Rejuvination

We are back.

After a hiatus of some months Ohmslaw is back. Thanks to Dave I have some new hosting. Its great to be back online. My old employer had given me free hosting for some years, fantastic and very generous but finally they need the space in their rack. So down came Ohmslaw. Up went apathy in its place.

I have been a little bit busy, NIB Lorne Pier to Pub Swim occupied lots of my time as one of the organisers. Fantasic event and one I hope to write about .

So now its back onlone, after a hearty battle that saw new servlet container, latest MySql, new java version and so on. pGal needs a bit of work to gussie it up, but we are back and can now grace the web with random thoughts.

The Kimberly

PMA Prognostications

Whats going to happen at PMA

Do I have some secret inside knowledge, nope. I’m just guessing and guessing is fun. Being an oracle a prognosticator is not something I have tried before. All the chickens in the neighborhood beware.

I think the market is split nicely into 2 parts There is the big scary monster DSLR market. The heavy iron end of the camera market. More on this segment later. The other part of the market is the smaller and cool end of the market. The teny tiny pocket cam, the cam that is shrinking in size and growing in features.

The small market is paradoxically the biggest market. Its the market that is the total replacement for film. Various studies have suggested that in the cam market the only player is now digital. The signs are everywhere, Nikon has dumped their film cameras though they claim to be still making a film SLR. They may be making it or just running down stock. Konica Minolta has got out of them business altogether and Kodak the film giant is desperate to become a digital player.

Film is dead for all but specialist uses.

So what going to happen in the teny tiny market. The market has to coalesce around a new idea of what we need, the pixel wars are over. At 8-10 mega-pixels small sensor cameras really don’t gain by getting much bigger in pixel volume is not to say that we won’t see pixel creep but to what point is unclear.
What I think that the market needs is better integration with the web, with printing services, with saving, and sharing.
So far camera makers have viewed their offering as separate from the computer and the net. The manufacturers have made simple USB connections allowing you to suck an image to the computer. There you can use the manufacturers often very poor image software to play with your images.
What is needed is ways to connect to the net, share your images to the web via some sort of service like flickr, to get printing and other services done.

I figure that the manufacturers will try and start down this path, but they will try and build the service themselves. They will fail of course, because they are hardware men, not software dudes. But this will be the start of integration with the service side of the business. This will be where the next big competition is. And I figure that we will see the start of this competition at this years PMA.

Now the big iron end of town. This will see the extension of the themes that have played out in the last few years. Canon will release the 30D and perhaps a 450D as well. These will continue along the path Canon have been plotting out for many years. There will be some lenses from both Canon and Nikon, again in the vein of previous offerings.

Well lets watch PMA and see if I am right.

What to buy?

What to buy?
Do I go with the cool kids and get a Mac or do I stay with what I know and asseble a baby rocket.

I know that I want lots of memory (2 gig), quiet, 2 screens, or the possibility thereof (DVI) and dual core if I can get it.

A new intel based mac is the way to go in mac land, I think the 20" is the way for me, if I choose a mac.

After much looking around websites and reading I have narrowed my choice down to a socet 339 AMD Altheon, any one of a number of motherboards. There are lots of rather hitech looking cooling devices on the market. Oh and to round my sort of spec out, lots of USB, an OK graphics card and a not beige case

The mac comes in at 3K and the PC around the 2.5K mark.

What to buy?

What?

Waiting

The deed is done. After much heart ache, and reading the tea leaves, consulting freinds, the google, and generally flapping about like a newly landed fish; a decesion has been made.

Making the decesion was such a releif, now at least I could stop looking and start waiting. Ordering and then having too wait for the order to arrive is so frustrating. I have put lots of thought into what I want and now that I have fianlly made the decesion, I want it now dammit. Now!

I decided on a mac. Everyone who has one tells me that they are the best thing since the lindberg baby, and that once I am in the water I will love swimming.

They are all smart people, well most of them, so that is one big factor. The other is its just time to try somehting new. I think that I may be anoyed with photoshop for a while as it only currently runs under Rosetta, the emulation layer.

And I expect I will find lots fo things that I currently have that I like that I will have to find replacements for. And no doubt that will be interesting but also rather annoying.

But I get a new toy to play with, that just has to be good, my current desktop is good but gettig long in the tooth.

So having ordered my mac it wont arrive for two weeks, two weeks. The 23rd, how can I contain myself for that long. 2 weeks.

I want it now.

Title

Tender life unfurling PMS 374 on the branch;
Is blighted PMS 499;
And reborn the same but PMS 3268;
Striving to elude Arbiter's ghost PMS 3251;
We grow in autumn for PMS 343;
Reaching, growing, striving never fruition;
Maturity and uobtainable flowering;

Rebirth is rebirth is rebirth is

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganization; and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization

Petronius Arbiter - Greek Navy - 210 BC

Not Waiting

The wait is over!
So much real-estate.
Home 5:55
Open box 5:56
Open next box all loverly and white 5:56
Power up 6:00
Register 6:05
On the net 6:15

Now its just a mater of overcoming the cognitive dissonance and getting to know the One True Way. Repeat after me. Beige is bad white is good.

But I have to stop the fest of Macness and watch the opening of the Comonwealth Games and clean my house. And all I want to do is to play

PostScript

I watched a movie and it was very good, the Commonwealth games were, ummmm well lets just say that there was a lot of gunpowder and a lot of athletes, but that they were not combined in the most ideal way.

The mac so far is good.

Commonwealth Games

The games have been, and are almost gone, I have been and saw what I liked and liked what I saw. The opening ceremony has been commneted on lots. It was the night I got my new mac so I spent time in the study and then shuttling out to the lounge as the TV sounded interesting. So it would be fair to say that the opening didn’t have my undevided attention.

I liked the opening but it seemed to me to be womewhat confused, there was a bit of everything. Lots of fire, lots of actors on high wires, tram conductors came back out of a flying tram. I suppose that they where heavily tram conductors cause we haven’t had any since the Kennet “I sell it all bargin bargin bargin roll up while I sell Victoria” goverment. So there was lots going on, tons of fireworks and lots that was Melbourne, trams, a leuing duck a spire, a real duck, footballers (who are not even in the games) and so on. It all seemed really good if you knew the references and a confused pastich if you didn’t.

The media had been predicting total chaos in transport, it just wasn’t so. Everyone stayed home and it was really easy to get around the city. Those who didn’t stay home used trams and they were chaotic. Yarra trams drafted lots of extra people to assist in the orderly flow of passangers. Whereever there was a collection of these fluro coated fools there was confusion yelling and things went slowly.

Safe to say I will be glad when i can get on a tram again and not be yelled at of feel like a sardine.

But what about the games themselves? I went with Greg. We decided that we should go and see something so we rocked up to the G for some athletics. It was brillant. the new G is fantastic, the night was warm and the sport awesome. I loved it and yelled myself horse. I loved it so much I went the next night was well. 110 bucks well spent.

You may guess that tickets were easy to get, and they were. Overall it was fantastic. Australia cleaned up, few if any world records were set. Its a marvellous competion third rate sport and Australia can excel, embarsingly so but on the whole wonderful.

Language mincing

Its all so maddeningly clever, did the government know about the AWB paying 100s of millions of dollars to Sadam. Well if you define government broadly then of course they knew, there have been scores of warnings, cables advices and cautions. But if you define things very narrowly then they maybe didn’t know. The maddeningly clever is the way the language of knowledge is so parsed and defined and sliced to remove all meaning form it.

So lets just take the Prime Minister at his word and suppose that he didn’t know, and by this we mean that he had direct knowledge, on which he failed to act. This is what the PM wants us to believe, that somehow all his staff failed to bring to his attention something pretty dammed important. One of our most major trading companies, the AWB, was giving direct succor to someone we were about to go war with. Lets ignore the oddity of the fact that we were happy to trade with the same monster that we were about to war with, that’s another story.

On the face of it, that seems odd as the Cole enquiry has found scores of people in the government sending cables to Downer, Howard et al. Now of course I don’t expect that everything addressed to the PM is read by him. I expect that he has staff that read it and filter it. Well if we are to believe the PM they are terrible at their job. Hopeless appalling, suitable only to be fall-guys in a B grade movie. And that’s just how this cunning word parsing seems to be playing out. The faceless and unquestioned ministerial staff are left holding the metaphorical can while the PM dances around the issue of what he knew and when.

And that of course is the maddening part. Not that we can’t pin anything on anybody, but that the willingness to get to the truth to be plain speaking is missing. Everyone is happy, prepared even to shade the truth, to lie, to dissemble. To play cleverly with words until they are drained of their meaning.

But in doing that the pollies leave us with two starke possibilities. They knew! But they did nothing for whatever reason. They didn’t know and have staff that are hopeless. Liars or incompetents its not a pretty picture. its one we have come to know and sadly accept. The children were not overboard, there were no weapons of mass destruction, the Tampa refugees were refugees. Innocents were locked up in detention centers.
In all of these cases, the pollies took no responsibility, occasionally a civil servant was punished. The Language was traduced and the truth, that was nowhere to be found.

It will be interesting to see if the Cole enquiry finds out anything, and if that in the end looks something like the truth.

Something will turn up

I admit it I am a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe in UN Black Helicopters of mysterious Aliens locked forever in Area 51. I do think there is a conspiracy behind the price of oil. This conspiracy is huge because no-one wants to admit that there is a problem, it 's a conspiracy of silence a confederacy of ostriches.

The oil price continues to rise and each time this happens the media reacts in its time honored role. A serious faced reporter announces that yet again the price is rising, experts are interviewed who have no idea what or why. They usually invoke either a reduction in supply somewhere, the rise in the Singapore spot market, the market which sets the bench mark price for Australian oil or sometimes suggest the effect is a flow on from the burgeoning Chinese and indian economies. All of this is just a media pantomime.

So what drives oil prices. Now lets start with some terminology, by oil I really am refereeing to the pump price of petrol and diesel. I will talk later about how the demand drivers for diesel and petrol are different, For now lets just assume that petrol and diesel are driven by the same thing and move together.

The first key driver is demand. In classical economics if demand rises then the price rises until demand can be filled. That is if the supply is inelastic the price will rise until stability is achieved again. People will eventually stop using vehicles if the price is too high thus reducing demand. Economics also suggests that when prices rise the market becomes more attractive and more supplies will enter the market.

in the oil market there are two constraints on supply, refining capacity, the plant that can turn crude into petrol/desiel and the amount of crude available in the world. Building a refinery is a big and complex task, its not the sort of thing you can bang up like a strip mall. Refineries take a lot of planning and a lot of work. they are considered to be bad neighbors. Around the world few refineries are being built in developed countries as increasing environmental regulation plus the NIMBY effect makes it increasingly difficult to find suitable sites.

Oil refineries typically have a life of 40 years so political stability is also key. Finding developing country sites has proved difficult

Thus building more refining capacity quickly is simply not possible. So in the short run lack of refining capacity can seriously effect the price. But no tin the long run, in the long run a site will always be found, political risk is outweighed by gains to be made from building a refinery.

There are more effects that happen on oil price though. Ass well as classic economics supply and demand all parts of the process crude refining distribution and so on have derivative markets operating. Futures are played out and traders operate. These are typically players who take a short term position in the market hoping to out guess the market. The effect of all of these derivative traders is to add lots of noise to the picture.

Viewed from the long term the futures market has zero effect on the underlying drivers, why well in the long term all the traders can do no better than the average and it is the long term average that we are interested in.

So there are two factors then that drive prices refining capacity and crude supply. Short term factors can also have an effect in the market. When hurricane Katrina arrived it knocked out some refining capacity and about half of Americas crude producing capacity. Which amounts to about 10% of Americas total crude supply. These effects were quite short term as the refiners and crude was soon back online, but coupled with the futures traders the oil price spiked. This spike washed through the system. Its probably fair to say that the spike mostly represents profit taking by the derivatives traders.

Lets examine then the last factor effecting price which is crude supply. Crude is modified by a number of factors. The amount OPEC is prepared to pump, the capacity that the oil heads, pipe lines and other infrastructure has to pump and the port and shipping facilities ability to handle what is pumped.

Opec has ever since the 1970s managed the world oil supply to keep prices high while not driving the world into recession. In this OPEC has been reasonably successful, shocks of the 70s and 90s not withstanding.

The capacity to pump oil is often misunderstood, the standard drawing of an oil field is pocket of oil in a lake like formation with a pipe going into it. This is more than a bit misleading. Most oil is contained within sedimentary rock in suspension within the rock. By removing oil a pressure gradient is established, more oil moves down the gradient and more oil can be pumped out. Eventually a balance is reached and no more oil can be pumped out. At this point the field manager will try and reestablish the gradient by flushing the rock with water or gas to push out more oil. They also use a battery of other techniques, more wells, explosives to break up the rock and help the gradient. gas flushing, the list is a testament to the ingenuity and imagination o f engineers. As a field starts off it might be producing mostly oil and gradually the mixture changes to oil and water then as water is pumped in water and oil. In the final stages of a field only a few percent is oil and the rest is water.

The faster the oil is pumped out the less of the total reserve can be recovered, and no mater how carefully a field is managed eventually the cost of recovery exceeds the value of the oil being recovered

The final factor affecting long term price is each oil fields or countries total available supply. As the supply gets exhausted the supplier tries to raise the price to compensate for a lack of future earnings.

So this is a long lead up, the ground work if you will to my Big Conspiracy. What is it. The Conspiracy is called ‘Peak Oil’ Peak oil is itself not a conspiracy its a name associate with oil exploration and recovery. Basically when you hit the half way mark in the worlds total oil supply you also hit the peak in availability.

This is easily shown to be true for a single oil field, at the beginning oil is easy to get and takes not much effort, at the point that its getting harder and we are starting to flush the field with water it gets harder, at some point the point of diminishing returns is reached and adding more wells or more pumps is not economically justified. The oil gradually dries up and eventually the field is exhausted. In europe and the US this process takes about 40 years, most European and American fields have been exhausted in this time frame.

So what about the whole world, the world curve is governed by four factors, discovery, field development, pumping and estimated reserves. Discovery adds to the supply, and estimate reserves tell us how long that supply might last, field development and pumping add to the available crude but also use up the oil leading eventually to field exhaustion.

Looking at each factor in turn, discovery is the truly sad picture. No new oil fields of any size have been discovered anywhere in the world for the last 30 years. None nada zip nothing, of course lots of small fields have been found, but no big ones. And what’s worse is we now know exactly how to find big fields and where to look. And finding a big field is easy, cause they are so big that having found the geologic structure any well will find the field. Despite the billions being spent discovery is going down and down and down. In 1960 the world used 6M barrels a year and found 45M barrels a year, compared to now when the world uses 24M barrels a year and discovers 6M

Since discovery is down the only field development being done is small fields the world over.

Reserve estimates are really problematic for a plethora of reasons, governments view oil as a national reserve they both overstate reserves and capacity to pump and also understate them for various national reasons. This is particularly true of the largest fields in the world in the middle east. These vast fields are hard to estimate because the data is from the 1970s before nationalization. Hopefully the worlds second largest reserves in Iraq should become stabilized once the US has complete control of that countries reserves.

Poor discovery trends and shaky reserve figures make it hard to determine the peak for oil. When the peak arrives the supply side of the equation is essentially known, after that no mater what you do supply will trend downward not upward.

When the supply starts to dip prices start to rise and that is what has been happening. Now of course this doesn’t prove that we have hit the peak, correlation does not imply causation, but causation is a reasonable supposition.

The Peak is when we have used up half of all the oil that there is, after that point the supply slowly starts to diminish and prices will rise. Many estimates suggest that the world has 2-2.2terralires of oil and that we have used 1 terra liter of it. The easiest cheapest most easily extracted terra-liter after that supply is constrained, and prices will rise.

This is the conspiracy, Peak Oil is here, the prices a rising and no-one in any government anywhere wants to talk. The reasons are simple and straight forward, if we mention the elephant in the room then all hell breaks loose, the markets spin out of control, people start to fight over the remaining oil, the economic system will start to unravel and in short ti will be the end of the world as we know it.

In 1970 the OPEC oil standoff caused the world supply to be constrained by 5% this shock to the economic system of the world caused every major economy to tip into hyper-inflation, growth stopped and it took the world 20 years to recover. This was from a relatively short constraint and price hikes that saw oil go from 8 dollars a barrel briefly to 20 and then to reduce again to 10. One short spike can do this much damage image that as we crest the peak we will hit the other side of the growth curve and supply will be constrained by the rate of growth we have enjoyed so far.

Historically we have grown supply at 3% or thereabouts a year. So as we tip over the crest it will begin to fall at 3% but we have to also factor in demand. So far its just the western world gobbling up all the worlds oil reserves but China is a growing power, so is India. All driving demand as their economies grow at 8-12% a year. This means demand will also hit the oil price and the short fall might be any where from the low estimate of an extra 2% to as much as 6% meaning that the gap could be anywhere between 5 and 9% per year.

The conspiracy is that if my ideas are true then we are in for oil going up, and up and up and up.

So what has oil been doing its been heading north steadily for the last 3 years. Not so long ago oil was a happy 65 cents then it passed 1:00 a liter and now it s hit 1:40 it shows no signs of stopping. i predict it will be 2:00 a liter by July 2007. By decades end oil will be 4-5 dollars a liter. It will be so cool if I am wrong but i don’t think I am.

What else has oil been doing well we are with our good buddies the Americans fighting over it., We have gone to Iraq, we will follow the SUVs to other spots on the globe. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. Who knows but its the black gold that is worth fighting for.

The counter to Peak Oil and mercahnts of doom like myself is that of course there is plenty of other alternatives to oil, they are just waiting to be used and can solve the problem. Its the polly anna approach to problem management, like Mr Mcawber something will turn up.
Still there is plenty of other hydrocarbon reserves available. Shale oil tar sands, coal, brown coal, peat, bio diesel ethanol; it’s a big list and is sure to change the picture. This argument is in essence true but it ignores how easy or hard it will be to get those systems online. Its absolutely true that as prices rise they will come on line. the key here is that they will come online as prices rise, at some point these oil alternates will help to stabilize the price, who knows what each of these alternates will cost, what output they can have and where they become economic, what output they will have to effect the price curve.

So thats the conspiracy. Oil is on the way up, for now and forever. its going north . No-one wants to talk about it or plan for what might happen when the price hits 2:00 a liter or 4 or 5 or 10. Cause no one wants to admit that there is an elephant in the room.

Iraq

Next Byte

Testing times

Some proposed questions for Andrew Robb’s new Australian Citizenship test.

1. Explain the location of Australian prison camps for people who take this test in Australia but fail it. Extra points if you can nominate the cost per person of those so detained.
2. Explain how a senate voting form works.
3. Describe how votes for senate seats are allocated. Extra points if you can explain the legal way of defeating the numbering provisions of the senate voting system. Note that it is illegal to explain this system to anyone. Further points if you can explain why Australia has a voting system that is illegal to explain but legal to do.
4. List the instrumentalities that allow the government to detain you without recourse to legal representation. Note that people so detained and taking this test risk further legal penalty if they answer question 4 best to skip it.
5. Define Mateship.
6. Explain how in 100 words or less, mateship has no place in the Australian workplace. Extra points fro pointing out that cooperation with the people one works with is in fact not mate-ship but antisocial.
7. Describe sports that the Prime Minister may appear at. Extra points describe the type of player who would field at deep extra cover. For further points what position would an Australian Rules player be in if he were located at deep extra cover.
8. Explain why the AFL commissioners are a pack of mange dogs and how St Kilda was robbed.
9. List all members of the opposition. Further points for cogent explanations of their failings both personal and political
10. Using no less than 10,000 words explain traditional Australian values from a marxist Leninists point of view and contrast this with the governments cultural war from the vantage of stay at home doctors wives at a barbecue.

How to score this test.

• 0-20 You are on your way to a pacific island holiday. All expenses paid. Estimated value 100 thousand dollars.
• 20-45 Perhaps bribing will work. It did for the AWB and everyone looked the other way. Have a dip mate
• 45-65 Its your shout digger.
• 65-85 You can stand for politics or invade a small foreign country, oh no wait you are already, best make that politics.
• 85+ Are you for real.

Smart Traveler Stupid System

Smart governments making dumb decisions.

Some architect somewhere is trying to graft the current design of the tram and train ticket system to smart cards. The current system consists of a number of concentric zones 1, 1-2, 2 and 3 Tickets are also zoned in time with tickets lasting for 2 hours, 1 day, 1 week, month or 1 year. These two dimension zone and time make an automated system difficult. To offer a 2 hour ticket you need to know both the start and end of the trip. This means that a user of the SmartCard will have to swipe on to the system and swipe off it.

The ever helpful website on the system says So if you don’t swipe off the system will penalize you in some way, the website is delightlfully vauge “If someone doesn’t 'scan off' then the system will not know what fare to charge them, and will have to use a ‘default fare'.”

As a first approximation of a default fare might be more than the current 2 hour fare and less than the full daily fare for that zone, but who knows. Surely we look forward to the usual heavy handed advertising campaign to make this part of the system work.

Of course travellers might be smarter than the card and choose not to swipe on. This is a system that screams out to the smart among us. Evade the system and save money. Enforcemet will presumebly have to be stepped up as now cards will need to be scanned to see if they are valid.

It is said that the system will take l second to scan a card, but getting onto and off trams is slow now, this will surely just make it slower and harder especially for the old, the infirm, parents with children, the bad the mad, in short lots of the users of the system.

The website has lots of details how the smartcards might work, basialluy these are a store value card, either a throw away card, or a reusable card. These can be linked to a bank account or recharged manually.

As the website descibes it you can “register” a card. This will of course be a rather neat tracking device. We are assured about privacy. But what value do those assurances have. The toll company lets out data, the police have lost files that tuned up at the dump. Medical records routinely turn up in odd places. Why won’t this data too get lost, misused, and abused.

To support it the system is going to have a huge call center located somewhere to deal with lost cards, wrong amounts being deducted, bank account foul ups and the myrid of other issues that will beset this system. All of this will be run as a horror amalgam of the current metlink bruisers (aka ticket inspectors) and the toll way fiasco run by the metropolitan transport services. The current system is bureaucratic and hard to use should something go wrong with your ticket. The new system will be just the same but linked into your bank account

It’s like getting to watch a train wreck happening in ultra slow motion again and again and again

This system is slated to cost 500 million dollars. There is no information on the running costs but they must surely be huge. The enforcers will still be there, there will be a new call center and then there will the extra cost of cards, infrastrcture management and so on. Who knows what the annual cost might be, I am guessing 10s to 100s of millions. The system has an expected life of 10 years, very similar to the current system. The overall cost might be in the vicinity 600 million to 1.5 billion dollars.

Thats just unbelivale, a hugely expensive system, a system that will be hard to use, and will actively encourage fare evasion. A system that will be a pain in the arse for all its users. A system that is a poor match to the current zone and time scheme.

There is lots that could be done to fix this system before it starts.

Change the ticketing model so that there are only daily trips, make these a bit cheaper. If you start in any particular zone that sets your daily price.

Have a simple accleration model, use you ticket four times in a week ie on four days and the rest of the week is free. Use it for 4 weeks and the fee converts to a monthly, 11 months and the ticket converts to yearly.

Conversly have a free system, 500 millions to 1.5 billions of cost. Well lets see for me my ticket cost $26 dollars per week. Over an 11 month working year my cost is around 1200 dollars. So for 500 million we could have 416 thousand travelers paid for for a year.

Its a very costly system, it will need event more goons on the network doing informant, It will be harder to use. Fare evasion will rise.

Its stupid, and its not going to work well. No amount of spin will turn this pigs ear of a system into a Smart system

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 I have been musing on misdirection. One can only muse on the negative of a concept if the concept exists; dark is the negative of light and that can be conceptualized and thought of. Nothingness isn’t that absence of something but the presence of things that aren’t there and that can only be discerned by observing that which is rather than that which is not. So to examine misdirection I must observe direction. In this case my own direction, velocity, acceleration. My orientation in the space of the inner observer. Where am I going, where have I been, and where will I go next. It is that time in each persons life the slow turn of another year, a notch, an anniversary. A year added to the score when one can reflect if one is of the mind. My photography has become stilted. Stymied contained bordered. Dull dry and uninteresting. Partially this is a difficulty in transport. I don’t drive and that limits me. but more worrying is the absence of vision. Where do I want to go. What do I want to look at. What do I want my art to be. Although street art, the observance of the seen scene and the recording of it interests me I have nothing to say, Noting to add to the discourse that others have already said. I have two interests. One is birds of opportunity and the other is the landscape rural or urban. of particular interest is water its reflection and utilization. To these ends I have been trying to decide what to do next. I have found a steady stream of photo-tours though most sadly none from Australia which I would still love to do.

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 But there are a plethora from overseas. Where to go, South America, Africa and the big glory animals, Europe the Americas. China? There are many operators and many opportunities. The real question is so much what or where but what do I want from my photography. And the more important question what do want from my life.

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My best trips have been camping in the outback, sleeping in tents. I don’t need or care for hotels of the fine things. They are sometimes comforts that I appreciate but a tent or a swag are fine by me. Trouble is with the exception of Africa and big game stuff tents are not that much of an option for an organized tour. Of course the real thing that makes a trip memorable is either perfect people or imperfect. Mick the rotational camera mad-man annoyed the hell out of me but made the trip memorable in its own way. Or Syd bumbling into each and everything, nearly blind destroying cameras as he went. The perfect trip leader Wayne Rose from Australian Photo Tours now sadly defunct. The enigmatic Graham. The list goes on, and these people are what make a trip.

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. So how long for a trip. I think my ideal is two weeks plus travel, long enough to get somewhere get the camera genes working and start to shoot. But that is in Australia or maybe kiwiland. Further afield how long is long enough. One week is clearly too short. Four weeks is getting to the limits of holidays for me. So I suppose that the sweet spot lies in the middle. 2 weeks more or less.

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So I mentioned that I like landscapes and minutiae. And of course birds. Birds have always fascinated me and I love to photograph them but I haven’t got the patience to wait crouched in the mud for patient hours to get that perfect bird shot. I am the shooter of opportunity. That said when my feathered friends are there I am prepared to wait and wait and wait. So how does this lead into what. I have found a couple of bird shoots (amusing term what) but the timing is not right so I might have to try these another year. China really appeals. Appeal as it is a society, in flux. Changing from the rural to the urban. I would like to take a tour there and maybe then do something on my own.

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My other option is a project. A theme. So I started by saying that I was talking about misdirection, that I was getting you looking one place whilst with the other I palmed the cards. Swiftly moving language so that the words said one thing whil the meaning of the words said something else. Maybe though the misdirection wasn’t external directed at the other rather it was internal, the misdirection was from me for me and by me. I have been misdirecting myself in that I have done nothing and have allowed my attention to wander. To focus inward to analyze what I might do,but not actually doing ti. I have misdirected myself from being a photographer to thinking about being a photographer. Its time to act. In the immortal words of Briteny Spears ‘Why don’t cha do sumthing”