D-Day is almost upon us with both a Clever Convention (11th March) and the first Hack-Your-Head (12 March) workshop approaching fast. Clever Convention promises to be very exciting as we have Dr. Sophie Billa coming in to talk about Neuroscience, brain structure and how disease and drugs effect the brain, while I'll be rambling on about memory and demonstrating some mental memory gymnastics. The Hack Your Head workshop will introduce some basic memory systems and the theories behind how we remember things. From this workshop the participants will come away with two great systems for memorising things and a better understanding how memories are stored (hopefully!). On another more personal note, I have just started a full time degree in Industrial Design and have discovered that my brain leaks. It's not a physical thing, but it turns out that when you try and ram information into your head without suitable ordering, bits leak out and become less defined, which is very frustrating. Currently I am working on a way to do some mental housekeeping every evening before bed just to have a tidy up, store away the non-immediate items and list and prioritise everything for the next day. I guess this is essentially a form of pre-meditation to prepare yourself for a spotless mind. I'll just add that to the to do list (memory image: on my sofa next to a fat little Buddha who is polishing a brain...)  

While doing a little research on the origins of the 'Method of Loci' I cam across some articles on caffeine versus brain performance, that I though were worth a read, seeing how the staff at the Edge (with a few exceptions) are all caffeine junkies.... Apparently there are optimal levels of caffeine intake which promote learning and work levels, while decreasing fatigue, BUT.... it turns out that caffeine promotes more frontal cortex functions for simple tasks and can actually inhibit some other learning functions. One of the favorite quotes on the topic was ' Caffeine is like putting a block of wood under your brains brake peddle'. Here's some links to the articles: Caffeine: A User’s Guide to Getting Optimally Wired What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain More about Caffeine and Memory Must be time for a coffee....

John from Project24 took some time to chat to Old Fashion, who were performing as part of project24 for the month. Read a little more about the band and take a look at their beautiful live performance, captured by John and the Project24 team. Take a moment to introduce your band – who are your members, how did you meet, how long have you been a band? Who are your influences? We are a 4 piece Brisbane band that strives ourselves on being a ‘live’ band. We have JJ Cole on vocals and guitar, Dave Cole on guitars, Dan Cowley on bass and Sam Johnston on drums. We draw influence by those making ‘real’ music. We all have slightly altered perceptions of this, but mainly: The Darkness, Biffy Clyro, Guns N Roses, Band of Skulls, The Raconteurs and Karnivool (quite the shamozal). How do we know each other? Well, the two Cole boys are cousins and have played with each other in different bands for many years. We also all went to school together and now ¾ of us live together. Old Fashion has had a pulse for about 2 years now. How did you get involved in Project24? We met John from Blueroom Productions/Project24 at a mutual friend's wedding. JJ and Dave were doing the ceremony music and John ‘liked’ what he saw (apparently) and we liked John’s ‘get-up’, so basically it was love at first sight. We had a lot of trust in what John had planned for Project24 and we were happy to be the first cab off the ranks. What's the best show you have played? This is difficult to answer as it differs between each member. Probably one we can settle on was at the Byron Bay Brewery recently in August ’13 - we had to entertain the crowd for 2 hrs and the response was unexpected and humbling. We drew so much energy from that crowd, despite it being outside our hometown. Recommend one band or artist from the local music scene? Guards of May. They draw you in with their ‘tightness’ and musicianship. When you watch them, you kind of forget where you are for a moment. Great tunes. Where else about town can we find you? Our next gig is at Tempo bar on Saturday 8th March. Planned new single release tour coming soon. You can also find us in all your favourite places on the internet: WEBSITE: thebandoldfashion.com FACEBOOK: facebook.com/oldfashionmusic TRIPLE J UNEARTHED: triplejunearthed.com/oldfashion YOUTUBE: youtube.com/thebandoldfashion Watch Old Fashion's performance as part of Project24.

As part of the Hack Your Head workshop series, I will be exploring how to super charge your memory. While preparing the various activities I have been dragging the Edge's wonderfully compliant staff into my various mental shenanigans and in return have been set two challenges... Challenge 1: Shopping list - Today I've been given 20 items to memorise. This list will be added to by 10 more items every day I'm at the edge (twice a week). Challenge 2: Memorise Pi to 78 decimal places (ouch) Challenge Accepted! I'll be using the Buzan Self Enhancing Master Memory Matrix (SEM3) to memorise all these items. If your interested in learning this, book a spot in our Hack Your Head Workshop, which hopefully will be Mid-March.

Dan Cook is our new Hack Catalyst. He's already causing trouble around the office (we now have a Daniel, Daniele, Daniel and Dan on the team), and proposing weird and wacky workshops (toy dissections, anyone?), but we're looking forward to working with him over the Hack period. I sent through some questions to see if we could get a little goss and get to know him better. What was your role before you came to The Edge? And before that? And before that? Before The Edge I was a ‘Solutions Manager’ for a large video company, before that a Technical Production Manager for a government Arts venue, before that, Managing Director at D-Tek Industries manufacturing lighting/video convergence products based around my own patent, and before that a freelance international lighting technician touring the world with rock and roll bands! Have you ever lived overseas? What were you doing? Travelling? Studying? Stowing away in the holds of a ship? I’m from England originally and have been in Australia for eight years now. I was a victim of the great Australian conspiracy to send over the Australian women folk to bring back English gene stock. Kind of like an Australian multicultural Aryan race but with bad teeth and a penchant for Marmite. Do you have a piece of advice or a motto that helps you make decisions in life? Being the Hack catalyst I feel it should be something profound like “You don’t own it until you’ve hacked it’, but it’s probably more like “I’m just going to let my subconscious work on this while I do something fun instead…” Do you have any hobbies or interests? Collections? Unusual ways you like to spend a Thursday evening? I have been renovating a 1965 VW Beetle and turning it into an electric car, which has turned into a very long term project now that I’m also renovating my house and trying to raise two children! Ah, Priorities…. I also spend a lot of time tinkering with 3D printers, electronics, growing ridiculously hot chillies, building things and planning for the zombie apocalypse. When you open your web browser what are the first three tabs you open up? Wired, Geekologie and XKCD Smartphone or snail mail? Either way, any favourite stamps or favourite apps? Smart phone. I have a half dozen different email addresses so having them all in one place is good. Also paper waste annoys me as it doesn’t compost well when it’s UV laminated. I’m seriously considering booby trapping my letter box. If you were to give me $10 I would spend it on 4 sets of 5 vibration motors from china for haptic feedback If you were to give me $1000 I would spend it on a beat up ‘70’s Landrover Defender to turn into a zombie apocalypse escape vehicle. Mac or PC? Both. At the same time. Keep an eye on what Dan's up to by following him on the blog.

Hi! So this is my first post as the new ‘Hack’ Catalyst at The Edge. For two days a week for the next six months I’ll be working on things to hack, crack,warp and modify. This is going to be great because this is pretty much what I spend my life doing anyway… So to kick off the next six months I thought I’d start investigating what we mean by hacking and how it applies to the world around us. Initial thoughts on the topic are to examine hacking consumer electronics, hacking in a sixth sense and hacking my head (not trepanning). “What? No computer hacking?” I hear you cry? Well, there will be a Clever Convention on Online security and we are trying to track down a hacker, but as for the ‘Hacking Banks 101’, well, let’s just see how we go shall we? In the ‘consumer electronics hacking’ area I will be investigating what devices are out there that can be hacked for fun and (feature) gain. We’ll also look at how to re-purpose things to provide low cost solutions to high(er?) cost problems. However, this may just turn into adding lasers to robots or making household appliances tweet… I will also be looking to augment my normal five senses with some additional ones in the ‘hacking a sixth sense’ workshops. These are likely to be senses such as magnetic awareness (built in compass like birds), EMF, ultrasonic hearing and other ‘extra-sensory’ additions that can built around a small microprocessor for wear-ability and hook up to some kind of haptic feedback system. The ‘Hack your head’ topic shall entail using various memory systems to increase my memory and fill my head with lots of (possibly useless) information. I’ll also be looking at speed reading and mental mathematics to see if the use of these techniques regularly over the next six months results into turning me into a some kind of super-brain. There is the distinct possibility that the combination of these things will cause my brain to either explode or dribble out my ears. I’ll also try and hack my behavior through Cognitive Behavior Therapy to blog regularly, but this may be one of the hardest things I do this year….

Greetings. I’ll keep this brief for once. It’s my second last week here at The Edge and I feel like my time here has gone by incredibly fast. I cannot attest the same for Beck and Tegan whom, having received the brunt of my rambunctious (and more often than not cringe-worthy) behaviour, are probably ready to break open the champagne. Speaking of champagne, today was the last day for Sally so it was only fitting that we had some bubbly and cupcakes for lunch. Sophie and I thought that it was possibly a cruel joke, building up our expectations of ‘the real world’. Where else does your supervisor caution you to stop working as it’s time for cake? Cake has been a good friend to me this week given that I’ve returned to editing the first three case studies that I wrote up. It’s not that I don’t like editing; it’s just that I resent it for forcing me to look back at my own work, which I can never really come around to liking. (I’m fairly certain I briefly touched on this in an earlier post.) Beck has also been friendly throughout the editing process having substituted her red pen for a less soul-smushing blue Staedtler. She’s still trying to beat the commas out of me (they’re my last wall of defence); fortunately I think that as a result some of her masterful ways are rubbing off. Once again one of my biggest challenges was cutting down several paragraphs into a matter of lines. Four lines to be precise. It started off being quite difficult but became easier as I grew better at identifying the most important information. And I have to admit that seeing a page full of equal length paragraphs was quite rewarding. That’s it.

So in September our programming intern Matthew ran a workshop on how to to make resonators that remove trapped bass frequencies found in performance rooms. Participants walked away with a set of 3 resonators. The workshop was a great success but if you couldn't make it to the workshop here is a link on how to make them yourself.    

Yesterday was the official start of my second half of interning. Due to some university jibber-jabber regarding my course, I was required to alter the focus of my position for the second half of my stay, and as such, now have a bigger focus on writing content. As I said in last week's post, I'll be beginning with writing up some case studies for the future website, the first of which was The Zombie Apocalypse series. Between 2011-12, The Edge held three different Zombie Amockalypses, with the prototype, Future Cities: Zombie Climate Apocalypse, stemming from the 2011 Fringes Ideas Festival. The focus of The Edge's undead debut was equally divided between surviving zombies and the environmental conditions of a hypothetically greenhouse-gassed planet. From there the program evolved with the influence of the Gaming programming period, and for the final two 'Outbreaks' the focus was cast upon the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) perspective.  Workshops were delivered prior to the final instalment, showing participants how to zombify themselves (make-up) and get the most bang for bullet out of their NERF guns. One of my favourite parts about reading up on the program was stumbling across survey responses (a part of the application process to participate as a survivor/'player'), particularly for the question: As you are fleeing your house, you pause to gather three things. What are they? Answers varied from, 'Clothes, Food and my copy of Kevin Costner's Water World, limited collectors edition', to 'Whiskey, the horse and string cheese'. These photos are just a few of the hundreds taken, if you want to see more I'd suggest checking out the Future Cities: Zombie Climate Apocalypse Facebook page. Amongst all the writing about zombies, I did manage to sneak in a go on Mick's Banana Piano. Unfortunately I can't really offer any explanation as to how it works. But essentially Mick (Programming team) had hooked up a bunch of wires to separate sections of banana, and then plugged those wires into his computer. With each different section of banana that I prodded, a different animated banana would jump out of its skin (fair enough really) and give an Autotuned scream.  The closest I can surmise to how it actually operates is that the wires project the bananas' sunglasses-wearing souls onto the computer screen and that's why they scream when I touch them. Please let me know if you have any technologically informed alternative suggestions.  

Hello again. Mid-way through week three I finally got my State Library ID (sky-punch!). Instantly, my credibility, acceptability, and I daresay vanity, are through the roof (the lime-green background really contrasts nicely with my awesomeness. Some disagree — colour-blind fools!). No more negotiating access with the cleaners! No more awkward inaudible intercom interactions! The possibilities are endless. Alas, I’m still yet to acquire printing privileges. (Slowly but surely I will build their trust...). Speaking of privileges, this week I was also instated as an editor for The Edge’s WordPress, as my workload this week included editing, editing, proof-reading and editing. This made for some interesting results. For those of you who aren’t familiar with WordPress (those such as myself), when creating a new post you can either view it under a ‘visual’ or a ‘text’ tab. The former shows it as it will appear — usually — and things like bold or italicised text and images will be shown. However the latter shows everything thing in text — what I’ve been told is HTML. To provide further context, and to elaborate on the ‘tasks’ I mentioned early, I’ve spent this week solely editing the blogs of the Residents and Catalysts here at The Edge. With the 39-page State Library style guide in hand, I set out on a crusade of correction, ‘em’ dashing instead of ‘en’ dashing and capitalising the ‘t’ in The Edge. But back to my experience with HyperText Markup Language (or possibly more apt: Hurting Tegan’s Mind for Laughs), which has proven thus far to be a worthy adversary. So worthy in fact, that it’s given me a comprehensive ass-whoopin. The last time I had anything to do with HTML was in high school, when I wanted to make my Myspace page cool. (I have a sneaking suspicion that my incompetency with HTML directly correlated with my lack of friends. Then again, maybe not.) So naturally I managed to mutilate almost every blog I touched on one level or another — there were mysterious spaces after links, text rendering had a mind of its own, and paragraph and line spacing were non-existent. Thankfully, Tegan managed to solve it and re-introduced me to my first bit of HTML, with what is known as a ‘paragraph tag’ [pærəˌgrɑːf - tặ/g/]. Aside from generally sabotaging them, the blogs gave me an awesome insight into the kinds of projects that are going on behind the 'behind the scenes' at The Edge. Anyway, I’m off to whisper sweet-nothings to my State Library pass — and then to laminate it so I can wear it in the shower...