Tag: Memory

  • A Big Day

    A Big Day

    It only makes sense that exactly three years (to the day) after doing my very first video on YouTube, I would cross the threshold of actually earning real money from Google. Let me tell you the story.

    For a little over a year, starting on July 4, 2011, I had been writing on my blog (which still exists to this day). December 1st, 2012, I made my first YouTube video, a Google+ Hangout live chat with my good friend, Carolyn Higman. You can go watch it, the quality of the video is relatively embarrassing, and a lot has changed since then.

    The first time I exposed my face to the world, three years ago to the day.

    As a point of comparison, here is the latest episode of Future Chat, recorded this past weekend:

    Over the years, a lot has changed. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that I still love teaching, helping, writing, and learning about technology. Here’s a brief timeline of my milestones on the internet.

    July 4, 2011 – I start Living In The Future, my blog, on my birthday. I published the first post the following day.

    December 1, 2012 – My first Google+ Hangout on Air.

    January 14, 2013 – I agree to begin work with Sons of Pluto, a band with my friends. Work includes recording their practices, shows, building their website, making promo videos, and running their social media accounts. Those guys are now working on an EP!

    February 7, 2014 – The first Future Tech Chat takes place. This is the spiritual successor to the first Hangout on Air from 2012, and the podcast continues on a weekly basis to this day under the more general “Future Chat“.

    March 27, 2014 – I make the first Attrell Update video. My sister and I go on to exchange videos on a weekly (or almost weekly) basis until December of 2014.

    May 20, 2014 – The first episode of Ottawhat is released, after Keegan, Amaan and I decide we should start an Ottawa-themed podcast about people.

    December 14-16, 2014East Meets West and Feedback debut, also marking the formal launch of UnwindMedia.com, a media network that is the home of my Internet-related work so far.

    November 5, 2015Ottawhat News, a satirical look at events around Ottawa, has it’s first viral post. In just a few days, over 65,000 people read about Peter Hayes and the Bier Markt.

    December 1, 2015 (Today) – In an inevitability of time, math, and fortune, Unwind Media finally passes the threshold for being paid real money for ads on the sites I run. It is now just a matter of time  now until a cheque from Google arrives. It’s not a lot of money, but it feels extremely good to hit that threshold.

    I really love making things, and being creative. I’ve been doing it for over 4 years and I’m more excited now than I ever have been. I’m looking really hard for a job right now, and the stuff I do on the side is the only thing keeping me sane at the moment, as it’s one creative outlet I have amidst filling out applications and writing cover letters.

  • The “Honeymoon” Phase of #JuliaRoberts2015

    The “Honeymoon” Phase of #JuliaRoberts2015

    Getting married has honestly been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. The idea of committing ones-self to only one other person for the rest of your life seems like the kind of thing that would be terrifying, but so far I have been completely fine with it.

    “The One Where They Got Married” #juliaroberts2015
    Posted by Jacquie Watkins on Saturday, July 25, 2015

    Even though the day-to-day events of Julia’s and my life since we got married are basically unchanged (finalizing wedding stuff obviously notwithstanding), everything feels very different. Getting home and seeing Julia’s beautiful, smiling face is that much nicer, going and running errands as she recovers from her excellent party on Saturday feels like no effort at all. I know we’re still fully in the “honeymoon” phase of the marriage, but I think we are both acutely aware of the fact that this is going to take work. More importantly, Julia and I should easily be able to put aside our minor squabbles and disagreements, and focus on what really matters, our life together and our mutual happiness.

    We are still fully entrenched in post-wedding business, like writing thank yous to everybody who was SO generous this past week, with their time and with their love, and our friends and family have proven to us just how much they care about our future together. I can’t wait to get started!

    At what point do we change #JuliaRoberts2015 to #JuliaRobertsForever?

  • Bliss (The Aftermath of #JuliaRoberts2015)

    Bliss (The Aftermath of #JuliaRoberts2015)

    Wow. There is nothing like a wedding to make a guy feel loved. I have about a billion thoughts and feelings going through my head right now, and I need about 4 more hours of sleep than I got last night, but it has all been so incredibly worth it.

    I’m going to need several weeks or even months to process this past weekend, and to sort out all the thank yous, acknowledgements, and hugs that my friends, family and everybody else deserve for helping to make Saturday the best day I’ve had, ever. This won’t be the last thing I write on the matter, and today it won’t even be very long. Due to the incredible depth of my distraction in the last week, my work has been somewhat neglected, so I’ll be focusing hard on making sure everything I need to do is complete before going on the honeymoon next week.

    I just want to say I am so very grateful to everybody in my life for the incredible amount of support, friendship, love and kindness I’ve received in the last week. I will never forget the way I felt and still feel; I have a blessed life.

    Pictures are just starting to trickle in, you can check out Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to see what people have been putting up. I’m just so excited to see what adventures will come next for Julia and myself!

    A photo posted by Brian (BL) (@mystical_wizard) on Jul 25, 2015 at 11:23am PDT
  • Share your favourite thing about Julia, and your best Taylor Swift memory for #Taylorette1989!

    Share your favourite thing about Julia, and your best Taylor Swift memory for #Taylorette1989!

    Hey friends and readers, July 6 is coming up fast! If you need to get up to speed, check out this post. For the next phase of #Taylorette1989, I’m asking everybody to share something about Julia telling Taylor why she deserves an extra-special bachelorette party, and also telling me about their favourite memory involving Taylor Swift. Either make your own video, or write it down and share your memories along with #Taylorette1989.

    As for me, if you aren’t going to watch the video above, I think that Julia is by far the nicest person I know. I love her so much, she’s sweet, smart, beautiful, and she is the world’s biggest Taylor Swift fan. My favourite Taylor Swift moment has to be singing along to Taylor’s album in the car with Julia, but seeing her perform in Toronto, with fireworks and a packed Rogers Centre is a very close second.


    If you don’t have a memory or something about Julia to share, please consider using the sharing buttons under the video to like or share the video! Thanks!
  • On Memory

    On Memory

    It’s been a while since I did a good old fashioned blog post.

    I’ve been doing a lot of hard-core thinking about big ideas the last couple of years, trying to figure out the best way to explore my thoughts on things that are really important to me but are hard to talk about in everyday conversation without people not wanting to hang out with you any more.

    The brain is a beautiful thing. Don’t waste it!

    However, today’s topic should only be tangentially related to this, and has more to do with the way my memory seems to have changed over the last few years, basically since I had what I consider full adulthood.

    I have always been told I have a pretty good memory, and I do have the somewhat uncanny ability to recall random facts from way deep down in my consciousness. It’s a fun party trick, until I overdo it and come off as pedantic or weird. Fact can only be so certain, and everything is subject to logical and never-ending scrutiny.

    It’s also worth considering that memory is a muscle, and things we don’t think about or which don’t fit into the world-view or thoughts we have tend to be forgotten or dismissed pretty quickly.

    For instance, I have heard that the healthiest way to drink bottled water is to purchase a bottle, empty the water inside (because that water has been slowly getting contaminated by the plastic in the bottle), refill the bottle with purified tap water from the nearest sink, and drink the new water. I heard that from a reputable source, but there are so many factors that go into determining the validity of a fact like that, there’s no quick and easy way to prove to somebody that it’s true. We also don’t know much about contaminants in plastic and what quantities would prove dangerous, with effects that might take 10-20 years to build up enough to notice adverse health effects or cancers.

    What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, memory.

    So, memory has been fickle with me of late. I’ve been told I have a really hard time remembering things, and maybe that’s true. But more often these days, I find that what really happens to me is that my memory of something actually stores multiple similar but distinct copies of something. I’m not sure precisely why that is, but I find it very interesting. To give you an example, say I am trying to make dinner plans with a group of friends, or even just one other person to keep it simpler. I might ask “What time would you like to do dinner? 5:30, or 6 PM?”. The person responds telling me that 6 works better for them, but then 20 minutes later, they tell me that upon consideration, 5:30 would actually be more suitable.

    What happens to me and my memory in this scenario? I create a memory to store the dinner plans I’m making, and I open a mental slot in my schedule for the evening in question. When they answer 6 PM, I store that in the dinner plans memory, kind of like a sticky note, and promptly stop thinking about it. Later, when I get the news of different plans for 5:30, I have to go back, find that original memory, and what ends up happening is that I put a new mental sticky note on the original plan.

    When I revisit the original memory to remind myself what time we’re having dinner, I find the memory with two sticky notes attached. I vividly remember making dinner plans, I can recall asking about times, but for the life of me, I cannot think about the 5:30 memory and the 6:00 memory and recall which is the more recent, and therefore accurate, memory.

    I don’t think this means that I have a bad memory, and maybe it’s more to do with the WAY I store memories and think about things than anything else, but this does cause real confusion in my life, and it leads people to believe that I’m forgetful, or not paying attention, when in fact having TOO much memory tends to be the cause of my problems.

    For a long time in the history of life on Earth, there hasn’t been much reason to remember things in order temporally, unless there is a strong emotion associated with a stimulus. When humans were in real danger from animals on a regular basis, knowing that sounds of shifting grass in a field meant that a lion was about to pounce might save your life. However, in our society today, we don’t get a lot of stimulus like that, and so there isn’t a lot of opportunity to tie survival to memory.

    Most of what humans “learn” when it comes to memory these days comes from repetition, It doesn’t help much with things like remembering if dinner was at 5:30 or 6 PM, or whether you wanted to eat our at a restaurant or stay in, but it can certainly come in handy when you’re talking about exercise, eating healthy, or taking out the garbage. We’re creatures of habit, and slow and steady wins the race.