Jam Night

A good day.
Slept well, awoken by the sun and two brindle dogs - Launch and Jethro - sleeping in the sunbeam on my bed. Tasty bacon and eggs for breakfast then a quick trip to Richmond to register the van and pick up medications, lovely sunny morning, four dogs in the back, all very well behaved.
Planting flax bushes on the bank and picking up horse poo for Tracey while she is away in Christchurch doing horse related things. Saw some excellent backlit cumulus clouds in the afternoon.
Squire came over for a lovely Witchy dinner - Moroccan roast vegetables with garlic crumbed sausages! Yum yum!
We then ventured out to the music room and had a jam session. Bloody marvellous!!
I'm a very tired Wizard right now but feeling it in a nice way. It's been a long day, most excellent.
Awesomely gorgeous night out tonight, not too cold, nice dark skies and lots of brilliant stars - including a Taurid meteor trail.
Time for sleep....

Animated logo sequence

Here's a little animated logo type thingy that I have been working on recently.



There is a point at 00:12 where the metalic logo turns into a cloud of pixels. This is based on an idea I've had floating around for a while and I am pleased to have finally had a go at making it work.

Yay! A Blogging milestone.....

.... was reached today! My blog now has ONE Follower! WooHoo! That's almost like going viral!

Welcome Witchy - may you be the first of many other followers.

History repeats.....(Anyone remember MySpace?)

 I saw an article online just recently where these scientist types had demonstrated that the popularity and use of social media sites like facebook follow the same mathematical progressions as communicable diseases. In other words they start, become flavour of the month and spread like wildfire through the population until they reach saturation point and rapidly wither and fade. These science wonks figured that facebook usage stats had reached the plateau stage and would very soon start to experience the same loss of popularity and rapidly fade away. MySpace anyone? It's pretty clear what facebook users want and if they can't get it here they will bail out and go elsewhere in droves. The end user has all the power (that's us folks!).
It is pretty obvious to me that today's internet savvy travellers know what they want. This is apparent from just reading through popular posts like this one which was recently posted to my facebook timeline:


Here's something from my facebook page today:"I'm a little disappointed right now. Just put on my headphones to listen to my SoundCloud stream and discovered that there is no way to remove tracks you no longer wish to hear from your stream! Wtf? I mean, like, seriously? What possible use is a personalised music stream that you can't actually personalise?Instant uninstall of app. I'll just go back to streaming my own music off my network drives."
This is another example of a social media service hindering the free flow of information by attempting to excessively control the content on the net. Here's some more from the same thread:"It was listening to podcasts that created the problem for me. I want to choose what I hear and I don't want some stranger talking to me (specially when they are talking over the music- just fucking rude IMO). I 'liked' a guy (Tydi) and had a listen to one of his podcasts. He started talking through music someone else had put a lot of work and effort into. For me this is a HUGE no-no. As a musician myself when I release a tune I do not want someone else talking over the track that I've carefully composed. The is the sonic equivalent of walking into someone else house and shitting on their lounge floor. So,,, sorry Mr Tydi but I'm here to listen to music, not some moronic talent vacuum flapping his gums over other peoples work. So I try to remove this guy and his irritating podcasts from my stream and there is no delete button. So every time I go to sound cloud I have this guy yabbing at me in yet another podcast I don't want to hear. Now, I can go and block this guy but that does not remove his podcasts from my stream. Completely brainless. I want cloud storage to operate like my own hard drives. I don't like something I delete it - simple. Soundcloud does not work like this (even though the net is covered with other people like me wanting to control their own streams) - therefore, they no longer get my support."
So I no longer use, support or recommend Soundcloud although I continue to use facebook for the meantime (and yes, in case you were wondering the use of a lowercase 'f' is deliberate. It is a token of my general disgruntlement (hey cool! 'Disgruntlement' must be a real word because Spell Check didn't put one of it's officious red wriggly lines under it when I typed the word).   
Now I know that the good folk here at www.blogger.com read every single blog posting so this is for you guys - keep giving your users what they want and they'll keep using your service.
Remember - "you can't stop the signal Mal"
PSMy apologies for referencing information that I cannot now find the original source - terribly bad form on my part. Or is it? After all is said and done these are simply the musings of a slightly deranged Wizard, not some learned treatise in an august and respectable science journal. Given that then I must apologise and retract my previous apology!

x

Rain on the roof...

(The following was written several weeks ago. Since then I have not had sufficient time to organise my photographs so this story is not exactly hot off the press. Hopefully it still makes for an interesting read. )

An old house like ours has a roof made of corrugated iron and when it rains you can hear the raindrops hitting the metal. It's a lovely, soothing and comforting sound which we have not heard for a while. After a long day like today, with almost a thousand kilometres of driving there is nothing quite like rain on the roof to send you off to sleep.

Last night I didn't get much sleep at all. I'd say I got maybe three hours worth and then it was up at 6:00am and on the road by 6:40am. Living rurally as we do we were able to hit open road speed right away and as the morning light seeped into the day we made excellent time with almost no other traffic about. We had not gone far before I realised that I had somehow forgotten to grab the camera! Stimpy, you eedeeot!

Thus my grand master plan to document today's trip was completely disrupted. Getting up that early is usually not such a great idea for a night owl like me. As General Patton said, "a new plan never survives first contact with the enemy" - in this case the enemy was me!

Fortunately (or was it magically?) the rest of the trip went beautifully - just as we had  planned!

After about four and a half hours we arrived at our destination and, after the appropriate social niceties, we loaded up the trailer with rolls of carpet and underlay and then wrapped up the load with tarps and strapped it all in. Then we unhitched the loaded trailer and went for a quick drive around Christchurch to catch up briefly with various friends and relations. I say "quick drive" but of course driving about in Christchurch is never quick these days as there is still so much damage to the roads caused by the earthquakes. It is incredibly sad to see how much damage there still is that needs repairing or replacing. Once such a beautiful and tidy city there are now so many fabulous heritage buildings gone that at times it can be quite challenging just to find your way about.

Familiar landmarks are gone and startling new vistas revealed where so many quake damaged buildings have been removed. This creates a strange sense of unreality as so much has changed while so much else remains relatively unchanged. It was quite surreal to drive along our old street to find our poor battered old cottage was the only house still standing along that stretch of the river.

Anyway, after our lightning tour we returned to the trailer, hitched it up and finally got back on the road again. We ran into some very light,  misty rain for a short while but soon passed on to finer driving conditions. Dry roads and light traffic made for an easy and pleasant trip.

As we neared home the skies darkened, due to both the setting sun and the arrival of the first cloudy harbingers of cyclone Lusi.

We pulled up in front of our garage and began hastily unloading rolls of carpet from the trailer just as the first raindrops arrived.

A Day in the life....

So....

What exactly does a Wizard do in his day to day life? Surely it's not all vanquishing dragons and summoning demons!  This Wizard, the person that I am is a visual being. I have always held a deep and abiding fascination for light in all it's myriad manifestations. Whilst it's not perhaps a strictly scientific view I subscribe to the general idea that everything is light in some way. A vibration, be it wave or particle or (more likely) something as yet still not understood, I like to think of light as energy in motion (something going somewhere)  and matter as energy that is essentially being still (energy going in very, very small circles).

Vision - the ability to perceive the visible parts of the spectrum as light and colour - is our facility for observing the interactions between energy in linear motion and energy in circular motion. Put more simply, light shines through, on, and off matter and our eyes 'see' it.

This photograph (taken last week in the meadow by the old railway line near our house) is an example. Sunlight shines through clouds and atmosphere and is absorbed and reflected by the matter that comprises the landscape.

Crepuscular rays (aka 'God-rays')

The combinations of the interactions of linear energy (light) and circular energy (matter) when observed through our perceptual filters is what creates magic - which is what Wizards (and Witches) do. A meteorologist observing this image might see cumulus clouds, a physicist might see crepuscular rays where an artist or visionary may see God-rays. An arborist may note the silhouetted eucalyptus trees. A photographer will note the use of the compositional Rule of Thirds and so on. Others folk will see other things dependant on their predispositions. A wizard (at least this Wizard) sees magic.

This process is utterly simple and simultaneously very difficult until one has acquired the skill of it.  Magic is everywhere for those with eyes to see it. Maybe this blog is about the perception or creation of magic? As the blogger I am quite interested to see what happens in the next post.....

~W~

Blowing off the Dust....

Hi There!

I thought it was well past time to blow the dust off the old blog and post some new content. I've had several attempts to add posts as this year has progressed but circumstances have left them unfinished and in various states of 'draft-ness'. Writing in a blog like this can be a somewhat daunting task - what should one write about? How much information should one include (or leave out)? How can one make it as interesting as possible and (the big question) is it worth the effort to write it if nobody is actually going to read it?

One of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People according to author Stephen Covey is to "Begin with the end in mind". Which begs the question - what is my intention here? What purpose does this blog fulfil and who is it actually for?

My intention is to share both my thoughts and my artistic output where anyone can see it. As a unique centre of awareness, a 'Thinker' and a Wizard I have my own suitably unique view on the world. Over the course of my life I have found many principles, affirmations, realisations and aphorisms which have been incredibly helpful and effective in allowing me to move through the course of life feeling pleased with who I am. I want to share some of these thoughts in the hope that they may be of use to others.

I have long held the desire to have a single place on the internet that could act as a repository for a sort of snapshot view into the world of one unknown Wizard. That is the purpose of this blog and as to the question of who it is for... I find myself wondering, does that really matter? I am a seven billionth of the total of humanity on this world yet I like to think the universe would be somehow incomplete were I not here. By putting my artwork, my visions and thoughts and conclusions out there into the World Wide Web it is perhaps merely my attempt to make a meaningful contribution to the world that has contributed so much to me. I am as insignificant as a grain of sand on a vast windswept beach. Perhaps by reflecting what colours and light I can, some passing awareness will perceive my sand grain as one of those brief sparkling motes that twinkle amidst the endless granules and contribute just a tiny touch of magic back to the world. If I must be a tiny speck at least let me strive to be a shiny one.

Will anyone read this? Is it worth the effort to write? Yes I will read it and it's worth the effort because someone else may read it and maybe the magic will spread. If I don't post it then most certainly nothing will happen. If I do, it might and that is ample reason enough for me

~W~