This is going to be a quick one because I have the flu and work is ridiculously busy right now. A friend gave me this link and I think it is possibly the most sobering and prespective inducing movie that I have ever seen. It’s only short, but if you can watch it and not feel moved then you must be dead from the neck up.
Miniature Earth

I’m single. Thirty years old and single. Have been for about six years now. Does this bother me? Not at all. You see, I’ve been married, been separated, and dealt with all the dramas of relationships that conflict with my job.

Working in theatre presents some interesting challenges to a relationship. I don’t do the 9 to 5 Monday to Friday thing. Some weeks I do, others I work 8am to midnight, Monday to Sunday or any other bizarre combination of hours and days. I’ve found that a lot of people can’t handle that inconsistency and it causes problems.

Over the past six years I’ve had some run ins with the opposite sex. Some have been fun, some would seem to have torn my heart from my chest and trodden it into mush on the ground. None have turned into anything more than a few weeks of fun.

In the last few months I have started to rethink my life. What is it about past relationships that has caused them to fail? Is it the women I choose to pursue? Or is it me, pushing them away before I get hurt again? Or maybe a combination of both?

All this thinking has led me to this….my Relationship Manifesto.

Earlier this week I took a trip to Melbourne to have a demonstration of a new digital console. Thanks to the guys from Group Technologies for being very hospitable and looking after me for the whirlwind day.

The desk I was demoing is the Digico D1. I know that I said in an earlier post that the Digidesign Venue was an amazing desk, and it still is, but the D1 is in a class of its own. If you want to read my review of the desk, head over to this link - D1 Review.

Here is a very bad picture of the desk. Unfortunately by the time I remembered that I took my camera down with me, we were running out of time to get back to the airport so this rushed and blurry shot is the best I could get. Still, I think it makes it look cool.

Compare that desk to the rigs that I usually mix on

If I needed a piece of hardware for everything available on the D1, I would need 4 of those sound consoles, and easily another 2 or 3 of the stack of rack gear beside it. You can see why I want a new desk

In the past few weeks of setting up the blog, designing the site and generally trying to figure out how this whole new side of the interweb works, I have noticed a rather annoying trend. Much the same as anyone setting up a homepage or business website, people creating blogs seem to be caught up in the hunt to be number “1″. Comments on other peoples blogs are full of spam to promote the blogs or blog search engines of others, blogs are full of internet garbage like Ebay links, porn, or just junk with repetitive keywords to produce a better Google or Technorati result.

I’ve spent a large portion of today looking for interesting blogs. Not just groups of people who have only barely evolved from MySpace, or sites that are no more than a replica of a business website so that the company gets more exposure to search engines. I’ve found some that were vaguely interesting but hard to decipher, many that do nothing other than regurgitate CNN and BBC:Worldwide feeds, and only one or two that seemed as though they had something worthwhile to say.

Now, I am the first person to put my hand up and say that I am probably not the most interesting or innovative person on the ‘net. I will however, endeavour to make every post here an original post. If I quote a news site it will be because I have something to say about that article, and I will say it.

So, now that I have made that rather worrying promise, I can point you to a site that I found today on my searches. This site is called Strangers Among Us. It is a collaborative blog by a few guys who take photos around their towns that capture people in action. Not posed or planned, but people living their lives. The post that really grabbed my attention was this one - Errands at Box Stores. More specifically the photo of the cashier at a coffee shop in the process of being abused by a customer. There is something in that picture that, I think, captures the duality of life. This poor cashier has no choice but to assist the customer, no matter if he was at fault, or if the person is just plain unreasonable, and all the while he must be thinking that he is better than this.

How many times have we all been in a situation where we have been on the receiving end of something that was undeserved and yet have had to bear it because at that moment we have no other option. It seems obvious to me that if people would only remember those times in their life, that we would be treating each other a lot better. What ever happened to “Do unto others..”?

I spent last Saturday in the studio with my friend Shane from the comedy duo The Laundromats. He has a side project going with another comedian doing music. No comedy, just some pretty cool songs etc. Check out their Myspace site at The Futons. It was great to be recording real music again after so long just doing live work and theatre.
Shane and I were in a band together back in 1999 and we wrote a lot of really cheesy punk songs about bizarre subjects such as The Tellietubbies and the cartoon show “Rocko’s Modern Life”. It’s cool to see that we have both evolved from that point and can now write intelligent and mature songs!
You can listen to the rough demo of Shane’s new song “One Pure One” from my webhost. Let me know if you like it, and I’ll pass that on to Shane. You have to keep artists fed with ego improvement all the time or they start to self destruct.
I’m still working on The Laundromats’ live album. All the final editing is done and now I just have to separate the 38 minute file into individual CD tracks for mixing. Then it’s off to the mastering studio and I can hand the boys their second CD. I know that they are looking forward to it and so am I.
I need to get it finished ASAP because I have to move house very soon. The way my life is at the moment it could be some months before I get my studio gear set up in the new place and that would put quite a hold up on your enjoyment of the new album.