I have stayed up to watch most of the games so far which broadcast at ridiculous times here in Australia (between 9pm and 6am) and then start work at 9am, so needless to say if it’s not the World Cup fever, it’s probably my immune system dying from sleep deprivation and giving way for the disgusting viral bacteria that is most probably spread through the dirty fumes that my smelly housemate produces. It’s not just the soccer that keeps my attention though. There is so much going on, for example the red cards, the background issues each team has, the new players making a name for themselves and the funny stuff in between.

Now I know not all of you have had the time to watch all the games like me or analyse the soccer to the extent that I go to so I’ve decided to provide you with the things that have entertained me about the soccer so far. This excludes the great class of soccer and the goals scored from star players (you can just watch that on the news or SBS). This is just the stupid stuff:

Counterfeit Players

The World Cup has star names, some of them you may know e.g. Messi, Tevez, Robinho, Ronaldo etc. They are infamous for their skill in the game of soccer and they have developed a brand. Just like all brands, however, there are counterfeits….

Player on the left is Beckham. Player on the right is his counterfeit. I’m assuming he was manufactured in Malaysia. His name is Beckmann.

On the left is Ronaldo. Star player for Portugal. You may know him as the retarded kid on the Castrol commercial. He says “futbawll teks mi meny plaaacccess”. Anyway, funnily enough his counterfeit is on the same team as him. On the right, meet Rolando. He is average and also probably made in Malaysia.

Funny Names:

With all the different nations coming together, it is inevitable that I would find some names funny. Here are some that made me giggle like a school girl:

Meet Oh Beom Seok. I wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce this but luckily the commentator mentioned his name once he got the ball. The correct way of pronouncing this name is (o-bum-sock).

This is Gaetan Bong. HAHA

And this is Emmanuel Kone… hehehe Bong and Kone…get it? Hehehe

Soccer Players in Showbiz

This is Georgios Samaras. According to some made up sources, Samaras has been chosen to play Jesus in Passion of the Christ 2.

There are rumors spreading that Dreamworks have convinced Sergio Ramos to play Monkey in their latest remake of the brilliant TV Show Monkey Magic. Jackie Chan will be producing.

Player of the tournament:

Runner Up: GERVINHO

Gervinho earns the spot of runner up for player of the tournament so far for his amazing hair style which manages to ride long yet cover none of his forehead. What a forehead… more like a fivehead.

And the Player of the tournament so far is!!!! …..

Vincent Enyeama – for taking a Jabulani ball to his balls and living to tell the story. Seriously though, he has done well for Nigeria as their goal keeper, putting his body on the line, and putting soccer before his future children on the priority list.

Things I’ve learned:

It is very expensive to get a haircut in South America. At least I assume this because of all the players with long girly hair:

Thank you to fifa.com for the profile shots of the players. Very amusing stuff.

Anyway, recently it just occurred to me that my blog site has lasted over one year! This is big news because as you know, it is very expensive to maintain a website. If you’re unaware of how much it actually costs me to keep this site up, here’s the math:


So to help you appreciate my expenses a little bit better, here is a list of things I could have bought with $200:

• A budget plane ticket to another State in Australia
• Over 100 budget UHT long life milk carton things
• Approximately 10kg of Salami
• 4 bottles of Glenlivet 12 year single malt scotch bottles with 22 standard drinks inside
• Approximately 8 ShamWOWs

Thanks to the continuous support from the two or three people that actually view this site, this sacrifice is easy to bear.

In between his rise to fame on TV, he was also crowned 4^th in the under 12 QLD chess championships. While other kids his age spilt orange juice on their school uniforms before school (me), he spent his time reading chess strategy books and learning the piano. He can still wow an audience when he plays the piano but he has an annoying habit of stopping when he sees someone is impressed. I usually get him to play the piano and act like I’m yawning so he keeps going.  He always seemed like he was going places but I felt like he never had the chance to be a real kid. Instead of laughing about spilling orange juice on himself, he’d probably be disappointed and practice sipping orange juice all day.

Now Jesus is back at University studying French. This is his 3rd attempt to do French A – introduction to French. Despite acing most of the first few tests, he dropped out of this subject twice, only to return to it and try again. He says it’s hard for him to cope with doing real life things. He gets scared because he’s making things reality. He once told me he can live his whole life in his head. If he wants a BMW he can drive one… in his head and it will be just as if it were real to him.

Today I asked him a few questions about his special abilities. He isn’t sure he can control the weather anymore. He used to be able to… but he is definite that he can still read people’s minds.  He then let me know that his mum is holidaying in Vietnam and she’s complaining about the weather. I asked if he tried changing the weather for her and realised only then that he lost his powers. He said “no”. I ask him quite regularly “what am I thinking?”… He always smirks and keeps silent; never providing an answer. This is frustrating as I get no closure. If he guessed and was wrong I’d know he was full of it… but I can’t make that claim yet can I?

While we were lined up to buy some McDonalds he asked me if I wanted kids. I proposed the same question to him before I answered it. He said “Yeah, but I don’t want to get married. I think I will just have a partner… or several partners forever”.  I told him that I’d caution his first girlfriend and tell her he was not going to be faithful to her. He then said “Sophia would be a great name for my child”. I warned him that a boy carrying the name of ‘Sophia’ may have a high propensity to get bashed during his schooling period. I got no response from him.

While we were sitting down with our McDonalds, he opened up to me about the secret organisation that was spying on him (apparently now he can’t feel them spying on him anymore). He repeated that they all drove shiny blue and yellow cars. Then he paused for a bit… and said in a startled voice “some of them were Chinese…and black… not just white people” to which I said… “Well I’m guessing the CIA and stuff don’t really put ‘Must be white’ on their self-destructing applications. That would be secretive discrimination”.  

He then asked me how much a Lamborghini Diablo costs. I said… “Definitely more than your recreational study of French is going to earn you.”  Out of the blue he said “I can make miracles happen” so I told him to go buy a lotto ticket. He informed me that he was planning on doing that, but I reminded him of the odds to winning lottery, mentioning his favourite movie ‘Good Will Hunting’ where they stated the actual odds. He reassured me that he will win the lottery and buy a Lamborghini Diablo.

I am not ruling anything out with Jesus. I have this strange feeling that he is going to come up trumps in life one way or another. It may be a case similar to Forrest Gump but I can just tell life has something more planned for him. I believe he will get his Lamborghini Diablo…. and his baby boy, Sophia.

1. I enjoy the vibrant colours and mesmerising patterns which are evident in a lot of artwork and I’ve been totally missing out
2. This was a great indication that I don’t know Brisbane

With an adventure trip to the museum prior to my GOMA expedition; it seems I learnt a lot that day. The biggest lesson I learnt from GOMA was that apart from admiring art for its aesthetics, I don’t really get art in its ‘artsy’ form at all but this in itself brought great novelty when browsing through the artwork.

Let me tell you, even the walk towards GOMA is interesting and fun. The State Library (located next to GOMA) has a weird patch of grass that is the same colour of the building and looks a bit like moss, but I don’t think it is moss. There was discussion over this grass/moss for at least a minute. It was intense. The entrance to GOMA is pure glass and it was hard to spot what was window and what was door… This made it slightly hard for some to enter (I won’t say who). Enough about the building though. I want to talk about some of the art which I really enjoyed….

William Yang and his bendy text

As soon as you walk in you will see the start of ‘The China Project’: Part of it was a strange collection from a photographer named William Yang. This was one of the few collections I understood (or at least I think I do). It’s basically a few photographs and some text which tells you about his experience growing up as a Chinese kid in Australia. He battles as a minority with a Chinese background and later on reveals his homosexuality. The hardest part about reading this art was the fact that the text went all bendy and I found myself reading the same line over and over again. I thought… so far so good this art stuff is pretty easy.

 We walked on a little further and I was totally impressed and fixated on the giant post-its that covered a massive wall. They were huge pieces of paper overlapped and stuck on the wall like post-its. Seriously if you haven’t seen giant post-its on a wall, do yourself a favour and go have a look. It’s awesome. The writing on these giant post-its had either deliberate misspellings or the people who created them only knew Engrish but it had things like ‘D&G and Cucci’ instead of ‘Gucci’ and other weird stuff that made no sense (No photos, I guess you will have to go see for yourself).

A little further from the giant 2 story post-it wall and we found a city of all the famous buildings in the world made out of clay. Around the city were TV screens showing some clay animation. The best part about this piece of art was that the clay had a colour and texture which resembled Cadbury chocolate to uncanny levels. Unfortunately again I cannot find a photo of this to show.

We made our way up to level 2… Here I found art from a person that I found really intriguing. Spencer Finch is (in all respects) a mad man. Here is a man that is more fascinated by colours, lighting, shading and shadows than me. His art is all about trying to draw these things in hope to conceptualise our perception of sight (I think). His first display didn’t really impress me much. It was a bunch of Polaroid looking photos which just looked like grey gradients and they were cloned and pasted all over the wall (something I could do in photoshop quite easily). Then he got a little stranger… I walked into a dark room and I think I shouted “Holy shit balls!” in an art gallery. I’m still not sure if an Art Gallery follows the library etiquette where you have to keep quiet but I felt bad about it… Anyway I found myself looking at his TV setup which looked like something out of a hybrid movie sequel for the Poltergeist and The Ring:

Holy Shit Balls!

I still don’t know what the aforementioned piece is about and I don’t think I will ever understand it but if he was trying to express his creepiness and insanity; this piece is perfect. If you find yourself in the Art Gallery, take the time to read the descriptions of his art though, they may help you more than it did me. They also add to the art as some of the descriptions are amusing and bemusing.

My favourite piece of his has to be his triumphant feat in capturing rainbow legs with black and white photos. I had to think about it for a long time… and the more I thought about it… the more it didn’t make sense at all.

Left leg of the rainbow.... in black and white

The man claims to have chased down the left leg of a rainbow and taken a photo of it… If you can see it in this photo please point it out to me as I cannot see a rainbow in this black and white shot.

The right leg of the rainbow... black and white

Again, he has claimed to have chased the right leg of this rainbow. It reminds me of the following motivational poster:

I have the urge to create art like this

Spencer also has a great book available from the Gallery Store which has a blank piece of paper tarnished by wind caught from the backyard of Emily Dickinson’s house…..

Although Spencer won my heart that day, I was also impressed with some of the Aboriginal art displayed at GOMA. Some of the patterns really had me thinking that these were in fact magic eyes so I spent a few moments trying to cross my eyes (to no unearthing). Even this lovely couple felt like they had to try:

A couple having a go at Magic Eye

There was a strange painting on the wall which I thought I should mention just in case someone can actually explain it to me: It had a kangaroo with sunglasses on, standing in a crowd of white people with stockings over their faces… but one of the guys had a condom on his head instead of stockings. This came with no description as I’m sure even the artist himself had no idea what was going on here (needless to say I can’t find a picture of this to show).

I feel I have to mention the giant hole in the wall as well. At first I thought, wow is this a massive subwoofer? I bet it pumps out some bass. Then I thought… gee this better not be a representation of genitalia…. and then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to get inside this thing… and then I thought, what if they made the inside like a jumping castle… that would be awesome:

Anish Kapoor's gaping hole

A special mentioning of some artsy video clips and the tree and kangaroos covered in pieces of fine China (which had me totally mesmerised) needs to be made here. Even apart from that pretty much everything is worth looking at. If you haven’t been there before or even in a while, I suggest you go have a look right after a stop at the museum. The transition from giant things hanging from a ceiling to giant post-it notes stuck to a wall really makes for a great day.

In a single train ride to work we would come up with at least three business concepts which had the potential to work provided he had the resources and time to dedicate to it. He often had me telling him to keep his voice down so people didn’t steal his ideas and he would quickly reassure me that the primary school child sitting next to us probably had great respect for intellectual property. During our recent coffee he reminded me of one of the ideas we came up with which was a revolutionary idea to optimise business process modelling software to reduce duplicate work efforts. He informed me that a company with the resources to implement our idea is actually quite close to a competitive product (if ours was to exist) so I thought it would be a good time to tell you the story of how we came up with our pseudo product.

Our work primarily consisted of interviewing staff while modeling their roles and work procedures on the fly as we spoke to them using tablet PCs. We would freehand scribble our workflows using Ms OneNote and then later on get back to our workstations and re-do it into MEGA. This was tedious (not to mention time consuming) and everyone, especially me hated it as I was the one having to put everyone’s models into MEGA.  One day instead of just complaining and whining about how terrible our business process was for having me do repeat work, I decided to actually look for solutions to our problems.

I couldn’t really find anything out there but I knew what I wanted. I said - “Hey you know it would be so much easier if we had a tablet version of MEGA which could recognise the drawing of a box or triangle and auto-convert it to legitimate symbols for process modelling”. Everyone looked at me and said nothing for a while so I added…. “or a giant robot that went to work for me”? To which I got, hey that’s a really good idea. “What the robot?… I reckon”. Apparently the team liked the Tablet BPM software idea better than my robot one (unfortunate but I respect their opinion). Phil moved the whiteboard closer and started to do his brainstorming thing. At this point I realised he wasn’t being sarcastic and he was actually serious about pursuing this idea. He had Ray on his side already searching Google for appropriate SDKs to work off and before I knew what was happening I was being asked what else the software would do.

I thought, OK let’s play this game. I decided to start throwing around outrageous clown ideas for the software … “Maybe we can double tap on a box and give it a new level so say Bob goes to the toilet, we can then double-tap on the box and then give detail to his process in the toilet…. Bob takes a pee and then hopefully washes his hands. You see we need the further levels to add important details to our models. What if Bob didn’t wash his hands? We wouldn’t know without that extra level”.  I can still remember everyone maintaining a serious business face. It is inspiring now but at the time it seemed that I was the only one who got my joke about fictional Bob.

I then complained a bit more about the fact that the current models don’t really demonstrate processes well. The imagination runs wild from a concise description of a process and one can easily translate a process to something totally wrong. “It would be good to have an animation mode like SIMS where we can play games of … say for example – make the process of cooking eggs visually. Set the foundation of objects like people, pans, eggs, time and allow different scenarios… if the egg drops, if I’m in the kitchen etc. (I must admit I got this idea from having endless fun with packet tracer during University. The lecturers were quite impressed with how much time I spent with that software but it was only because I loved the animation of packets traversing the internet through pipes. That was better than TV). It looked something like this:

Accurate representation of packet tracer doing its thing. All software should have an animated ending except for that crappy paperclip helper on MS Word. That is poo.

Of course I have only revealed the initial ideas which triggered our extensive product concept. With the help of Ray who is a genius software developer and Phil who knows the ins and outs of business marketing we finetuned my less than ambitious initial ideas into a worthwhile concept for BPM software which would change the face of Business Process Improvement and tablet PCs. We took it as far as considering networking with tablet PC suppliers and resellers in hope for collaboration as well as liaising with investors. The only thing that stopped us was me leaving the project early for a new job…wow I guess you could blame me for not letting our idea get off the ground.

I have some exciting news for this web site too….wait for it… I have gone through negotiations with an amazing artist who is going to provide me her artwork which she has given me full permission to display on my site. I will create a dedicated page for her drawings. Trust me; I want each and every one of them on a t-shirt. They are amazing. 

Before I start with that I would just like to go off on a tangent and mention how easy it is to create a personal blog. It took me roughly 1 hour and 30 minutes from purchasing a domain to installing word press and blogging away. It was incredible.

Ok so let’s move on to the really educational stuff (not really). I have been thinking about how the internet liberates me in ways I never thought possible. Back in the day as a child in order to express myself I would have to use my outside voice to get my point across in a family of five. Now we have this amazing thing called the internet that lets me broadcast whatever the hell I want and potentially billions can read it. I then thought about the reason why I spend so much time on the internet and I realised it’s not just all about the interesting content out there. It’s the fact that when I’m surfing the net I have virtually no governance from others and I’m basically cut off from any kind of political control….and I really hate politics. This is where the real feeling of freedom kicks in for me.

I then thought about it a little further (yes I have way too much time on my hands at the moment) and became conscious of the fact that the only reason our internet is so liberated is because of our great Nation’s democracy. We are in fact a lucky country. While we complain about the government as they put fluoride in our water or protest the hogwash fact that recycled water is icky there are countries out there which arrest bloggers for having a point of view.

Accurate illustration of freedom levels

I then had a quick look at the great Wikipedia about internet filters and which countries use them. I found an amazing trend (haha it’s not amazing in the slightest) which I have thoughtfully placed in an extremely legible graph for you:

Although my graph was hand drawn in paint, a trend is evident here. More political control leads to more restrictions on the internet. Why? Because the only way to act out against a government is to create a following and what better way to create a following than to use the internet.

I have placed Australia under mild filtering. Now some will say that’s not right, Australia has no filtering. This is somewhat true. We have restrictions on hosting hardcore pornography but that’s about it. We are for the most part a working democracy but we take a look at the other countries which have a hard time trying to use google without breaking a sweat and see how fortunate we are. Saudi Arabia filters immoral content in general and even has a security committee that can block whatever the country’s internet users can see. Moving up on the graph and we have South Korea who actually censor and delete blog posts which criticize the government in any way. Then we have Iran….Iran is a lovely country, but seriously I would crawl up into a ball and die if I had to live there with their internet laws. Iran has actually arrested bloggers for expressing their opinion. They also block women’s rights websites, weblogs and online magazines. This is an outrage…ladies I’m all about women’s rights but their most ambitious block is youtube. Who the hell blocks youtube?

Anyway that’s enough ranting for one day. Stay tuned for more mediocre blog posts from me and make sure you look at the “drunkie pants” category once it shows up. I am full of epiphanies once inebriated; I just haven’t had a chance to be so yet.