Latest blog entries

The end of another comedy festival

Monday, April 21st, 2025 at 11:17am

Yesterday was the final day of the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival and it is also ten years since I jumped in to going to live comedy.

In early 2015 I was six months in to working in the city and having to commute on the train. I was looking for things to listen to and I was put onto two Melbourne based comedy podcasts. Things escalated quickly as the host of one of those podcasts ran a Saturday afternoon comedy room, and then both of them had live podcast recordings on the Saturday and Sunday afternoon during the comedy festival. As I was now working in the city, it became easy to stay in and go to comedy shows.

Looking back at my calendar for 2015 I see that I went to 10 podcast recordings, 15 solo shows and 3 showcase shows.

Those weekend afternoon podcasts (more than the original two) became the foundation of my festival, also becoming a place to catch up with friends I had made because they also listened to the podcasts and you need something to do while waiting in line…

I won’t go through every year, but in 2019 that had grown to 19 podcasts and 45 solo shows.

A big difference for this year was that due to some podcasts ending and others not being available to do live shows I no longer had that foundation for my weekends. There was a single live podcast, but I made up for it with 52 solo shows. If I didn’t have to still go to work there were a number of late night shows that could have pushed that up above 60.

And now some miscellaneous observations:

  • The weather was hot or warm, not the typical cold and rainy April in Melbourne
  • I caught the train from my regular station 12 times and due to works I drove to a station on a different line 7 times.
  • I drove in once because a late weeknight show finished after the last train.
  • Last night was the only time I drove in because all the nearby train lines had works.

Tagged with: ,

Half a decade

Sunday, March 16th, 2025 at 10:21pm

My sense of time is still broken as today marks five years since I started working from home. Broadly speaking my routine is still the same as it was a year ago.

Do I have any highlights of the last year?

I didn’t get out with my camera as much as I wanted, though I did spend a decent amount of time working through my backlog and putting up a few new albums on Flickr.

At the end of last year the decision was finally announced that the lease would be terminated on the Melbourne office, we would all be formally considered remote. In 2024 I only went in once to work (on a day we had an all office meeting with catered lunch) but I did use it a couple of other times, it was handy knowing I had access to somewhere in the city that was quiet and I knew would have a clean toilet… I still miss the random lunchtime conversations, but the opposite is true for the two hours taken up be the commute.

Tagged with: ,

Uninstalling a reliable program

Saturday, December 28th, 2024 at 03:41pm

For a long time I have had a TV tuner in one of my computers so that I could record broadcast television to watch later. To handle the scheduling and recording I have been using a Java based program called DV Scheduler. I don’t recall if I ever knew the name of who wrote it, just that it was on a personal page of someone that worked/studied at the University of Sydney.

Today I uninstalled the program and removed the TV tuner from my computer. Not because of any problems I was having with it, but because it has been a full year since I have watched anything that it recorded.

As my recent lists of youtube channels and podcasts indirectly reveal, there is very little on broadcast television that I watch. When there are shows that I do want to watch I have been “watching” them on the relevant station’s “catch up” service.

I have a bit of regret in uninstalling DV Scheduler as it has been such a reliable program. Looking back I found that I first gave it a try fourteen years ago. I don’t know when it’s website was removed but the most recent capture of its website in the wayback machine is from 2016.

Oh well, time marches on…

Tagged with:

My current podcast subscriptions

Friday, December 27th, 2024 at 08:36pm

After going through my Youtube RSS subscriptions I went through my podcast subscriptions as it had also been some time since I put out a list.

This was a much simpler task but also bittersweet as I decided it was finally time to remove a couple of podcasts that ended suddenly this year, plus some that petered out a long time ago…

This isn’t quite the full list as I didn’t include the feeds with bonus/premium episodes for the few podcasts that have those.

Tagged with:

What I now watch on YouTube

Tuesday, December 24th, 2024 at 06:11pm

Every year or so I try to go through my Youtube RSS subscriptions to confirm if I still want each one. The last time I listed out the channels was six years ago and there were about 60 in the list, while now there are over 150…

With the increase in number I have also noticed that my viewing style has changed, while there are some channels where I will watch every video, there are a lot of channels where I will skip over some videos or skip through others. It is when I skip over every video that I remove it from my RSS subscriptions.

I could just dump out a list of all the current channels, I saw that there were a couple of themes, which I will list based on number of channels.

The first theme was vehicles which can vary from channels that get abandoned equipment running, recovering stuck vehicles, restoring old vehicles, building vehicles to race, converting some to electric to just showing historical oddities:

The next theme is construction and renovation, this one ranges from the use of heavy equipment to DIY renovation of an old house to the cutting of grass:

Moving to a smaller scale (but sometimes not) are making and fabrication channels. Some of these can be very crafty, while others are fabricating at a scale that overlaps with the vehicles and construction channels:

Moving away from hands on projects are the channels that explain things, from historical events and places, to every day technology, to new concepts:

A sub category of explaining how things work is that of showing and working on vintage tech. Some isn’t that vintage but it is all significant in some way or another:

Earlier I listed channels that explained things, this next theme also explains things but in a longer form. Some of them go significantly more in-depth with their research, while others are a bit more topical with their research into current/changing topics and issues:

If the above automotive and excavation channels seem out of place, then you are surprised as I was to be following a number of farming channels, though I have been following them long enough to skip over a lot of the repeated farming specific things, it is the related infrastructure type projects they do that keep me watching:

If it isn’t clear that some of these themes have a huge overlap, then these transport channels could have all been listed with the explainer channels:

While I don’t watch movies as often as I used to, I am still interested in the effects and how adaptations have been approached:

One of my favourite TV shows of all times is Good Eats due to how Alton Brown would explain the science behind the recipes, so of of course we have Alton and a couple of other food related channels:

I keep a vague eye on current tech through a handful of tech channels, though like with the farming channels I am more drawn to their infrastructure side projects:

Based on how many comedy podcasts I listen to and how much I try to go to live comedy I am surprised this theme isn’t bigger, but the other way to thing about it is that these channels are Melbourne based and feature people that I already follow and support:

I am now at a point where the possible themes for grouping channels is getting down to a single channel, so here are the remaining few channels:

This is quite a long list, but as I said at the start I no longer watch every video from these channels. I wonder how things will be next time I make a list like this…

Tagged with: