Ben Stewart – Violet the Killjoy

This is one of those videos which should be watched first, then explained:

Ben Stewart – Violet the Killjoy from Jaymis on Vimeo.

This was probably the most fun video I’ve ever been involved in. Well and truly nestled in the “fast, cheap, effective” philosophy, we went from concept to completed shoot in under 24 hours.

Ben Stewart approached me with a small budget and a catchy song. On Saturday night, while waiting for Rachgirl to get off the phone with her mum, I did a little experiment with party poppers and the 200FPS slow motion mode on my camera.

I called Rowley Cowper up on Sunday morning with “bring your tools over, you need to make me a device to set off 200 party poppers at once”. Ben and I bought Cannon Hill out of poppers, Billy Hyde’s out of ukuleles, and we made it to The Edge in time for nightfall.

As it took almost two hours to load the launcher, and we were shooting in The Edge auditorium after closing, we only had one chance to get the shot, so we did about a dozen rehearsals before the “live fire” exercise.

I’ll have some behind the scenes details, photos and video soon.

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?

Chilli Jam Recipe

Spring’s first super cheap produce hit the grocers last week, so over the weekend I went on a small cooking rampage, making roasted italian tomatos and chilli & onion jam.

Yes, we’ve almost gone through a jar of it in 2 days.

It’s based off this recipe, but the quantities have been changed drastically for my tastes:

8 red onions, sliced thinly
8 chillis, seeds removed if you don’t want it super spicy
8 garlic cloves

No pureeing either, and loads of extra olive oil added during the cooking process. This spicy goodness was strained off and used to start various other recipes over the weekend.

Track of the Day: Architecture in Helsinki – Debbie

Currently loving the hell out of this slightly unhinged track from Architecture in Helsinki’s last album:

Architecture in Helsinki – Debbie from helsinkids on Vimeo.

Lots of fun.

iPhone in AU on Virgin Mobile

I’ve been on Virgin Mobile AU for over a year now. I got in when they were doing their hugely cool 1GB for $10/month data plan, which they subsequently knocked down to 300MB when they realised that people were actually going to use up that data.

Virgin’s mobile internet service around AU is pretty damn good. I used it for my year of touring, and could get coverage in some surprisingly remote towns. I had to do a little bit of geeking to get the phone working as a bluetooth modem with my Macs, but once setup it’s all extremely smooth. The only problem I’ve found is that sometimes the computer connection will crash, and then be unable to connect until I restart the machine. Despite the dire predictions about $15000/GB for over usage, I never even got close to my 1GB cap, and Virgin now have a usage monitoring page on their site, so that’s not much of a worry anymore.

Now, the iPhone is out in AU, early adopters have bought ridiculously expensive ones, even though 99% of them don’t really understand what the thing does. I’ve been thinking of picking one up eventually and probably having to jailbreak it to get working on Virgin. Turns out that’s not the case.

$70/month for 24 months. 1GB data. Usual Virgin awesomeness with free Virgin to Virgin calls etc. and you can upgrade to 5GB/month for an extra $30. Fantastic stuff. I haven’t been on a mobile contract for quite a while now… This almost looks like something which could take me back into the fold.

Not on holiday in India any more

Just in case you hadn’t realised, I’m back in AU, well and truly not on holiday. Working extremely hard on various projects. CDM, O2K, and I’m also running a series of stop-motion animation workshops at the Queensland Library over the school holidays.

I have updated my site template though, and migrated it to our Australian servers. Happy times.

On Holiday in India

I’m currently on holiday in India with the Rachgirl. Not much internet, but I’ve uploaded a couple of days worth of photos to Flickr, and am updating Twitter semi-regularly via SMS.

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