Addendenim

It is here that I admit, once and for all, that yes: I am a time traveler.

There have been suspicions for some time now - a few inquiring minds have poked around and thrown a few unsubstantiated accusations in my direction. While they have failed to come up with any solid proof of my activities, all it seems they had to do was wait for me to slip up. And slip up I have.

Eyes Forward

I'm not going to get into a lot of detail about the nuts and bolts of how I travel in time - suffice it to say that in this instance I had a few too many drinks at Spleen this coming weekend. This meant that when I arrived back at 'current date plus one day' I miscalculated and ended up in Thursday (actual 'current date') instead. Which is probably fitting punishment for me trying to avoid Thursday in the first place.

Correct: Time can be confusing most of the times (because Time is concurrent but I'm not getting into that right now either).

So good on you to the eagle eyes who spotted the clues to the fact I'd missed my target by a whole day: wearing casual clothes to work when it wasn't 'casual Friday'; posting my Friday-dated video with an unadjusted time stamp on Thursday; anticipating Dave's gig at Vibe after work a whole 24+ hours early; a slew of clues for you tenacious busy-bodies out there.

I should've just issued a media release.

Spoilers ahead

So the future: I do spend a bit of time there - but not as far forward as you might imagine. That's mostly because I've seen further into my future and it's a bit shit, to tell the truth.

Oh the Earth is mostly okay - I'm pre-empting the question the Greenies amongst you will want to ask. The planet is still holding together as far as I've seen. It hobbles along despite our best efforts to wreck it completely. It's cobbling together an atmosphere (mostly) and still managing to produce enough food to feed a large proportion of us. It's not great food, and a lot of it is synthetic - but it does the job. Good news is the population dropped off enough for us to cope the ones left behind.

Oh yeh, the Scientologists: turned out they were *actually* scientists. Who knew? I don't know all the details because I skipped ahead a bit but turns out Admiral T. Cruise wasn't as green as he was cabbage looking when he bought those plots of land on the Moon. Building Suri (the lunar base station) is how they managed to get 'off world' and get most of their brethren to Titan.

It's a funny old turn of events.

Back to me

So mostly I just jump forward to the next weekend and have a good time. After all, what else would you do if you had the technology? I generally pop back to 'current date' (my own time-line) after my weekend so I can maintain some sort of cohesive life-stream. Plus I get a couple of weekends per week which is a) great and b) the reason I'm wrecked most of the time and c) maintain my mayorships.

But sometimes, slip-ups happen, such as this latest, rather public one. I blame these accidents on the small control panels of the time mechanism (it wasn't design in Cupertino) combined with my fat fingers coupled with a liberal splash of gherkin juice. This all culminates in me not always hitting the dates and times I aim for.

Oh right, I haven't told you the story about the gherkins yet - it'll make sense when you read that story somewhere down the track (sorry can't remember the exact date I published that - they were vodka infused gherkins: say no more! but stay tuned - it might make sense in the end).

Concluding statements

I've already said more than I had intended. Understand I have no further comment on the subject of my extra-chronicular activities.

In closing though, I just want to award the eagle-eyed busy-bodies their point. They may have won this round, but know this snoopers: it's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

Game on!

Wednesday Links

It has been quite some time since I posted a list to the Wednes day Links title.

I first started this as a way of getting my fellow 'multimedia' colleagues interested in the internet and the joys held therein - yes, one might ask oneself why they weren't interested in it in the first place, given it was supposed to be what they did for a living - but people are funny creatures. They sometimes call themselves one thing but do something different: or nothing at all.

The way I tried to ease my colleagues into the wealth that is online was by emailing a list of interesting links via email each Wednesday. Interestingly enough, those who proclaimed to be the developers/designers of the group didn't appreciate the emails, oft deleting them on sight, but those who were of a more academic persuasion found them to be wonderful springboards to an world of ideas.

Shoveling

Maybe it's just the industry - but there are a heck of a lot of bullshitters associated with online web services and products. I guess there are some doctors who bull shit but after a few patients die I suppose their industry does something about it.

Not in my industry - the bullshitters just keep shoveling and shoveling - always able to find another poor client who wants to do extraordinary things but doesn't have enough knowledge to know when they're getting shafted - not until they've sunk lots of their money into very few results.

But look: don't get me started. I spent this morning trying to read my book in a cafe with one such web salesman trying to a) use his computer (had to phone for help with the password back to the office - twice) and b) sell his client on promoting his company with an 'interactive' CD of PDFs (total of 60 pages if my eavesdropping was correct). Not to mention the client had a $1,000 budget and the salesman was saying they couldn't do it for less than $4,000. I left with the salesman urging the client to come up with more investment in the CD, and to buy a domain name ASAP because owning it the longest time was the secret to getting great Google search results.

I hope the client ended up doing a bit more research before committing to anything.

Springboard

• I cannot recommend WITS highly enough. This last episode features the distractable John Hodgman with a guest appearance from Neil Gaiman. Grab some snacks with your coffee and spend some quality internet time.
• What happens when you get a professional to design your Lost Cat poster. 
• Get your face in space via one of the two the last shuttle flights.
• Extreme DIY: Building a homemade nuclear reactor in NYC
• Words about the packing tape artwork and see the moving pictures below:

Earwigs

She had never liked earwigs.

They looked to her like they would do as their name claimed and crawl into her ear, scritching and scratching their way inside. Whispering doubts and insecurities; falsehoods and misleadings. She was sure earwigs were the weasels of the insect world. Conniving, manipulative earwigs.

He was a lot like an earwig. A scuttling sort of a man; she didn't think he'd ever been particularly good at anything except aligning himself with people who were. She felt bogged down by the earwig's latest alignment - a person of consequence in her life. The fact that earwig's schemings were clumsy and transparent didn't make them any less dangerous and she was feeling her position was becoming more and more perilous.