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Shark!

A few weeks ago we organised a public speaking workshop for the whole of Clearleft. A lovely chap called "Alex Marshall":http://www.alexmarshall.com/ hosted the workshop, and asked us all to give a 5 minute presentation to the rest of the team. Each session was video recorded and then played back to help us see what we're doing well and what we're doing badly. I've been a dive instructor for several years, and have worked as a safety diver on shark feeds in the Great Barrier Reef. I've dived with all sorts of sharks in my time, from little white tip reef sharks in Thailand to schools of over 50 hammerheads in the South China seas. There is nothing like jumping in the water with a top level predator to get the heart racing. However my first ever experience of a shark underwater was dead, laying on the bottom of the ocean with it's fin cut off. Shark meat isn't worth much, so it's quite common to slice the fins off a living shark and then throw it back in the water to slowly drown. As such, I chose to do my talk on the terrible shark finning trade around the world.

The Defining Culture of the Naughties?

So another year has gone and we've only got a couple left till the end of the "naughties" and the start of a new decade. Ever since the second world war, each decade has been typified by it's own unique culture, usually a combination of the music and fashion of the day. These cultural movements start small and localised, but the popular ones thrive and get transported round the world via movies, radio, magazines and TV. Prior to the war, cultural movements did exist. They just were more localised and look longer to propagate due to the lack of mass media.

On Experts and Expertise

We currently live in a world dominated by experts. You only have to open a newspaper or switch on the television to see experts giving pronouncements on everything from parenting to the economy. In a world of multifarious complexities, the need for such experts is clear. We need experts to filter the huge flow of information and simplify it into something more digestible.

The Real Tao of Deadlines

The beauty of Taoism is that it's a very holistic belief system. Rather than setting down rules and doctrines, Taoism focuses on the natural order of the universe. Nature has it's own pace, so rather than struggling against the flow, Taoism teaches us to move with it. After all, a young sapling will bend with the wind while the mighty oak gets torn from its roots. Sometimes nature is an unstoppable force and the only way to survive is to understand it's core essence and be flexible. The same could be said of many a web design project.

Freediving at the SETT

As some of you already know, I'm a qualified PADI dive instructor, and spent a good part of my twenties travelling around Asia, teaching people to dive. During the surface intervals, me and some of my colleague would jump off the side of the boat to practice our breath hold diving. We started just by finning down, but quick progressed to variable weight diving where we'd grab hold of a weight belt to pull us down, and then haul it up afterwards. We weren't very good, and I've later found that this practice was also quite dangerous, but it was fun and killed some time.

5 Things You Didn't Know About Me

# I can eat and breathe fire # I was flying planes solo before I was old enough to drive # I've dived on an active, underwater volcano # I lived in a tent for a whole summer while surfing in Devon # I helped set up a dive shop in Thailand when I was 27