I’m a friendly and loving geek, a budding photographer, a little bit of a programmer. I also spend my spare time organising, filming, and editing films with
Rodney Twelftree.

I own and run Grey Phoenix Productions, which is a small multimedia company that enjoys studio portrait and wedding photography, plus website design and hosting, although usually has at least one film project on the go.

The many clones of Michael

Religion : I’m too philosophical to have a religion, although classify myself as Atheist, I still get a kick out of Venganza.

Current Interests :
Photography - Especially studio portrait, modelling, weddings, and photoshop fun.
Website Design – Especially hand coded dynamic websites using HTML + CSS + PHP.
Webhosting – I run a Virtual Linux server in America through Quantact, plus a backup server at home, and enjoy the scripting, admin, and reliability that goes with it.
Film Production – Camera work, SFX, Editing, Sound recording, DVD authoring, just about everything but acting. I have a Canon XL1 video camera, which allows for very nice quality SD footage.

Past Interests :
Electronics & Robotics – Especially Pic Microcontroller based, although also used Lego Mindstorms, and even competed in Italy at the International Robocup Challenge.
3D Animation - I still want to get back into this, but haven’t had the time. I primarily used 3D Studio Max v4, and loved playing with particle effects, including Aura, and Glue3D but would like to learn Houdini and Blender given the chance.
Compositing – While I’ve played around with Combustion, and had a brief look at After Effects, I am still looking for a good compositing application when I start integrating SFX and 3D with live action.
Aviation – Getting my Private Pilots License before I could drive taught me a lot about weather, navigation, and also gave me the confidence to tackle nearly anything, even if it was expensive for someone still at high school. One day I would love to get my Aerobatics rating in a glider.
Running – I competed in the 100Km relay 3 times at school, and have done multiple City to Bay fun runs. I thank my Dad for the encouragement, and perseverance while we trained together.

Michael Kubler - with creepy eyes.

Suggested Watching :

• Zeitgeist Addendum – A very informative documentary/movie about the current Money as Debt system, and how it makes it almost impossible under the current system to have an economy that can co-exist with the environment. It also shows how corrupt the system is. After watching the movie I immediately purchased the domain ‘moneyasvalue.com‘, which has a mailing list for people interested in discussing possible ways of nicely converting over to a resource based economy, instead of debt based.
  For those that want a higher resolution version than the Google Video link, I have a 1GB high resolution version here, but do note that it is a very large file.
• An inconvenient truth. I don’t know how much is actually truth, but even if CO2 isn’t directly related to global warming, we can still kill ourselves from excessive air pollution, not to mention we’ve already passed peak oil.

Suggested Reading :

Sophies World. A great introduction to philosophy, and some of the early, prominent philosophers. The novel itself has some good twists in it, and it helped to really open my mind when I was younger. In fact, I read this in primary school, and it introduced me to the idea of Atoms through Democritus‘ ideals, before being taught the scientific way at High School. This book is really a must read for anyone who has not already studied philosophy, or who has the inquiring mind to ask ‘Where do we come from?‘, and ‘Who are we?‘.

Cradle to Cradle. This book is a great start to changing the way industry creates things.