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.

Tess McClure in The Guardian reports on Pak 'n' Save's mealbot:

A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes – recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, “poison bread sandwiches” and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes.

The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.

We're in the beautiful age of quality assurance in large language models. The giveaway is that the supermarket responds with:

(we are) disappointed to see “a small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose

Instead of owning the issue and revealing that the whole thing is built on a house of cards and we're all just figuring this crap out.

After two months in London, across regional Austria, Liechtenstein, regional Italy, Puglia, and Tuscany, it is so refreshing for my soul to be walking the streets of Paris again tonight.

I could walk the streets of Paris and New York City for the rest of my days and never get bored or lose inspiration.

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.

Driving from Siena, Italy, to Graz, Austria, today Goldie and I were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch and we decided on this place named after a beach in Los Angeles.

I took Britt’s Fuji X-S10 with the 27mm f/2.8 for a play while we were there.

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

For an interesting NASA and Apple-related fall down a rabbit hole, start with the origin of the name of "The Whole Earth Catalog" in 1966, skip forward to 1972 when a whole earth photo was made.

Then take a turn to one of Steve Jobs' favourite sayings "Stay hungry stay foolish" which he quoted in 2005 at Stanford in his famous commencement speech.

Ad then wrap back around to how the whole earth image as an iPhone wallpaper came to be.

Welcome to my brain, where I just think about this stuff.

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.

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

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.

A MacBook with a turntable instead of a keyboard? Shut up and take my money, DJ.

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.” 

Uluṟu, that beautiful monolith that captures the very essence of Australia. It's my favourite place in Australia. This iconic natural wonder is far more than an awe-inspiring spectacle - it represents the rich tapestry of indigenous heritage and gathering for ceremony.

Uluṟu is intrinsically linked with the indigenous Anangu people, serving as an embodiment of their Tjukurpa - a term that captures the moral laws, spirituality, and existence of these people. Uluṟu's formation stems from a time of ancestral beings, the Dreamtime, whose stories are etched across its vast surface in the form of petroglyphs.

For countless generations, Uluṟu has been a significant ceremonial site, bearing witness to rites of passage and important celebrations. This land, imprinted with the songs and dances of the Anangu, has been a part of their life's tapestry, from birth to death and every joy and hardship in between.

Now, imagine breathing your marriage into life here - a site resonating with tales of love, life, and dreams, where the deep-red soil has observed centuries of human connection. A marriage ceremony at Uluṟu represents a union not only between two individuals but also a communion with our shared human legacy and the ancient rhythms of this remarkable landscape.

As a wedding celebrant, my commitment at Uluṟu is to ensure that your ceremony encapsulates your story while honouring the deep-seated heritage there. In doing so, we pay tribute to the traditional custodians of this land.

Joining the long line of stories woven into this sacred land, adding our mark to the generations of human experiences that Uluṟu has borne witness to.

Photo by Heart and Colour from Steph & Kieran's elopement with The Elopement Collective.

Reed Albergotti in Semafor Technology:

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and the navigation company TomTom released a free mapping dataset in a bid to compete with Google Maps and Apple Maps. Developers can use the data, which includes 59 million places of interest, to create their own navigation products.

If a powerfully simple mapping system like What3Words can't gain traction in a decade, I don't think TomTom can get a foot up by giving it away.

I am curious where this leaves Bing Maps though.