www.nickhodge.com

Andrew Smith of Stu­dio Solu­tions is a reg­u­lar com­menter here on nickhodge.com

Even when I was between jobs, he vis­ited my site and kept an eye on me. He was “the guy” that ensured I was OK, and made me feel good. People like this are rare.

In a thankyou, I’ve decided to make Andrew famous:

http://www.on10.net/Blogs/nhodge/the-geek-stories-andrew-smith-pc-based-designer/

First, the email:

progeek@microsoft.com

Second the T-shirt:

Lastly, the busi­ness card:

Now I feel at home!

I don’t under­stand a word of this, but the cent­ral ten­ants of Geek hard­ware and repro­duc­tion are universal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8PQnKdYh-0

Accord­ing to Bruce Satch­well, hard­ware and radio geek from the Gold Coast, this is an example of a weird European hobby called Ama­teur Radio Dir­ec­tion Finding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Radio_Direction_Finding

I won­der if this hobby star­ted like arch­ery in the 11^th through 13^th cen­tury in Eng­land? Eng­lish arch­ers were revered through Europe due to their prowess. This was developed in vil­lages from a young age. Maybe dur­ing the Cold War east­ern bloc coun­tries had their young radio geeks make RDF devices to stop the Cap­it­al­ist west air­borne intruders? I wonder.

Pas­sion is dif­fi­cult to hide.

Glenn and Kings­ley from Inter­node have per­sonal pas­sions for gam­ing — and they jobs that take this pas­sion and unleash it on the unsus­pect­ing gamers in Australia.

Find out how to get a ping­time of 1, the inside of a server rack in a secret Adelaide loc­a­tion and why Kings­ley uses mois­tur­iser in this On10.net interview

First of two inter­views with the lan­guage & com­piler gods of Queens­land Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy. This was Wayne’s first on cam­era inter­view. And only my third highly tehnical-audience interview.

Wayne Kelly on Ruby.NET.

Uncle Dave “Likekludger” Wal­lace goes large!

This video was ori­gin­ally shared on blip.tv by nick­hodge with a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Kevin Richard­son, Head­mas­ter of Immanuel Col­lege, on the Future of Learning.

It has been three days of abso­lute pleas­ure in Adelaide.

Firstly, a big shout out and major thanks to Mike, Mandy, Jamie and Jemma Sey­fang for their hos­pit­al­ity and record­ing stu­dio (which doubled as my late night work area and sleep area) for three days.  Oh, and happy birth­day Jemma. Get­ting out of the hotel room shenanigans and liv­ing with real people made the dif­fer­ence on this trip.

It also gave Uncle Mike and I to dis­cuss the day’s events in depth, explore ideas and sug­gest dir­ec­tions. I must deeply thank Uncle Mike for his sug­ges­tions on improve­ments to “The Geek Stor­ies”. Hav­ing Australia’s premiere Social Net­work­ing thinker at your beck and call night and day, mak­ing you cups of tea, is a rare exper­i­ence.  The value is inmeasurable.

Secondly, a major thanks to my video sub­jects: Dave “Lifekludger” Wal­lace, Mike “Fang” Sey­fang, Kevin Richard­son, Glenn Butcher and Kingl­sey Fore­man. Unlike last Fri­day, I pur­posely spread the video cap­tur­ing over three days to ensure I was on the ball through all interviews.

Oh, and I rang Robert Scoble after he Twittered he was bored on his way south from Petaluma to his home. That’s Cali­for­nia.  Con­nec­tions and wir­ing brings us together in strange ways.

Con­nec­tions. This social net­work­ing thing is about con­nec­tions. Using them to pro­duce value greater than the sum of the parts. A com­mon theme emer­ging from all my inter­views is that either for life (Lifekludger), learn­ing (Kevin) or enter­tain­ment (Glenn) humans value con­nec­tions. Mak­ing them, and rein­for­cing linkages.

With Munge Brother, Uncle Tim Kleemann, we explored this from a busi­ness per­spect­ive. Tim owns Next­Byte, and ori­gin­ally hired me way back when I was a pimply kid in 1985. To Tim I owe grat­it­ude for the 21+ years in this crazy industry.

These human traits of want­ing con­nec­ted­ness extend to our kids, too. They have strong social net­works that extend into the digital world, and out­side of school in the home and on the pro­ver­bial bus — and the lines between school and home are becom­ing equally as blurred as work and home. Pres­ence via Mes­sen­ger; pub­li­city via MySpace and You­Tube. All around are con­nec­tions. Both vis­ible and invisible.

Uncle Mike is explor­ing some of the learn­ing aspects to these social net­works through his work with education.au; Dave exper­i­ences this every­day in his extraordin­ary life.

Ensur­ing Par­ents and Teach­ers under­stand the envir­on­ment of social net­work­ing in all its forms is the major chal­lenge for tech­no­logy com­pan­ies work­ing in this space: Microsoft, Google or whomever. I think the time is ripe for a major model change in the way edu­cat­ors think about online access, and the skills kids are going to need to sur­vive in a smal­ler, greater con­nec­ted and inform­a­tion rich world.

Return­ing to Immanuel to speak to Kevin, I learnt many things. I did not expect this as an old scholar. One learn­ing was that I owe Noel Volk and Greg Sharp a major thankyou. In my school years there was a con­cious effort to install com­puters into the school and use these as a part of edu­ca­tion. This effort lead me into this industry I now find myself. Money was siphoned off other pro­jects into this some 22 years ago. Like the Angle Park Com­puter Centre, Abefoyle Park pro­ject and oth­ers — the product of these efforts have not gone to waste. So thanks.

Inter­node is a con­nec­tion com­pany; the inter­view with Glenn and Kings­ley will air some­time next week. Aus­tralian gamers know Inter­node as the best gam­ing net­work, and ser­vice, around. You can feel their pas­sion for games; a pas­sion that extends from the MD of Inter­node, Simon Hackett.

I feel that get­ting people’s stor­ies told, and out there for all to see is import­ant. Geek Stor­ies or not, the con­nec­tion poten­tial is huge.

Send in your story, and let’s go make a difference.

4:00am AEDST — alarm, alarm, alarm. Snooze for 5 minutes, then up and check the laptop in the midst of upload­ing an epis­ode of “The Geek Stor­ies” to Red­mond. Failed. Bug­ger, not happy Jan.  Must find a more effi­cient way to get these videos pos­ted faster. Some­times it might just be easier to Blip.TV these suckers.

4:30am AEDST — showered, shaved and in SCRLTT to air­port. Missed tun­nel entrace, had to divert through Har­ris Street and Red­fern to Sydney Air­port. Park, checkin. Strange looks from be-suited and en-tied men won­der­ing why someone would proudly wear a “geek” T-shirt. Smile, and I walk on.

5:15am AEDST — checked in, wait­ing to board 737–400 for a 1:10m flight to Bris­bane Air­port. Sleep, break­fast, sleep whilst eat­ing break­fast on the flight.

6:30am AEST — Same lon­git­ude, dif­fer­ent time zone. Yes, an hour has been lost in this timeline due to the cows in Queens­land going off their milk. Long story. Wiki the answer why.

7:15am — in a small hire car (small 4-cylinder, manual trans­mis­sion Toyota — closest thing to a MINI and the cheapest on Avis’ books) driv­ing down M1 to north of the Gold Coast. Over Gate­way (AU$2.50) with a friendly lady tak­ing my money. Roar down free­way past Dream­world, Movieworld and mortgageworld.

8:45am — Alive Tech­no­logy video shoot with Bruce + team. Approx 25 minutes of foot­age shot; excel­lent gad­gets! Bruce wants a “geek” t-shirt. Frank­arr may trade for Mambo shirt People have now seen “The Geek Stor­ies” so know what to expect. Heart rate 83bpm with blood oxy­gen of 97%. I want one of these just for the geek factor alone.

10:00am — back in hire car to Mar­garet Street, CBD of Bris­bane. Roar up the free­way and red­line the Toyota to see how fast it can go in second gear. Sorry Avis.

11:30am — Joel, John, Wayne and Joseph all wait­ing for me for inter­view. Takes a few minutes to set the scene and for me to attempt to show I might be an OK guy. Feel a little like a storm trooper at a Star Trek con­ven­tion, but that soon wears off and we get into it. 3 video shoots and at least 1.1 hours of foot­age. Par­al­lel pro­cessors, trans­ac­tional memory, CLR, com­piler lore and incant­a­tions. Oh, there are some excel­lent geek stor­ies here!

1:45pm — lunch with Wayne and John in very fast Chinese res­taur­ant; just like Singa­pore — even the weather! Dis­cuss more of John’s his­tory with Com­pilers, Microsoft CLR, PDP-8s, XOR and life in gen­eral. Tuscany, rid­ing bikes up hills and stuff.

2:30pm — on return to QUT, dis­cuss with John why people are not going into IT as a pro­fes­sion. Are we turn­ing into a nation of miners and shopkeepers?

3:00pm — more video with Andrew Smith of Stu­dio Solu­tions in Milton off Coron­a­tion Drive. Makes excel­lent cof­fee and revives me for rest of the day. Watch video promo for Cairns air­port. Andrew tries to rope me in to help with a friend mov­ing house. Politely explain my back isn’t what it used to be, and con­tinue on with interview.

4:00pm — back in the Toyota nego­ti­at­ing foot­ball traffic around Sun­corp sta­tium, car acci­dents and gen­eral Fri­day after­noon CBD mad­ness exper­i­enced in any city. Toyota air­con­di­tion­ing gets a blast­ing in 30degC Bris­ve­gas weather.

5:15pm — explain to Berno on mobile why his video is in limbo (check 4:00am entry)

5:20pm — check foot­age from the day (2 hours in total) and decide what to put where, in gen­er­ally what order. Slee­py­geek. Two com­ments on checkin about “geek” t-shirt and Microsoft. Brand name recog­ni­tion cool.

6:00pm — Dis­con­nec­ted from everything for a day is cool. The world could have exploded and I wouldn’t know!

6:30pm — board flight to Sydney. 737–800 packed to the gills.

9:05pm — land Sydney. Sydney is 31degC, warmer and cer­tainly more humid than Bris­bane: this is not nor­mal for the south­ern hemisphere

10:00pm — after nego­ti­at­ing the heavy Fri­day night traffic out of Sydney domestic, arrive home to a happy fam­ily and inquis­it­ive cats.

Gen­eral Notes

Cam­era has worked flaw­lessly. Micro­phone used today was the gun/zoom mic.

Thanks to Charles Ster­ling for Alive Tech­no­logy and Joseph leads for interviews.

Yes, I will be return­ing to SE Queens­land in near future for more video cap­tur­ing and foot­age. Next time I go inter­state for “The Geek Stor­ies”, I’ll take a little more time and spread a busy day into two so I can really speak to people rather than seagull in.