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November 1997	End of Year Update Roadshow (tecjhnology update for Apple’s customers in Australia)
June 1997	WWDC Update Roadshow (representing the technologies and strategies of Apple to customers and developers in Australia)
May 1997	WWDC, San Jose
February to April 1997	EasyRider ’97 Roadshow (Internet and Intranet using Apple and Apple-related technology)
January 1997	San Francisco MacWorld

October 1998	Art of Illustration Roadshow: Adobe Systems: Australia and New Zealand
August 1998	Transition to Adobe Systems Pacific as Applications Specialist
June 1998	Re-presentation of Programming WebObjects I Course, Sydney
May 1998-June 1998	WWDC 1998 Update Roadshow, Publishing Update Roadshow
May 1998	Attended WWDC’98, San Jose, California
February 1998	Attended Programming WebObjects I and II course, Cupertino, California. WebObjects is a piece of technology Apple inherited (and still seems to be the forgotten middle child) when it purchased Steve Job’s NeXT, Inc in 1997. WebObjects 3.0 and later uses Java extensively as its programming language. I still miss WebObjects at Adobe …

May 1999	Implementation of Adobe Solutions Network, Service Provider Program
May 1999	Future of Publishing Roadshow (Adobe InDesign, Adobe PressReady, Adobe GoLive, Adobe Acrobat)
February 1999	Adobe Tech Summit, San Jose
January 1999	Adobe Sales Conference, San Francisco

October-November 2000	Stay on the Edge (Photoshop 6) Roadshow. Incorporating special 1.5 hour indepth session
November 2000	Shred the Web Roadshow: South East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia & India) Appearred on CNBC “e” with Keith Lui. Live TV interview (not a prerecord)
August 2000	Adobe Tips, Tricks and Techniques Roadshow, Pacific
July 2000	Transition to Technical Resources Manager, Pacific and South East Asia for Adobe Systems
May 2000	Shred the Web Roadshow: Pacific
May 2000	Assistance to the 3DAP (PDF Guidelines for Magazine Advertising Delivery) in the creation of the “3DAP Guidelines for Digital Advertising Delivery”.
March 2000	Adobe Tips, Tricks and Techniques Roadshow: Pacific

November 2001	Right Tools for the Job Roadshow, incorporating a special “Adobe for Developers Session”
June-August 2001	Assistance to ACP in evaluation of InDesign and Photoshop as a mechanism for changing internal design workflows. Resulted in ACP purchasing InDesign and other Adobe products. InDesign now implemented across all 50+ titles.
May 2001	PacPrint, Melbourne
April 2001	Paid-for events in Singapore, Malaysia and India
February 2001	Premiere 6.0 Roadshow, New Zealand and Australia

Who are the Munge Brothers, & What is this Munge Thing?

pre-Munge Brother Mythology.

Prior to joining Apple Computer Australia, I worked for a reseller in Adelaide, Random Access (Random Access, Adelaide).

In early 1991 I was near a burn-out situation. It reached a point where I told the Manager of the reseller to “get me some help or else!”

Subsequently, RA advertised for another Systems Engineer. There was only one candidate who stood out: Mike Seyfang.

Prior to joining RA, Mike worked at Elders IXL (a pastrol, real-estate and brokerage company) as “End User Computing Manager.” Whatever the hell that meant … see, I was a Apple/Macintosh-centric Systems Engineer with no formal Information Technology/Management Information Systems training. Mike, on the other hand, was had a degree in Chemistry! Now, that was more relevant.

Coming from a Mainframe/PC background, and HyperCard programmer in his spare time, he was the perfect fit.

Mike remembers his first day on the job. It was straight after the Easter long weekend. I had spent it installing Ingres, A/UX and Apple’s Data Access Language on a Macintosh IIci. Without documentation. The aim was to show Mike that “we Apple people knew about serious IT stuff, too.” This weekend of hacking did not impress my wife: she was 6 months pregnant at the time! On his first Tuesday, I sat Mike down and demonstrated Apple’s Data Access Language (DAL – Again, Apple demonstrated it was sooo far ahead and then dropped the ball. RIP) as middleware to link Excel, a query tool and HyperCard to a Unix-based Relational database. Needless to say, Mike was impressed!

The very next day Mike and I flew to Sydney to meet “relevant” people at Apple Australia and other distributors. One of the most important people we visited was the legendary Apple Systems Engineer, Garry Turner. (Garry now works for Cisco). RA’s manager thought it was important to build the relationships early.

Another Gary, Gary Vial – RA’s Travel Agent – booked Mike and I in a hotel in Oxford Street, Sydney. In a twin-room suite. Now, for those of you who do not know Sydney, Oxford Street is in the middle of the gay section of the city. Mike and I had nothing against gay people, but we were both married men with kids (or on the way) — and Mike didn’t really know me at all. When the male receptionist suggested we go to the 10th floor for a relaxing spa — well, poor Mike didn’t know what to think! It didn’t help that there was a dry cleaner outside our window called the “Come Clean Laundry” Hmmm.

There are two distinct memories that I have of this jaunt to Sydney. One was Garry Turner explaining the lay of the Apple landscape. It did not bode well for resellers of Random Access’ ilk *unless* they entered the value-added side of the industry. The other was explaining AppleTalk, AppleTalk routing and networking to Mike on the flight home. Needless to say, a “defining moment” of my career.

Emerge: The Munge Brothers

So, RA had to enter the Consulting business. Thankfully, Unlce Mike (by this time we were calling ourselves Uncle Mike and Uncle Nick) had some experience — and understood all this IT/MIS stuff that Apple people tend to either ignore or hate.

Mike was an excellent mentor. In my career, he was the second to really influence my thinking and challenged me to extend myself. The first is Brian Musker, ex-MIS Manager of the Australian Submarine Corporation, now an IT consultant in the US.

RA’s strategy was to “split” into two: A Consulting business called Random Access Consulting (RAC) and a retail storefront called Simply Mac. At the time, it was a pretty good strategy.

Mike and I were the consultants in RAC. We started out by showing the world the Client/Server – DAL extraveganza above. In the end, we found that while it appealed to the IS/MIS people of the day, it was before its time. Nowadays, everyone uses the ODBC standard to do these sorts of things; Visual Basic to create front ends to relational databases. In mid to late 1991, it was just too much out there.

At around this time, someone named us “The Munge Brothers.” We had a habit of saying ‘munge’ to explain a complex process of changing data into information. Who can forget the magic hat demonstrations? Uncle Mike and I changed hats depending on who we were in the demonstration: an IT bod, an end-user computing type and a manager.

That said, we did convince one customer to create a warehouse of mainframe data on an A/UX box running Oracle RDBMS. The customer created custom front ends in HyperCard to extract data. The data orginated from a MVS-mainframe, and was downloaded via IND$FILE and bulk imported into the database. With data-warehousing all the rage (along with Intranet) — it is sad to realise Mike and I were 5 years too soon. This was to be a common experience…

It Ain’t F**cking Rocket Science!

No, this is not a Munge Brother created quotation. A certain Systems Engineer in Apple Computer Australia’s employ was rumour to have said these immortal 5 words to a non-so-technically literate fellow staff member. The story goes that he was in the midst of a DAL/Client-Server demonstration and became rather frustrated when attempting to explain what was going on.

Needless to say, the Munge Brothers took on the term “Rocket Science” to describe their anticts with technology. It colminated in the now-collectable “Munge Brother/Rocket Science” custom T-Shirts. Of which only three were made – and only worn once – the 1993 Apple Australia Christmas Party hosted by Roy Ramage.

Diversification; or the blue period

In late 1991 I was offered a consultantcy. The project was report on the implications of changing a large AppleTalk Phase 1 network to AppleTalk Phase 2. In the end, I was given a contract to implement the changeover. Now that was a Christmas/New Year break that I won’t forget.

As always with contracts, I was extended for a total of 10 months. This strained relations with the ‘mothership’, RA and RAC. For me personally, I learn much about large organisation politics and management structures. And more importantly, what didn’t work.

In 1992 we gained another Munge Brother, Paul Baily. At the time, Paul was a gifted support engineer at the Australian Submarine Corporation. He compleded the Munge Brother threesome. We added Paul to the team to do some more low level coding work. Mike and I couldn’t cut 68K assembler!

During this period, we also had other people on the RAC team: Dr Charles Hart and Peter Harris.

1992-1993 – Projects Galore

After my sojourn on contact, I re-entered the RAC team with mixed feelings. Being away from your mother-ship on a customer’s site can seriously skew your perspective – and this is a lesson that I have remembered since. For instance, you find it hard to re-establish yourself in the mother organisation and can feel an outsider.

At this time, Unlce Mike started a product called “Councillor.” It was a PowerBook-based agenda management system for Local Governments. Uncle Mike based the solution on FrameMaker and the SGML standard. Looking back, I wish that WWW/HTTP/HTML was around in mid 1992 — it would have been such an easy thing to do with Intranet based technologies.

In 1992 I started the “Macintosh Support Expert Course” — a 3 day intensive course for people supporting Macintoshes. Christmas 1992 was a hoot. The Munge Brothers hosted a Christmas party in our office — and released our now famous “Nightmare on Bent Street” Quicktime movie. Who can forget the “DOS BOX” screaming up the levels at the car park with Jimmy Hendrix’s guitar wailing in the backgound? Stunt driver: Mike, Stunt camera: Nick. Stunt Music: Jimmy Hendrix.

In 1993 we started to diversify our projects. However, there was one project where all three of us collaborated. Due to commercial-in-confidence issues, I cannot name the client — but suffice to say, RAC was in a little over its head. The experience certainly helped us all understand the bounds of our skills, and our ability to expand into alternative platforms.

1994: The End

In 1994, the Munge Brothers, aka RAC split up. First to go was Uncle Mike: he went to Ferntree. Next to go was Uncle Paul. He followed Michelle to Sydney. In early 1995, Nick moved his family to Sydney to join Apple Computer Australia.

In December 1995, Random Access closed its doors. 14 years of history went too. Its sad to realise that the amalgam of people and technologies will never be repeated. In many ways, we were ahead of our time — and if we had stayed together to the present day I am sure we could have kicked butt in the Adelaide IT industry.

Where are they Now?

Nick Hodge: (this page’s author) Technical Resources Manager, Adobe Systems. Mike Seyfang: Consultant, Microsoft Consulting Adelaide Paul Baily: Contractor at large, Brisbane

Honorary Munge Brothers:

Peter Svans, Garry Turner, Dr Charles Hart, Peter Harris.

People we would like to thank:

David Sherrah, Mark Keough, Brian Musker, Kay Lindley, Roy Ramage

Photoshop Tip 1 here

tip 1 in here

watching
nickhodge.com resolves to: 208.97.134.179

Zettai

No Name tags required

Driving familiar streets of Adelaide on Saturday; the names and the faces on buildings have changed – yet the roads still head in the same directions. Names are tags, that sometimes attempt to label, but are generally used to represent “things”, but they are not who we are nor indicate directions we choose in life.

At my first school reunion, name tags were mandatory even as we recognised faces, physical expressions and postures, voices and groupings. Old school nick names that once sounded edgy were now embarrasing and difficult to explain to non-old scholar partners – and the girls who chose to change their maiden names to unknown surnames have only changed in name; not dramatically in personality.

A reunion of this nature is unique life experience. Not one to be missed. It is surprising that it is rarely explored by art; and where nostalgia is thematic, it seems comical rather than cathartic.

It was difficult to tell: was Kevin Richardson, the current Headmaster of Immanuel College, joking when he said he “had checked around” on the class of 1985? I am sure the uncovered opinions of our group would have been mixed. The pride of this school, and any private school, is it facilities. These are paramount in attracting a steady stream of revenue – and they express the educational will of the teaching community. Kevin, coming from a technology background in teaching; seems to have swung Immanuel down the road of modern teaching techniques – a lesson my son’s techno-phobic school could learn.

In the tour of the school grounds, ably spruiked by Kevin with doors unlocked by the famous non-mirrored sunglassed Mr Dawes; one of the few members of administration staff we recognised with some mixed fondness; we all realised that the scale of the operation has changed. As has the method of delivery of classes from our day. Old school: Whiteboards were the mod-device in 1985. New school: 1024×768 LCD projectors. Chalk dust is as ancient as slate boards and wooden hinged desks. The number of vocational classes, and seemingly focus, out weighs the pure academic classes.

Our class of 1985 was sandwiched between the swot-heavy classes of 1983/4 and the active and engaged class of 1986. Our year was the class that experimented with the application of the Pareto principle as it came to high school education. For 80% of the class, 20% of the effort was applied to schoolwork. The other 80% of the time was spent in other activities which ultimately had a greater positive outcome on who they became.

The attendence rate directly reflected the class Pareto principle. Roughly 80% of the class turned up. For a minority, it was the first time they were drinking alcohol on school grounds in the shadow of the former boarding houses. Those who were not there were remembered in words and stories. Classic events, bustups, inadvertent animal sacrifice and pairings reanimated personalities. Many stories, left unsaid and untouched, remain in the collective experiences.

“So what have you been up to?”, when first asked, is a frightening question. Stupidly and strangely, I had not prepared a PR talk track and 15 second elevator pitch to intelligently answer this question; to achieve any formal goals of comparison. Mumbling some words; attempting not to be a bloke and focus only on the work and provide an element of family colour; yet knowing that this aspect provides the shapes that explains who you have evolved into.

Twenty years is a perfect interval to reconnect with old school acquaintances. There has been more “after school life” that outweighs the ackwardness of of the teenager that lives inside us all. Family, experiences, relationships, travel and raw maturity provides an ability to shroud the embarrassment with intruiging small talk to fill 6-7 hours.

Yes, Immanuel is the school that Lleyton Hewitt attended; the sheer number of tennis courts is probably the core reason he chose the school. Yes, this class sprouted a Miss Australia. restauranteurs, respected tradesmen, vegetable based protein manufacturers, standard grey-haired business-types, two PhDs and a bevy of dedicated mothers of largish broods. Success, if gauged only by an ability for self-support and an ability to not be a burden on others – has been kind to this class.

According to Dawkin’s, “The Selfish Gene”, the meaning of life is to re-spawn more life and perpetuate DNA. Therefore, the topic parenthood was usually an immediate question to assist in generating conversation. Many had braved three children; others speak of staying at home with their children, and working “0.8” weeks. Adelaide, in comparison to Sydney, is the perfect location for detuning from a pure career ladder of a economically fulfilling yet soul draining lifestyle.

Putting it scientifically, the desire to reproduce, partner and perpetuate DNA is a driver close to the surface of all teenagers. Another unspoken activity at reunions is the evalutation of our teenage crushes/hormones/pairings to determine if our mental wiring had chosen an appropriate potential mate. A few had made very appropriate choices of partners early. A surprising few were single.

Many of the class have started to spawn their own future students. There is a surprisingly large number of the group who have chosen to live in the Immanuel side of town, and send their children to the school. There is some business planner at the Immanuel that must model these figures with an eye to future revenue from old scholar parents. As a parent, it’s difficult enough to converse with your child’s teachers, let alone in send your children to a school you attended in your distant youth.

Another measurement of success is living up to the spark of potential first shown at school. I have always wondered if teachers can foretell the potential of the students in their class; and live in wonder of their results. Not enough teachers from our time arrived to ask this question and test the hypothesis.

Mr Volk, or should I say “Noel”, popped over to say hello. His first question is a question that will echo for some time: so are you a journalist or in IT? There was an air of inferiority on “IT”, or at least I wasn’t living up to a previously unforseen potential. Personally, I never viewed doing the school’s magazine as a journalistic job; nor as it as a path to future career success. English wasn’t a subject I felt passionately about to complete in Year 12/Matric, but it was a small moment of pride seeing people reading a 1985 Echo that contains your fingerprints. I sort of fell into the magazine job in an vain-glorious effort towards self-promotion. Everyone else on the team did the hard yards. That is why IT is the perfect home for me; standing on the shoulders of giants.

The age from 12 to 17 is difficult for all. Apart from the obvious physical changes, our worldview emerges yet it seems the fundamental nature of people is there to see. Look at a 16/17 year old, and you will see 80% of their future self. Yes, there are many experiences and more education to come – but the adult they are to become is just there. There are more than just shadows and echoes of their school self in the adults I met.

This class reunion, for me, was more than a mechanism for measuring our personal life choices against our peers – it was a good cathartic mechanism for extinguishing regret. Rather than dwelling on the past, it permits us to refind old friends and let the intervening years of disconnect fall away. These are classic pure friends that are untainted by the mud of a working relationship and the shared age group of our collective children.

If anything was to be learnt from this weekend’s experience, is that I will become a better parent of a teenager – and see the future potential in the sparks of the next few years; the mirror of others and the memories of life blurred by time has been cleared a little – and I am able to lay a collection of personal mnenomic demons to rest.