Goodbye For Now

31 Oct 2016

It is well overdue that I retire yet another blog. At least for now anyway. I might revive it at a later date with a new layout or something.

See you, Space Cowboy.

A Meagre Company

23 Oct 2015

Has it really been this long? So it seems I’ve been busy this past year. What have I been doing? I got a job. I got two jobs. My old work now has me back there part-time. A relief on the back pocket, as I’d been drifting and freelancing for so long that I thought I would float away.

Earlier this year I was working for a company down on the Gold Coast for a while, helping to build a mobile app. It was a long drive down there every day and on the way I decided to listen to a set of lectures on How To Start A Startup and soon after that “Meagre” was born, in the mind at least, although the seeds of something similar had been floating around for a long long time already.

A few months ago, my old friend Fletcher had arrived back in Australia from Berlin. He does design and stuff, so I asked him to be my co-founder. I had a million ideas floating around in my head. Surely one of them would make us billionaires.

We settled on an inital idea and have been developing it (slowly) ever since. Life seems to get in the way. Also we need to actually make money to live, so yeah, there’s that too. On the side we’ve also been doing other web design jobs etc, so I guess the company is a kind of a cross between a tech startup and a design studio at the moment.

But an Alpha release is there on the horizon. I can see it. Though the horizon seems to be getting further and further away at times.

But now it’s time to make this Meagre Company into something substantial!

Anti-Social Behaviour

24 Dec 2014

On the 1st of December 2014 I decided it was time to have a break from social media. Way back in 2007 I happened to stumble upon a little website called Twitter.

setting up my twitter account

— ıllıllı joshua byrd (@phocks) May 2, 2007

Soon afterwards I joined Facebook, later Instagram came along, and of course Tumblr, and then about a million more online enterprises vying for my time.

After 7 years or so that initial spark had certainly dwindled. For most of these sites I found that I was only updating them and checking them out of pure daily habit or because I felt almost obligated to stay active. And so I got the idea late November that I wanted to see what it was like not be beholden to any of these websites each day, just for a little while. I even went back to using my old Nokia phone with a whole week of battery life.

It was great! The taste of freedom!

Of course I didn’t abstain from the internet completely. During the month away I have been looking for a new job, working on my own projects, and tending to other obligations and commitments. I also found that the fine line that distinguishes social media from the rest of the internet is often very vaguely defined. That became largely what drew my excess attention during those days. In a way, email is still the largest social media platform in the known universe. At least I made it to inbox zero.

And now as the month wears thin and the time to return calls me back to that great social stream, I can appreciate the time spent apart. I did get quite a few things done. All those things I wanted to get done without additional undue distraction. But I also learnt that the art of procrastination and distraction is an ancient one, one easily found, even in the absence of a few major social media platforms.

In the end I truly believe it doesn’t really matter how many social networks you are active on at any given time. In any life, productivity and procrastination will forever be locked in that eternal battle for the mind and for all time.

Nanoisms

05 Nov 2014

After an inexplicable and inexcusable absence last year (actually it was mostly because I was over in Europe travelling and whatever), I have decided to return to NaNoWriMo this year to see if I still had it in me. Last year was the first time since 2004 that I’ve actually not written a novel in November! It was a bit strange.

Anyway it’s day 5 and I’ve still not given up. I seem to even be on track somehow with my wordcount, having last night just broken 6666 words. Here’s my opener:

The River winds on. A hundred thousand million billion trillion molecules of hydrogen atom pairs bonded to oxygen flow in millisecond intervals out to sea. Impurities abound, collected, deposited, added to along the way, from high mountain top rains through all the twists and turns of water cycle samsara. It’s a trap. We rise high; we trickle low.

All the world is a window. Looking through, one warm, hazy October night was Willow. The ferris wheel had stopped, frozen in time. From that height, the river’s twin winding water-lines, both upstream and down met his field of vision, each meandering off into dual distant horizons. His own faded reflection in the window also bounced back against the glass. A chance percentage of photons flash-danced in quantum space, and returned back from where they came. The cityscape hung as a glowing red, green, & blue, neon, jagged backdrop against a dark sky.

And it gets progressively worse from there!

Just as an almost side-note, as I am using Google Docs this year to write my novel, there is a feature where you can share your work publicly and even allow comments on it from the anonymous viewers. I probably won’t keep this public for very long, but I thought it might be an interesting experiment. Here’s the link anyway if you want to experience the real-time writing of a really terrible novel in 30 days. goo.gl/tdcZ0M

Edit: If the above link does not work, for kicks I’ve decided to put the entire unedited manuscript up on the Amazon Kindle store here www.amazon.com/dp/B00QQ9DHOK

Modern Mouse Art

15 Sep 2014

Here’s what 2.3 hours (from 14:53 to 17:13) of my mouse movements looked like yesterday while working and browsing the web. Track your own mouse art over at IOGraphica, and turn your mouse movements into great works of modern art!