1. Teacher Time, the web platform I’m helping develop with a passionate group of entrepreneurs is coming along really well, we just validated the business model and have our first paying customers. I want to work on it full time, but without funding I’m not going to be able to afford to. If we do get funding then I’m likely to move to Sydney for a few months to really put things into full gear.
2. SneakerNet : I allied to the Innovsy startup incubator to get SneakerNet off the ground. The couriered hard drive service would likely end up with me riding around Adelaide a lot whilst also developing better data backup processes for various companies and professionals. It would require that I setup a physical presence with a secure storage site, making it a lot harder for me to move (at least for a number of years until I’ve sold the business off or maybe it does a major pivot).
3. City of Marion Glade Crescent redevelopment : Myself, Saeble and Derek/NextFaze applied to do an interactive artwork project as part of the redevelopment of some wetlands and playground in Hallet Cove. We did a pretty decent pitch of Laurie the Lizard (a physical metalworked masterpiece complete with LED lights and touch sensors) which is mixed with Augmented Reality and a Lizardgotchi app. We have a 1 in 3 chance of winning and if we get it I’m going to have to get out the soldering iron and learn to program Arduino microcontrollers and connect them with an Android phone (and get help from people who are good with electronics). It excites me but is pretty challenging.
4. Earth Communities : This is the one I really think will be awesome, but is a much longer term project. It’s about creating an intentional (sustainable) community which is a practical application of the Price of Zero transition to an RBE. Most likely I would work on websites, hosting, film making and photography for non-profits. I’m currently uploading a 6.5GB high def video of the hour long presentation video of Craig Cowling explaining the concept (the 2nd time it was filmed).
5. Last ditch option : None of the above pan out and I go on the dole for a short while as I try and find a programming job or *shudders* more IT support.

So overall it looks like my options revolve around either anchoring in Adelaide, going interstate, or floating around.
I don’t know what will happen, but I certainly know that the future will be interesting.

• Entertainment – Using the Multipath, interactive online video concept.
• Education – Using a combination of the flipped classroom model and child-driven self education.
• Energy – From centralised Fossil Fuels, to decentralised renewables (although I’m helping push some large scale centralised renewable projects as a transition).
• Economics – From our current Capitalist monetary system to the Resource Based Economy model, which is based on science, sustainability and automation.

Michael Kubler

They are all somewhat linked. The energy change requires a change in Economics because the price of renewable energy goes down over time, which directly affects the GDP of the country and also removes power from the oil monopolies. To change Energy and Economics you need to change the education and culture (entertainment).

The reason I came to these aims is because I realised I didn’t have a good enough direction in life, I knew that my long term aim is that I want to be remembered for my contributions to humanity and the environment, but I didn’t have enough details on how or what specific contributions. The 4 paradigms are ones that I’m passionate about and feel that I can actually help with, using the skills I have and the knowledge that I am often seeking.

I will also be making sure that if I do something I will  “do it smart and with passion and purpose“.

The paradigm changes may occur with 10 years, with my life time, or might take a few generations to occur, but given my understanding of current trends, these are things which need to occur, but certainly aren’t the only changes.

I’m not interesting in getting rich (unless that is an unfortunate requirement to making some of the changes required), my passion is around making the world a better place for everyone.
I want to see a world where we can provide food, water, electricity, transport, entertainment, education and all the necessities of life, for free to everyone on the planet.

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked by a reader of TIME magazine, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?” This is his answer.

I recently added some videos to the Zeitgeist Info Video Wall, check them out!

http://zeitgeist-info.com/video-wall

• I’m currently working 9-5 at the Adelaide Festival and the very busy Festival period is starting.
• I’m developing a web platform for an education startup called Teacher Time.
• I’m the founder of the South Australian Zeitgeist Movement chapter and would like more time to help organise ZDay and work on a presentation for it (but send an amazing amount of thanks to Kari and David for doing most of the work so far!)
• I’m an active member of Occupy Adelaide and pretty much run the website.
• I have recently started helping the Climate Emergency Action Network of South Australia (CLEANSA) run a campaign to convert some coal fired power stations to Concentrating Solar Thermal, which would be the first installed in Australia. An amazing opportunity. I’ll also need to help fix their website.
• I occasionally do photography and a little film work for a local non-profit news media outfit called Our World Today which is helping re-define journalism.
• As such I’m pretty much running at 108% capacity, at least until the 18th of March.
• I’m also in about $9,500 Credit Card debt as I tried getting Films on the Fly off the ground last year and went to Sydney for about 10 weeks. Unfortunately I’m a social programmer, I need to bounce ideas off people and by the time I built the networks which could help me I ended up running out of money (hence the debt).
• I worked at 2moro mobile when I got back to Adelaide. Was doing web development and Linux system admin, but they unexpectedly got liquidated and I lost $4k in wages I was owed.
• My general aim for the future is to get out of debt, and when there is enough traction with Teacher Time (and hopefully some investment), go work full time with Michael Imsteph, Jesse Black, Silvio and the others on a full time basis to help scale the service up and out and add new features and pivot and everything else required.

Green bike

I thought this was an interesting dichotomy. A bright green bike vs the dark Crowne Plaza in the background.

This is my proposal to the Occupy Movement

Proposal : Occupy should not talk so much about what we are against. We should primarily talk about viable solutions which we support and why.
We should be solutions focused.

If there is an issue or range of interconnected issues without a viable solution then we can help help facilitate the discussions and education required to then come up with solutions.

Examples

1. As an example instead of saying we are against the 1%, it would be that we are for Income equality, power equality, and democracy.
2. Another example : We support the Beyond Zero Emissions stationary energy plan. A proposal by a group of volunteer engineers which aims to convert Australia to 100% renewable energy.
   Why? Because it means our electricity will be cheaper in the long run. It means we can replace the ageing, dirty coal fired power plants with Concentrated Solar Thermal Power stations. We can use wind farms and keep people in jobs (compared to transitioning to a gas power station) and won’t require environmentally destructive industrial processes such as Coal Seam Gas extraction which put our ground water at risk of being permanently destroyed.
   We can have our power outlets running off 100% renewable, carbon free energy allowing for a new wave of electric vehicles.
3. In regards to income equality and the major issues with the economic and political systems, we are still discussing, debating and educating ourselves regarding the root causes and the alternatives available. We can attempt to make changes the current capitalist system or attempt to change to a new system such as  Communism and Socialism or some of the newer options like  Steady State Economics, True Cost Economics, Participatory Economics and Resource Based Economics.

We hope the public will take part in the discussions, bring their perspectives and help augment and enhance the final proposed solution.
We would like to hear and discuss proposals regarding everything from environmental to social to energy, economic, political to health, food and more.

Note : We don’t need to be locked into a single solution, in many cases it may be better to support/test/advocate a number of them.

Talking about something worth showing. Here’s a manually placed version of the RaVis explorer tree view which we are using for the Films on the Fly Nodemap viewer. In this case it’s my version of what I’d like to see. What I call a ‘Story Timeline’ view. Unfortunately the software doesn’t work that way. Yet.

FotF - Orthogonal Tree View

The first week in Sydney was about finding my feet, the second was getting over my cold/hayfeaver and moving into David’s place whilst transitioning to my natural state. That of being a night owl.

Night Owl

During the past week at least 3 of the nights I’ve not gone to bed until 7am. The earliest night being about 3am.

I’m also developing callouses on my hand from carrying my briefcase around everywhere. If it’s not that then I’m walking around with plastic shopping bags.

Sydney is weird. Well, it’s at least different in a number of ways from Adelaide. Their bins being the most obvious difference, but their transport system is more subtly different. It’s certainly not as well integrated as the one in S.A. No Google Maps integration, very few bus timetables you can take with you and basically no train timetables (but they usually come within 10mins).

Instead of having multi-trip ticket where you can use the bus or train up to ten times and when you use the ticket you can re-use it on any other public transport within 2 hours, in Sydney you need different tickets for the train (which are split into a number of zones) and also different tickets for the bus service, which also has different zones. This leaves me with 3 multi-use tickets. A train and two bus tickets. 

The annoying bit is that the train tickets are multi-day passes, not multi-trip passes. Whilst the bus tickets are multi-trip tickets and you can use them up to 10 times, I had a 1 week train ticket. This caused me lots of confusion as when the ticket expired and it wouldn’t let me through the turnstile. The turnstile machine simply said there was an error and to see the attendant. I went to see the attendant, but as I was holding a briefcase and a bag and they man the wide berth laneway, when I waved my ticket at them they just nodded and pushed me through, with 2 mothers pushing prams and a guy with a musical instrument behind me.

The next time my ticket failed I had to almost forcefully explain that my ticket doesn’t work. Only after repeated prodding from me did the attendant lady actually try it a couple of times, look at the ticket, then point out it was expired. Suddenly a light went on in my head. I didn’t have a ticket capable of ‘10 train trips‘, instead it was capable of 7 days worth of travel. Doh!

SA vs NSW tickets

Did I mention I’ve already been having days where I feel burnt out? I woke up the other day after it had been raining for nearly 3 days straight and I had been having sneezing fits (usually sneezing up to 5 times in a row). I felt burnt out. I’ve been trying to work on the data structures for the Tree view page. How does the Javascript or HTML/CSS use it?  As a JSON array). How does the Server send it to the browser? JSON or XML.. I haven’t implemented XML yet. Also, using  the jQuery data type in the page construction, or via an AJAX call (I’ve implemented both)  I’ve not yet worked out the best way for the back end MySQL database to store the data.
Anyway because of all this it’s not really worth showing to anyone yet. Which means I can’t get excited by people looking at it and going ‘ah ha’ with understanding.

Also, whenever I try and work, I end up getting very distracted. After working on something for a while I’ll need a break, as does anyone. But I’ll jump onto Facebook, open up a bunch of links, start watching an hour long video and 5 hours later I’ll feel bad because I’m not working. Either that or it’s now time to go.

It’s not like I’m playing Angry Birds. Although, at one point I did watch a video about the making of Angry Birds. I also tried out the Angry Birds Chrome Web App. It’s kinda cool that they could make a game like Angry Birds that runs in the browser. It shows that Javascript and HTML5 have come a long way. Thank you Google Chrome and Firefox for making the Internet awesome.

I’ve also been watching a lot of the Google IO 2011 content. So far about 10 hours out of the ~45hrs worth that I’ve downloaded.

So. One of my greatest strengths is my greatest weakness. My hunger for knowledge, my passion for learning means that it is very hard for me to not want to watch something informative. Hence why I like documentaries but hate the news. I particularly love TED talks. I’ve watched over 500 of them and agree; they are Ideas Worth Spreading.

There I was again, getting distracted. Setting up something on the other laptop, waiting for my food to cook and missing my girlfriend.
I was feeling, not depressed, but burnt out and exhausted. But, I ate dinner, called my girlfriend and now I’m starting to feel better. To feel happier. Despite it being night, cloudy and dark, I feel like the world is brighter. Like the screen brightness has just been turned up.

So I finish off my call out for a Graphic/Web designer and some other emails, but as I didn’t go to sleep last night until after the sun came up, and I didn’t get to the office until 6pm, it’s now past half past Midnight. I race to the train station for no use. The trains stopped a while ago. Thankfully there’s a late night bus service. I spend 15mins walking to Town Hall, realise I have to wait on the other side of the road, next to the smallest, crappiest bus stop sign I’ve seen. The bus finally comes at 1:30am. I try to do some programming but the bus driver doesn’t know anything about gliding. They are either accelerating, braking, or going around corners. I start to feel sick and have to pack the laptop away. Thankfully I made it to Turramurra and found a taxi driver to drive me to David’s place as I didn’t want to spend 45mins walking home with my dark brown leather suitcase and blue hat (with white chequered stripe).

Portrait of Michael Kubler - Showing off 'The Hat'

2 days pass since I did the graphic designer callout and I still haven’t received a response. I’m contemplating making up a poster and plastering it around UTS (University of Technology, Sydney). Alternatively when David Zwolski’s got some spare time I’ll utilise his skills.
It’s not that I can’t do design work, it’s that I know it’s not my strength, it’s hard to switch between programming and design, but importantly, it’s because I want to bring someone else into the project. Get their perspective. Look at their face as they realise all the possibilities and opportunities. Because of the information intense nature of the work I need someone I can physically meet with and spend time with so we can brainstorm various iterations.

Michael's Office Desk in Sydney

I am putting $1,000 of my own money towards the project. $500 for a designer, who’ll hopefully help me create some example layouts for some of the Multipath, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and also the RPG style interactive video interfaces that I have in mind. If there’s time I’d also like some illustrations to help explain the concepts during demo day. Assuming the platform will actually be ready for pitching to potential investors/the public.

The other $500 goes towards Google Adwords advertising and some of the other stuff (like MailChimp mailing lists) for testing the landing pages.

The idea is to try and determine what people are most likely to be interested in and which features to aim for first to gain traction. To achieve a great product-market-fit.

The Startup Triangle

The problem with doing the above is that I’m already stretching my financial resources pretty thin. I’ve got maybe $5.5K to last me the entire 3 months I’m in Sydney. This includes food, rent/utilities, transport and those annoying things like paying mobile phone bill, minimum credit card repayment costs, server costs and all that jazz.

That $5.5K is made up of my measly personal savings (I’ve been pumping pretty much everything I can into the company for the last 2 years); my last payment from ANAT, which was basically double my normal pay as it included my accrued annual leave (so ~$2k); plus up to $3K I can take out in a new credit card I recently received (just before I stopped working at ANAT).

I’m trying to use lean startup techniques. But even then, I’m trying to do something that even web startup incubators like  Pollenizer wouldn’t expect to do for less than $150K.

When I get back to Adelaide I’m going to have pretty much no money, but hopefully enough of a platform that we can show it off to people so they understand what it is and get them excited about all the possibilities of what it could be.

FOCUS

The reason why focus is important (and I need more of it) is because otherwise I’ll fail. It’s pretty much my whole reason for coming to Sydney (I’ve got a nice office back in Adelaide, but when there, I make films, not program). Certain types of failures are good, you learn from them. But failing because I was watching YouTube video’s is not the type of failure we are talking about.

Who’s talking about it? Mick Liubinskas of POLLENIZER he’s pretty much the reason I came to Sydney, so if you’ve read this far please watch his short presentation.