Saturday the 17th, first day of market life.

A quick reprise, a nice little check-in before a quick political rant. I like breaking up the passionate rant with the personable update, iffin you don' mind sah. So today was my first day working a market. It was Mairangi Bay Farmers Market, and it was a standard Auckland day, few random showers interspered with brilliant bluesky. Go figure. Made good money for the Cheese Man, so that made me feel good. Next market is tomorrow, the Takapuna one, so I will check in then with how I did. My fingers are crossed and my aspirations are set for it to be a good report. Still need to find a way to fill in this last week before Christmas. Last market for me of 2011 will be Mairangi again on Saturday, Christmas Eve. So hope the drive down to Waihi isn't total shit on that mother of all bad traffic days. Maybe I'll get stop in Maramarua for a pint. Watch the circus go past. 

So that was it. One blog post during my three weeks of non-work. Pah-thetic. First day back to work and one post to match. I hope for myself this ratio will strengthen. 

Ciao blog. 

Monday 5th December 2011

Hey Blog,

Been a while. A spell. I've been lazy with you, but not specifically you. I've been wandering for a little while. Got my priorities muddled. Got 'confused' as Marl would say. He'd say something about his mitts as well though, and yeah I guess that applies to me as well. That's all I need, these here mitts. 

Being unemployed for a little over a week now has been real. Real tumultous. Always one to be buffeted by the socio-political currents around me, over a week of news consumption, media binging, socially inebriating myself has been a tempest. 

I don't know, genuinely, how to think about the world at the moment. So many levels to the current of the human river. Noone's wrong, everyone's justified, but how do you choose an end goal for your life when there are so many dueling schools of thought. So, young person, what are you? A Muskite, one obsessed with the stars, post-Earth human life, the next frontier? Does the wealth/power/technocrat god status appeal to ya, cause if so the Jobs-Summers dualism may be your thing. Or do you accept and believe in one of the hundreds of other 'career paths' that you can select from the veritable buffet of the Western business world. 

I genuinely feel like I stand on the edge of an age of civilization, and am leaning out over a great dark expanse. Not dark due to manevolence, not necessarily, but because it is unknown. What's next? I have generally been able to discuss history with those in my life, and now my questions of the future are being met with an uncomfortable silence that I should have expected. People live in the present. My fear, and my uncertainty about the fear itself, is what if we're the generations that are actively harming our direct future, that by living in the present we're fucking it all up within a matter of years. 50, 40, 20, doesn't matter. That's far to imminent to fuck with. Isn't it?

So, what do we do?

Hi Blog!

Just a quick little thing for tonight. I know I'll be rocking it up at Modest Mouse till an indecent hour tomorrow, so didn't want to get into any bad (badder) habits.

Found this while traversing the web on a hike of textbook sites. Was looking for a place for my Speech and Language Therapy flatmate to get a reference book, without paying $150 for the right to kill trees to make a book. Started talking about Cochlear implants, amazing little doodads.

Found this: A comparison of music as we hear it with unimpaired hearing, and what a Cochlear user hears. Makes me realize I am so damn lucky to have my senses.

On that note, night y'all.

My visit to a spaceport.

I’m surrounded by beings. They are walking, talking, breathing, all in a way that is extremely familiar. I have observed it before. Crowds in foreign lands, seemingly alien regions where the air drips with moisture and the personal transports fly past you fast and recklessly. Rooms full of coattails and fancy dress, lurid liquids leering from fine-stemmed vessels. The interactions across these locales were essentially the same fundamental activity. It’s never the similarities that first hit you. The beads in the hair, the hunch in the shoulder, the sideways look, and you find yourself viewing a fellow individual as an ‘other’. These people can be inscrutable, uninterpretable, and unknown. Seemingly, baffling me, on purpose. Eye-contact and a smile is met with a hardened stare, a set of the body as if there’s a litter of young being sheltered from a threat. Fistfights are a half-understood concept, as familiar as a concept sketched out in a textbook illustration. They belong more in a kung-fu movie then any real-world interaction. When eye-contact is made however the error of that thinking is revealed. Different worlds exist, we just don’t like admitting it.

The meeting of another’s eyes is a spin of the roulette wheel. Questions of etiquette, non-threatening acts of acknowledgement, and niceties become hopeful guesses. Powerful foundational works in their day and age, published works on etiquette were our earlier solution to this problem. However, with our sudden plunge into the world, being global from every locale, we have not yet caught up.

The other day I felt like a tourist in a spaceport, surrounded by members of cultures outside my understanding. This presents both fear of the unknown, and a sadness that there lies between myself and another individual some not insignificant barriers to camaraderie. I was at a raggae night at AUT.

Google Labs, oh how little we knew you.

Google Labs meant Gmail skins before they were commonly available, a Mark as Read button you could manually activate years before it was ever official, colour coding for emails, labels, and a few others. At least, these were what Google Labs meant to me. Being a serial dabbler in technology, dipping my toes in a few things that the general populace classified as 'Nerdy', I loved it. It meant I could walk into a room of coders, techies, and the intelligentsia of the web-community, as say 'oh yes, I use Labs'. 

"Google Labs is a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them." That's the official definition. A great idea, let users in, have a play, have a chat, all in an environment where appreciation for access and excitement about the new outweighed consistent performance. 

Below are the words that result from a brilliant product strategy, and damn good communication.

Why in the world did Google decide to do this?

Google engineers and researchers are always looking for a way to show off their pet projects, and Google Labs seemed like a great way for them to get feedback without forcing every new feature on all of our users. So, please follow the "Details and Feedback" link under each experiment and post a comment to let them know what you think of how they're been spending their time — and be frank. It doesn't help anyone if a bad idea is encouraged to spread like a noxious weed.

The prompt for this little chat about Labs, is the recent and, in my opinion, sad news that the laboratory is shutting its doors. Not that the boffins will stop inventing, that Googlers will stop using there 20% time for awesome, forward-thinking things. What's gone is the one-stop shop to the emporium of Google product agnates.

Google has announced that its Labs project, which spawned Gmail, Goggles, Maps, Reader, and other products, will be shut down. The closure of Labs indicates a stronger commitment to a far narrower lineup of projects.

This, to me, is like the theme park I used to go to as a kid shutting down. I didn't go there often lately, busy with 'jobs' and 'relationships' and all that other rubbish. It was there though, in the back of my mind. I knew that if I made the time to brush up on my tech cred, or just wanted the thrill of being at the cutting edge of internet trekking, that this collection of tools would fit me out. In classic 70's Rambo montage. 

What amazed me today however, was while reading the entertaining tell-all of Goog's first Marketing Manager, was that Labs had been... a marketing campaign. 

In typical Google style, engineering drove everything they did. Sales, marketing, facilities, the departments needed by every company with employee numbers rivalling towns, they served the idol around which the village was built. From this focus came a great idea. Engineer a marketing campaign to engage potential Google recruits at their level. Formulaes suffixed with a .com led viewers, after the problem was solved, to a recruitment page. 

Google Labs was Google Jobs. If you've read all that came above this, you know how fantastically this served the company it promoted. Gmail came from Labs. The world's defining email service, how I've communicated with my family across continents for more than half a decade, came from a Google want ad, and a marketing firms bright idea. That firm was... well sadly, after about ten minutes of searching around, their name is not sifting to the top of years and years of Labs related data. And that is, I would propose, just a small measure of the phenomenal success that marked this project. 

A quick close to this personal opine turned fireside chat. Google deserves full credit for opening up their wide and wondrous world to the public as long as they did. The fact that the original idea drawn up to bring Googlers in, brought the workings of the magic factory out to the public is a story in and of itself. I can't help but feel however a stab of pain, that this could mean that the village is now full, and the doors of the laboratory are now shut to us.