Cowper – Morning Prayer music video

I’m really proud of this one.

Both video and audio for this clip were recorded in a single session at the flood-destroyed Graetzmedia studios in West End, Queensland, Australia.

You can download the song for free from:

http://cowper.bandcamp.com/track/morning-prayer-video-version

Technical Details:

Shot with Red One MX, on a CamBLOCK Pan/Tilt/Dolly motion control rig, which was customized by Jaymis to pull focus as well.

Blog post from Rowley:
http://cowperband.com/2011/06/morning-prayer-official-video-launched/

Music by Cowper

Video by Jaymis
Color and gear by Daniel Graetz

Music produced by Matthew Redlich.

Byron Bay Bluesfest 2011 – Google Calendar

Because I’m a gigantic nerd, instead of actually getting ready to go to the Bluesfest this morning, I spent my time making a google calendar so I can subscribe to it on my phone and see who’s playing where and when!

It’s a pretty complex document. Five stages across five remaining days, so the best way to consume it is to subscribe to the calendar on your phone.

Update 12:45pm, Sunday: twitter user @NickFromSydney sent an easier method for subscribing on iPhone:

“I went to Settings->Mail/Contacts/Calendars->Add Account->Other->Add Subscribed Calendar and put the ics url in there. Worked for me.”

There you go, iPhone users. The ICS URL is:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/jaymis.com_ug81qtuus3sgsm278ehlol7e38%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Most phones (Android, others I’m sure) will understand and open this iCal link, and there’s also an XML version if that’s the way you roll.

If you’re on an iPhone, you need to subscribe to the calendar on iTunes first (here’s some instructions: http://iboughtamac.com/2008/04/23/syncing-a-google-calendar-to-your-iphone/). If you don’t have a laptop with you, use the HTML version below.

You can also view it as a plain old HTML page, which should work on just about anything with a web browser.

Previous Update, 4:10pm, Friday: Turns out subscribing to calendars while mobile is way harder than it needs to be! I’ve tried on iPhone & Nokia E71, and neither will just open the iCal link natively. Turns out the easiest way to go is for me to invite people to the google calendar. So if you have gCal already setup on your phone, email me at “phone [at] jaymis [dot] com” with your gmail account, and I’ll invite you to the calendar.

The Jezabels + Danny MacAskill – Way Back Home

I’m so monstrously addicted to The Jezabels‘ music, having heard them on the second half of the beautiful Red-Bull-sponsored mountain biking video Way Back Home (below). The track is A Little Piece off the Dark Storm EP.

Lovely female vocals, piano, and frenetic drums. That’s pushing a bunch of buttons right there.

You can listen to lots of tracks on their music player, and there are some free downloads on their TripleJ Unearthed page.

Daniel Kitson touring Australia with “The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church”

Daniel Kitson is my favourite comedian in the world. From multi-hour long standup, to his beautifully constructed and delivered “story” shows, I will see anything he puts on.

In recent years he’s been doing more story shows. They’re as beautiful, hyper-intelligent and darkly funny as his standup, but also feature sets, lighting, recordings, and a, y’know… Plot.

If you like things which are entirely amazing, you’d be crazy not to go to Kitson’s show, currently touring around Australia and other parts of the world.

Here’s a bit from his most recent email newsletter:

Dear People of Australia

I leave the northern hemisphere tomorrow, hurtling through the sky like a magical balding lunatic to your beautiful and cruel shores. So basically, this is just an email to remind you, that im coming, to prepare yourselves physically and emotionally and to politely suggest that you buy tickets to my show.

Im not being produced by any venues or festivals this time and am touring far more in the manner that I would at home. Which is to say, swaggering about in a self important manner, not really doing any press, minimal advertising and relying on the power of my mailing list to access an enthusiastic and loyal audience who would walk into fire if I suggested it. There are of course, pros and cons to this charmingly low key/repugnantly arrogant behaviour. On the upside, I’m not contractually obligated to engage in interviews that make me want to weep and secondly I can have significantly cheaper tickets than on many previous visits. I’ve been genuinely uncomfortable in the past with some of the ticket prices and my inability to control them as I do at home, so this time I’ve tried to keep them as close to $25 as I can. Which I know is still not super cheap, but it is better than a kick in the nuts.*

On the downside though, ive not really sold that many tickets. Especially in Adelaide where I cleverly combined my lack of press and marketing with a stupidly large room in a tactically astute combination almost purpose built for humiliation. So, if you can think of anyone who may fancy it. Please do let them know.

Feel free to spread the word, basically, in any of the various social media you people frequent. I’d be very grateful, but please be careful to articulate the nature of the show accurately? That would be lovely. It is, for the record, a storytelling show, that’s very funny, a little sad, a bit uplifting and a touch melancholy. It’s not stand up basically. And i wouldnt want people coming thinking it was. Im sure you understand. I’d hate to sell a ticket for an apple when all I have is oranges.**

* – “A kick in the nuts” is a term used by monetary academics to indicate an overpriced ticket to a piece of melancholy, uplifting, and comedic storytelling.

** – This is a proverb. A new one. I just made it up. Spread it. That’s how Aesop started.

I’ll be going to the Monday and Wednesday shows. Rowley is going to all three, because after the last one we said “Next time he comes, we have to go to more than one showing”. There you go.

Buy tickets at the Brisbane Powerhouse site.

I’ve looked at this image a dozen times today…

… and every time I do, I laugh:

Paranoid Android, played on Ukulele, while sitting on the toilet

Just in case anyone missed Ben Stewart’s gig at Ric’s on the weekend. He uploaded a video of himself playing Paranoid Android, on Ukulele, on The Toilet.

The Awesomeness is strong with this one. Lovely fast intimate production. The shower scene is particularly excellent.

Jaymis with Marcus Westbury on ABC Arts video blog

The prolifically cool Marcus Westbury came along to The Edge launch last month, and got his fast punchy video blog on for ABC Arts. I was running the webcast for the night, so he came and had a chat to me about what I was doing, and what I think is important with video production:

Up. Date.

I just put some Coffee and Date loaf in the Bread Robot, which has nothing to do with the title of this post.

I caught up with electronic musician Tim Exile on Friday, before his gig with Imogen Heap. As we jumped off the stage at the Hifi bar together, he asked if it was ok for my spleen to do so, which made me realise that I haven’t actually blogged on Jaymis.com for over a year.

So, for reference: I survived the spleen-removal operation, have had a crazy-amazing year, and continue to take on way more than I can handle at any given moment. Oxygen Kiosk, my web business, is growing well, and I’m also working as one of the inaugral Catalysts at the State Library of Queensland’s amazing “The Edge” technology art incubator center thing.

Jaymis Minus Spleen: 29 Days and Counting

In November 2005 an ultrasound displayed a kind of benign tumor in my spleen, most likely a splenic hemangioma. At the time it was rather small (about 3cm), so I went on the waiting list for an outpatients appointment at a public hospital. As this isn’t at all a serious, life-threatening, or even noticeable condition, the waiting list to be told “it’s all cool, you’ll probably never even notice it’s there” was rather long. So I mostly forgot about it, except for replying to the occasional “would you like to remain on the waiting list” letter from the hospital.

Jaymis.SplenicThingy, 2005

In January this year I received a letter informing me that my time had come, that I had an appointment at the urology outpatients clinic at the Princess Alexandra hospital. Because a little over 3 years had passed I thought it would be good idea to get a new scan to see if anything had changed, so I went to my local dodgy bulk billing GP and got an ultrasound referral.

Spleen.Massive, 2009

The ultrasound found that my cute lil toomer had grown up big and strong, and was now about 10cm long (or the same size as a normal adult spleen) and instead of having a spleen with a tumor, now I had a tumor with a spleen. This isn’t a problem in of itself, but if I was in a car accident or, say, “accidentally” fell over hard while snowboarding, it could explode messily, and dump my blood supply into my chest cavity, which is apparently a Bad Thing.

So I went to my outpatient appointment. There the friendly urologist quickly referred me on to the hepatologist, who had me go in for a CT scan on Monday. The scan was super cool. Medicine direct from The Future. I had a giant white whirring torus passed along my body, and ten minutes later I was furnished with a disc of images showing what I look like inside. So obviously I had to turn them into an animation of what my skeleton looks like.

Yesterday Rachgirl took me to the PA for my appointment with Dr Kellee Slater, who was super friendly, professional, and thorough. We discussed the cause of my Splenic Embiggenation (not a technical medical term), which is most likely due to: a) Weird shit happening in my body or, b) My repeatedly falling over very hard while snowboarding. Either way, our options were to wait and see, or take it out.

Waiting could be dangerous, as the aforementioned accidental sharp blow to the torso could leave me filled with bits of spleen, lots of blood and on the way to dead-ish. I would also need to stop doing fun things like snowboarding and go-karting, and I wouldn’t be able to commence fun things such as paragliding.

Conversely, having Spleenzilla removed would obviously require a stay in hospital, where one of my internal organs would be removed. That’s quite a serious thing to happen, but afterwards I would be able to lead a normal life, and get up to any number of silly and dangerous things. Apparently the only real day-to-day-life change required after splenectomy is to be more careful of bacterial infections, and to take prophylactic (precautionary) antibiotics if traveling in 3rd world countries. Also, I’ll have more stomach and lung capacity, as I won’t have a spleen the size of a house brick pressing up against them.

So we ended up deciding on the course I had expected we might take: I need to part ways with my Giant Spleen. Kellee whipped out her blackberry and said “How’s the 9th of April for you?”, and it was decided.

Then Rach and I remembered that the 9th of April is our anniversary. What a fun way to spend our romantic day! “5 years prettygirl! I have tubes stuck in me and I’m unconscious. Happy anniversary!”

Semi-meaningless milestones aside, it’s all happened very quickly. From the initial “Wow, your spleen is pretty huge” scan, until “Good morning, hope your feeling ok, here’s your spleen in a bottle”, less than 2 months will have passed.

Queensland Health has been copping a huge amount of bad press over the past couple of years, but I’ve found the system to be fantastic. It’s extremely well organized, with letters and phone calls before each appointment, and every person I’ve dealt with has been friendly and professional. The initial wait was obviously quite long, but that was for a condition which displayed no symptoms, and is rarely even noticed by people afflicted by it. Once it was decided that there was actually something slightly dangerous going on, everything has moved extremely rapidly: I was booked in for a CT scan and specialist appointment within a week, and surgery less than a month from then.

Obviously the deed hasn’t been quite done yet, so I’ll have to hold judgement until I’m several kilograms lighter. I am feeling very positive and confident about the whole thing though. So we’ll see what happens in 29 days.

Internet Censorship in Australia, AKA the “Clean Feed” – Do Not Want

For a while now I’ve been keeping an eye on the web censorship antics various Australian governments have been getting up to. The previous, coalition government decided that spending AU$3000 per copy on some web filtering software was a fantastic idea: Dan of Dansdata has a summary of the maths behind that particular exercise in pointlessness.

So the new, Labour government looked into that failure, dubbed it so, and then decided that the reason it failed was that the coalition just hadn’t wasted enough money. That they’d aimed too low. So instead of some kind of pointless, wasteful, opt-in filtering software that kiddies can bypass, now they want to implement country-wide, mandatory internet filtering of “illegal” and “inappropriate” material.

This is wrong and pointless on so many levels, it’s quite difficult to even know where to start if I was to explain to someone why this is a bad idea. Once again, Dan has a summary, and he doesn’t think it’s actually going to happen, which is nice.

But I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen.

Similar threats have been made here in the past, and they’ve always petered out into nothing. There are no votes to be won in actually filtering the Internet, after all. The people who vote based on Net filtering promises are unable to tell whether it’s actually happening or not. And there are plenty of votes to be lost when everyone who doesn’t call their browser “the Internet” discovers that they can’t get to YouPorn or Mininova any more.
(link)

Just in case they actually think they’re going to go through with it, there are some people starting to activate and campaign against this pointless stupidity. So here’s some resources:

No Clean Feed – The Website, The Mission.
No Clean Feed on Twitter.
No Clean Feed petition
No Clean Feed Facebook group.

How a “Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy” can think this would be feasible, or that it would be a good idea even if it was technically possible, is completely beyond me. Why is Australia repeatedly lumped with luddites for our IT ministers?

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