I get the feeling logic can go out the window when having fun

One of my favourite things to do is eat fried chicken and drink beer.

Actually, that's two things, but who's paying attention.

And there are three things in this photo.

Learning from failure brings you closer to success

Sometimes in life, you just got to wear a lady bug hat like it's eating your brains.

When I was sitting for my interview a while back, the usual greatest strengths and weaknesses question came up. I know what you're supposed to answer with these -- a weakness which is actually a strength -- but I decided not to.

My greatest strength, I said, was that I am mostly aware of my own weaknesses and actively try to fix them. That's the truth. But it also means I do the exact opposite to what I'm meant to do with the weakness question: I reveal a weakness.

For me, it was that I feel as though I live a sheltered, geeky life, and have difficulty relating to others. The great thing about my greatest strength though, is that all that can change. It's no longer my greatest weakness, although it is still a weakness.

It's a long story (which I've saved you the sob story of having to read), but I've found that there are two pretty easy ways to deal with it. One is about two standard drinks. The other is to do occasionally do outrageously random things and deal with the social interactions that result.

I'd rather not become an alcoholic, so sometimes, doing weird things just has to happen. Because after all, if you can deal with the stares as you walk down the street with a funny hat on, I'm sure there are plenty of other things you can deal with in life.

It's funny how so many people only know what they want after they're given it

I've been sick the past few days with what seems like the flu. I'm sort of like a cat when I get sick. I just get a little quieter than usual and don't really show any outward signs, but the way I recover is more like a dog. I burrow away for a while then emerge a few days later all fine.

This typically means roasting myself into a horrid sweat for hours. Its worked pretty well for as long as
I can remember, but it also ruins my mental state. I end up having crazy thoughts and dreams and I lose all track of time. So though I had broken sleep for about 12 hours the other night while trying to recover, it felt like I lost a day or two. Unfortunately part of that was dreaming about going to work, so it felt like I went to work for another day.

Anyway, the watch. My dreams got me thinking about who I am and what I do. Yet again. The truth is, as much as I am passionate about journalism and writing, it's not something I see myself doing for the rest of my life. So in my sickness I realised time is ticking away from me and I've settled into a state of adequacy. Everything is adequate for my needs, but really, I'll never achieve the form of greatness that I want.

To be honest, I want to go into business, create jobs, but feed profits back into a community, and solve a problem. I want to live a life that gives back more than is possible through a single person. And I feel that every day I don't is another day wasted. So worse than being sick is getting better and realising that you're wasting your life's potential.

Still, my life isn't a complete waste of time. I know that what I currently do does bring benefit to others' lives, but it's on a much smaller scale than I would have hoped. I'm no superhero, but I feel like what many of them claim to feel like before they find their purpose. That there's something bigger, something greater, that they're meant to do in life, but they just don't know what it is. The problem is, life is not a movie, and there's no guarantee I'll ever find out what it is.

The watch? It's my new favourite toy, my first automatic. Doesn't keep time as well as a quartz movement, but I like how it's purely mechanical. Sometimes I'm old-fashioned that way. You'd think me different, a lover of technology, but some things just don't feel the same for some reason. Razors with a gazillion blades? What happened to a straight edge shave? Cars that park themselves? What happened to becoming a better driver? Sometimes it feels like advancements in technology just make us dumber.

From the Gold Coast earlier this year. Sipping on a beer in the media room. It was a security conference and the year before, a journalist was arrested by Qld Police. Nothing of similar event happened this time around, although I secretly had hoped something would. Is it mean to hope for excitement? I think it's just biting off more than you can chew. Or perhaps a sign that you're tired of life.

Virgin Atlantic. Scotch and dry.

VA isn't bad. It's not fantastic either. I've racked up enough frequent flier miles in order to get to a pretty high status level with Star Alliance. The problem is, I'm a cheap ass and these days rarely ever fly on a Star Alliance carrier, so having status doesn't really matter.

We flew Sydney to Hong Kong to London. Took a train out from London to Shropshire to Birmingham to Shropshire and back to London again. Then flew London to Nagoya to the Gold Coast and back to Sydney again. That's our first holiday in about six years and it only lasted two weeks. I have personal photos, but client work I need to see through before that.

I'd like to go to the US for a holiday some day. I've been to the US about three or four times now, but only on transit. That's life just teasing me.

And while I was in Tokyo, I figured it was time to visit Disneyland for the first time. I'm not getting any younger.

It's funny I say that. I've refused to admit I'm getting old for a while now. When I was in university, others would say it and I'd simply not believe them. I guess it is a relative thing. Now I look back at people in university and they seem like such young folk. I'm guessing my peers think the same of me.

But physically, I'm starting to feel it. I used to work two jobs and still attend university as a full-time student. These days I can barely manage my other job on the side in addition to my full-time one.

Ignorance is bliss, but a closed mind is like a closed book

I love Portal and its sequel. Actually, I never finished the second one in co-op because I don't often play and by the time I found some free time to play it again everyone else had finished it. I guess it has limited replayability.

Anyway, if you're wondering what the hell this is, I wouldn't blame you (even though many people who aren't from the internet seem to have cotton on to the whole cake is a lie meme). Someone from work baked it and brought it in. I was very impressed.

"So, how are you holding up? Because I'm a potato!"

I did think this was also rather impressive. Unfortunately, PotatOS it's not powered solely off the potato, but she does need to actually hooked up to operate. To operate? Yep. She spouts off lines from Portal.

Why is there a PotatOS and what looks like a beer? A high school friend of mine had a house warming where everyone had to dress up as a video game character. One of the guests came in a lab coat, PotatOS and, get this, one of those very limited edition Aperture Portal Devices.

Unfortunately, most of my high school friends are the Nintendo console video game sort so they didn't have a clue as to who he was or what a speaking "potato bomb" was related to. I would have felt horribly bad for all the effort he put in...

Yes, that's Mario and Luigi in the background.

Why I have bandages on the outside of my arms, I have no idea.

... only no one really knew who I was meant to be either. Admittedly, my costume was a bit haphazard, but I was meant to be a hunter from Left for Dead. We tried the blood on my face, but decided I'd probably get it everywhere. Or eat it all first since we were using coloured honey. You wouldn't believe that it's easier to buy a brand new sweater and ruin it with bloody paint than go to a thrift shop and buy a second hand one.

So it's going to turn into a top I wear when I go running on cold winter mornings. I don't know if I'll get weird stares from other joggers who think I've just cannibalised someone for breakfast, but if I do, maybe they'll run faster.

A day in the life of a technology journalist

It's no big secret that my profession is one of the least trusted in the world. I'm a journalist by day because, as much as the pay is really crap, I still need to pay the bills while I make even less as a photographer on the side.

So for a while, this was my typical grab bag. A camera with a 35mm lens, a bus ticket for those times I couldn't walk across the city in time, business cards, tissues for my horrible sinus-infected nose, a collapsible keyboard, a spare battery for my camera, a set of headphones, my trusty notetaker, a lens pen, a sharpie, a backup red pen, a USB stick, a bag to hold everything in, whatever notepad I happen to have at the time, and a tablet to type everything into. Phew.

That pretty much covers me if I get told to be somewhere at the last minute, otherwise I'd bring a laptop. These days I find I'm ditching the camera since processing time often takes away from writing articles.

So what do I actually do with my day? I figured, for kicks, I'd take notes for a day or two.

16 July 2012

0840: I'm out of the house. I'm late. Again.

0852: In the lift and up to the office. We have news meetings to plan our day at 9am, which means I have about 8 minutes to read up on what news I've missed and figure out what I want to pitch. This often means I skim through the news on my smartphone as I walk to work. I've learned quite quickly where I have to look up to avoid being hit by traffic.

0900: I'm in the lift again. As it turns out, there's an event on at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, so I haul ass to get there in time for it to start. After the session, I quickly go and find a corner to sit in and start writing up the article immediately while it's fresh in my head. I have an interview scheduled for about 12 noon, so the more I get out of my head now, the better.

1224: Interview is done, so I grab my first piece of food of the day thanks to the event catering, which turns out to be cake. Then I sit down and continue hammering out my first article from the morning's session.

1259: I file my article, close my laptop and go and find something substantial to eat. Sandwiches are available and are a handy treat. Sandwich in one hand, smartphone in the other, I chat back to my colleague in the office who is looking through my article and answer his queries. I don't have long because the next session I want to cover is starting.

1423: That's the last session for the event that I'm interested in today, so I head back to the office. When I get in, I notice there's been the slight possibility that there's been an intrusion on one of my accounts, so I spend a few minutes changing all my password, check my mail, tie up a few loose ends, and help my editor with something she's looking for before getting to work on an article from one of the sessions. The interview I had can wait: the interview was set up as an exclusive, but the session was not. I start getting to work.

1724: I finally file my article. It hasn't been a very productive day, but sometimes it's like that. I start going over the agenda for an event the next day to decide what sessions are worth going to.

1814: There are some issues that my editor has with my article. It's frustrating, but we go back and forth over the issue until it's resolved.

1829: I'm drained, exhausted and a little frustrated. I hit the gym to work it off then slink back home at around 8:30pm for dinner.

2100: Jess does her best impression of me.

17 July 2012

0833: I wake up and instantly I know I'm fucked. I get ready as fast as I can and leg it to work.

0905: News meeting. I'm fortunate enough to have a busy enough day as it is that I don't really need to pitch.  By this time, my article from the night before has gone live, but I have the interview still left over from the previous day that I need to get done. I scour my usual haunts to see if there is anything on fire that needs coverage straight away. With nothing demanding my attention, it's into writing up the interview.

Interviews bother me because they make me realise how certain subjects squeeze their way out of questions by changing the subject, by answering a similar question, or by not answering it at all. On the other hand it also helps me to recognise when such a tactic is being played though and I end up playing the typical counter: asking the same question as many times as necessary, but rephrased differently. It's a waste of everyone's time if the subject isn't willing to talk or simply isn't honest enough to say they don't know.

1100: I file, stick around a bit for a few quick questions from my editor, then I declare that I have to get moving and leave, jumping into a taxi to get to the other side of town. The taxi driver is insane and gets me there faster than I expected. I wander upstairs and there's a bit of an issue with media accreditation, but they eventually relent. There are a few sessions beginning at about 1130, so I find myself a seat and get comfortable.

1130: The order of the speakers has changed due to one of them being late, meaning I now have to sit through a session that I wouldn't have previously attended. I take notes anyway because there are no other interviews or previous sessions that I could write up in this time. The talk turns out to be a mixed blessing as later in the week another speaker touches on the same topic and the two can be combined into a larger, more in-depth story.

1309: I grab a taxi back and pick up some lunch on the way. Wanting to avoid a repeat of having to stay back while my article is edited, I eat at my desk while I hammer out the article.

1532: The deadline for last articles is 5pm, so I file at this stage and prepare to start on the next article from today's sessions. My editor flicks it back and suggests that because it's a popular, but complex topic, I could go deeper into detail. I spend more time researching certain elements of the story and plucking out more detail from my notes.

1640: I file again, but it is quite a complex topic and editing takes some time.

1724: The article finally makes the cut after several edits. It goes in the queue for publication the next day and I get to go home.

So that's two days in the life of a tech journalist that is still learning the ropes. Although I picked these two at random, they probably represent two rather tough days in the past month. I don't always get to go out and some days I'm just at my desk, writing and talking to people over the phone. The thing is, I don't think there really is a routine day. There are regular things like meetings and so on, but sometimes what's planned at the beginning of the day completely changes. And sometimes you have days where something significant happens and you drop everything to cover it.

As much as people like to hate on journalists, I don't think many of them appreciate the effort that goes in to a story. What generally takes someone a few minutes to read can actually take significantly longer to put together once you consider the additional checks that journalists do. Even when giving away a slice of the day to an event, there's no guarantee that there's going to be anything newsworthy.

And sometimes people make mistakes, or worse, they are misinterpreted through a lapse in concentration or an error introduced in the editing or sub-editing process. It's deeply demoralising to have someone rip you to shreds with accusations of being biased, too lazy to fact check, serving someone's agenda, or simply because you made a typo. While I was certainly humbled by my boss when making a typo in an engineering report when I was in that industry, the world never descended on me and called me the scum of the Earth.

But then again, I guess part of being a journalist is being able to bear that.

Life is a rollercoaster, sure, but there's no guaranteed safety belt

It's been a long time.

I've re-written this post several times now; a combination of trying not to kill the mood with details you don't necessarily need to know or hear about, and also trying to come to grips with what I want to say. Sorry if this jumps around quite a bit.

So I've been busy the past few months. There's been a number of exciting things that have happened, including going to the Gold Coat, UK and Japan, but a couple of downers too like getting through recurring bouts of unhappiness and getting a bit sick physically and of my (non-)progress through life.

Seven in Sydney has been affected a bit by both the good and the bad as I try and find time for it and also try and avoid it in some unhealthy mentality. I've been working on that last bit for a while now.

Anyway, me being gone for so long means there's no shortage of pics since I've still been snapping away. There'll be a couple of days where I might not write anything at all though. This does sadden me in a ways because I usually like to blab on about nothing in particular, but more recently it's been the last thing I've wanted to do after coming back from work.

It's been all too easy recently to tell myself I haven't posted anything here in so long that another day isn't going to matter, so I'm hoping that by posting this, I'll at least guilt myself into posting.

Having direction isn't about making the right decisions, it's about making them at all

Bloody hell Michael.

I've taken to sitting around in the State Library more recently, which is where I think I wrote my last Seven up, but I keep finding I'm using the time for other things I just haven't done yet and need to catch up on.

I think this should probably rank a little higher though.

After so many years, my router finally carked it, rolled over and, well, sort of died. It decided, quite randomly, that it didn't want to maintain sync for all that long and kept booting me offline. Me being me, I instantly suspected that someone was doing something odd. Perhaps trying to boot one of my other computers off the wireless to steal the handshake.

No, it's just what happens to crappy hardware when it's left on for several years at time. So I got around to getting a new one after being rather unamused at the random jerry-rigging of old hardware I had been using to maintain a decent sync speed and keep my wireless secure.

This one says that as a rule of thumb it is essential... So it's a rule of thumb or I must do it? I don't know. I never really read those guides. Does anyone?

I set out from home one morning all bleary-eyed and asleep (actually, that's me most mornings, but anyway) and I'd wandered a far way when I realised that the normally loud and busy roadway next to me was completely empty. During peak hour. On a week day. I instantly decided I'd died and had woken up in some alternate universe.

It turns out there was an accident some time in the early hours of the morning and while forensics teams were looking at the scene, they had shut off most of railway square and the roads nearby, so there was barely any traffic.

I heard it was a ute that hit a taxi and the taxi driver had died. Either way, everything felt rather strange, but that could also be because I don't really wake up completely until later.

If I had a setup like this, I'd have a live kitten feed on one of the monitors. I get to see some of the strangest things during my day job. It's supposed to be a cyber security centre, but in the back of my mind all I could wonder was how awesome a LAN party could be in a place like that. Not that I've had a LAN party in a while.

In fact, I haven't heard even my geekiest friends talk about having one in such a long while. Doesn't anyone do them any more?

Probably about 5 to 6am in the morning down in Darling Harbour before the Google+ Photowalk. I have a couple of my pics from the day up on Google+. Now you get to see how bad I fail when I try a little harder.

Probably the strangest thing about the walk was that I'm not a landscapes person. I shoot people most of the time. But taking photos of photographers is not exactly normal.

I don't remember the name of this place. I think it's called Mad Pizza or something similar? It's next to the Mad Mex out near Oxford St. Awesome food. What's more fun is that they leave you crayons to draw on the paper tabletops. I can't draw to save my life, but just about everyone else I was eating with could.

My friend, the one that got caught in the kid's playground netting from a week or two ago, decided the first thing he would do is draw a giant penis on my table. Joy.

Another discarded pic from the Google+ Photowalk. More recently I ran up these after going on a Nike Sydney run. Big mistake after having already run several kms. I think I near fell right over at the top and I'm sure I looked like a fool at the time. Nevermind, it's all in the name of getting fit!

It's something that's been taking up quite a bit of my time actually. Strangely, I've been off heavy weights and long runs for the past week or so just due to random outings and things, but I've also felt horribly depressed. I'm not one to usually talk about these things if I can help it, but I thought it was rather coincidental that the two happened at the same time. They say exercise raises your mental state and you can get addicted to the high (source: broscience ;P), so perhaps that's what's happening.

Either way I want to get back to the gym and beat the crap out of a bag.

On Cockatoo island I spied this. It's probably a bit hard to tell, but it's one of those concrete sculptures! Even on an island, hey? It's funny how these things just turn up when you're not looking for them, but you know about them. Like when you decide you like a particular model car and suddenly it feels like they're everywhere.

Perhaps the same could be said for how we see people. Perhaps if the pessimistic me could see that people are willing to go that extra mile, I'd better appreciate others' efforts.