Quadrocopter Video Piloting - Surfing - Byron Bay Australia from rc-video.org on Vimeo.

Surf action on Saturday 10/7/10 at Broken Head, Byron Bay, Australia

Broken Head is the right hand point break at the southern end of Tallow Beach. It is a world class, sand bottom, long right hand wave.

The swell was up, but the rides were not particularly long.

But when a friend posted a photo of me playing music at the Treehouse cafe (Belongil Beach) last week … it reminded me of something…

(source The Daily Telegraph)

JENNIFER Hawkins has combined a surf holiday in Byron Bay with a schedule of property inspections as she moves to expand her impressive property portfolio.

The canny investor and her boyfriend Jake Wall spent a few days in Byron looking at fixer-uppers with a view to acquiring not one but two homes in the area.

The plan, as we hear it, is to buy the older houses and put Wall, a builder, to work renovating them.

Hawkins’ agent Sean Anderson confirmed the Myer model’s trip and her plans to grow her real estate portfolio.

The new purchases are believed to take Hawkins’ net worth to between $10 and $12 million and is a credit not only to her, but to the team of financial advisers she has in place to help her prepare for the career winter that may follow her eventual retirement from modelling.

The former Miss Universe, now 26, is aware that when a career is built on your physical attributes, there is the very real possibility the work may start to dry up by the time you reach 30.

As a result, Hawkins has been acquiring properties - five now in total - after making some shrewd purchases in 2008-09 during the economic downturn.

Her property portfolio is currently valued at close to $5 million - coincidentally the value of her current contract with Myer, inked last year.

At last count it included three houses in Newcastle, an apartment in Kings Cross and her home in Coogee, last valued at $2.3 million.

She was looking at other properties in Bondi prior to Christmas, but has now moved her focus north.

Last week she and the buff Wall went body-boarding at Byron and were photographed strolling the streets of the township together.

Last night Hawkins was back in the big smoke, stepping out at Rosemount Australian Fashion Week to take in her first show, Nicola Finetti’s collection.

Hannah Mermaid from Byron Bay Artists (.com.au)

It’s easy to see, anecdotally, why Byron Bay has long been famous for being a hotspot of sexy people. Just walk down the street and try to keep from turning your head, it’s not easy. The place is filled with very spunky, young attractive people (like me).

So it was good news indeed to hear my suspicions confirmed by a recent highly scientific peer-reviewed survey from beautifulpeople.com listing Byron Bay as one of the “hottest” travel destinations on the planet. Ninth to be exact, beating out Sardinia, Italy (Take that Sardines!).

1. Bahia, Brazil;
2. Laguna, California;
3. Biarritz, France;
4. Florida, USA;
5. Cabo San Lucas, Mexico;
6. Ibiza, Spain;
7. Cape Verde;
8. Milano, Italy;
9. Byron Bay, Australia;
10. Sardinia, Italy.

Ok so maybe I’m embellishing the telling a little, but there are a few local shark stories and this is one of them. A friend of mine told me about the terrible attack on John Ford in 1993 off Julian Rocks, where John and his newly wedded wife were diving. Seeing the approaching Great White Shark, John pushed his wife out of the way and was promptly eaten alive, never to be recovered. (Although some local rumours talk of pieces surfacing here and there).

Anyway that was a pretty amazing story by itself.. but as it turns out the last fatality in the area before that was another fella called… Martin Ford. Ok, weird.

I’m told the fatality before him is yet another Mr Ford, but I’ve yet to find that record. So if your surname is Ford, and you like swimming / surfing or diving at Byron Bay… I hope you are not superstitious! If anyone can tell me who the other Ford is and when, let me know in the comments.

There you are, minding your own business when you that one of those emails. You know the ones, from your domain registra reminding you about that domain name you registered last summer for that brilliant startup idea you had after a night out with your friends. You remember the passion, the inspiration, the alcohol, the entrepreneurial spirit and energy you possessed when you registered the domain last year.

And yet now, here it is 9 months later staring you in the face like a hungry child from an old relationship, asking you for money and attention. To renew or not to renew, that is the question. It’s a good idea, you tell yourself. So good in fact that nobody else in the last year has had the same idea.. it’s *that* niche. You don’t have the time, or the money, or the inspiration you had on that fateful night anymore though, and the more you think about it, the more you realise how much effort would be required to take your idea from drunken resolution, to startup and success.

So you let it expire. Oh God, you just let it go. All the while thinking that some other guy who is smarter, richer and more inspired than you will notice the amazing domain name that just fell back into the public pool, register it and make GAZILLIONS of dollars from it.

But that’s your fault isn’t it… you should have built that website while you had the chance! Oh well.. at least you’ve saved yourself years of pocket money squatting on a domain you’ll never use.

*sigh*

- The Printing Press (1440)

- The Telegraph (1792)

- The Telephone (1876)

- The Radio (1895)

- Fax Data Transmission (1924)

- Internet & Email (1974)

- Instant Messaging (1980)

- Blogging (1997)

- Social Networks (Late 90’s)

- Mobile Devices (2000+)

Each one of these technologies builds on the one before it, and every single one has two things in common:

1. They are, or have been, widely adopted by a large % of the human population.

2. They all connect people.

Comparing them, it becomes clear that each “evolution” of the technology simply performs the same task as the last, but better. Either via speed, scope or quality the proceeding technology exceeds the limitations of the ones before it by taking advantage of the previous technology’s advancement.

Speculating on the future of our connective technology, and which technology will supersede (or build on) those we use now, one can imagine the proliferation of mobile devices and internet as a major factor in future technologies. Moreover, the rate at which we connect, and remain connected increased, and the depth and “quality” of this connection through media also increases. As bandwidth grows, video and augmented reality will become standard communication faculties, but another cultural phenomena is also at work. The Internet and Social networking has broadened the scope of our connective technology from mere one-to-one connections, to one-to-many and many-to-many. (1:1, 1:m, m:m) the impact of which is only just being realised as a cultural shift affecting our media, politics and interpersonal relationships.

As this occurs, I can’t help wondering whether such technology has an upper bounds, a ceiling, to which the advancement overtakes the social benefit. It might be hard to comprehend a world now without The Internet, Blogs and Mobile technology with the immense social and knowledge capital it has delivered, but it may be less difficult to imagine the detrimental impact of a hyper-connected world.

The disadvantages of such technology may be observed through the proliferation of violence, hate and misinformation that our connective technologies can disseminate just as quickly as efficiently as any other data across the network, but to suggest such negative-data is the basis for our hypothetical ceiling is naive, and wrong. All the technologies listed above have been used for violence, hate and misinformation and none of these things represent an upper-boundary for a technologies utility.

Such a boundary, if any, would develop via the “feedback” loop that is created by our hyper-connection. An example of this would be the way in which the internet’s content is indexed. Google’s search algorithm is designed to find, and share, information that is relevant and where possible - accurate. The algorithm was written to reverse-engineer us and our data. How we search and what we are looking for, and how we share. Google’s algorithm applies this methodology to our data and tries to give us what we want. It does this very well, and has been very successful for it.

Now that google is dominant however, a feedback loop exists. Content creators create content for google’s algorithm specifically, and a lot of data, comes from Google itself, and Wikipedia, a well ranked knowledge base. So data goes in, and out, and back in again. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, this is entropic by nature and eventually leads to chaos without external forces to balance this.

Our social data, and our new information is the balancing force. Fresh, relevant content - from our friends, our colleagues and our leaders, all provide inputs into the information ecosystem.

An interesting thing happened to me recently to illustrate the hyper-connected feedback loop. I connected my YouTube, to my Facebook and a handful of other participating, connectable websites. When I interacted with YouTube, this activity was shared to Facebook, and to my Twitter. Through some duplication glitch, my activity was echo’ed repeatedly and randomly over time. Friends would complain about this, which added to the meta-entropy data which continued to cycle through my networks ad infinitum until I took corrective action.

This small example perhaps highlights the beginning of the entropic overlap through hyper-connectivity. Users of Google Buzz are noticing this feedback too, with activity being shared, cross-linked, commented and duplicated over various networks causing some confusion, and some loss of control which manifests as a privacy issue.

Privacy, is the inevitable casually of the hyper-connected world, and the valid reason why many intelligent, rational members of society choose not to participate. As humans, we posses the innate capacity and desire for the shared human experience. As social animals is is natural for us to connect, strongly and emphatically. The limits of this capacity are only now being explored and is it this that will be the foundation of any upper-boundary.

I am reminded in this present state of technology by Douglas Adam’s fictional race from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, who gained the ability to read other’s minds when they weren’t talking out loud, and being suitably personally confronted by this, eventually spoke out loud constantly thereafter, becoming one of the most chatty species in the Galaxy.

I am optimistic however, that we will recognise the potential for feedback and entropy that our hyper-connected world creates, and that our future technology will address and transcend these limitations, perhaps becoming the foundation of the next “age” once information itself reaches it’s cultural and technology apex.

- Dylan O’Donnell B.IT

What an eventful week in the bay. I don’t even need to resort to pithy editorial about the lifestyle-rich, wage-poor region for your reading pleasure, instead here are 3 juicy news morsels for you.

Tragedy this week in Ballina on the South beach, just over the wall. A man jumped into the surf to rescue his wife who had been caught in a rip which ultimately claimed them both, their children helpless on the shore. The community has been left shocked, and reminded of the dangers of powerful ocean which should never be taken for granted. National news media and local collections have been set up to raise some money for the now orphaned children.

In other news, a 3m white pointer was spotted yesterday at Watego’s beach (near the lighthouse) closing the beach temporarily. Sharks are common around Julian Rocks, a popular diving spot off the bay and attacks are rare, but it’s always good to be cautious on such a popular beach!

Finally I just wanted to repost Will Anderson’s recent tweet about the sad end to Ballina’s Big Prawn. He (she?) will be missed greatly. The prawn that is, not Will Anderson.

@Wil_Anderson: News: Ballina’s Big Prawn to be demolished. As a tribute they should throw away the head and the tail first…