My will: and I hereby bequeath to my children, 739 partially completed buy 10 get one free cards from coffee shops all over the city.
A love letter to defrag.exe
Scott sent me this cute Thread by Calm and I remarked that defragging my computer ‘back in the day’ was one of my favourite tasks.
I loved running defrag.exe on DOS and then Windows as often as possible.
It was one part “I’m doing God’s work,” one part “this will totally speed the computer up,” even though it only slightly affected performance, one part “looking under the hood,” which is an element of computing I dearly miss today, and one part just sitting there for an hour watching the defragger defrag.
A file, say your homework – homework.doc – might have been saved in position 1045 on the spinning hard disk. However, it might have needed 10 positions, but only positions 1045 to 1050 were free, so the last five parts would be placed later on the disk where there was free space. Then, if you wanted to access that document, the disk would be spinning back and forth between the two different positions on the disk.
Defragmenting would bring all the bits together by moving other bits out of the way.
Watching the defragger run you built such an intimate relationship with your file system, operating system, documents, applications (we called them programs at the time), files, games, etc.
In some defragmentation apps, they would show you which file it was working on at that time, and if you were nerdy enough, you’d come to know all the files, even operating system files. When you only had 100 or a few hundred megabytes on a disk, you’d have to sacrifice things like help files, unneeded applications or operating system features, or Minesweeper if you wanted to install a new program or game.
It really was a beautiful time to use a computer.
Miss you, defrag.exe.
You know what sucks about using the internet today - whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or Threads - is that they’re all geared towards virality, these big pieces of content that goes so far.
There’s not really any room for me just to bitch and moan about being stranded at Melbourne Airport for five hours this morning when I want to be home.
I guess that’s for the better. Who wants to hear about me being stranded to Melbourne Airport?
The thing I miss though is that sharing our mundane life was a fundamental part of the social web 15 years ago and I miss your food photos and flights delay posts.
48 hours in Bali - a photo dump
It must be terrible for every other musician and songwriter in the world to know that anything they ever make will be - at very best - second best to Throw Your Arms Around Me.
One day, some day in the next few years, I probably won’t fly as much as I do, and as my Qantas status fades and staff forget my face, the thing I’ll miss the most after the Qantas staff is the Sydney Qantas First Class Lounge.
It’s just a real joy to slip away to a fancy as heck (and free) restaurant (airport lounge) then get a neck massage before being slammed into a tin can for a long haul flight.
WWDC 2024 prediction: iOS is dead. Long live aiOS.
aiOS: Think Different.
Did you know Japan had its own beautiful and amazing method of measuring time before Christians ruined it all?
The Uniqueness of Japanese Time - JapanUp!
H/T Ian Betteridge’s A+ email, Ten Blue Links.
Kent Nerburn:
Debt defines your future, and when your future is defined, hope begins to die. You have committed your life to making money to pay for your past.
Apart from actually doing the work couples pay me to do, like making their weddings and elopements, some of the proudest professional work I’m doing these days is in Aisle Authority, my daily letter to the world’s best wedding creators. If you create weddings for a living like I do, it’s the kind of daily business encouragement I wanted to receive but no-one was making, so I wrote one.
I can’t stop looking out the front door of our new home in the Huon Valley, so now I’ve got to show you. Plus a photo of the door because it’s potentially the cutest way a house has ever been presented at settlement.
They say that when you have kids you enter your second stage of life. This is me entering my third stage of life.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, call me crazy, or call me stupid, but I get a feeling that TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, LinkedIn and honestly any algorithm-driven social network isn’t the place for deeper thinking, intellect, and non-viral-bs-business ideas. So I’m investing what little business-intelligence capital into my own blog and email. It’s called Aisle Authority, I write it every day, and it looks like this. Read it and even subscribe like a madman at aisleauthority.email.
The aurora australias, the southern lights, were a spectacle to behold last night aroundd Hobart, even with lots of cloud cover.
My first taste was a seeing pulsing of lights from behind the clouds. It was the most surreal thing I’ve seen.
I can’t stop thinking about this Boox Palma
I could work for a million years, doing the best jobs, making the best things, writing the most eloquent words, delivering the best service, or creating the finest art, and still, I would pale in comparison to the eternal and beautiful legacy left by any mother, especially Britt.
Do you ever just do something, then regret it, then feel awesome about it? That’s how I felt when I got the domain name theinternet.com.au this afternoon
Vale Stan Hillard
A quick search on the internet for Stan Hillard doesn’t reveal much. You’ll find my name-dropping about a decade ago on Radio Today as I trample on the great legacy of community radio in Australia, you’ll also find that Stan was most recently the President of 2WAY FM and was even presenting radio shows last week. He loved the theatre, and even acting if we’re allowed to call whatever is in that YouTube video as acting.
I met Stan on my first day at 4CRM, Mackay’s Community Radio station early 2004. I’d always wanted to be on the radio, firstly because I’d admired everything I’d heard come out of Triple J, Hot FM, and 4MK’s transmitters since I was a little boy, and secondly because it was the closest I could ever come to being heard - something that didn’t happen much for this kid from a broken home. I walked past and saw a sign on the door about learning radio.
This post to the usenet group aus.radio.broadcast recalls the moment in terific hi skool dropout englissh
I went up the radio station stairs expecting to find out about some big course and the next day, after talking to station manager Allan Berry, I was in the studio with Stan.
Dig deeper on Google for Stan and you’ll find a story from the Alice Spring News reported on February 11, 1998, a story containing an anecdote about colour TV coming to the region:
When Alice Springs finally got TV in 1970, it could have gone straight to colour. However, the ABC, the sole transmitter at the time, had put a colour bar on its equipment. “Nobody realised this,” recalls Murray, “but we had a technician here called Stan Hillard in charge of the transmitter. He went to Adelaide and while he was having a look at their equipment, he noticed the colour bar, pulled it out and all of a sudden Alice Springs had colour. “He got into hot water for doing this, the ABC were going to reinstate black and white but the Northern Territory Government intervened, someone in the ABC got their knuckles rapped and Stan was a hero for the town!” Murray has heard that Stan now lives in Rockhampton.
Born on March 11, 1947, Stan passed away this last week, and although the internet leaves much to be imagined about Stan, his leadership, training, and guidance in the early days of my career were foundational and I wanted to honour his legacy by repeating what he taught me on my first day in front of a microphone, before which he’d taught me how to panel a radio show. I quoted Stan on this blog last year, but I share again to honour the mark Stan left on my life and career, and so the people at the back can hear it:
Imagine the audience are the stupidest people alive then treat them with the upmost respect.
It’s my golden rule for broadcasting, publishing, posting, tweeting, threading, tooting, facebooking, gramming, or microblogging. Imagine for just one minute that the people reading this thing, or hearing it, and they have no idea what you’re talking about - explain it to them in a quick and simple way so they may understand and perhaps even engage.
Whenever I’ve failed in life it’s almost likely because I’ve ignored or failed to employ that golden rule.
Brought wedding-ready two pairs of pants and three shirts to Queenstown for three weddings here this week with the full confidence that one of the pairs of pants would serve double duty.
Both ended up in the snow mud, and I think I’ve cracked my ribs.
It’s now 10pm at a laundromat.
This is the exciting life of a travelling adventure elopement celebrant.
