5 April, 2004

I found this quote on Wired.com’s rant/raves area and kinda liked it: “There is dignity in labor. Let’s not let the robots mow our lawns. Let’s make robots watch television for us.” Brilliant.

Interesting times. The last few weeks have been full on but in a somewhat fulfilling and exciting way…actually exciting is the wrong word, some mix of excitement, character building, interesting, new direction sort of thing. I have decided to move my office back home so I can have a more flexible work space. Having learned how to manage my time I feel it’s now time to learn how to expand my knowledge into other areas of Design that interest me. The Trouser Project has expanded into the initial stages of a business with the first t-shirt designs and a web site and I am wanting to spread my time between that and ZYPE now. Alongside is the vegetable garden and a growing interest in sustainability which will all benefit from my time and focus. I can also now justify a fast Internet connection at home which just tops it all off.

On a different tack, I had a thought this morning. One of those out of the blue moments of clarity when you define a little part of your life. I have been struggling with the growing mentality in New Zealand that the government is meant to fix all our problems. When the shit hits the fan the first comment is always “What will the government do?”, “what will our leaders do?”. This has always bothered me as I wasn’t raised to see politicians as leaders…I mean, we elect them…how can they be leaders? I also like to be independent and having other people ‘fix’ my life seems like a cheap way out. At any rate, this morning my brain helped me out a notch with the following: You don’t hire employees to tell you how to run your business, why would you elect politicians to tell you how to run the country. “Too right!”, I thought. We elect them to do a job. In my case I elected Labour to look after the little issues around Canterbury – make sure everything runs reasonably smoothly and listen to all the nutty ideas us residents have about making it a better place to live etc and The Greens to stamp their feet at a national level, keep the Genetic Modification issues on their toes and generally get in the way of the main parties. I don’t expect them to come up with ideas of their own, god forbid. That’s the rough idea anyway and I am very appreciative of my brain for offering it as a potential solution.

Music…sigh. What is up with this industry? That and the movie industry for that matter. These huge industries seem to have lost the plot completely with their continued attacks on file sharing and music fans in general. It’s strange that they are blaming, supposed, huge slumps in sales on file sharing via the Internet and piracy in various undetermined forms. I bought an album recently. It was an old Sommerset album (on CD), NZ punk at it’s best and it was second hand for about $14.95. The price was right, the music was good and I got to see them live two days later. Other than that I have bought nothing, not because I download them all, though I do download the odd song here and there, but because I haven’t heard anything that I want to own. The best punk has always been in the backyards and the bands on Epitaph all seem a bit contrived these days – don’t get me started on the mainstream music. My income is beginning to stabilise now but costs for damn near everything seem to constantly be going up (the house market at the moment is insane and food is more expensive every year) and, quite frankly, the luxuries are beginning to become harder to justify. Music, unfortunately for the music industry, is a luxury. DVDs still seem way too expensive and I’m not sure what I’m paying for: is the movie I’m paying for? The formats would all cost similar amounts then; is it the medium it’s on that I’m paying for? Video tapes are surely more expensive to make that DVDs; or am I paying for what the industry thinks it can get out of me? In which case they are still about $10 too expensive. Seems like a bad business model to me.

But, enough ranting. With any luck my new winter garden will grow and provide us with some veges in the cold months and maybe life will not get any weirder…though I’m not holding my breath.