Fang – Mike Seyfang

Thanks to my piss-poor organisational skills, a forgotton Christmas pageant and some unseasonally hot weather, I managed to turn a proposed meeting with Nancy White and Dave into a last minute public ‘tweet-up’ which failed to attract a single person via twitter. What happened instead was a wonderful gathering of fascinating people with amazing connections to networks that LifeKludger has been trying to find and engage with for ages.

Lets start with a description of what happened before I try to analyze what I think happened.

When Dave and I heard that Nancy was coming to Adelaide, we thought it would be great to catch up and reflect on what we have learnt since our first meeting in Dave’s office just over three years ago. A few tweets were sent, a blog consulted and a loose plan to catch up on Saturday morning began to hatch. Due to a crazy work week (and the fact that Dave’s airconditioned office in the city dissapeared along with his job thanks to economic rationalism) I suggested 9am in the Adelaide central market where Nancy and I first met. By Friday night it was obvious that it would be just too hot and too hard for Dave to make it, so we threw it open to the entire twitterverse. Nancy asked me to email some guy called Mark and I rang a chap named Chris who had expressed an interest in meeting Nancy.

At 8.00am on Saturday it was already hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum, and while I was loitering about the house my wife pointed out that it was the day of the Christmas pageant and that my plan to drive to Uni and catch the tram from there was not gunna fly. She kindly drove me into the central markets and I went straight to the ‘Providore’ stall to see if there was still a chocolate fountain, and if some kind of ‘flash-mob’ had assembled. Turns out there were two chocolate fountains, and not an iPhone totting twitter mobster in sight. Nancy arrived and we had a quick chat before John arrived, then Mark followed by John’s business partner, Chris. So, who are these people?

Chris and John run a local consultancy called ‘Helpful Partners’ who specialise in making complex information clear and accessible.

Mark is the ‘old tool’ responsible for the awesome ‘Institute of BackYard Studies‘ home of shed culture and master of the great Australian piss-take. Someone I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time (thanks GB) Author of fine books like :

• Blokes and Sheds
• Henry Hoke’s Guide to the Misguided
• Makers, Breakers and Fixers
• Rare Trades: making things by hand in the digital age

How does this connect with LifeKludger?

As we talked around the table about who we are and what we do, I found myself gushing forth about my desire to grow an ‘ecosystem for enriching human life‘ and listening to amazing stories of connection with networks of ‘makers‘, ‘givers‘ and even ‘suppliers‘. Mark ‘I tinker therefore I am’ Thomson spends a lot of time connecting with and documenting some of the most amazing makers on the planet – who have used ingenuity to survive, nay thrive in the harsh land of Aus. As we discussed tinkering projects from ram-jets to hand-held gene sequencers Nancy bought us back to earth with wonderful stories of soapbox derbys and slow food. Chris and John described some ideas they have for clients in the health sector, many of whom are givers seeking to extend their caring over the spectrum from individual to (online) networks. All very ‘LifeKludger ish’ if you ask me. (Dave, plan for a long Skype call – I ain’t gunna try to write it all down).

How did Dave elucidate my scattered thoughts by NOT being there?

I sent this tweet just after I listened to Nancy’s keynote on my way into the IPAS launch (which, according to Nancy, ‘nailed’ the thesis of her kenote addressing the spectrum from individuality through community to networks):

fang #edayz09 a community would notice @dnwallace is not here, the network simply drops the (weak) connection … @nancywhite keynote reflection.

You see, Dave knows a thing or two about community, especially online community. He is also a world leader in online social networks. Talking with Nancy, Mark, John and Chris I could literally see some of the interesting connections and nodes – people like Genevieve Bell, Beth Kanter, Marnie Webb, Doug Jacquier and many, many more. As he so dramatically points out through his own experience – most of the online activity people like to call ‘online community’ is not community at all. Communities notice when somebody goes missing or falls upon hard times. Dave has been out of work for a long time now, thanks to some excessively brutal economic rationalism at the State Government level. LifeKludger blog posts are few and far between, our extraordinary everyday lives podcast is losing momentum and the twitterverse has simply routed around the loss of @dnwallace lurking and tweeting. Networks scale and route around damage – communities need a sense of place (or at least centrality) and do not scale.

Analysis – what I think happened:

Last week was a huge one for me with two events (the #wine2030 BlueSky2009 conference and launch of IPAS ) at which I wove some online social media magic. The IPAS launch on Friday 13th clashed directly with the edayz09 event that I wanted to be involved with, and was, thanks to the skillful weaving of Kerry Johnson. In particular, Nancy White’s keynote presentation was scheduled for the exact time at which I had to make most critical preparations for the IPAS launch. Because of this, and the fact that Dave was not going to be able to play the role of ‘remote podcast producer’ and record it for me, I decided to record and publish an .mp3 file of her keynote from the #edayz audio stream.

more yada yada…

You know, if I try to write down all the connections and thoughts that fired during this tweetup I will never finish the post. Speshully if I bang on about the trip home, post pageant apocolypse, the pint of kilkenny and kerfuffle that followed. So, I’m gunna publish it now, half finished half-arsed and I bet nobody notices. Did you really read down to here or did you scroll down! Shame on you ;-)

http://tr.im/postpageantapocalypse

http://www.slideshare.net/choconancy/should-we-use-community-edayz09-keynote
http://kerryj.com/2009/11/12/covering-edayz09-todays-coveragetomorrows-schedule/comment-page-1/#comment-2485

<<<note to self send mark lifekludger and mecart pics and links + letterbox photosynth

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

lifekludger, ibys, tinker, maker

It took a great deal of self-control to swim toward some sharks while snorkelling on a recent trip to Noumea.

I love to windsurf, but find myself constantly on the look-out for fins or dark shadows lurking ‘neath my tiny, sinkable craft, assuming that when I see one I will be in grave danger. Sure, there have been two fatal attacks within 5km of my favourite sailing spot (if you draw lines between the two attack locations and then between where I launch and turn around it makes a nice ‘X’).

I blame the media’s obsession with statistically unlikely attacks, that film ‘JAWS’ and a bunch of sensationalism.

Take last weekend for example. There were a lot of sharks about according to fishermen. One friend of mine had a crab net taken by a 2m “white pointer” (layman’s identification) and managed to get some video and photos (updates coming soon). A young spearfisherman was unlucky to be bitten by a 2m bronze whaler off Normanville in South Australia. He arrived at the emergency department to a gaggle of frenzied media, and managed to smile for the cameras.

Here is the type of sensationalist crap we have to put up with on telly, newspapers and now on the web:

Here is a picture of the young man on his way into hospital”

And here is the shark my mate saw while out fishing the day before.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Over the past few weeks I have been re-mixing some key messages from organisers of the event with highlights from some of last year’s presentations and an interview or two with some invited speakers for this year. They are all shorter than 10mins and are designed to give you some insight into why this event is a great catalyst for innovation – giving rise to several successful funding bids and collaborations.

Have a listen to:

• Call for participants (give an idea of the type of people we are seeking)
• Photonics talk (quite technical but lead to successful funding and potentially great outcomes)
• Andrew Jefford (keynote presenter sneak preview)
• Marketing talk (fascinating stuff which also lead to further research)
• Visual technologies (behind scenes ‘look’ at surveillance cameras and emerging video technology)

Fang – Mike Seyfang

That was my first experience with Google’s new Social Search unleashed today. After a fair bit of hunting and pecking it turns out there is a conflict between the old ‘SearchWiki’ experiment (pretty sure I opted in as a google labs experiment way back) and the new ‘SocialSearch’ experiment which can be worked around by disabling ‘SearchWiki’ in my http://www.google.com/preferences page.

Select “Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment, or add your own results” option under “SearchWiki” at the bottom of your google preferences page.

Having disabled SearchWiki a new search for my own surname yielded the usual gratifying result along with a link to ‘Social’ once I expanded the +Options. Marvellous – key members of my social network have been talking about me – and it’s easy to figure out what they have said. It also turns out that I was involved in some rather fruity dialogue with someone we shall call ‘Nick’ via comments on a blog post back in 2006.

That, my friends, is a perfect example of why we need to be careful with what we say online. Things previously ‘hidden’ will come to light in new and interesting ways as technology evolves. And I, for one, can’t wait!!! Bring on face recognition in flickr I say.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

I know I can set up FinalCut Pro to import the
footage, change the duration of each clip to 1:40 then paste the three
together and export to quicktime .mov. Trouble is it will be fiddly to
match frame size rate etc, then take ages to render and export. A quick
google search suggests QuickTimePro can do the trick via some clever
copy/pastery in QuickTime player.

Here is the secret:

• You need to have QuickTimePro (and Flip4mac to deal with the .wmv encoding).
• Open the first .wmv file and drag the start/stop handles of quicktime player to select 1:40 of footage
• Edit->Trim to selection then save as ‘OneMinute40.mov’ as self contained movie
• Drag start/stop handles to select all 1:40 of OneMinute40.mov
• In the first .wmv window, Edit->Select ALL, copy
• In the OneMinute40.mov window Edit->Add to selection & scale
• Window->show movie properties and delete all unwanted tracks (except the newly pasted movie)
• Quick as a flash you have compressed one hour to one minute fourty seconds
• File->Export (I’m exporting to quicktime .mov, original size, 25fps, Jpeg compressor). This is the slowest step at about 10 minutes to render each minute of final output.
• To join my 3 x 1:40 clips into one 5 min .mov I’m just pasting from one QuickTime Player window to the end of the movie in the other.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

boys and their toys!

Originally uploaded by mandyseyfang

This ‘Vocal Delay’ apparatus was made for Jamie by one of his band mates. It was used to great effect in recent gigs by ‘breakable things on the bookshelf’ – the latest band to grace our rehearsal room and the streets of Adelaide.

The ‘kludging’ of an old PC CD-ROM box is a great example of ‘Maker‘ culture, something of which lifekludger would be proud.

Imagine a world in which makers ‘kludged’ devices for livers using components from suppliers with funding provided by givers.

You may say I’m a dreamer…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Trouble is, I’m having a tough time finding data (especially historical) on e/mail usage. In addition to displaying e/mail messages sent on Gary’s COUNTer, I would love to be able to produce a chart showing the number of mailboxes on the planet each year since e/mail began. (Along with something like the average number of e/mail messages sent per day for each of the same years).

Fortunately for me, Gary’s blog post references some interesting data sources that have inspired me to make a second attempt to track down those elusive figures. I would be thrilled if y’all could help me with this. Here is a re-cap of what I have discovered to date:

My growing list of sources on delicious.

Looking thru Gary’s references we can add:

(I plan to work thru some of these to see if they have e/mail history stats)

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of
  2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill
  annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Any additional data sources, charts, suggestions welcome.

If somebody can find me charts like those above going back to Ray Tomlinson’s early e/mail back in the 1970’s I will open my cellar and send you a nice bottle of wine.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

I would be grateful for any hints leading to the original creator(s) of this work. I think it makes a fascinating study in photographic mash-ups, copyright, creative commons and remix culture in general.

UPDATE:

Thanks to some great detective work by Graham and Leo we now know that the photo was taken by Mark Khademi from Milson’s Point and that it was featured in online galleries by both the BBC and the Australian (which could well account for all the un-attributed e/mail that followed).  So Mark, if you are reading this, I would love to know if you are cool with the re-use of your image and if you can shed any light on the first person to re-mix it by adding the large lizard.

I am trying to track down an attribution chain to the person who took this photo and the first person to photoshop it (adding ye olde lizard). I first saw “Godzilla – Sydney Dust Storm – by Julia” on Flickr

It kinda freaked me out because it reminds me of a print of the image below I have behind my desk (which has a story of its own).

- this one (Uploaded on September 23, 2009 by avlxyz) [cc:by,=] (1600 x 1071)

The comments on this one indicate it was received by e/mail and point to two other versions:
- Grrrrr! Sydney Red Dust vs Godzilla
- Godzilla in Sydney
A further clue is given by – rahsoft, ah, thanks for the tip. i got the original in the same email… taken with a Nikon D60 at 07:40 GMT+10!

Grrrrr! Sydney Red Dust vs Godzilla
Was Uploaded on September 23, 2009 by glossy_mirrorplanet [C] (1600 x 1071)
Who is not the original author but points out it has been circulating round the net.

Godzilla in Sydney
Was Uploaded on September 23, 2009 by The Gee Spot [C] (1024 x 685)

So, if you can help track down the originators leave a comment.
Ta.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

godzilla sydney mashup reddust

UPDATE: (some definitions)

Transdisciplinary – What sets transdisciplinary studies apart is a particular emphasis on engagement, investigation, and participation in addressing present-day issues and problems in a manner that explicitly destabilizes disciplinary boundaries while respecting disciplinary expertise.

Design Thinking – is a process for practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result. See also “thoughts by Tim Brown“.

While travelling to the city on the tram today, this TED talk video offered the framework of ‘Design Thinking’ as a way to co about innovating solutions to big questions. Having spent much of last night producing and publishing this podcast on ‘Transdisciplinarity’ (and the past five years immersed in the world of ‘social media’ or ‘Web2.0’) I saw some important connections between, and opportunites for blending, the philosophies of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Trans-disciplinary Scientific Research).

Let me being by listing some of the connection points and recurring themes:

• Prototypes – playing around with possibilities by constructing quick, cheap prototypes of things. Central to my work in Proof of Concept (PoC) projects which seek to promote innovation through iteration.
• Play – a key ingredient in emergent behaviour, playing around with stuff leads to interesting possibilities and great questions.
• Build in order to think – closely connected with play and curiosity driven research.
• Diverge to create choices over Converge to make choices
• Expand – pure reductionist thinking and methods have served us well in the scientific method and will continute to do so. While we are busy learning more and more about less and less, we should take time out to expand our horizons from time to time.
• Design is too important to leave in the hands of a ‘priesthood of designers’ working on an ever shrinking canvas and smaller questions.
• Embrace complexity – we will need to do this as we get together to look at big questions. (it has been suggested elsewhere that we would do well to educate future generations more about statistics than calculus).
• Work at the boundaries – one of the key tenets of Transdisciplinarity is to step outside the comfort zone of a single discipline, go beyond collaboration with other disciplines by working at the boundaries. Warning: will expose one to risk and possibly the need to develop new language. (worth it).
• Embrace Risk – learn to fail cheaply and often.
• Open Co-operation – pass it forward, share.
• Culture of active participation – over passive consumption.
• The renaissance scholar and modern science.
• Swim up-stream and be counter-cultural.
• Trans-disciplinary does not replace traditional research – is an added component.
• Embrace ambiguity, human complexity, exploratory, interpretive, participatory culture.
• Immersive and experiential, community based, lifelong learning, perspective broadening.
• Tension between agility and rigour.
• Speed the Process of Innovation through prototypes, enabling more breakthrough.
• Exploit opposing ideas and constraints.
• Balance desirability with technical feasibility and economic viability.

These are the elements Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace and I have been trying to combine in our vision for LifeKludger – ‘an ecosystem for enriching human life’. It might be easier to suggest how some of the elements of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Transdisciplinary Science’ may be combined in the context of a research institute at a University (since I am currently involved with several at the University of Adelaide).

Before I attempt to articulate this lofty concoction, give me some time to go back and re-listen to the inspiring material, update my list of elements and get back to you in a new blog post. Meanwhile, as always, I value (nay covet) your comments to help me as I think out loud.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

Note to self: Keep an eye on the #CDBQ twitter hastag mentioned by Tim Brown in his TED Talk. Also possibly related: abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor

Over a year ago, I convinced Prof. Monro to  fund the shooting and purchase of some video footage that we could publish online with an open license. This effectively grants PERMISSION IN ADVANCE to anyone who might want to re-use that material. Up to now, the only person who has actively re-used this footage is me, preparing educational and promotional resources for the University of Adelaide.

So, what are some of the things I have been trying to achieve?

• Leadership in appropriate strategies for re-use of digital material in the context of online social media
• Promotion of some excellent research by passing interesting stories through social networks
• Efficiency in the very costly process of creating effective digital stories
• Protection of valuable brand and IP assets through careful selection to manage risk
• Prototype an ecosystem for multi-generational re-mix of digital assets for both research and teaching & learning

How does this early example of re-mix rate against my lofty goals? I’d say we score 6/10 based on the following criteria:

• Efficient – at short notice we conducted brief interviews & provided links to existing footage with minimal disruption to labs
• Effective – a good, new story has been created and shared on a high traffic site
• Correct – appropriate footage was re-used (in fact, some of it was ’second-generation’ that is based on footage that was already re-mixed)
• Social – passing links to the video through twitter and facebook resulted in a measurable increase in views of the video in a very short time period (from 10 to 40 at the time of writing, within hours of publication). Compare this to the average of 0-5 views of other videos published on the same site, earlier on the same day.

On the down-side we missed out on:

• Attribution – the only requirement stipulated by our open (cc:by) license is that some form of attribution is given to the source of content. Ideally this would take the form of a hyperlink like this: “video materail courtesy of Prof. Tanya Monro“
• Possibility of future Re-Mix – the streaming video on AdelaideNow site is difficult to download and is locked up under Copyright (i.e. not openly licesed). This means that this story will die when the video ‘ages off’ the AdelaideNow archive. Furthermore it is effectively sterile and very unlikely to ‘re-produce’ because of the restrictions just mentioned.

How could we do better next time?

• Attribution – it would be enough to mention the names of contributors to successive generations of video content in some form of credits in the video itself. For example video courtesy of Mike Seyfang, Rob Morrison and Tanya Monro covers it. Better still, hypertext links in the copy surrounding the video might reward the contributors with visits to their websites, downloads of their material and possibly further re-mix of their work. That could be achived in a simple sentence “video courtesy of  Mike Seyfang, Rob Morrison and Tanya Monro .” Even better still something like:

Derived from video by Mike Seyfang, shot by Rob Morrison , courtesy of Tanya Monro.
Derived from video by Mike Seyfang, shot by Rob Morrison , courtesy of Tanya Monro.

• Downloadable for easy re-mix – in addition to the streaming video, provide links to easily downloadable versions in appropriate formats for editing. For example this version of the ‘GreenBeamMeUp’ sequence is available as medium resolution quicktime and mpeg-4 while this version of it can be downlaoded as high resolution DV-Video (which is how it was shot). p.s. As a side note – trying to prevent downloads by only offering streaming video is a complete joke. Worse still the futile act of crippling the content with DRM locks and the like.
• Open License – granting permission in advance to would-be re-mixers is a very potent thing to do. The cc:by (Creative Commons, Attribution) license granted to carefully selected material from Prof Monro’s labs places only one restriction on future re-mix – that of giving some form of Attribution. As re-mix culture evolves, I predict that any material not licensed as openly as possible will rarely be discovered, seldom re-mixed and will therefore dissapear out of culture over time. Notice what happens in the advanced search tabs of google and flickr – when selecting material you are free to re-use and modify, even for commercial purposes, only the most openly licensed material is returned in the search results. Think about the impact of that.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

remix, ccdrm, video, coephotonics

While distributed approaches to realtime updates like RSSCloud and pubsubhubbub be architecturally superior and more scalable than centralised serivces like twitter, I kinda doubt it. My optimism for the potential of distributed publishing platforms (like old-school blogs, rss feeds and aggregators) dampens each time some new fangled central service like myspace, facebook or twitter comes along. Anyone else noticed how hard it is to get a discussion going in the blogs these days? Find yourself tweeting every time you publish a blog post??

While I doubt that blogging regularly and subscribing widely will ever be as fruitful as it once was, I’m looking forward to see what these new realtime extensions bring to that experience – which has served me well for over five years now. While we wait here are some of my thoughts from my earlier post today:

My RSS feed now realtime tks to wordpress.com for implementing rsscloud

September 15, 2009 by mseyfang

After a couple of false starts, I finally managed to get myself on a tour of the Roseworthy campus of the University of Adelaide. Yesterday was open day for the campus so I threw my camera into the car and took the (very scenic) route, out to the campus with a view to grabbing some shots while on one of the organised tours.

While waiting for our group to form near the Science Hub, I took a peek at some of the back-issues of ‘Believe it? (or not) on display. You may well have seen these in local Adelaide paper, the Advertiser. Once enough people for a tour had gathered, we headed off to various displays by research groups based at the campus. The first couple were mainly examples of posters and various documentation designed to show the diverse range of opportunities on offer to future students. Not visually stimulating, and I must say that my concentration level was directly proportional to the enthusiasm of the person in each room who addressed our little group.

Soon, we found ourselves at the library which was both visually interesting and provided a stimulus for some interesting questions and answers concerning the projected growth of animal science books and the internet. We then moved from the library to the residential quarters where I decided not to take photos out of respect for the people currently living there who may not want their personal effects published here. I observed a sharp increase in attention from some of the younger members of our group who may well end up as future residents themselves.

The next display was a real treat for the senses, both visual and those related to smell!! Here we saw how effluent from piggeries can be harnessed in interesting ways to reclaim water, fertilise crops and extract fuels like bio-diesel and methane. Our host from SARDI was extremely enthusiastic and engaging, keeping the entire group inside the pungent facility for quite some time.

Un-deterred by howling winds and spots of rain, we trekked out to the site of construction for the new Vet School which has really started to take shape now that the ground-work is done. I have taken several photos of the site since my first visit for the ‘Sod-turning’ ceremony that marked the start of building. Follow this link to watch this growing collection.

By now it was past closing time for the day so we got to see the dis-mantling of a few more displays related to both animal science and agriculture. After stopping back at the science hub to help with packup and vocabulary lesson (what on earth is a ‘bunting’ I wondered) I had to rush back to get Mandy off to the airport.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Well, that same tent (and bulky but thermally inadequate sleeping bags) and two swags made it out to Mt Remarkable last weekend. That would be father’s day weekend. After a quick trip to snowy’s camping store to replace missing gas connections for our old lamp and stove (at approximately the cost of a motel room for a night) we loaded up the subaru and headed north – to the Melrose ‘bush camp’ at the base of Mt Remarkable in the southern Flinders Ranges.

We arrived just after dark to find the park office closed with a note suggesting we could set up camp and fix up payment in the morning – which we did. After setting up the tent and swags and a hopeless attempt at building a fire without much wood I discovered my father’s day present – a folding table with chairs built in (probably costing equivalent of two or three night’s motel room accommodation).

Now, my hatred for all things IKEA and any overly complex contraption is legendary. This monstrosity has to be seen to be believed. My body language and hasty snatch of the useless instructions said it all. Mum’s feelings were crushed, Ms 16 retired to the car declaring ‘Im not sleeping in that swag’, and Mr 19 was left in charge of sorting out the contraption-feckery. You can see how simple it is to erect by clicking on the small image sequence below and choosing ‘all sizes’ to get the full-size original picture:

(Take a moment to view the full-size version of the image from my flickr site – then think about how easy it is to pack away by ‘*SIMPLY* reversing installation procedure!!!)

To everybody’s credit, we had a laugh, re-grouped and after a chilly night arose with a plan:

• Collect a decent amount of fire-wood before dark
• Get out and have a walk thru some of the nearby trails (like Alligator gorge)
• Take some photos of old stone ruins

Turns out the plan was a good one and we got back to camp with plenty of firewood, enough daylight remaining to get prepared for dinner in time for a quick pub-crawl thru Melrose. We downed a few pints, staggered back to camp and got our fire going to settle in to a night where preparing and eating food was the major attraction. It really was wonderful and reminds me how distracting our gadget filled lives can be – while we say family is a priority we each spend a heck of a lot of our finite attention connecting with other stuff/people.

The second night was much milder, and the fire kept enough heat to do brekkie next morning – father’s day. Twas lovely to have my beans, toast and cup o tea lovingly served while seated at my oh-so comfy table with built in chairs. And THIS home-made card really touched me:

As the card suggests, I got some nice photos, some of which I will share below (others can be found by clicking one of them and looking around my flickr pages). So a big THANK YOU to my wonderful family for putting up with this grumpy old bastard for all these years and for softening me up with your generous gift of time and wonderful individualities.

Fang – Mike Seyfang