It’s sim­ple really. If you’re an aspir­ing musi­cian just wait until you hear Google is updat­ing images of the streets in your sub­urb and then fol­low these steps and you’ll sell mil­lions, if not bil­lions of copies to work­ers in Indian call centres.

1. Get a guitar.
2. Get a sign.
3. Drive around until you see the Street View Car.
4. Go one block past the Street View Car.
5. Set up a plac­ard and pose.

The result: Price­less.

Did you know that water droplets are per­fectly spher­i­cal? You could mea­sure it for your­self if you could remem­ber the for­mula for the vol­ume of a sphere and if you had one of these pi shower cur­tains fea­tur­ing pi to 4,600 dec­i­mal places.

Email you can do from the bath­room with­out fear of con­dem­na­tion or suspicion.

The Oat­meal has ten rea­sons. I like this one.

This made me:
a) wish I had a lit­tle brother.
b) glad I don’t have a lit­tle brother.
c) laugh.
d) all of the above.

UPDATE: I posted the wrong video — I’ll leave both up.

My lit­tle sis­ter obvi­ously didn’t get the memo. You know. The one I addressed to the whole world invit­ing con­tri­bu­tions for the increas­ingly inap­pro­pri­ately named “Mad Skillz Week”… you can decide the basis that I think the name is inap­pro­pri­ate for your­self. Any­way, Mad­die, aka lit­tle sis­ter num­ber 2, had this to contribute.

I was annoyed that Nathan didn’t ask me to give input dur­ing mad skillz week. I thought per­haps he didn’t believe I had any mad skillz, and he may have been right.

I’m Mad, but the skill part still eluded me. I con­sid­ered giv­ing 5 tips on how to be me. But then if all the read­ers took my advice there could be maybe 3 or 4 of me run­ning around and so I thought the bet­ter of it.

I con­sid­ered writ­ing 5 tips on how to be a cat lady.

1. Buy two cats of the oppo­site sex.
2. Never shower.
3. Walk hunched.
4. Wear scarves and cardigans.
5. …

Well now you see the prob­lem. Plus since I’m not actu­ally a cat lady it seemed like a fallacy.

Still I was con­vinced I could give 5 tips on some­thing. Then it hit me…

Mad on How to share mad skillz:

(in no par­tic­u­lar order of impor­tance, except point 4)

1. Be hum­ble. Sug­gest you’re not that skilled, that there are a mil­lion peo­ple bet­ter than you and that you only have the skills because they were bestowed upon you by a mentor/teacher/father figure.Including other people’s names makes it clear you’re not a self cen­tred blog­ger and that you’re part of a real world com­mu­nity with­out suf­fer­ing some supe­ri­or­ity dis­or­der. I’m not really sure I’m qual­i­fied to advise you on how to write about your real skills, but grow­ing up with Nath has taught me a lit­tle about writ­ing stuff.
2. Never say your skills all come nat­u­rally. If peo­ple are read­ing about your skills part of them wants to be like you. Fill them with a lit­tle false hope — tell them if they work hard they’ll be able to do your skill too. Any­one could write 5 tips to oth­ers, all you need is a skill and a com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium — chisel/stone tablet, pen/paper, fingers/iPhone.
3. “Although seem­ingly con­tra­dic­tory to rule num­ber 1″ — this phrase should always be included in your 5 key points. why? Because it shows there are shades of grey, there’s no best way, and it makes it look like your skill is a fine bal­anc­ing act — so is actu­ally a real skill.And although seem­ingly con­tra­dic­tory to point 1, it’s impor­tant your 5 points show that you are skilled, don’t shy away too much from your abil­i­ties because if peo­ple think you don’t know what you’re talk­ing about why should they lis­ten??? I know this because I won a pub­lic speak­ing award in grade 10.
4. Always have some­thing funny in point 4.
5. Don’t put too much tech­ni­cal jar­gon in your points, but do include exam­ples, pho­tos, dia­grams, flow charts — things that can be grasped fast. Peo­ple out­side your world aren’t famil­iar with the cul­ture and stuff. And to be hon­est they prob­a­bly don’t care about tech­ni­cal­i­ties because how many peo­ple are going to become sub­sti­tute roller-skating pho­tog­ra­phy teach­ers? Not many.
   
   They are inter­ested in the gen­eral gist of your skillz. So stick with sim­ple words, con­cepts and gram­mar. Keep it short. <- see?

Some­times I read links to awe­some posts about cool stuff where the per­son does such a good job of describ­ing the con­tent at the other end that I don’t feel the need to click through. This is prob­a­bly a bad thing. A few weeks back Kot­tke linked to a post about how to write an incen­di­ary blog post. His post was good. I shared it via google reader, and thought noth­ing fur­ther of it.

Then Amy linked to the same post and I read the orig­i­nal. It’s funny. You should read it — and make sure you check out the com­ments too…

This sen­tence claims that there are many peo­ple who do not agree with the the­sis of the blog post as expressed in the pre­vi­ous sen­tence. This sen­tence spec­u­lates as to the men­tal and eth­i­cal char­ac­ter of the peo­ple men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous sen­tence. This sen­tence con­tains a link to the most egre­giously ill-argued, intem­per­ate, hate­ful and ridicu­lous exam­ple of such peo­ple the author could find. This sen­tence is a three-word refu­ta­tion of the post linked in the pre­vi­ous sen­tence, the first of which three words is “Um.” This sen­tence implies that the linked post is in fact typ­i­cal of those who dis­agree with the the­sis of the blog post. This sen­tence con­tains expres­sions of out­rage and dis­be­lief largely expressed in Inter­net acronyms. This sen­tence con­tains a link to an Inter­net video fea­tur­ing a cat play­ing a piano.

Here’s my favourite comment…

“This com­ment is by a trolling Jehova’s Wit­ness who is filled with broth­erly love for all the other com­menters, but knows with­out meet­ing any of them that they all deserve to burn in hell for­ever. For­tu­nately, any­one will­ing to read this far is already jaded from way too much time spent read­ing comments.”

The moral to this story (other than that you should read both Amy’s blog and Kottke.org) is that you should always click through to inter­est­ing links.

Part of me wants to cel­e­brate this video as the epit­ome of exu­ber­ant youth, the other part of me wants to run scream­ing down the street aim­ing for some sense of mind numb­ing cathar­sis. You will be simul­ta­ne­ously richer and poorer for lis­ten­ing to this song from a teenage band in the states. It’s every­thing that is bad about over­pro­duced Chris­t­ian music — and I wouldn’t be sur­prised if these guys get some sort of record­ing deal in the wash.

“Shine” by Final Place­ment from shar­ity world on Vimeo.

This video has gone viral and the fun­ni­est part of the story is that the gui­tarist dud­ded his mates in an attempt to sal­vage some pride — he jumped onto the dis­cus­sion thread on the Dan­ger­ous Minds blog and defended his role in the cacoph­o­nic cat­a­stro­phe.

Your enlight­en­ment: Hello. I apol­o­gize for the rhythm­less train­wreck of a song before you. The bassist and singer take all of this very seri­ously. This stuff is of para­mount impor­tance. They recorded this and asked me and a drum­mer to come play some parts on it. When­ever friends do this, I just fol­low ther direc­tion blindly, let­ting them do what­ever they want. This stuff will never get out to the pub­lic, right? Wrong on this one. So I guess this is me defend­ing myself and the drum­mer. We are not mem­bers of the band. We were not asked if this could be made pub­lic on YouTube. If we had been, we would have undoubt­edly said no. I guess we could have saved them a lot of trou­ble if we had just told them from the begin­ning their record­ing sucked. Ques­tions? Feel free to ask more.

And the lyrics.

there are times when we all fall down
can’t seem to get it off the ground
you put your hope on what you do
but still feel you never get through

you know it’s hard
most of the time
but one fine day
you will find

this is your life
this is your time
it’ll be alright
you’re gonna shine
a sec­ond chance
a brand new day
don’t give up
you’ll find a way

so take a deep breath
and close your eyes
this is your life
you’re gonna shine
cause this is your life

you think the world has got you and
you can’t seem to like happy end and
it’s a one step for­ward two steps back
the train is run­ning off the tracks

you know it’s hard
most of the time
but one fine day
you will find

this is your life
this is your time
it’ll be alright
you’re gonna shine
a sec­ond chance
a brand new day
don’t give up
you’ll find a way

so take a deep breath
and close your eyes
this is your life
you’re gonna shine
cause this is your life

(solo)

take it all in stride
one step at a time
cause some­day you will find
the words you’re look­ing for

take it all in stride
one step at a time
cause some­day you will find
the words you’re look­ing for

this is your life
this is your time
it’ll be alright
you’re gonna shine
a sec­ond chance
a brand new day
don’t give up
you’ll find a way

so take a deep breath
and close your eyes
this is your life
you’re gonna shine
cause this is your life

An arti­cle from Freako­nom­ics has caused a bit of a stir. A fam­ily from the Bible Belt con­fessed to feign­ing Chris­tian­ity in order to fit in. It’s sad. If the church is pres­sur­ing peo­ple — either overtly or covertly to con­form behav­iourally with­out a change in beliefs first then it is not doing its job. The church should be lov­ing and seek­ing the wel­fare of non-Christians — and Chris­t­ian par­ents should be encour­ag­ing their kids to play with the non-Christian kid next door. If they’re so wor­ried about their kid being con­verted by the friendly neigh­bour­hood athe­ist then maybe they should recon­sider their par­ent­ing strat­egy lest the kid make up their own mind when they reach his/her 20s only to dis­cover a big and scary world of ideas beyond their shel­tered milieu.

Here’s a quote from the article…

We found by expe­ri­ence that if we were truth­ful about not being reg­u­lar church atten­ders, the play dates sud­denly ended. Thus started the fak­ing of the reli­gious funk.

It seemed silly but it’s all very seri­ous busi­ness down here. We don’t go to church or teach or chil­dren one belief is “right” over another. We expose them to every kind of belief and trust that they will one day set­tle in to their very own spirituality.

I know we Chris­tians want our chil­dren to grow up just like us (and I’m not a par­ent — though I have been a child) but surely we can be just as con­fi­dent that our chil­dren will make the right choice as the agnos­tic is about theirs… I won­der if there’s a cor­re­la­tion between the par­ents who don’t believe in vac­ci­na­tion and par­ents who don’t let their chil­dren play with the scary atheists.

This was not the most inter­est­ing part of that par­tic­u­lar Freako­nom­ics post. Oh no. The most inter­est­ing part was this study of the effect of using an open col­lec­tion plate rather than a closed bag thing — this fur­ther demon­strates the hypocrisy inher­ent in the system.

In these churches, the col­lec­tion was taken up in a closed bag that was passed along from per­son to per­son, row to row. Soetevent got the churches to let him switch things up, ran­domly sub­sti­tut­ing an open col­lec­tion bas­ket for the closed bags over a period of sev­eral months. He wanted to know if the added scrutiny changed the dona­tion pat­terns. (An open bas­ket lets you see how much money has already been col­lected as well as how much your neigh­bor puts in.) Indeed it did: with open bas­kets, the church­go­ers gave more money, includ­ing fewer small-denomination coins, than with closed bags — although, inter­est­ingly, the effect petered out once the open bas­kets had been around for a while.

Andrew isn’t just an opera singer about to hit the big time in Ger­many. He’s also a pho­tog­ra­pher of some repute. Here are his tips on low light pho­tog­ra­phy. I’ll update this to include a link to his Flickr. If he’ll let me. I guess you’ll soon find out. Ahh, stuff it, it’s pub­lic domain. Here you go. Check his work out.

And here’s one of his pho­tos — it is copy­right so look but don’t touch (even though I’ve hyp­o­crit­i­cally stolen it — but we all know how I feel about copyright…).

A cou­ple of years back I had a 10-tips arti­cle on pho­tograph­ing rock con­certs pub­lished in JPG Mag (Read it here). So for Mad Skillz Week, here’s an adap­ta­tion of 5 tips for pho­tograph­ing in low light. Whether it’s a con­cert, candle-lit cui­sine or the cool colours of the Eif­fel Tower light-show, these tips will help make the most of dif­fi­cult light­ing situations.

*Dis­claimer: of course, you shouldn’t be tak­ing pho­tographs in pro­fes­sional per­for­mances, but if you hap­pen to have a child star, then this will be of use.

Of all the peo­ple in all the blo­gos­phere Kutz is the only per­son I have lived with in Bris­bane. Tim also blogs, and Mat­tias used to. I also work with Kutz. And go to the same col­lege. And we play fut­sal together, and very soon we’ll play foot­ball together.

For a guy who almost staged a coup on my only claim to pres­i­den­tial author­ity (QUT Chris­tians in 2005) we get on sur­pris­ingly well and spend a lot of time together. Kutz is a deep thinker, who I think some­times thinks so deeply he gets lost in his own thoughts while try­ing to artic­u­late them. Lots of peo­ple know Kutz — both online and in the real world. His two great­est per­sonal achieve­ments are con­vinc­ing his wife to marry him and play­ing inter­na­tional roller hockey — that’s my assess­ment not his. How many sport­ing inter­na­tion­als do you know? I can count them on two fin­gers. While the cyn­ics out there might think that pick­ing an obscure sport to play is kind of cheat­ing — Roller Hockey is hard core (I watched a tour­na­ment once) and Kutz was a standout.

Any­way, here are his tips on how to be awe­some at Roller Hockey. He gets extra points for dia­grams — though I sus­pect he was mak­ing them when he should have been writ­ing a sermon.

I’m Kutz and I’m an ex roller hockey player. Hoquei em patines, for those Spaniards among you.

Roller hockey is awe­some. You take 5 steps, and then all of a sud­den you’re already going fast. Seri­ously. You don’t need to keep run­ning. You just roll. Your legs are still. And yet you’re still going fast. A beau­ti­ful con­cept. Add to this the feel­ing of smash­ing some­one into the wall, flick­ing a ball into the top cor­ner (prob­a­bly on the keeper’s stick-side) and get­ting to hit a ball (and, on occas­sion, other peo­ple) with a stick and how can you go wrong?

Now, I used to play with a team of guys: Michael, Les, Dion, Matty, Serge (my bro), Chris, Peter and some others.

Michael’s top 5 rules were:

Rule #1 — Hit Dion
Rule #2 — Hit Dion
Rule #3 — Hit Les
Rule #4 — Hit Dion
Rule #5 — Hit Les

Fun rules they were too. They aren’t, how­ever, mine.

My Five best* tips for play­ing roller hockey. (And these are gen­uine, and hence will inter­est only a very few of you.) (They will also mostly be team, not indi­vid­ual, prin­ci­ples. That’s because that’s all my dad taught me.)

1. In neg­a­tive sports**, a strong defence that puts some pres­sure on the oppo­si­tion is the key to win­ning. So defend tightly, and com­mu­ni­cate well.
2. Don’t give away the ball close to the halfway line. Break­aways goals are imper­a­tive to avoid.
3. If you’re try­ing to score, the hot-spots to skate to are here. (see dia­gram)
   
4. When defend­ing man-on-man (ie, you’re mark­ing a spe­cific player, not defend­ing in a zone) skate in straight lines, roughly par­al­lel to your penalty box lines. Skat­ing in straight lines gets you there faster than skat­ing in curves.
5. Try to make your team-mate look good. If every­one on the team has this men­tal­ity, hockey is a beau­ti­ful thing.
6. 6. (Unof­fi­cial, but vital) Don’t drop the soap in the showers.

Nathan’s asked me to tell you now how apply­ing these 5 tips will change your life. I would sug­gest that after intense thought and appli­ca­tion these prin­ci­ples will sim­ply con­fuse you if you try to use them while learn­ing to play hockey. Our coach Eduard Karayan (ex-pro in Ital­ian league) just let us go and have fun. So we did. :)

* May change after more than 10 min­utes of con­tem­pla­tion.
** A ‘neg­a­tive sport’ is my short-hand for a sport where in any given attack­ing phase it is more likely that the attack­ing team will not score than that they will score. Ie, football(soccer). A ‘pos­i­tive’ sport would be some­thing like bas­ket­ball where the expec­ta­tion is that more likely than not the attack­ing team will score from their attack.