For this past week and a half, I can tell you that the majority of talk, thoughts, feelings and planning have gone into the coming weeks and months(and I guess other things on my mind).
What Im going through is what everyone goes through. The waiting stage. You plan something in advance, and once it is planned, all you do is wait for it, and throughout this stage, you find yourself doing the exact same things every week (or day) until the time comes for the event. Which generally is work, eat, sleep. Then occasionally you get play, eat, sleep. Now I don't know whether your pattern is similar to mine, but I do know that these similar patterns in motion can make your week(s) slow down so much it is at the pace of a slug. Only the strong, inspired, last minute, and creative ideas pull through to make the week more entertaining and quicker.
Celebrating the birth of James Chew was an inspired but not really last minute event in which made the week more entertaining.
Directed by James Chew, and Produced by Hannah Foley.
Photographed by Abigail Armstrong and featuring some A-listers such as :
James Chew
Harvey Brown
Kenneth Barnett
'Muzz Buzz'
Matt Damon
Hannah Foley
James Dye
Seon Kwak
Stephen Hawkins
Palmino Mercuri
Abigail Armstrong
And those two other guys who I mistakably cannot remember their names to save my life, if you were their and I missed your name leave a comment!
A night that saw interactions with Sourz, Jack Daniels, Desperados, Malibu, Budweiser Budvoir, and cake.
This event made the week go quicker, but now the week has now slowed down to pace where I look at the next events for me to enjoy and endure and I find that everything's around the corner.
And now, a message, to all of the past and future customers of Costco.
When you see the 'Extended Opening Hours on Sundays' notice,
Take note that its states '10:00am to 18:00pm.'
and that '18:00' does not mean 8pm, it means 6pm.
Relaxing trading hours on Sundays?
This relaxation on Sundays, relaxed in attempts for businesses to make more profit during the Olympics, now may be relaxed all together. This swift news that the Government are considering this has left multiple unions angry about it. I personally don't mind, and nor does Dave Collins as he has expressed his opinion in the past about this matter, however it seems it is only Dave Collins that I know, that agrees with relaxing Sunday trading hours. By the way Dave if your opinion has suddenly changed about this subject do tell me.
People that I know, completely refuse to work Sundays and they feel that they have the right to have every Sunday off all year round. But none of these people are in no way religious, so what makes Sundays such a ritual driven day for people not to go to work? Commitments? to see the kids? to do those 'chores'? can you not do that on any other day?
I leave you with that, if you like not working on Sundays then thats fair enough I do not mean to offend you, I just find it puzzling.
By this I mean with the Internet back into my vains, and back into my new household, the usual time spent surfing the web is back to the way it was, is it a good thing? who knows, and with Internet usage back, this means my services on the web are now up to date.
Milestones
Looking at statistics on both Weekly Changy & the James Chang YouTube channel, turns out that I will be reaching 3000 views on the Weekly Changy soon, and I have now gone over 1000 views on the new-ish YouTube Channel, so it's all good online. Going through more digging on viewers, I found that the YouTube Channel is a lot more global. Viewers from Egypt, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Singapore, Morocco, India, Hong Kong and many more. These regions haven't never viewed the Weekly Changy. Why Im stating all of this to you? I don't really know myself, Im just amazed at how small the world is.
At this moment in time, apart from right now as I am sitting on my computer chair typing one sentence at a time, pausing, staring, reading back at what's been typed, and continuing to type, this has been a partly relaxed and partly worked 1-2 weeks. The worked bit surprisingly, is the good bit. Not at my part time place that is, for you see, I have recently and finally got myself some work experience. Trying to get work experience (in my experiences) is almost as hard as trying to explain what Dr Thornthwaite works on everyday at his University (which is difficult). Finally getting this, I dream of the manager grabbing his assistant, pointing at me and state the following:
"Hey! That guy, that guy right there, find him, and hire him!"
A man can dream though, a man can dream.
This work experience excites me, and the upcoming festival Creamfields, also excites me. A festival that was (apart from the acts) terrible, because of the performance of the weather, and the extreme bad luck that myself, Dave Collins and Dr Thornthwaite received, made the festival smelly, muddy, wet and ...bad, a time where when it ended, I swore NEVER to do it again, or at least never camp again. Guess what Im doing for Creamfields?
This:
I will camp in a Tauntaun. It will be easier,
I can ride it, with all of my stuff on it,
and then kill it, and camp in it,
just like Luke Skywalker. By doing this,
I will have a better time than last year.
On a truthful note I will be camping again but in a bigger tent, from the last one. I didn't want to do it, but unfortunately I had no choice. This time it shall only be myself and Dave Collins. Dr Thornthwaite will not be joining us for this year, I sincerely hope for good weather, but I very much doubt it, if it at least doesn't rain as much, I will be satisfied. All year I have not really been looking forward to it, because of last year, but now the time is near, I am actually looking forward to it, regardless the events of last year. If you are going to Creamfields this year, I shall hope to see you there, most probably in deep mud.
P.S Whilst at Global Gathering, I noticed 2-3 camera operators in the Lucozade Yes Arena, so I wanted to get into the background, unfortunately I am not in the background much, only one side of my arm and torso. Dave Collins' face and arm is seen in the background, but it is Dr Thornthwaite, who takes the gold for background shot, with his entire upper body, right in the middle of the background, which is a perfect shot of him.
Hibernation time is over for me and for the Weekly Changy. I must confess, hibernation time has actually been over for approximately a week and a half, but I have been busy working on a few things and so the Weekly Changy was left untouched, until now.
My full time without Internet was approximately 3 weeks. Yep, 3 weeks, if any of you have lasted longer, I salute you. These past 3 weeks, were not too bad, but doing everyday things that you would do on the Internet, you had to do the 'old fashioned' way, if you can call it that.
3 weeks without Internet? What did I miss the most?
Everyday I would wake up and turn my computer on, and this is what I would see in the top right corner of my screen. It's not the greatest thing to look at to be fair, but it just meant what to do on my computer was limited.
If you think about what you do personally in your life, how much of it revolves around the Internet? For me it would be banking, emailing, social networking, chatting on skype (not often some may argue), downloading, uploading, blogging, listening, watching, keeping informed, gaming, updating and finally staring at Kenneth Barnett's photos for 3 hours. All of that Internet activity, disappears for 3 weeks.
If you were to ask me, "what did you miss the most?" you may think, out of all of those activities it would be staring at Kenneth Barnett's photos for hours on end, but it wasn't.
On a serious note what I missed the most was the social networking, when having the Internet, you can keep close contact with loads of people over social networks, and because of this easy instant access, there was sometimes not a need to even socialise (as sad as it sounds) because you can always find out what people are up to. Without this access, you have to resort to other ways of communication, like text messaging and phone calls, but I find that people communicate like that when the recipients are very close to them. So being without this access wanted me to catch up with people, that I haven't spoken to in a while.
I must admit, seeing this again in the top right corner feels very good, and the feeling can be summed up in one sentence: "Hello World."
"But, But you said you were doing things whilst you had no Internet?"
This is true, I cannot fully remember what I mentioned in the previous post, but I mainly remember it being something about music making. I can tell you that I am still at it, its been fun making music to be fair, using Ableton Live. Throughout this random music messing, I have concluded, that when it comes to making tracks, I can only either make synths for a track, or the beats. For some reason, I cannot put the two together to save my life, I have tried, but the two I want to put together, just never go together. Ive gone through a few lessons, but not enough to say I can work Ableton. My recordings are no way near completion to a point where I can post them on here, sorry.
Global Gathering 2012.
So as you may or may not know, Global Gathering 2012 was on Friday and Saturday (27th & 28th of July). If you went then you will know how good the weather was and how lucky we all were to have such good weather.
My report starts with the wake up call of my alarm (which reluctantly was Abigail coming in from work) at 5am. Dr Thornthwaite, sleeping in the spare bedroom, was eventually woken up 30 mins later. When we hit the road it was approximately 6:20am. Not bad timing, we drive all the way down the Stratford Upon Avon, and didn't manage to see many people heading in the same direction. When getting there, at about 8:34am there was only a handful of people here before us, like in this picture above. I would go off by saying there was about 150+ there when we arrived, when it came to letting people in at 10:15am, yep that's right, this was the queue behind us:
Inspecting this image now, it doesn't look like there's as much people, but there was. When getting in, we head to the very nice, big, open, non muddy, campsite. Myself and Dr Thornthwaite engaged in construction of my tent, and after approximately 30 minutes:
Of course when it came to having camp set up, the best thing to do is to socialise with the people that are around you. The people you can see in the picture were a group of nice people from Barnsley. The tent to the right of this picture were 3 guys who were also nice guys, and the 2 guys in front of us were not English, I think they were either Polish or Russian. When taking this picture, I was standing on a pile of hay. This pile of hay was great for jumping on, diving on, lying on, sitting on, and drinking on, and eventually socialising on. Because we had a mound of hay to sit on right outside our tent, we had a few people come and talk to us. So morale of that? bring hay to boost socialising.
The next bit that happened, I do not have any pictures of or videos to show you.... Because from 11:05am to approximately 16:30pm I got very drunk, Dr Thornthwaite and I got very hungry, we went and got food, and by food, I mean the meatiest sandwich known to man, which was like meaty cocaine for someone that was very drunk:
After this god-like sandwich, we went back to the tent (I think) and I passed out. Now when it comes to going on night's out, and festivals, usually I mention Dave Collins in my posts, and If you were wondering, He did go to this festival, but had to work in the morning and so he arrived around 17:30pm, after I woke up (kind of sobered up) and me and Dr Thornthwaite were in the main festival area.
With the geek team assembled, what followed was long lovely rave.
*Catch all of the Video Highlights on my YouTube Channel*:
You know when you go somewhere and you find it amazing, and when you go back you find it wasn't as good as the first time you went? This was not the case for this years Global Gathering. 2011 Global Gathering was amazing, and Global Gathering 2012 was equally amazing.
The top 3 highlights that made the festival were:
3. All the booze I got in.
2. The Meaty Cocaine Sandwich.
1. The Weather.
The top 5 live acts that I saw (In my opinion) were:
5. Armin Van Buuren.
4. Funkagenda.
3. Mat Zo.
2. Above & Beyond.
1. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.
I didn't know what to expect from T.E.E.D, but I found each track trippy, different, creative, inspiring, and beautiful. I will definitely be going to see him again.
*To Reiterate, look up the video highlights of these acts on my channel, because its better quality than these little 'peep holes' on my blog:*
