Mr Altruistic

This week is council clean up and look what made its way onto the pile. The dakcreaming electric orange Morey Boogie 136. Arguably the best board of its time. I couldn’t tell you how many countless hours of enjoyment were had surfing on that board, and I just had to take one final snap before wishing the old friend a new life (in the garbage tip, or some lucky kids garage). Round here, if you stick stuff on the nature strip it’s fair game, council clean-up day or not. If you are in the middle of mowing your lawn, and trot off out the back to stick the clippings in the mulch pile, don’t be too surprised if when you get back the mower ain’t there. Don’t laugh its happened before. So I can only imagine the glee of the kid that picked the boogie up off the pile literally minutes after i took that shot.

Going on a trek with the geek to South West Rocks Shallow Crossing tomorrow to do some fishin` and fourby fourin`. Leaving at the crack to dodge the traffic in Dave’s Cruiser, and get out of this shitty town is something that we are both looking forward to. Sydney is considered one of the best cities in the world, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get to you. Getting out of the everyday and reconnecting with nature is always a bonus and when you get those opportunities you want to grab them with both hands. Expect some photo’s to capture the good times had on the trip. See yas when I get back.

Stacey Keibler. What more can I say? i before e except after K And what a Special K she is. She’s RED hotskies. Check out the shots in the Stacey Keibler album for some more pics of her. No wonder the WWE isn’t missing the likes of Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock or Goldberg…

With lovely ladies like Stacey in their line-up, most men wouldn’t care whose wrestling as long as they get a glimpse of scantily clad Stacey as Miss Hancock, with her trademark long legs and that rope-between-the-legs-whilst-bending-over entrance to the ring.

’nuff said!

Update 30th September:
Due to the overwhelming positive support for the Stacey Keibler pics I’ve gone and added another 5 to the pic page (namely Stacey #11 to Stacey #15). If anyone knows of anymore that are of this calibre in quality please post, and I will add them (and a link to you in thanks). Let’s share Stacey K around hehehe

For those that don’t know I have recently left the horror 9 to 5er that I was struggling at, so that i could engage myself in something more meaningful to me. This involves reviving my business partnership. I am also in the process of constructing a brand new Australian music venture in conjunction with Time Signature Studios to promote up-and-coming bands and established rock outfits, which through my 15+ years experience in the industry (playing bass guitar in band chillum/recording in studios/performing live gigs all around Sydney) screams of success. So where do I go to get the creative juices flowing required to construct this magic? Why the office of course. This isn’t your typical run of the mill office though. The office is a sun-soaked balcony in a sleepy suburb in Sydney (see image above). I just sit out there with the laptop and a coffee or 6, and let the fingers dance on the keys. The table comes with its own ornaments (yes the gigantic cat is real - 6 year old Himalayan called Billy) and the sounds of the outdoors, the fresh air, the sunshine all put me in a deep state of calm and working doesn’t seem like work at all.

I can’t describe the liberation you feel from casting off the shackles of a role where you have to be up at the crack of dawn to prepare yourself for the day, then travel on Sydneys rail system (I won’t even bother commenting further on that, suffice it to say that it is the worst rail system in the world BAR NONE), then work MORE than 8 hours at a job that is beneath you for a paycheck that covers your bills and not much else. Time-wise the breakdown was 12 hours dedicated to work (including travelling; actual work; getting ready for work), 8 hours sleep (hopefully), which leaves a grand total of 4 hours to yourself a day. Fuck That! If you wanted to have anymore time to yourself that involves eating into your sleep time. I can’t do that. not for another 40 years. I think the worst thing about it was standing around waiting for work, and spending that time thinking fuck this is boring there has to be something more meaningful I can do with 8 hours of my day. My mind would often wander to working from home and using the skills that I am both qualified and adept in. When you think like that for 4 months straight somethings gotta give. For once I made a decision for ME. It’s my life I should be living it the way that I want. Fuck this 2 weeks notice bullshit, that’s THEIR problem, not mine. I’ve done that in the past and given an employer 4 weeks. So I do believe this balances that out.

So I’ve taken this step and hopefully it proves to be the right one. I have a powerful piece of hardware at my disposal (and I’d like to be a geek and get a whole lot more) and the impetus and momentum to make this a success. Working for oneself incorporates doing things your way (hallelujah!), and you can take a break when you want for how long you want OR you can work a full day without a break if that’s your bag. You can have a day off in the middle of the week if that suits you better, and that means getting things like banking and shopping done are a breeze. Under that context a 12 hour day doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, under that context working 12 hours a day over 7 days doesnt seem so bad. There’s a lot to be said for autonomy. It’s the factor I value most when approaching employers. I value it even above the salary. It gives you freedom, in a place where you are stuck for 8+ hours a day, and in that sort of prison-like structure you need that freedom. Otherwise you may as well be the bitch on the block, bend over, grit your teeth and just bear it. I did a Shawshank Redemption, and escaped

I know many people do the suit and tie thing, and put the hard yards in, get the job done, and climb the ladder. If they can do that, then kudos to them. I’m the kind of person that doesn’t want to wake up in 30 years time and think where the fuck did my life go?, what did I get done? I want to be creative, I don’t want to live in the box. I want to be a bass player and make records, I want to be a web designer and create fresh devastating design work, I want to be a world class photographer and travel the world taking shots of beauty, I want to live oh why won’t you let me live!!!! Sorry had to get that off the chest hehehe.

So if you’re sitting at your desk, in your cubicle, and your online in your 30 minute lunchbreak and you are reading this and thinking to yourself “I want to own a petshop, I want to design a golf course, I want to be a professional tennis player, I want to bungie-jump off Mt Everest, I want to make money from carving little wooden pinocchios out of the dead branches that fall in my backyard… I want to live!” then take my example and MAKE it happen. Why dream about it any longer. Sure you have bills to pay, and you need the money to pay them, but in 40 years time when you’re Senior Manager at your cubefarm, and you’re 10 times as stressed and earning 10 times as much, those bills are still going to be there, fatter and uglier. Like a cranky, old friend they grow with you over the years. Take the plunge now while you are still young and have the energy to enjoy living your dream.

p.s. Thanks to Dave for suggesting I improve the readability of the site. Not one to mince words, the geek lets you know what does and doesn’t work on your site, without beating around the bush, so cheers for that dood. The vilesilencer is a living, breathing, coding dinosaur, it needs a back-end update, I’m aware of that. Tables are out CSS is in. I know I know. The silencer is built on a nested-table structure as complex and dense as a beehive (and just as sweet hehehe) and I’m not about to start fucking with it. I’ve added a line-height so that hopefully the site is easier to read, but I wont be making any drastic design changes anytime soon, so for now do as I do and maintain the rage

One of the classic lyrical lines from Dancing Days, one of Led Zeppelin’s many hits, that to this day I still don’t understand. Ahhhh the obligatory Led Zeppelin entry. You knew it was coming didn’t you? But did you know why? Here we go…

I first got the inkling to play bass guitar when my brothers mate Rob used to bring up his Cherry Red Aria Pro II Cat Bass (see image above) and his quadraverb, and he and my brother Mike on his Ludwig Vistalite Big Beat Series Drumkit would jam the rhythm section on a handful of Zep tracks. I always envied them, though at that young stage of my life I thought Zep sucked, I was into The Thompson Twins or Bronski Beat or something tragically gay like that. Anyways. I digress.

The day I knew I was going to be a bass player was when I found one of my brothers old Santana cassettes. The album was 1978s Inner Secrets, the track that did it was One chain (don’t make no prison). I heard the running-octave bassline in that track and thought to myself that’s it i’m taking it up. Other standout tracks were Move On (another great bassline), Open Invitation, Well Alright and Dealer/Spanish Rose. The last 3 tracks really showcase Carlos’s guitar virtuosity. If you think that Smooth track he did in the 2000’s is good you have to listen to the old stuff, you’ll cream your daks.

So where does Zep tie in? Well the aformentioned Rob wanted to unload his bass… and I bought it, and began learning by ear from tapes. The first thing I ever learnt on bass was the ending to Stairway to Heaven when Jimmy Page wails in with the lead. Then I went through a multitude of other Led Zep tunes, practicing them with my brother playing Bonzo on drums, before I found my masterpiece. I purchased 1969s Led Zeppelin II, and was struck absolutely dumb when I heard track 3 The Lemon Song. No band gives their bass player a solo, let alone that fucking long, but it works and it is honestly the best bass lead I have ever heard. I can play quite a lot of the solo and I found that it opens up a whole new world of playing to you. From learning that solo you can go places you couldn’t go on the fret board before. It is like an awakening. So you can see where this is heading…

I became a huge fan of John Paul Jones (JPJ) after that. Especially since he was a session musician and predominantly a keyboard player. He was probably the least known member of the band. He hid behind his keyboards, and was little known. John Bonham gained notoriety when he died, at age 32, from the increasingly common rock-star-alcohol-induced-vomit-suffocation. Whilst Page and Plant have been inseperable through many re-enactments and tours of the band, JPJ has faded into obscurity, doing his own thing, working on small unknown albums and only really popping up recently when he produced New Zealand band The Datsuns 2nd CD Blacken my thumb. He truly is The most underrated musician on the planet. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with ex-Guns’N'Roses and current Velvet Revolver bass player Duff McKagan, that nicely sums up my thoughts on JPJ:

Listen to John Paul Jones — he didn’t get that groove listening to “rock” all the time. He was a real soulful player, and there wouldn’t have been Led Zeppelin without John Paul Jones. No doubt about that. Amen

Now, you might think to yourself, dude my favourite band is Hootie and the Blowfish, what the fuck has Led Zeppelin got to do with them? Well, go listen to the album Encomium, which is a tribute to Led Zep by a number of bands, including Hootie. They fittingly cover the very Hootie-ish Hey Hey What Can I Do? and more importantly it rawks! Another band from the other end of the spectrum that plays on that album is Tool, and they are fucking hardcore.

That’s what Zep were about. Diversity. The music itself is complexingly brilliant. Twin and Triple neck guitars, Bassplaying mandolin-wielding keyboardists, and arguably the worlds greatest ever rock drummer, all gelled together with poetry style lyrics. Hey, don’t think they haven’t influenced your favourite band poindexter. You are probably sitting there singing along to Matchbox 20s latest dull hit on your iPod, oblivious to their influences and wondering how they do it. I’m telling you it was probably Led Zep. They were and are that big. If you like music and you don’t like them, then throw away half your CD collection because they sure as shit influenced all the bands you like.

In the interest of fairness, after my little Apple bashing midweek, I’ve decided to dedicate this auspicious entry to Bill and that wonderful windows operating system he stole from IBM. As you can see from the image above, my AMD-k6 450Mhz PC has seen better days.

Why the fuck is it in bits? I hear your ask…

Well my friends, it’s in bits because it died rather abruptly one afternoon suffering a massive cardiac arrest as the harddrive died and took the rest of the machine with it. Attempts to resuscitate it were futile as 2 replacement heart drives were implanted to no avail. Surgery went awry as my 6 year old flatlined never to see the light of day again. So what happened? Who the fuck knows, all I know is the machine was dying a slow painful death. It all began when I allowed the windows “auto-updater” (WAU) the right to download updates from MS for the Win2k Operating System. I noticed that the WAU was always updating.

Like everytime I was online (I had dialup back then), it was always sitting in the taskbar with a % completion progress bar. I started noticing the OS working very slowly in the weeks that the WAU had been granted access. Call it a conspiracy theory but I think auto the updates are designed to get you to make a real update (i.e. to go and buy windows XP) by rendering your current Operating system obsolete & unusable. After one particular update my Internet Explorer failed to work, as did Windows Explorer and My Computer. Making file handling and surfing an absolute bitch. No, it wasn’t a virus, Bill’s updates fucked my machine, I don’t get viruses (unless I intentionally load them onto a machine).

About 8 months later the HD failed to boot, and was making a whistling noise. If you’ve ever heard it before (and I have when my 486 passed away) you know the boot sector of your hardrive has had the dick. John Holmes size. Still 6 years is a good life for any computer, and mine served me well.

However it was this incident that prompted me to give Apple a go. I had witnessed a Dual 2 Gig G5 with 23″ cinematic display set up in full swing running Final Cut Pro and, being the 24/7 user I am I felt that a laptop was more my thing. After hearing Dave Dakcream about his 17″ Powerbook G4 I knew I had to have one… So far I am liking it enough to stick with Apple for a while to come. However as you can see from my previous post, I still have a few gripes to come to terms with. Hopefullly that’ll all be rectified in the near future