The long weekend here in Australia has drawn to a close (I took an extra day off at the end to give myself an even longer break) and I’m pleased to report it’s been a productive and interesting break on the Western front.

I get repeatedly told to maintain the ‘work / life’ balance, so any opportunity to catch ones breath, stretch your arms and spend quality time with family and friends should always be embraced. So that’s predominantly what I did (along with sleeping in and making gin & tonics for my friends).

It’s scary actually how easy it is to disconnect from the world when you constantly revolve around in your little work bubble, thinking of nothing more than dealing with that next e-mail.

Speaking of which, roughly 1,095 days since I started my current job, I’ve finally been promoted. Now whilst I won’t be able to afford a penthouse in New York JUST yet ( hehe that will come), for once in my life, I have the means to reduce the stress of living paycheck to paycheck. An unfortunate trait I’ve had to live with throughout my entire working life, due to the high cost of inner city living and the even high costs of paying rent to be there.

It’s undoubtedly a great achievement to get promoted (especially during the current economic climate) but it’s been somewhat tainted with an over-riding sense from everyone that I’ve spoken to, despite their elation, that it’s been long long over-due.

I’m glad it has finally happened, after 3 years of steadfast loyalty, in the same role, constantly exceeding it and working tirelessly during that time, I think any reasonable individual would expect some form of pay-off and tangible recognition, not just a token “Thanks for all your hard work this week” and a pat on the back.

I’m relieved that it has finally happened and that I can move forward, knowing that the company does value me and has made a concerted effort to secure my future. Above all, it gives you a renewed sense of confidence when you’re seen as having the ability to play a pivotal role, in the future direction of the business.

Ultimately, that is what everyone who cares about and is good at their jobs wants –  a place at the table, to get taken seriously and have their input seen as credible and reliable.

I’m particularly thankful that I wasn’t forced into a position where I had to look at moving jobs, because it was genuinely looking that way for while. No matter how much enjoy working for a company, or appreciate being part of a charismatic team, the need to grow your skills, challenge yourself and expand your horizons will eventually take precedent.

And as my previous post alluded to, sometimes change is just inevitable one way or another.

In saying that, I hope I would never become like this guy lol (can’t see the video below? Click here)

I’d also like to thank everyone who has sent me a message, e-mailed, spoken to me in person to or phoned in with congratulations, it means a tremendous amount to me, it really does

You can always mark the sign of a true friend, when they share the same levels excitement and relief as you do and I’m very lucky to have so many of you that care about me, I forget that sometimes.

It has been an epic emotional roller-coaster over the past several months, but to the select individuals that have been with me from day dot, through the dark days and by my side 24/7 (you know who you are)……… an extra little special thank-you x

I also have some other news (which I’m going to be deliberately vague about!)  For a few weeks now I’ve been working in the background on a brand new project with a few friends of mine.

Master Blueprints for the forthcoming Space Rocket

Now anyone who has been to my house could be forgiven in thinking that I was building a space rocket in secret,  what with all of the notepads, diagrams and scribbles dotted on various unkempt bits of paper floating around!

(It’s not a space rocket by the way.)

I don’t want to jinx things or give away too much information (sometimes less is more) but it’s something to get really excited about. There are a few of us all working together on it. We want to make something really special, unique and well frankly, just really really fucking cool. I wanted to mention it now, so that in the future, we can look back on this entry as the start of it all.

I’ll tell you more about it, as we get nearer a launch date (which is still some months away) – but I genuinely hope you love it, because I know I do and we haven’t even started putting it together yet haha.

Your friend,
Alex

p.s. I also went and saw these guys play last Monday (June 1st) if you haven’t heard of them by now, where the hell have you been lol

I’ll talk about Ghostbusters in the future, because that in itself is a entry on its own! The mythology, the impact it had on youth in the 80’s, the merchandise (ok I admit it, even I had the Ghostbuster Proton pack haha), the cartoon, the mainstream success it enjoyed – Ghostbusters really was a movement unto itself. After all, who doesn’t recognize the infamous Stay Puffy Marshmallow Man right? And to think, that was 25 years ago!

The folks over at IGN.com have posted a short teaser for a new Batman title, Arkham Asylum. Visually it looks jaw-dropping, and in the trailer below, the gameplay looks seriously top notch as well. On the surface and aesthetically, it looks to be more closely tied with the DC Comic books rather than the recent film franchise. (If you can’t see the clip below click here)

Least we forget Superman…a hack journalist during the day (Clarke Kent), who frequently went into a phonebox to get changed into his outfit, which was entirely comprised of his underpants being on the outside – awesome.

Maybe it’s just me, but for some rather amusing reason, Superman always conjures up images of this buff superhero gracefully gliding down from the sky, kitten in hand, returning it to the elderly lady on the street – Mr Bigglesworth, the mischievous moggy, freshly saved from a burning building.

At least Batman had some edge and depth about him. The duel life of being a billionaire, mingling with the upper echelon’s of society, then fighting crime in the streets of Gotham at night. The Batcave with all its amazing gadgets including the Batmobile! (Do Superman or Spiderman own a kick-ass car? My point exactly.), the classic yellow Batbelt with devices that allowed him to zip-line across buildings, or release smoke bombs on unsuspecting villains and finally the iconic Bat symbol in the sky – the cry of a city in peril to its most reliable vigilante.

As a kid, it all captured your imagination (for me anyway) in a manner that the other two never did. I mean, lord even the Batman movies are superior to their Spiderman and Superman counterparts.

Let’s hope the game lives up to expectations

Alex

I personally found the 90’s a boring era in the grand-scheme of things, whilst some of the most genuine and innovative bands emerged during that time (Jane’s Addiction for one, who coincidentally I’m going to see live next month!) I don’t think, by and large, that the 90’s was a period noted for its ability to empower the public or create any tangible sense of change.

A worldwide recession, the Gulf War, the dot com boom bust saga and every kid wanting to be Kurt Cobain – hardly the marks of a memorable moment in history.

But as we entered the current decade, a palpable change was in the air – technology began to evolved at a far faster rate, becoming cheaper, smaller and more accessible in the process.

Suddenly your computer has morphed into something vastly superior to just using Microsoft Office and sending an e-mail. The Internet has shifted into not only a place to share information, but has now lead to the creation of new business models, worldwide political movements (the Obama campaign) and broken down the barriers into many fields of work, previously off limits to the average man in the street.

With broadband penetration continuing to rise, so to is the change in people’s habits in the digital realm – a shift away from conventional media and a sharper focus online. Conventional free-to-air TV audiences are shrinking, magazines and print media are watching their revenues vanish, retailers continue to see sales slump whilst radio is seeing a decline in their popularity. So what is happening here?

It’s very simple, as technology gets faster, as our lives continue to become a blur, people want content (be it music, news report, a TV show, a movie) instantly and on demand. That’s why on the graph below, On-Demand cable shows and the Internet are experiencing growth.

Current figures show an increasing number of Internet users searching for a particular news article, rather than visiting a site FOR the news. They’re finding out about breaking news via RSS feeds, referral links, blogs, forums, social-networks and status updates on sites like Twitter.

It’s an easy question, why would you buy a paper which is already dated before you’ve pick it up, when you could just as easily find out what is happening in real-time and for free? And just wait until mobile technology becomes even more seamless.

Lost in the suburbs? No need to fumble through the street directory, use Google Maps on your BlackBerry or iPhone. I do.

It seems less and less people are reliant on the influence of tastemakers in the media too. If they don’t like what Channel 7 has schedule for tonight, they’ll sit on YouTube instead or download their favorite show illegally. I don’t want to listen to the same 5 tracks being played on radio, I’d rather sit on MySpace and discover music on my own terms. It’s becoming that black and white. Active consumption of engaging content, verses the predictable passive offering.

But perhaps most interesting of all, set against this backdrop of average Joe changing the rules on the major media outlets, is that a new phenomenon has begun to emerge.

The startlingly ease with which to download anything you want illegally, combined with the power to sidestep the need to build a site or host content (MySpace, Vimeo, YouTube) and all tied together with the cost of cameras and laptops continually getting smaller and cheaper – has truly put YOU in control of the entire show.

Jeffree Starr - Personal Branding In Effect

We’re all collectively in the center of one of the most creative periods the world has been in, since the 1960’s. Just like then when people were busy creating an idea of what they wanted life to be like, people now create the idea of what their life actually is. True or make-believe, its all down to perception and more importantly how well you manage yourself as a brand.

I realize that seems like a rather peculier thing to say, the notion that you’re a “brand” in much the same way Coke-A-Cola is – but you truly are.

What is the difference in going to an interview in a sharp suit with a crisp shirt and uploading a great photo of yourself for your friends to see? They both serve the same purpose. You want to be percevied in a certain manner. (It’s funny to me because photos more than anything give you a very distorted view of the world, 90% of the time they are posed, forced and only attempt to show you the happy times. Rarely do they reveal the story going on behind the scenes.)

Say you upload photos of you and your partner. You want everyone to know you’re happy, that you want the same things in life and you want me think of you as an item and not individuals. That is precisely how a brand such as Coke operates, when they sponsor a summer festival so they be more aligned to people who like music and go to parties.

More and more people spend their majority of their time online, maintaining their favorite brand in the world – themselves. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing at all, but if someone is uploading a video of themselves to a social-network, that is time which was previously spent potentially watching TV or reading a magazine.

Suddenly the public are the programmers, user generated content is by far the most watched and consumed on the net – not the major networks.

Now there will always be professionals when it comes to music, online journalism, photography, design or any other creative medium. It’s all very well downloading the brand new Photoshop Suite, but at the end of the day you still need the talent to use it effectively.

And yes, there will still be blockbuster movies and mainstream bands on account of million dollar budgets and sponsorships. But now those outlets are not merely restricted to the privledged few – anyone can make their own indie movie, without financing from any of the corporate film houses.

Anyone with a decent internet connection can create and that’s the beauty of the era we current find ourselves in. Modern day technology provides you with the tools, society has given you the requirements and now its down to you – to piece it all together.

So what are you waiting for? Fire up your Macbook, log on and join some social-networks MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, register on photo and video sharing sites Flickr and YouTube, create a blog on Wordpress or Blogger and promote your content to a worldwide community via Delicious and Digg.

Total cost? $0
Benefits? Millions of eyeballs waiting to see what you’ve got….

Welcome to 2009 people.

Alex

So the inevitable day has finally happened – GeoCities is officially shutting its doors and going offline. This is the same site that was bought by Yahoo back in 1999 for a staggering $3.57 BILLION US dollars and at the time, was home to 1.1 million users. As a modern day comparison, Rupert Murdoch acquired MySpace in July 2005 for $580 million and it came with 120 million users.

Look at this fantastic time-line of its beginnings and its final end.

I owe a lot to GeoCities, I really do. My first pen friend even came as the result of being on GeoCities, I can’t remember her name but she was from Canada and we use to write each other letters – then I think we both ended up getting a life haha. But memories like that never fail to bring a smile to my face. Without the genuine impact GeoCities had on my life, I probably wouldn’t be in my current career.

I learnt so much from that site, from uploading onto the Internet itself (which blew my mind at the time) through to data management, hyper-linking, animated gifs (remember the spinning e-mail envelope?), different file types, blogs, bulletins, forums, avatars all of which seem so commonplace now in the current world of social-networking. 

I always found it inherently interesting and appealing, web design mixes logic with creativity, a combination which is often hard to find in the workplace. So it doesn’t really surprise me that I’ve ended up where I am. There’s no doubt in my mind that it was GeoCities that set the wheels in motion.

To give you a brief background to GeoCities, they were the first outlet which allowed you to create your own website without any complex HTML knowledge, your very own Internet webpage. You could custom it to an extent using their WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor and it was all for free, no hosting fees, all ad driven and supported.

Of course the pages were shockingly awful, as it was the first experience many people had ever had with personalizing and populating the Internet. However, it will always be the first avenue where people legitimately had the power to express themselves, in a worldwide community. Check out some  worst sites on the net.

I vividly remember sitting in the collage IT department building a GeoCities page for my band. You can see what I was doing aged 16 here (Whilst some of the images are broken, the links still work – it’s an illuminating trip into the mindset of 16 year old wannabe rockstar let me tell you!)

There was a real innocence about it then, a whole new frontier of discovery. Unlike nowadays where people grow up not knowing what it was like BEFORE the Internet existed. That notion really does make me feel old, the reality that I was around before Google haha.

So here’s to you GeoCitiess, for all you’ve done, for everything you allowed us to do, for opening so many doors and most of all for all those memories which have shape how we use the Internet today.

The existence of GeoCities will always go hand in hand with the birth of the Internet for me – I’m sad to see it go.

Alex

The Internet Archive is site, which allows you to browse through 85 billion web pages archived from way back in 96 to only few months ago. It’s fiendishly addictive and will provide you with some serious laughs. I like looking back into past eras, it gives you a sense of depth and evolution, not to mention it conjours up some hilarious imagery. (Bill Cosby I’m looking at you in your fetching cardigan.)

You can see the very first inception of Google, or chuckle at Yahoo! and its humbling beginings. A personal favorite of mine, is looking at all the various updates and changes made to the official and “ultimate” David Hasselhoff website.

It’s fascinating looking at all these different sites and how they’ve evolved, much like computer games have today.

I mean jesus, I remember when I honestly thought Pong was the coolest thing ever. I shudder to think how many hours I spent playing this game, utterly enthralled at how amazing it was, that at 10 years of age, I was making things move on a screen for no apparent reason, purpose or end.  This is what it looked like – so funny.

And tonight, I just finished playing the new Xbox360 game Lord Of The Rings Conquest with my friend Jesse, which looks like this. 

What leaps we’ve made in ensuring our children remain glued to the screen at all hours of the night

Visit the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine.

I warn you, you’ll be hooked for ages!
Alex

WWE Legends Of Wrestlemania is set to be released on Xbox 360 in the coming days. You can re-create classic matches and select from the biggest superstars icons in the history of wrestling – Hulk Hogan, Jake The Snake Roberts, Ultimate Warrior, Big Boss Man, Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase, even the late Andre The Giant!

The guys over at IGN.com actually brought in Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase and interviewed him about the game and set up a match from Wrestlemania 6, where he went toe-to-toe with Jake The Snake Roberts in front of 67,000 fans.

Watch the interview and preview of the game below (click here if you can’t see it). I am soooooooooo excited!

It’s like being a kid all over again!
Alex

I’m just giving you guys some advance warning. I think my life might be over haha.

Why so? Well, today I bought a copy of Street Fighter 4 for Xbox360, the original arcade version not only reminds me so much of my wasted youth (I dread to think how many pound coins I put in the slot trying to beat the boss M.Bison) but just how much fun I had playing it.

Even back then in the mid 1990’s, Street Fighter was easily one of the best games to ever be created. So with that in mind, you can imagine how awesome it is 10 years on, with an Xbox360 powering its engine. Well, for starters it got a 9.3 on IGN.

So just HOW good is it? Just watch the short clip below. (If you can’t see it click here.)

*drools* I’m off to go and kick some ass as Ryu.

HADOUKEN!
Alex