With gentle skill he probed away at the curb to determined its depth and stepped off without a hint of a stumble, just a nice evenly balanced step. The cork of the cane kept bobbing in short spaced intervals just in front of him until it hit the first collection of stacked paving stones, then the rhythm of movement changed to very quick taps sweeping in wide arcs. His head tilted back and fro as if he was watching something only he could see. I could only guess he was using some sort of spatial location awareness to build up a 3D map of what his cane was feeding him. With precision he picked his way through the gaps of the paving stone stacks, navigated over the paved and unpaved road sections and then confronted the cars. I really thought this was going to give him some grief, because really they were a wall with the last one sitting to one side of a street with traffic. As his cane hit the first car he instinctively must have known what it was and quickly turned his body to take a sideways tack on the object, in the direction of the road and traffic. I remember holding my breath a little bit and thought if he walked out onto the road I’d scream and run over, but as I was formulating this in my head he had found the edge of the car’s back-end and shimmied past it just brushing the bumper with his pants leg. The cane’s end found the curb, which he then stepped over, and off he went up the street resuming his rhythmic tap-tap-tap broad sweeps with his cork tipped cane.

I couldn’t help but smile in admiration for the man and I whispered a very quiet, Well done, mate, to him as he walked away.

I am confronted by obstacles in the same way as the blind man but the difference with me is he accepts his obstacles as a part of his environment – his life – and he finds a way around them because he must if he is to continue walking forward. I know myself that I don’t accept the challenge of all the obstacles in my life with the same gracious acceptance and skilful navigation. Of course you could say he has to graciously accept the physical obstacles of his environment and navigate around them because if he didn’t he would never leave his home. As I’m feeling philosophical this afternoon, I’m going to say this is really just a metaphor of life for those of us with eyes.

I’ll never know his name, and will never speak to him, but that afternoon that man showed me something that I’ll remember for a long time to come.

Andy.

Now me, I love kung fu flicks. I grew up with them as a young kid from the time Monkey made it to Australian TV, which was around the early 80′s when it was aired on the ABC in the evening just after dinner. All the kids back then watched Monkey, and I do mean everybody. At school we would do Monkey’s cloud call technique as a pisstake for get-me-the-hell-out-of-here-fast. We’d even make stupid kung fu fight noises at friends when we’d pass each other in hallways and classrooms. There were reruns, and reruns of reruns for years of this show after the first screening, which embedded itself into the very core of popular culture of the day, and gave me an appetite for kung fu that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

At university I was introduced to Japanese anime manga in a big way. I was one of those geeks who suddenly found a place where I was surrounded by other geeks like me and manga brought us all together like iron filings to a magnet. Big groups of us would make the pilgrimage from our student housing to an art house cinema in Brisbane’s Valley suburb when they would have all night manga events; 12 hours of manga from 6pm to 6am. Boy, don’t those memories make me nostalgic.

Through a process of cultural absorption all of these kung fu flicks have had a profound influence on my personality over the years. At the most superficial level there is the cheesy lines which have become part of my working language. These phrases are almost like secret handshakes among devotees; because all gen-X’ers know that - the nature of Monkey was irrepressible! At its deepest level, there was the introduction to eastern philosophy that put me on a path of exploration which has become a long journey that still continues.

Kung fu and eastern philosophy have gone together in western culture since the time of Kung Fu the TV show. That’s pretty much the time when generation X were just youths getting into TV, so from an early age we were learning Kung Fu philosophy. Each decade has shown that kung fu movies continue to have huge appeal, and film productions are only getting better with age. Still for me I’m most of fond of the flicks that hit town around the late 70′s to late 80′s. I really like the new stuff for sure, but these older flicks were where the real cult classics can be found. At the top of that pile is still the grand daddy kung fu flick of them all, Enter the Dragon. Oh man, that fight that Bruce has with Bob Wall still gives me shivers down my spine.

So after at least a thousand hours of kung fu films over the last 30 years, I’d thought I’d share my top 10 lessons learned from the old masters.

1. When you have only seconds to act, it’s still possible to have a flashback that will go several minutes, and still have time to do something. Kung fu training includes time dilation technique that will slow time down around you and give you all the time you need to first playback a significant moment with your teacher, and then formulate a plan.

2. The more cryptic the saying, the more valuable the lesson. Grand masters only ever speak in riddles. The more gibberishly cryptic they are, the more grand master-ish they are, the more awesome the lessons they give. Of course it might take you your whole life to work out what he was trying to get across, but that’s fine. You’ll get it right when you need to, which takes us to lesson number 3.

3. Kung fu masters sayings will be understood right at the time when you most need it. You won’t know why your grand master tells you half that shit that he does, but he does, trust him. And one day, just when all seems lost, you’ll have that deep insight into his message which will give you great power to defeat evil and win the day with a big music score in the background.

4. Don’t pick on the quiet guy in the corner, because he’s a kung fu badass. The louder someone is, the more rubbish their kung fu. But that kinda big guy in the corner just drinking tea who doesn’t say a word, well that guy is the guy pondering his master’s last cryptic gibberish lesson after which he’ll be bestowed ultimate power and when that happens all the bad guys within a 10 kilometre area are toast.

5. Any good kung fu move will have a really long name. Of course all kung fu guys learn how to punch, and they all learn a punch-kick combination. But the really awesome moves have long names you normally call out during the battle, like; flying dragon double fist strike from the clouds, and floating crane going downstream with claws out front. I think my personal favourite move name was, the ten thousand fists of Buddha strike from the heavens. That was end move that won the fight.

6. You can tell a kung fu grand master by the luxuriously full head of long flowing white hair and accompanying long flowing beard. Under no circumstances say anything even slightly offensive to this guy for any reason. He may look 300 years old and more frail than a blown glass ornament, but he can kill you with a ripple of his robe and merely thinking your name.

7. Grand masters do live under rocks. For some reason this seems to be their preferred place of residence. They wait for unsuspecting heroes to fall next to their rock and then they pop out to start speaking gibberish to them, to give them the wisdom they will need to be bestowed ultimate power and win. To the unsuspecting hero, this can really be disorienting and give you more than a few WTF-ARE-YOU-DOING-HERE minor heartache moments.

8. There are no women kung fu masters. I never thought about it before until now, but it does seem slightly sexist. Maybe kung fu women masters give it up to become home-makers after they fall in love with some hero. Either way, I haven’t seen a film yet where the grand master imparting wisdom was a woman.

9. Once you start a kung fu fight, it will more than likely last an hour. During this time several cafes and bars will be reduced to rubble, and you’ll piss off a whole bunch of business owners. However everyone else will thank you and respect you in the end because you will have saved the day. It’s rare that once a kung fu fight starts it takes less than 5 minutes to end. If you have to get up, you may as well make it worthwhile for everybody.

10. The love interest will be completely incapable of doing anything to help themselves. Doesn’t matter how competent she appears before things go belly up, once the shit hits the fan, she’ll completely fall to pieces and you’ll have to do all the work when it comes to saving her. If it’s any consolation, she will love you for it in the end, and be good for a few hot nights of passion once you can be touched again without screaming in pain.

In the end, as the final credits roll up, Bruce Lee will never die and never be forgotten because of the legacy of wisdom and philosophy that he brought to a bunch of impressionable kids, who made it a part of them, and took that legacy wherever they went.

In some small way, we were made all the better for it.

Andy.

This kind of thing isn’t really new, enthusiastic amateur and professional athletes have been doing the same thing for years in an effort to achieve high levels of performance. But this is something else, this is people attempting to perfect their overall life performance using the same approach that businesses use to achieve peak operating efficiency.

Why would you want to? Was my first question when I started reading the article. The answer after some thought became clear; because you want to function at the peak of your human potential. Imagine having your body and brain work at full throttle over extended periods of time, say months to years? Translate that into personal achievement – whatever that defines for you – and you’re starting to see through the window into the personal world’s of the self quantifiers. (Which does sound an awful lot like a sci-fi movie).

The whole thing intrigues me if I’m being really honest. For years I’ve been half-arsed about improving my body and physical potential through exercise. There are times when I’m fanatical about exercise and eating and after about 6 months I get to a point where I start looking like a solid fit guy. And sometime later I fall off the fitness wagon and slowly loose the physique I made. I’m hoping as I grow older and wiser I can temper the peaks and valleys in my motivation and turn the whole cycle into a persistent lifestyle. Physical health is only one aspect of what the self quantifiers are hoping to improve, their approach is to holistically improve the mind-body-spirit trinity as a single unit.

It did seem to me though that there comes a point with self quantification when you start measuring data for the sake of measuring itself. Really, how much data is enough and how much is too much? You don’t need to be statistician to see that you can keep finding more and more data to measure, if you want more data. But what does it get you? You could probably measure 100 personal details (data points) and it gives you 80% of what you need to know to improve your personal performance, but you have to measure 300 data points to give you 5% more once you have achieved 80%. It’s the simple rule that in the beginning gains are easy, but the closer you get to optimal performance the harder it gets to achieve an increase until you get to a point where even just marginal improvements require vast amount of effort, or for the self quantifiers, data points.

Personally I can see the benefit of adopting a self quantifier lifestyle approach, but would I? I think I would benefit from measuring certain aspects of my life and tuning it to improve, but I know I’m not the kind of guy that’s going to get all anal about the numbers, and it’s sure not going to stop me from my infrequent 6 hour drinking sessions with my friends. Once that first beer has gone down it’s hard not to get locked into a serious drinking effort. I think the people who really get into the self quantifier lifestyle are those who already have anally obsessive personalities with a tendency towards being a control freak. Basically the type of person that regular people would want to avoid going out on blind dates with as if they carried bubonic plague.

If I do give it a go I’ll make it interesting by putting everything into a personal performance website and then having automatic calculations being done on everything. Oh, and I could probably hook everything into a phone app as well, so that I can get real time data on my exercise routines and sync that up with…

Maybe better that I don’t start, because it’s a short walk from intense personality to over top anally obsessive personality with a tendency towards being a control freak.

Andy.

This first incarnation of the web would be what historians would call pre 1.0 (one dot oh) ¹. Websites in the first half of the 1990′s were a pretty basic affair, and the whole concept of consumer web services was still more an ideal than a reality. To anyone browsing sites back then the internet wasn’t much more than a few streets of multicoloured side show attractions. The ‘net sure didn’t look like an information super highway so much as a one big construction yard.

Internet evolution though has always occurred at very high speed and these beginning days were no exception. Early sites that were displayed as fixed content, basic box layouts were quickly replaced by more sophisticated sites that could modify their content in real time resulting in a richer user experience. Internet browsers themselves became more sophisticated as the technology inside them expanded to support better consumer side presentation and server side information exchange. By the time we arrived at the year 2000, internet 1.0 was a reality. We were all enjoying services such as online shopping, getting our weather and favourite sports updates whenever we wanted at the click of a mouse, and dipping our toes into a new way to consume media content. These early years of experimental digital media use whet our appetites for the possibilities to come. Instant gratification would soon be a powerful force in both the production and consumption of content media.

And then a few years later came Facebook ². Pretty much from out of nowhere and it took the world by storm. You know something is really big and popular when they make they a movie out of it. That plus the fact that it’s recognised – rightly or wrongly – as a monopoly in its business space. Facebook in and of itself isn’t what is interesting to this discussion, it’s what it brought to the world that is; ubiquitous globally adopted online communities. Facebook is about people being connected to other people; about people sharing their lives with other people; about people looking for justification and acceptance of their lifestyle which they present to other people. When you look at a typical Facebook profile most people have something filled in for music, books, television, activities, relationship status, along with a whole bunch of photos. People no longer share mementos via postcards anymore, they post their life online and bask in the comforting glow of their friends real time interactive feeds.

The big trend that’s emerging now is for people to post about lifestyle purchases they make, such as shoes, clothing, cosmetics, books and music. Of course there are many other products that people write status updates about but these lines of products tend to be the ones most popular in younger groups (we’re talking 18 – 25 here, the early adopters). And this is where right now we’re seeing one of the biggest changes in consumer attitude than could ever have been predicted; the desire for purchases to be made public by the individual consumer. I should also add that this is something really only seen in the “young” demographic. If you’re my age, you’re pretty much guaranteed to not do this, and not get why you would even want to. One of the new social consumer services, Blippy, allows users to post credit card purchases on their Facebook account. Now me personally, I’m one of these people that if any of my credit card purchases made it to a social network, I’d be raising legal hell with the company behind the card. However, it’s an attitude that will quickly be losing mainstream acceptance as this new wave of social consumerism rises with the social networking tide, which many tech pundits speculate isn’t anywhere near peaking.

Wherever you look there are signs that consumer sentiment is rapidly shifting. Once upon a time marketeers had control over the information that was disseminated about a brand. Information channels cost money and were manipulated by people in suits. The internet and social media changed all of that so fast that there are marketeers in suits sitting around in traditional advertising businesses that still don’t have a clue they just became obsolete. Product and brand information in the modern age is traded free between consumers themselves on a 24/7 basis. Marketing in digital space is now about harnessing this phenomena and putting it to work for you. The Old Spice advertisement campaign is the best example of this so far. A series of video ads that were first released on Youtube, which went viral and then were subsequently taken to TV. In industry circles it has been one of the most successful advertising campaigns in the last few years. Youtube itself has become a personal brand advertising and marketing channel that is so powerful, complete nobodies have become popular niche market personalities, with some achieving an almost household name status ³. While personal opinions vary, there is one thing these internet personalities have in common that makes them of big interest to product brand companies; the number of visitors per month they clock up. Internet personalities that have subscribers to their channel above 100K have a deep reach into a consumer market. Getting them on side with product endorsements has huge appeal and comes relatively cheap when stacked up against traditional media channels of TV, radio, magazine, and cinema. We’re seeing this move now with cosmetic and fashion companies paying for product placement on the sites of young self made reviewers. It’s probably no wonder why, if an ordinary individual has the chops to build up a following of a few hundred thousand, it’s a good bet they’ll know how to pimp your product and make it sell.

So what does this mean to us oldies? (In this context, anyone over the age of 40). Well probably not much. After all, we’re not actually a group that counts in this new social networking wave. No, after the numbers have been crunched by the marketing group it turns out that our generation are far too conservative in their online habits, and far less likely to be swayed into joining early adopter social consumer services. Ironically the group that led the internet revolution have become middle aged and very staid in their online habits. Research shows they also no longer go to the cinema ⁴ and no longer buy luxury goods at the same level that they did ten years ago. Growing older has meant growing safer and becoming nostalgic in buying trends. Once habits have been set, they don’t really change over time. That’s not true for everyone, but it is true for the very large majority of older internet users. These are all signs that the next wave of social technology won’t see much adoption in my group. It could actually come to represent a digital cultural divide between the age groups in much the same way music is to the last generations.

Whether your an early adopter or digital curmudgeon it’s pretty clear that at some point sooner or later depending on where you fit you’re going to be hearing a lot more about social consumerism, and by all accounts it’s going to be huge. The entrepreneurs that get there first are going to make a lot of money, along the way they are going to push a paradigm shift in areas of marketing, advertising and consumer relations. All in all it’s going to be as big as the last wave that brought us here. All you have to do is keep up.

Andy.

If anything the experience led me back to my trusty iPod as well as down a series of roads experimenting with putting my own music in cloud land servers with various software front-ends. That was okay, but I couldn’t help but feel I was being cheated somewhat because really, we’re in the 21st century, streaming music services should be so ubiquitous, cheap and satisfying they should be the equivalent of a tin of baked beans. However no, this wasn’t the case (the huge irony here being, I don’t actually like baked beans).

Without going into too much detail, it’s extremely hard to get a streaming content service off the ground not because of the technology – that’s the easy part – but because of content ownership rights. That there is a Gordian knot being pulled every which way by a large army of lawyers, marketers and management execs all hell bent on holding on to the last vestige of content control and royalty revenue from the bygone age of the last millennium. It’s a problem that will still be with us 30 years from now.

Now at the same time that me and Grooveshark were getting acquainted, friends of mine living in the The UK were raving about a similar service going by the name of Spotify. It all sounded pretty great until I found out that it was only available in The UK. I used to hate getting all these Facebook updates from people sharing all this cool stuff and I couldn’t listen to any of it. Kind of like being told you couldn’t participate in Christmas because you weren’t allowed in the house. A short time later I gave Grooveshark up and moved on to other more niche cloud based streaming music services such as SoundCloud, and Mixcloud that catered to those producers and fans in the electronic/dance scene.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

From the time I was an early teenager I would visit psychics with my mother as she was a person that believed heavily in such people. If I was asked why, I would have to say it was because of her circumstances. Mum had a hard life during the decades of her 30’s and 40’s; unceremoniously dumped then divorced and left with two kids to raise, I think she was looking for hope more than real answers when she would go to these people. Most of the time though they would tell positive stories out of a hard past, and convey happy future events that were generically vague and something anybody could tell you if they came from that same cultural background. It was simply a clever twist of words from a person attuned to body language being told to someone looking for some hope. Let’s face it, if you’re the sort of person that regularly goes to psychics then you’re the sort of person that is willing to believe anything as long as it is what you want to hear. For me personally though there were two or three occasions when someone would tell me something genuinely and specifically accurate from my past, and detailed events that would actually take place years later. These rare chance meetings forced me then to admit the possibility of forces at work that are outside the scope of a non deterministic universe.

In my late 20’s I moved to Europe and suddenly the world expanded to full size. I did a lot of traveling around and saw many things that spanned the length and breadth of human culture. There is really nothing like extended backpacking travel to show you that life in your own back yard is a very small part of life everywhere. I started to question a lot of the ideas that I had taken for granted while growing up in Australia, particularly after a trip to India and Nepal. For me the experience of coming into contact with people of deep spiritual beliefs from the east was profound to say the least, it led me to periods of intense introspection concerning my own understanding of reality, life, and fate.

Plans either fall into one of a few broad categories. In your 20′s your likely to have 24/7 drugs and partying planned, up to and including Xmas eve, and recovery Xmas morning, just in time for the family do in the afternoon. Most 30 somethings are a spectrum of this falling strongly into this group at the young end, fading out into more family based stuff at the other. The 40 somethings are definitely in the family category as most have kids, while the 50 somethings are too old to give a shit about travelling and are waiting for people to arrive.

Me, I’m firmly trying to hang in there on the 20 something plan, but age is telling me I should grow up. Maybe so, but I’ve always been stubborn.

Andy.

The snow on the ground seems to trigger some dormant state of self review, and I can’t help but think of what the year really was with it drawing to a close. Much like this tram as it comes to the end of the line.

Andy.