing with RAW Power and I reckon that they’re stuck in the iCloud/phone storage jungle.

My Mac’s Photos library also has this weird thing where it picks 1 or 2 photos that it allegedly cannot upload to the cloud, yet it actually originally got that photo from the cloud (it was uploaded on my phone), and the photo is still in the cloud.

I’m semi-tempted to burn this 20-year-old .mac/MobileMe/iCloud account to the ground, export everything, and start again. It feels like there’s always something small that could be buggy happening … or is that just how iCloud feels for everyone?

The most fascinating, whilst also overwhelming, experience in travel, especially when you undertake it for more than a weekend is ‘noticing’.

Almost every time I notice something I think about what Steve Jobs once said:

“When you are a stranger in a place, you notice things that you rapidly stop noticing when you become familiar.”

I sincerely love being a stranger. I think that’s a common thread in my life, that when I become too known I feel uncomfortable. I feel very comfortable being a stranger in a strange place and rather too uncomfortable being at home.

I hope I can give my kids the upbringing that would help them feel the complete opposite, but still curious about the world, still desiring to be strangers in a strange place, noticing.

I think I just accidentally haggled with a vendor in an Italian street market. I thought the fruit cost less than five euros, I gave him five euro., he looked at me and giggled, winked, and points his finger at me and took the money and gave me no change. Is that what haggling is? I’m good at life.

When I first went into self-employment over a decade ago now I set up templates for common or transactional emails and I was always aware that I didn’t want an email not from me, yet from me, to not sound like I had sat down and written the letter.

So I used to write the automated emails from our cat, Stevie.

Stevie is no longer with us, her liver went south, but she lives on as of this week. I’ve replaced all of our automated emails with ChatGPT-generated emails and yet messages written by Stevie AI. Seeing what ChatGPT/Stevie is writing is amazing and hilarious and really good.

Consider that my teaser to enquire with me for your wedding, that a cat will send you emails.

You’ve heard the phrase “Content is King”, coined by Sumner Redstone - the old rich white person behind CBS, Viacom, Paramount, MTV, Comedy Central etc who passed in 2020 - but Bill Gates popularised the idea for the internet back in January of 1996. It’s so beautiful and odd to read this essay 27 years on.

But to be successful online, a magazine can’t just take what it has in print and move it to the electronic realm. There isn’t enough depth or interactivity in print content to overcome the drawbacks of the online medium.

15 years of the Apple App Store and my first purchases are realllll nerdy

I’ve been featured in all the great newspapers around the world, the New York Times was one of the coolest. But none felt as good as having one of my photos printed six years ago in the newspaper I read as a young adult, the newspaper I got it earliest jobs from by reading the classifieds.

Jiddu Krishnamurti:

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

“For everything there is a place but that of wonders is just a little more hidden…”

📷🇮🇹 We went for a drive to the little village of Ostuni today and unknowingly stumbled upon a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show. We didn’t stick around to watch the beautiful people be beautiful, but we saw the rich people trying to get into the town we were leaving.

Threads, compared to Mastodon and BlueSky, is the difference between an idea and a product.

When Steve Jobs saw the graphical user interface with a mouse at PARC, it was an idea. Apple made it a product.

Mastodon and Bluesky are powerful and beautiful ideologies. Threads is a good product.

Apple Photos face detection software needs a “tell me the date and location of that photo” button when asking which of your daughters it is if the photo is of an infant.

Programmed a Zapier zap to get ChatGPT to reply to my website wedding enquiries with an email and a text message in the form of our deceased cat reincarnated as AI. My AI assistant refers to me as “Joshy”.

Pretty much me

Can I share a weird thing that has haunted me for over a decade now? Yoko Ono followed me on Twitter 10 years ago and I forgot to follow her back. Has it been too long?

PJ Vogt’s new podcast helps me feel better about my deep desire to drink coffee mid-flight. Do you drink airline coffee?

One of my great loves in this world is the format and medium of audio storytelling. First radio, then podcasting, it’s one of the most beautiful ways to tell a story.

So it’s pretty cool to wish the modern medium of podcasting a 20th birthday this weekend. Thank you to @podnews for the writeup.

The girls say they’ll catch us dinner tonight. I’m googling pizzerias.

I think about the Malcolm Gladwell book ‘Talking to Strangers’ every day

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

Today I’m thinking about it in context to Threads by Instagram and how the hot takes are flying about how it’s absolutely going to succeed or absolutely going to fail.

Make room for the nuanced, complex, enigmas.

My day job is to stand in between people on their wedding day and make them smile then kiss. It’s not a bad gig tbh.

Yesterday in Puglia, Italy, with Casey and Rob.

Planned by The Elopement Collective and photographed by Pearce Brennan at Masseria Grieco in Ostuni.

Cory Doctorow was on the ABC talking about enshittification and it was beautiful. Must listen audio/radio.

The shining light in the rubbish pile that is Twitter is the @HelpfulNotes service. There is so much misinformation out there, so many people so keen to share the metaphorical train crash that is the world that they don’t even care if the train crash ever happened.

🧵

Normalise back to work after a sabbatical photos

First day back at work photos

After being on sabbatical for almost seven months I’m creating a marriage ceremony today.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a break from my day job for this long, I might have fogrgotten what to do.

Any tips for a fresh wedding celebrant?

Happy America Day

We’ve been in more Airbnb’s this last year than most people, about 35 so far I think. Most hosts mention either in person, or in their review, how it’s unique to travel with our kids (four and two) and how we don’t ask much of them, like how this host mentioned out “autonomy”.

Should we be more needy? Are we too Australian? Honestly, after driving three to five hours with kids the last thing we want to do is talk to an Airbnb host lol.

Remember when we’d suffix names with 2000 to make them feel cool and modern?

2023: when everything has to mean something.

Taylor Swift touring somewhere or not touring somewhere being a political move is wild. She’s not playing Brisbane in Australia because it was too much on her schedule, work-wise, she’s not a robot.

If anyone’s forgotten their password recently I can pick you up a new one when this store opens later today

Italian supermarkets: two aisles worth of pasta, but no rolled oats

Sunday in Puglia

Looking for fiction book recommendations. Give me the name and why you think I’ll like it.

Hey Siri, prepare an edit of the Richmond FC players singing So Long, Farewell to Elon Musk.

New month, new locale. Hello, Martina Franca, Puglia.

Is the future of TV, radio? Or the future of radio is TV? Either way, it’s almost 7pm and this is what Italians are watching on TV?

The number one indicator that you’re an old dad is when your cables and leads company emails “Let’s Catch Up!” and “We miss you!” as if you’re high school buddies.

As a family we travel with a MacBook Pro, iPad mini, two iPhones, Apple Watch, and a series of things that require either USB-A, USB-C, or micro USB to charge. We’ve chosen gadgets and utilities that are all USB-C, with exceptions where necessary.

My DJI Magic 3 drone batteries need 65W but my current travel charger’s 65W apparently doesn’t quite meet the needs the DJI three-battery USB-C charger, so the 96W Apple original MBP charger does the MacBook and the drone batteries.

For a family of four travelling globally for a year it was hard to figure out the exact right kit, but we got there in the end.

So my worldwide travel solution has been

• two Anker 543 Chargers (65W II), these have two USB-A ports, a USB-C 45W port and a USB-C 20W port
• my original 96W MacBook charger.

Each of these, including the MacBook charger, takes as an input the figure 8 lead. Figure 8 leads, or IEC C7 leads as they’re technically known, are very easy to procure locally, most Airbnb’s even have multiple devices already using them, they’re inexpensive, and they’re small to carry.

So I buy three IEC C7 leads for each region we’re travelling to. If we weren’t on a year long trip I’d hold onto the leads but suitcase space is at a premium. So far I’ve needed four different leads, a set for Australia, Mexico/USA, then the European kind, and finally the best of all - the British variety. The Brits don’t get much right but they figured out electrical points and plugs really well.

I also have this assortment of cables

• 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB-C cables about 25cm long. These suit most charging, data, plugging-in situations.
• USB-C lightning leads for the iPhones
• the Apple MagSafe travel dock for Watch and iPhone
• and the get out of jail free card is my USB-A to Lightning + USB-C + Micro-USB three-headed plug.

That’s how we travel the globe keeping everything charged and no stress.

Tonight we sojourn at the Tavignano Estate in Cingoli, Italy.

Was just driving and stopped at a red traffic light in a small Italian village and a civilian car drives up being me, looks around, and just overtakes me and runs the red light. I love Italy.

South Carolina, you go grrl

I just want to go on the record for being totally cool and not scared at all by the demonic kitten sound coming from the vineyard outside our Airbnb in Northern Italy. I am a big brave man and not scared by the feline calling out in the pitch black night.

Apple Reminders in iOS 17 is finally getting pretty useful

How Italians know whether to walk around shirtless or not

Our Italian Airbnb’s TV made me feel all nostalgic

I’m back baby!

Listening to an investor on a podcast today reminded me of how and why I do what I do. He was talking about advice that he had been given regarding his investment portfolio, and the person giving the advice said how well does that pie chart of what you’ve invested in reflect or match your interests, talents, and skills? The advice being that you should invest in what you know, invest in what you are passionate about.

So, after a solid sabbatical that has taken us through Mexico, the United States of America, and so much of Europe, I am proud to say that we’re coming back to Australia in August and I’m coming back to work as a celebrant.

It’s been a wild couple of years where I didn’t know if I’d ever want to create weddings anymore, but it turns out I just needed a few months off and some quality time with my girls.

I say all of that, to say this. There’s a book, and a principle, called the proximity principle, and it’s a simple principle. The idea is that the people that are around you, the people that are your community, are the people most likely to be able to help you.

So there are two things I would love some help with. Number one, when we get home we have to buy some cars, and buying a car today is terrible. If you or someone you know is selling your car, let a brother know. Secondly, we’re coming back to work and my calendar is wide open. So if you know someone getting married, anywhere in the world, let them know that your mate Josh is a pretty good celebrant.

Normally I’d say I’m looking forward to catching up with you when I’m home for a beer, but it turns - and I’ve researched this extensively on myself during this sabbatical - that beers make me fat and bloated and sick.

So instead I’m looking forward to an old-fashioned or red wine when I’m home.

See you soon!

Is there an AI tool around yet to help manage customer journeys? New client comes in, and the AI can take that journey on the pre-set rails we decide on in the business. Automation, but with intelligence?

Made our way into Italy today and caught the sun at it’s grandest, just before it goes to sleep.

I accidentally installed the developer beta of iOS 17. It’s mostly fine with a handful of annoying bugs you’d expect to see three months away from launch, but I’m so grateful for offline Apple Maps. Get me some offline Apple Translate and I’ll be set!

Whenever someone sees a photo of mine and asks me what iPhone I used my 25kg full ThinkTank camera bag weeps.

The thing that’s extremely visible throughout Europe is that there was a time that buildings weren’t just built but they were created, and created beautifully.

How did that art get lost?

A 360 view of the sunset on our last night in Liechtenstein from the Fürstin-Gina-Weg, or in English, Princess Gina memorial trail on the Sareis mountain ridge overlooking the village of Malbun which has been our home for the last week.

Snuck over the border to Switzerland to watch the sun set today

Striking images at the Lichtenstein national museum of a medieval Liechtensteiner teenager using his early-model iPhone

Weirdest thing I’ve seen in Liechtenstein award goes to …

How all men bathe

Hey, Europe. Why?

Despite being 450km from an ocean or sea, summer has hit Lichtenstein and the country’s beach is open!

Showed the kids what the early iPhones looked like at the Liechtenstein National Museum

Can you spot which country FIFA left off the list of countries that play football/soccer in the FIFA exhibit at the Lichtenstein national museum?