TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

For anyone who has ever done any kind of writing you'll know that you never really feel quite like a writer until you have a book of your own writing in print. Yes, old style ink on paper, professionally printed and bound. So it was quite a buzz today to finally get my hands on a small stack of two books (pictured right) I've self published, one of which represents my first properly published work as a writer. Wrong Way Already , A Road Trip Across Southern Australia , is half travel guide and half travel journal of a Road Trip my Sister and I embarked upon mid way through 2007. We traveled from Gawler, South Australia to Broken Hill, New South Wales and then back across the continent to Perth Western Australia. Each day I wrote about my experiences in this very blog you're reading now. Hence the book brings together all the posts and photos from this blog into one handy sized guide that you can either take with you on your own Southern Australia travels or curl up with if...

There's been a lot of buzz lately in tech circles about tablet computing, in particular the Apple Tablet which is either a soon to be released product or a whole lot of geeks speculating on a fantasy. Possibly the most exciting thing I've seen in this space is the Microsoft Courier booklet , which, like the Apple Tablet, is a potentially soon to be released product or just some one leaking ideas that may never come to pass. For the purpose of this article let's suppose this product is really in development. The Microsoft Courier Book (illustrated in the picture from Gizmodo top right) is a tablet computer with two screens that folds in half like a book. It's about the size of your average journal or diary and is operated with a combination of touch screen motions and a pen/stylus.  Microsoft Courier. Gizmodo has also discovered a video of how we'll actually use the Courier (follow the link to see the video). From an artist's perspective I'd have to say...

Since I discovered jogging wasn't for me I've been kind of all over the place with my daily exercise routine. In fact for a little while I stopped my daily walks altogether. Not walking meant I could do an extra 50 minutes of work a day which was great for getting things done but not so great for my health. Since I haven't yet been able to get myself a bike to replace jogging it's back to walking, however, this time it's different. When I was jogging my daily walking route I'd managed to cut my time down to 35 minutes, noting that I only actually jogged about two thirds of the way. The rest of the time I spent gasping down water and walking until I felt ready to jog again. It occurred to me that if I simply walked consistently at a fairly quick pace the whole distance I could probably cut my time dramatically and increase the benefit of walking as a daily exercise routine. Yeah I know, totally obvious, right? So I gave it a try. Now we're not qu...

I've written about my Frog Van on several occasions so I thought it only fitting to mark it's first real use as a cargo mover on my blog too. Granted this isn't the first time I've used it to transport stuff (I used it to move my recent art exhibition back home from the gallery) however it is the first time it has had anything close to a load that would require a van. My partner, Enigma, and I decided it was time to clean out some of our crap from my studio and the house. What better way to do that than to haul out all the excess stuff to a local 'Mega Car and Garage Sale' and try and get a few dollars for it. I don't think it was actually called that but it was pretty big. Easily more than a hundred stalls at a guess (maybe even close to two hundred). You can see our stall in the photo, taken at about the half way point of the sale. By this time we'd sold most of what we managed to sell so almost all of the rest you can see came home again. If you'...

I recently upgraded my mobile phone to this very modern Nokia E63 (pictured right). At the same time I changed my phone carrier to Virgin Mobile . It cost me nothing up front and the new plan I'm on is far better than the plan my previous mobile carrier imposed upon me as part of 'upgrading their billing system'. This article is actually a sequel to an article I wrote just over two years ago titled Forgotten by my Phone Company . In that article from April 2007 I described how my phone company *cough* AAPT *cough* failed to upgrade my very old mobile phone (a Nokia 2100, pictured left) when my contract ran out - like they had the previous contract. How to Lose a Mobile Phone Customer Step 1: Double your monthly service access fee. Fast forward to November of 2008 and I get a letter from my phone company explaining that they will be upgrading their billing system over the next few months and as part of that I'll be switched over to a new monthly plan called '$15 Ac...

A few weeks back I started jogging on a daily basis. For those of you in my age group that are unfamiliar with the idea, jogging is like walking only much quicker - or so I thought. Turns out jogging is more like systematically bruising your muscles and joints until just standing upright becomes a challenge in the face of pain. Let's back track a little. I've been walking about 1.2 kilometres on a daily basis for the best part of the last two years. Taking the same circle route every day as part of my exercise routine - which also includes about an hour of daily weight lifting. The walk usually takes me about 50 minutes - clearly I'm not walking all that quickly. Recently I've become bored with walking and I don't actually think it's doing me a great deal of good. I started my walks to get my high cholesterol levels down but discovered it was having only marginal benefit. However some benefit is better than none so I kept walking long after the doctor had prescr...

You don't even have to be on the Internet to know about the JK Wedding Dance Video . The unique wedding where everyone danced down the aisle to Chris Brown's song 'Forever' spread so widely that it even made it to the evening TV news. What's interesting is that the video seems to have resurrected the failing career of Chris Brown who is currently facing charges for assaulting his former girlfriend, singer, Rihanna as reported in this E! News article, Could Viral Wedding Dance Video Save Chris Brown's Career? Bearing in mind that the original wedding video was posted on Youtube for the happy couple's family and friends to view but then went viral, there was no licensing agreement with the copyright owners of the song. In this Mashable article, JK Wedding Dance Also a Boon to YouTube’s Click-to-Buy Ads , It appears that Google and Youtube moved quickly to monetize the video with their click-to-buy program, which places overlay ads for iTunes and Amazon downloa...