The View From My Bicycle (COLUMN)

It wasn't long after the year of Big Brother, 1984, that I got my first computer - a ZX Spectrum. It looked like an oversized calculator, not much bigger or different looking than the modern Blackberry. It had the same thing where you had to type one key three times to get from a to c. The thrill wore off pretty quickly, and I transitioned from there to the Commodore 64. It basically looked like a keyboard on steroids. I had a lot of fun on Steroids...er...the commodore, and played some super games, including Revenge of the Mutant Ninja Camels. It was an early faceoff between Atari gaming and computing power, and computers won. I still do not believe Xbox, playstation AND WII will ultimately win the game platform thing...

Anyway, going into high school I remember reading some of Microsoft's very first books...instructions on BASIC (a computer programming language) and HTML...and I remember spending an entire weekend programming code that was supposed to render as a ball bouncing across the screen. And it didn't work. I went back and checked every single digit, every space, everything. Still wouldn't render. Went back again and again and again...and ultimately...it defeated me. I chucked computers for about 5 years - the fact that the family wanted to watch TV (the TV was my monitor) didn't help...and so what started off as a huge headstart on my peers in school didn't really materialise.

I sort of made a mini comeback by zooting off to the most wired country in the world, where I started blogging. At that stage the word was virtually unknown in SA, and people were likely to confuse it with the word 'gob'. "Oh, you've started gobbing....you mean when you go jogging..."
And jogging had a lot to do with blogging. I actually started blogging on a social network called Beginner Triathlete,and then decided I wanted to record my Ironman journey (the workouts, the heart rates, etc) in my own space.

It may sound arrogance and even conceited, but Bill Gates and I have something in common which is more interesting than anything else - it's certainly not something to trumpet about too loudly:
"People in the computer world saw that he was a derivative, that there (were) other trailblazers before him," Rivlin said. "Microsoft's great gift, his great gift, was that he was a great imitator."
I am the same in the sense that I see something and want to use it in my own movie. So I'm not as strictly creative as I seem, but that said, I'm a damn sight more creative than the average person who thinks they have creative talent. That's my humble opinion.

Shakespeare, by the way, is the same. Much of his inspiration came from plagiarising other stuff. You can say that makes Shakespeare a fraud - I say the magic is in the mix, and if you can't render something in the best way, what is wrong with someone who takes your idea further and does that. This happened with Superman - whose inventors lost faith in the franchise and died penniless - meanwhile...the franchise has roared forth making buckets of frothing cash.

And so here we are, post Matrix, post 9/11, post atom bombs, living in a time that is so far beyond normal it's disturbing. The View From My Bicycle is of a world with a lot of potential to love and embrace and sparkle. Unfortunately, the great gloom of our ignorance make our collective prospects rather grim. I wish I could wave a magic wand and show how and why we will find ourselves at $500 oil in just a few years. But you know, I taught high school kids, impressionable kids, economics and even 16 year olds didn't want to accept the possibility of $100. I preached the gospel of $100 oil at the end of 2006. If I had been taken seriously then, perhaps some lunch money could have been set aside...yeah right. I don't bullshit myself that it makes much of a difference either way.

I do believe the most important thing is for the world's population to begin to prepare psychologically for some difficult times. We can train our bodies, and our minds, and initative collective adaptation - even if it is much further down the road.
In the meantime, the best way to take care of ourselves is by beginning to think of ways to take care of others. And a great way to start is by spending less time inputting ourselves and our attention spans into machines (TV, cellphones, computers, DVD players, movies and all the rest) and investing in more one on one time first with ourselves, and once we can pull that off, and then by turning our bleary eyed focus on our fellow shipmates. We are about to become children in a Peter Pan fairy tale that involves Captain Hook, crocodiles, and our ships tossed by stormy seas...

Oh and by the way, my 'Oil' story is currently ranked number 1 on Ohmynews, with the 'Climate' having just entered the top ten.