First, the background: as a mentor and investor in tech startups, there’s only so much time I need to spend face-to-face with people, and since clients are as likely to be in Lausanne, New York or San Jose as Sydney, I don’t really need to maintain a city office, or spend more than a day a week in the city if I plan ahead.

But working from home has drawbacks for such a distractable guy. My productivity plunges if I get distracted by hanging out the washing and finishing the newspaper, and I miss the chance to bounce off other creative, entrepreneurial people.

This is how I'm often distracted: by kayaking

I was keen to try and solve these two problems, and was investigating establishing my own co-working space in the neighbourhood if need be.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space…

The day after we moved house, I was at ZUBI Bar, one of the best locations in Newport, an extremely funky and fun coffee shop on the main strip. Big, charismatic South African Steve and his team of loud, cheerful, playful baristas and waitpeople are happy to share their Wi-Fi connection if you order a meal.

I told Steve about how I was considering starting a co-working space. Steve knew somebody I had to talk to: “Simon Bond, a guy up the street who’s got a space with really fast internet access and a few spare desks”. Sounded intriguing!

Got Simon’s contact details? No, but Steve thought the owner of the local Apple reseller, Mac&Me could help, so I went looking for Margot. She  had Simon’s number because she was also setting up a training room and Apple service centre in Simon’s space.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space, NewportNet.com.au from Simon and his wife, Karen. I’d gone from worrying about finding someplace to work to finding the perfect workplace in an afternoon.

ZUBI Bar, like the best of Surry Hills transported to the Northern Beaches

Thanks to St George Bank opening a branch downstairs, this brand-new building has high capacity optical fibre all the way from Newport back down to Sydney. When stockbroker Simon was looking for office space to relocate his busy broking business, he happened across the developer at [address] and discovered that much of this optical fibre cabling was sitting un-utilised.

Simon’s connections run far and wide, including senior management at Internode, the Adelaide-based internet service provider. Simon knew just the people to help him put in the hardware required to utilise all that unused high-speed bandwidth.

Simon needed some high-speed, reliable internet access for his broking firm: if Internode could install and configure the necessary internet plumbing, could he build the Northern Beaches’ first high-speed internet access point for small creative entrepeneurs? Would Simon Hackett of Internode back that idea with some technical people and hardware? The answer was a resounding yes.

He’s a bit of a visionary, is our Simon, and he and his wife Karen have an admirable vision for the Newport business community: “build it and they will come”. That is, create a bright, open, collaborative business environment for the creative entrepreneurs of the Northern Beaches, give them access to the services they needed, make it affordable and too good to refuse, and they will come.

That certainly appears to be the case so far at NewportNet, with video production company Stem Media and Mac training and retail business Mac&Me joining me as anchor tenants in the new space.

The entry to NewportNet

As well as high-speed internet access (currently 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down, with both Wi-Fi and Ethernet available throughout) the premises includes elevator access, secure car park, meeting room, kitchen, bathroom and several lockable offices about 4m x 4m. All the desks are IKEA and the chairs are Herman Miller.

One of the offices

Downstairs you’re a block or two from banks, chemist, post office, supermarket, organic produce market, several great restaurants and cafes, and the wonderful ZUBI Bar.

A typical desk (in this case, mine)

Space in NewportNet is available by the desk or by the office, by the day, week, month or longer commitment.

Meeting room

If you’re on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and you’d like to share a workspace with other professionals in a casual and collaborative environment, get more details at NewportNet.com.au  au, follow us on Twitter as @NewportNetAU or drop in at Office 1, 341 Barrenjoey Rd, Newport Beach 2106 (Google Map)

By the way, if you’re lower down the Northern Beaches, I’d recommend you check out Co-Worka in Dee Why.

The team from Mac&Me in their training space

My wife feels like cancer has taken her body hostage

She’s got two more weekly chemotherapy treatments to go, but that doesn’t make it any easier when she feels as crappy as she does today. She says it was easier, sort of, when she was sicker, because back then she was able to sleep through some of the day. Now she’s not sick enough to sleep that much, she’s left with no energy to do the things that might take her mind off how bad she feels.

She says for her, it’s been like a hostage crisis. The cancer has taken her body hostage, and her body is no longer something she can take for granted, something that is just part of who she is. (Read more…)

Very little trickery used here, just the iPhone in my pocket with the apps Darkroom (for minimising blurring in low light) and Tiltshiftgen (for a touch of blur, saturation and brightness).

Check my Flickr feed and you’ll see a significant percentage of my photography in the past year has been low-resolution because I’ve been taking more shots on my iPhone than my DSLR.

It’s certainly not the quality of the lens or the performance of the shutter and sensor that make the iPhone my camera of choice; it’s the programmable power of the apps I’ve installed, the fact that I can post photos direct to Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly it’s the way the iPhone is always in my pocket, on the arm of my chair, in the glovebox of my car, and since it became my alarm clock, on the side of my bed.

If I were a futurist I’d predict in the next five years, the photography industry will be dominated by devices that have lenses and sensors, but also have SIM cards, 3G and WIFI radios, address books, calendars and browsers. Quality of lens and sensor will still matter, but quality of OS and apps on your ‘camera’ will increasingly matter more than the lens and sensor.

It may be tough for a phone maker to make good cameras, but it’s well-nigh impossible for a camera maker to make good phones. Unless you’re a premium professional brand like Leica or Hasselblad, better merge or seek to be acquired by a Samsung or Nokia. Yes, Nikon and Canon, I’m looking at you.

The future of photography is not about what happens in the process of capturing the image, it’s about whether there was a camera present at all, and about what happens to the image after it’s been taken.

Here’s the first half of our route (captured before my iPhone battery died) and our 10-12 mins/km pace is good, although it was largely downhill (following a river towards the sea is like that).

It was raining heavily at times and I was soaking wet but warm with the exercise and a moderately warm morning. Nothing makes wet shoes and socks fun, however. The rain meant I was unable to snag any photos, sorry.

It’s very cool to live in a big urbanised city like Sydney and still walk from the outskirts to the interior almost entirely in the bush for 20 of our 25kms.

It’s cooler still to finish a training walk right on your front door. Most endurance training events involve a lengthy train or car journey at either end, and there’s generally nothing worse than spending an hour or more, wet, muddy and tired, in a car or train waiting to get home before you can slip into a bath.

Next weekend I’m visiting friends in Melbourne but the team will be out there training again, and I’ll have to catch up during the week. Spare a thought for them, and spare a dollar or two if you can to sponsor us — we still have more than $1,000 to raise in donations before the event, in less than a month. Ruh-roh!

Here’s the online donation page.

What are you made of? It takes something special to be in the bush by 7am on a rainy Sunday.

]]> http://js-kit.com/rss/doingwords.com/p=1946 0 http://doingwords.com/2010/03/10/seeking-free-charity-auction-platform-get-an-xbox360-cheap/ http://doingwords.com/2010/03/10/seeking-free-charity-auction-platform-get-an-xbox360-cheap/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:00:19 +0000 alan jones http://doingwords.com/?p=1906 Help me. I have reason to believe Microsoft is stalking me. I need a free charity auction platform to make them go away, but so far, no luck. So I’m turning to you, dear readers (Yes, both of you). But perhaps I should explain…

I’ve only ever won two prizes in ‘lucky door prize’ type giveaways in my entire life. [cue X:Files theme music] and both prizes were Microsoft XBOX360s! [music: climax!]

I don’t think Microsoft just gives XBOXes away left, right and centre at every geeky meet-up in town, in fact, there was only one given away at Ignite Sydney 2010 and it was given away to me!

Here I am, the only person in the photo who doesn't really want an XBOX360

Too coincidental to be just a coincidence, surely? Could it be that Microsoft is trying to make it up to me for encouraging me to, shall we say, ‘leave my job’ at Microsoft many years ago? Funny way to apologise, and I long since stopped holding a grudge.

Besides, I’m not a huge fan of console gaming platforms, and of the XBOX in particular, as it seems like a platform skewed towards games about killing things. And I’m not about killing things. I’d be more of a Wii customer, if I were into platform games at all.

Finally, as an enthusiastic proponent of #freerangekids I’m not about to install anything that would lead to Boy8 spending most of his free time in front of the telly.

So, I’ve decided to auction off the new XBOX360 and donate the proceeds to charity — one of the three fundraising events I’m working on this year — Kayak For Kids, WildEndurance or Oxfam Trailwalker (the winning bidder can decide which charity gets the donation).

My only stumbling block: I can’t find a good free web platform for running charity auctions. The one I’ve used before, 32auctions.com,now requires you to have a US street address for some godforsaken reason (probably to do with godforsaken lawyers worrying needlessly about godforsaken liability).

Can anyone recommend a great auction platform I can use to create a charity auction, without paying fees to do so?

UPDATE: I’ve given up on charitable auction sites and I’m just auctioning it on Ebay. Go bid now!

(This post started out as a comment on fatpaddler.com, where Sean mentions crying while watching The Cove. But me, I’ll cried in anything with a sad moment. Well, anything except romantic comedies starring Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston, which are sad for 120mins straight and I just can’t watch those at all.)

Dr Karl reckons crying in movies on planes is all psychological but I think it’s far too widespread for that to be the case.

I googled some studies that show a link between long-term high-altitude and changes in oxytocin reception.

Oxytocin (as we all remember as husbands who paid close attention in pre-natal classes to try and minimise the risk of being torn to pieces by our demonically-possessed spouses in-between contractions) makes us very emotional.

So, I have a hunch: that the rapid reduction in air pressure as the plane ascends affects our ability to absorb oxytocin, the hormone that makes us cry when watching movies.

Perhaps the change in air pressure (from sea level to about the same pressure as you’d get at 8,000ft) in short time it takes to get to cruising altitude might effect your oxytocin receptors quite markedly for a short period. Your brain notices the shortfall and instructs the hypothalamus to dramatically increase production.

The meal service begins, the in-flight entertainment gets going, and by the time you get through the inflight interface and the ads to the emotional part of the movie, your body has managed to catch up, and is now fully adapted to the new atmospheric pressure.

But by now, your bloodstream is flooded with all that additional oxytocin the brain had ordered. All that’s required now is a small audio-visual cue in the movie and you’ll weep.

Now, I’ve got no data to back this up, no study at all. In fact, I had a lot of trouble understanding anything real scientists had to say about oxytocin and altitude. So I can’t really call it a theory, since that would require a hypothesis and I can’t even be bothered to write one of those properly. So let’s just call it a hunch. A suspicion. An opportunity to exclaim, “Aha! I had a hunch that was the case back in 2010! If only they’d listened!” to my grandchildren (who of course won’t be at my nursing home in person. They’ll just subscribe to my lifestream and pretend they’re viewing it.)

While I’m rambling, let’s extend my hunch a bit further still: if your oxytocin receptors are affected when you suddenly gain altitude, it makes sense it also happens when you lose altitude. Perhaps when the plane descends to land, you’re left without enough oxytocin reception and that’s why you feel strangely unemotional and robotic as you leave the plane and walk into baggage claim and customs. And then the excess oxytocin washes over you right as you walk out into the crowded arrivals hall to find… nobody waiting for you again… where’s the taxi queue? [sob!]

In other words, it has been a time of mixed blessings.

Thanks to everyone who’s expressed their well-wishes and support. I never realised that it’s not just about being polite — it really does help. Thanks, and I will repay those favours. We’re walking in a bubble of love created by friends and family. It’s a wonderful thing to be reminded how lucky we are to know you.

Melissa and Boy8 ham it up at New Years Eve, Byron Bay

On to other news.

Regular readers may remember Miles Campbell from our co-presentation at last year’s Interesting South conference in Sydney. Borrowing from the iconic Australian film The Castle, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Miles is an Ideas Man. His latest idea is a real corker, inspired by his frustration with organised religion vs spirituality, and by the increasingly cluttered lives we find ourselves drawn into.

Miles’ idea is beautifully simple, memorable and in my experience, useful for anyone who seeks peace, clarity and balance in their lives. It’s called ‘Shhh’ and after participating in a few pilot sessions last year, I’m looking forward to seeing Shhh go public and grow in 2010.

I had offered to help Miles with explaining Shhh, but really, he’s done such a good job on the following description, I have very little to offer. Instead, please enjoy Miles’ explanation, since it’s clear, interesting, and strikes just the right balance between proscriptive and flexible, formal and casual, serious and funny:

What is Shhh?

Shhh is born from the belief that there is meaningful experience to be discovered when a group of people share a space and are still and silent.

Many people miss out on meaningful reflective times that are created in silent ceremonies, due to the fact that they don’t share the history, beliefs, culture or practices that are part and parcel of established ritual. You can’t really participate in these times without ‘buying in’ at some level with the expressed tradition that is hosting the event.

By choosing a name which can’t be mistaken for being the expression of any particular belief system, and by banning the writing or speaking of any words during the official gathering, the ceremony is protected from any particular personality, culture, religion, belief, ego or agenda.

Anyone from any background can happily come and share the silent space with others, and be confident that they will not be expected to listen to, judge or defend anyone’s views or beliefs.

The drink and chat afterwards provides the opportunity for those who wish to enjoy the company of the friends or strangers that they have just been silent with. Some will likely discuss what the experience meant to them. This is fine, but it isn’t a part of the Shhh ceremony, it is just people talking.

Rules:

1. Be silent (that is kind of the point)
2. Be still (so you don’t distract or annoy others)
3. No kids for the time being (see 1, and 2)
4. Don’t take it too seriously, it’s just a bunch of people not talking

So, that’s Shhh — the most minimalist and individual ceremonial expression of spirituality I’ve ever seen. Interested in learning more about Shhh and how you can get involved? For the time-being Shhh invitations are limited to like-minded friends of those who attended the pilot sessions last year, because it would be better to keep learning and growing Shhh in a controlled manner for a little while longer.

So, if you’re a like-minded friend of mine, and you’d like to come along to the next Shhh, let me know — you already know how to reach me.

Me and Boy8 getting some Shhh in the Himalayas in 2007

Each year my wife and son and I try to find the time to go on a journey together and have at least one really extraordinary experience.

This year, we travelled to Tonga. Scott Portelli and the team at Swimming With Gentle Giants took us swimming in shallow tropical seas with humpback whales and their calves.

My own little digital camera, while waterproof, was about as clear as Mr Magoo, and it’s taken until now to see the beautiful stills and moving images captured by Scott, who moonlights as a professional underwater photographer when he’s not whale-guiding and being creative at a big Sydney agency.

Here’s a video that really captures what the experience was like. It cost us less than a ski holiday, and was far more memorable. I don’t know how long it will be possible to swim with whales in Tonga, and this is the only location in the world where it’s legal to do so.

So get in touch with Scott if you want to have an extraordinary experience of your own..

Full disclosure: Perkler is a Pollenizer client and I do some work through Pollenizer. I haven’t personally worked on Perkler. So while I’m conflicted to a certain extent, I’m still going to recommend you check out Perkler.

If you are a member of one or more Australian loyalty programs and always feel like you’re not getting the maximum benefit of the scheme, Perkler is for you. If you’d like to compare loyalty programs against each other, this is for you.

And if you’d like to someday maybe score a natty blue tee in return for helping build a better product, then Perkler is for you.

Bonus: you’ll almost certainly look better in it than I do.

Thanks Team Perkler!