www.nickhodge.com

Photo: Rod Yates, editor of Empire Magazine inter­view­ing Michael Azer­rad on his movie, Kurt Cobain About a Son.

Kurt Cobain looms out of the cinema screen like a mel­an­cholic Vik­ing, ready to pil­lage our minds. Like the images of other dead celebrit­ies, the image sets off thought pat­terns and we clas­sify: drug addict, father, musican.

Like all nar­rat­ives per­petu­ated by the one dimen­sional main stream media, he was also a son. A tal­en­ted per­son with real prob­lems, real skills and dreams.

A son of divorced par­ents, a com­mon aflic­tion of chil­dren of the late 20^th cen­tury, this and the times haunted Kurt. The lyr­ics and music of Nir­vana described the world of the US Pacific North­w­est: dark with low hanging fog and cloud. This descrip­tion also applies to his life, and the life of many of Generation-X. Cold war, AIDS, unemployment.

The movie, About a Son, is Kurt nar­rat­ing his life in his own words. As cap­tured by bio­grapher, Michael Azer­roth in 25 hours of taped inter­views dur­ing 1992–3. The imagery paints a Wash­ing­ton state that Kurt lived in. A child of his par­ents, age and area.

Using Kurt’s own words, and show­ing the real life Aber­deen, Olympia and Seattle one gets a sense of the angst of Nir­vana. Kurt also talks about his addic­tion via self med­ic­a­tion to opi­ates to escape pain; depres­sion and scoli­osis.

The movie is about an ordin­ary per­son; it human­ises a driven per­son. An com­plex artistic soul that expressed the nihil­ism of my generation.

Most import­antly, Kurt touches the ulti­mate poison that is the cult of celebrity that has only grown in the last 15 years. Espe­cially fight­ing the neg­at­ive narrative.

Any Nir­vana fan or mem­ber of gen­er­a­tion X should see this movie.

Thanks to Pop­cornTaxi for bring this movie to Australia.

Uncle Mike has a story that illus­trates the increas­ing lack of cus­tomer care in busi­nesses.

One day I’ll write my AMEX story up.

 

Fol­low­ing an old meme Stilgher­rian and fel­low Munge Brother, Uncle Dave Wal­lace dredged up and tagged me, and Frank Arrigo: god bless his Saint Kilda socks also tagged me. So here’s eight ran­dom facts about me.

The rules:

1. Each player starts with eight ran­dom facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t for­get to leave them a com­ment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I have a pen­chant for Carry On… movies. The UK of 1950s through to the mid 1970s fas­cin­ates me. A coun­try rebuild­ing itself without Empire, pre-European Union and Mrs Thatcher. The Carry On movies reflect many of the weird­ness of the time. Oh, and I also like music­als from the same era.
2. Born in NSW as a Royal Aus­tralian Navy “brat”, I recall listen­ing to planes and heli­copters and accep­ted this exist­ence as nor­mal for all kids. Abruptly moved to coun­try South Aus­tralia to live on a farm; lived in a board­ing school in Adelaide. After work­ing and find­ing my soul mate in Adelaide all in 9 years; I moved back to NSW. Been in NSW for nearly 13 years.  Life is cir­cu­lar.
3. After wear­ing braces my teeth for 18 months, and los­ing count how many baby teeth were manu­ally removed: now dent­ists can work on my teeth unaided by anaes­thet­ics. Con­gen­it­ally miss­ing a lower molar and do not have any wis­dom teeth. My facial nerves are pretty well hosed. How­ever, since Bell’s Palsy I can­not open my mouth wide as it locks up. Yawn­ing is painful.
4. One of my encoun­ters with Crowded House: In Light Square, Adelaide buy­ing tick­ets to one of their first, very small con­certs. As my friends and I were leav­ing, the three Crow­dies were approach­ing the club for a sound check. I said “Hello Mark” to Nick Sey­mour. Paul Hester asked if I had met “Tim Finn?” (as he was look­ing at Neil). Laughs all around. I felt like such a doo­fus. (BTW: if you are not get­ting the humour in this, you are not a Fin­natic and I weep for you)
   Update: I was sit­ting across from Mark Sey­mour in a Qantas Club in Bris­bane. I gathered up the cour­age to tell him the story here. He LOL’d and thought that it was a funny story. Circle closed 
5. In Janu­ary 1993, I went to Mac­world San Fran­cisco. My first (well, I did go to the Sey­bold Con­fer­ence in 1989 when John War­nock blinked in the font-format wars: and this was on our hon­ey­moon)  Mac­world where I con­nec­ted with Dave Winer. He was show­ing Fron­tier off in a room in the Mar­ri­ott rather than a full stand on the show floor. Here I met Dave, Doug Baron (and Julie) and saw Utah – a UI builder for Fron­tier that sorta kinda shipped. I may have been one of the alpha test­ers for a while, too. 3 years later whilst at Apple I cre­ated a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem in Fron­tier for the Fair­fax 1996 Olympics web­site. Good days, good days.
6. I dropped out of the South Aus­tralian Insti­tute of Tech­no­logy study­ing Account­ing after about a month of stud­ies. Epic fail. Thank­fully, I man­aged to work hard and com­plete a higher edu­ca­tion jour­ney by com­plet­ing an MBA. It only took me 10 years. Now I am fully qual­i­fied to do what I don’t want to do again. Strange.
7. After a bad reac­tion to beer, I haven’t had alco­hol since June 2002. Well, apart from a small slip on the back of a pickup truck in Mex­ico in 2005. Real Mex­ican tequila tastes excel­lent. Tequila just may be my weakness.
8. After leav­ing school, I was part of a band called Stranger than Fic­tion. After drop­ping out of Account­ing (See #6 above), I decided that learn­ing Audio engin­eer­ing may be a good thing to do. Drop­ping out again after 6 months, as I found Avril. It was way worth it

 

Next 8 Victims

1. http://twitter.com/dswaters
2. http://twitter.com/rog42
3. http://twitter.com/ang
4. http://twitter.com/aeoth
5. http://twitter.com/willhughes
6. http://twitter.com/steven_noble
7. http://twitter.com/fifikins
8. http://twitter.com/lu_lu 

Achilles Tendin­itis.

Can­not walk on right foot as where the ten­dons attach to the back of the heel is mega inflamed. Doc­tor says anti-inflammatory drugs, raised leg and warm com­press. No walk­ing or stress on the foot.

The kit­tehs think I am just bone lazy not get­ting them their fuds, but are lik­ing the warm com­press and think this is exclus­ively for their use.

Good news is that in this mod­ern world of intar­webs and com­puters, I can work from home. And I will live, too.

The day the Microsoft announces this, Red­Hat goes and does this.

Has the world turned upside down?

Good news and Bad news Chris. You are on the radar screen.

Recent 491 Scam email received at one of email addresses:

Dur­ing our invest­ig­a­tion and audit­ing in this Bank, my depart­ment came across a very huge sum of money belong­ing to one of our deceased cus­tomer who died on Feb 29^th 2002 of a ghastly motor acci­dent and the fund has been dormant in his account with this bank without any claim of the fund in our Cus­tody either from his fam­ily or rela­tion before our dis­cov­ery to this devel­op­ment. Although personally..

Spot the error?

Thanks to those 8 people I don’t know who voted for me. +1 to my Mum!

Lach­lan, Ajay, Mar­tin, Rene and Russ should really be ahead of me. Oh, and where is Mark Pesce?

Per­sonal organ­isa­tional skills. I can not has. They left me some time ago.

Microsoft has released some research on the gender dif­fer­ences of To Do lists.

About 70% of people have a To Do list.

20% of males keep their To Do list in their head.

Mine is a com­bin­a­tion of email (whatever is still in there needs to be done) and my head (flex­ible rearrange­ment) and cal­en­dars (so I know where and when I should be)

If I spent my time man­aging my time I’d have no time to do stuff. And I’ve decided never to be so busy and stressed that I’ve got to have pages full of things to do. Been there, done that. Oth­ers are bet­ter equipped to deal with myri­ads of lists of things to do, del­eg­at­ing, meas­ur­ing and motiv­at­ing. I do, not to do.

Enjoy­ing life is not cross items off a list. Life is in the doing.

Les Carlyon, The Great War. Doc­u­ment­ing Aus­tralian stor­ies from indi­vidual sol­diers to the indif­fer­ent com­mand­ers on the west­ern front of World War I. Excel­lent 2.5 day read. Highly recom­men­ded for lov­ers of Aus­tralian Mil­it­ary His­tory, and a good fol­lowup to Les’ pre­vi­ous tome, Gal­lipoli. It also doc­u­ments the inter­fer­ence of then journ­al­ists Charles Bean and Keith Mur­doch in mil­it­ary and polit­ical mat­ters. That would never hap­pen today, right?

US ver­sion of The Office. Not as tightly writ­ten as the extremely ori­ginal UK ver­sion, but a fun watch.

Yes, Prime Min­is­ter.

Re-watched Band of Broth­ers. Always good.

Nemesis, by Max Hast­ings. I love Hasting’s his­tor­ies of World War II.

Cur­rently read­ing Fin­ished The Viet­nam Years by Michael Caufield, and the auto­bi­o­graphy of Richard Ham­mond.

1. The home matters.
2. Weigh less again at the end of 2008. Improve on 2007 res­ults.
3. Geeks Who Care mat­ters.
   There is some­thing in Cameron Reilly’s ini­ti­at­ive. If all this tech­no­logy does won­der­ful stuff, and we geeks are the mavens: where are the so-called bene­fits? Polit­ic­ans should care less about cen­sor­ship and con­trol, and more about what they can do to make life better.
4. Think simple. Be social. Uncom­plexify and con­nect. Use the tech­no­logy at hand. Find and spread info about the good stuff, ignore and don’t sweat the bad stuff.