"I would request that my body, in death, be buried, not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

I used to do all my checking, savings, and have my main credit card with HSBC in Sydney and in NYC. I have a good credit score and was never late on a payment with my credit card, keeping balance usually at $0. I assumed I was a model customer to my bank. In early 2009, I got a notice from HSBC saying they were lowering my available credit limit on my credit card by 97%.

I called HSBC immediately. I explained my shocked disbelief and insisted this must be a mistake to the customer service representative on the phone. She gave no explanation as to why this action had been taken, then went directly into her required up-sell to get me to buy overdraft protection. I hung up on her.

I did some research on "the google" to find answers as to why I was being treated so badly. Turns out, HSBC was dumping a lot of US credit accounts like gangbusters in 2009. In an effort to lighten their insurance on credit risks with customers, they were significantly lowering a lot of those credit accounts they had to insure against, and they were going after a lot of inactive users, as well as zero balance users off whom they weren't making money. Suddenly it made more sense. This was HSBC's answer to weathering the financial crisis. I was lucky - many customers were reporting that HSBC had significantly lowered their available credit limit to a much lower amount than they currently owed, thereby causing them high over-limit credit charges each month.

January of 2003, I was sitting alone in Union Square in San Francisco, California after a long day's drive down the coast. I was just sitting, collecting my thoughts and watching the world go by. A girl came up to talk to me, she was taking a survey. She asked me who my personal heroes were. I really had to think about it. My first answer was Horatio Hornblower, a fictional character from the 17th Century English Navy who traveled the world on Tall Ships. My second was President Kennedy, as he was the last president we had at the time that was forward thinking. My final answer was Steve Jobs.

Back in 1990, I was starting my second year of University in the design program. I was taking a class on publishing and for half the semester we were in a print shop learning about the printing process, which seems archaic now, but the other half of the semester I was introduced to the Apple Macintosh Computer. We learned the desktop, the basic navigation, the command keys and the first two programs we learned in the class were Digital Darkroom and Adobe Photoshop. I instantly fell in love with the computer and what I was going to be able to do with it.

Sixteen years ago I started this website. Much like every other website on the internet back then, it was terrible and hardly anyone saw it as not many were actually using the internet just yet except nerds like me. I think I even had a page on it about the two cats we had at the time that I couldn't stand.

The website has evolved over the years and so have my abilities in design, code, and photography. Evolution of the site saw a blog come about like everyone else, in the beginning I talked about everything that was cool, important, then it turned into a place to talk about everything that annoyed me, then it turned into a lesson on how to keep some opinons to yourself and not be so judgmental.

As my photography grew, it became a place to showcase some of my work. In that time, flickr.com came on the scene and I slowly left this site behind and used the flickr site to network more and showcase to a new audience.

Last night, as I was was nearly done riding around the lake again, I noticed the moon in the evening sky was full, or nearly full, and bright. There was another awesome lightning storm in the near distance, a rain storm was coming this way, and the sky was filled with a beautiful cloudy sunset full of color. When I got back to the 4Runner, I opened up the back door and laid inside , drank my water and enjoyed the view 'till it got dark. It wasn't anything a photo could capture, it was a peaceful feeling I enjoyed.

Things are good.

So, I gave in, I bought a bike this past week, a Canondale Supersix 4 Rival and over the last week I have come to love this bike. It's fitted to me and despite a sore ass than needs to get used to the modern problem of bike seats just aren't that friendly, it's been a good fit. It's also been 100F+ days since I purchased the bike so my only time to ride has been early in the AM or late in the PM but it's still really hot in the PM.

This bike was more expensive than I was originally looking for but I was sold on the up sale for good reasons. It came with much better components that I will rely on more and get more benefit from. It's a carbon frame with a carbon crank as well. The SRAM gear shift system really sold me as well.

I purchased the bike from a local bike dealer in downtown Oklahoma City, Schlegel Bikes. They treated me well and happy to refere them to anyone looking around for a good bike.

You know what I hate about coding? for about every bit of coolness that you see happening on a website, 95% of the time spent on making that happen went to make things work right behind the scenes, things you usually wont even notice. So when I'm all "TA DA!" people look and go, yea? and then I go "but no, see, if you do weird things here, I've compensated for that" and then i get a golf clap.

This is why visual design appeals more to my ego. People can more easily see what you did there.

Okay, so, I decided to give up Diet Coke again a few weeks back. This usually happens for a time, then i will have one at some point, then another, then a deadline comes up and I have an empty case of diet coke next to me in an appallingly short time span.

Usually when I lay off diet coke, I will drink a lot of tea. Ice'd tea full of yummy caffeine and artificial sweetener. My choice has always been sweet n low because it dissolves the best. 3 packs per glass.

So this time, since I am in Australia, I have had to resort to other sweeteners to do the job since Sweet n Low isn't sold over here, Splenda was the next choice. Trying to be good, I've resolved myself to two packets of Splenda, rather than three, even though it's not as sweet as Sweet n low.

It was just over five years ago that I moved to New York City from Sydney, Australia where I had lived for almost two years. That same week, I discovered Flickr and found a new home for my photography. After a few months of sleeping on an air mattress, our stuff finally arrived from Australia and we began to settle into our new home in the big city. The first few weeks felt like being on vacation, not permanent residence.

America lost the last of it's royalty today. By that I mean, as a nation that prides itself to be free of a monarchy, we had this family that championed themselves as a matter of duty to be a voice to help shape and guide America though some challenging times in it's history. To this effort, the Kennedy family paid a great price.

A few years ago I took a road trip through the American West. I spent a day in San Francisco and took a few hours to relax in Union Square. A pollster came up to me and made some chat and asked me who my personal hero was as part of her polling question.  I had to think about it for a bit and came up with John F. Kennedy. When she asked why I chose him, I said it was because he was our last idealist President. That idealism actually branched out to his brothers, and this country owes that family a great deal of gratitude for it.

I was let go from my job today. My producer and I were let go after long talks of downsizing the company, after some disappointing months of trying to build a brand in a tough market. The economic collapse didn't exactly do us any favors either. I can't say I didn't completely see this coming, but I thought I had more time for us to turn it around.

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity."

- Gilda Radner

I have become used to my new morning routines that have come with the new job. I walk to Wall Street every morning, grab a coffee, jump on a crowded subway that zips me under Manhattan past Fulton, past Union Square, past Grand Central, exiting finally at 59th street. Three stories up the stairs and I finally get to see the daylight on a short five block walk that takes me to my building. After the fourty-five minutes of standing on the subway I have noticed a pattern in the passengers including myself in behaviour, Many people stare at the floor or look at the ads above the seats, most look like they are not happy with where they are going. iPods have saved all of us from acknowledging the crazies or one another for that matter. I like the crazies. They make the ride interesting and they make me feel oh so very normal. I keep making myself smile, to not become one of them. I probably look like one of the crazies.

So, here's something new: I started a new job today with a startup called Our365. A photo sharing website for families of New Borns. This feels like a new direction and a new opportunity and I am excited to see what we can to do with it. It'a practically building now from the ground up. I will no longer enjoy a short walking commute in the mornings as I will be catching the express 4 train every morning to my office on Park Avenue.

Ten years ago, I started playing with a program called Adobe Pagemill and made a simple little website on my3mb of web space provided by my dialup internet provider; earthlink. The title Absolut Wade came from a design project I was working on while in design school at the time where was learning about branding and did a series over Absolut Vodka. Eight years ago today, I was thinking it would be kind of cool to move my web site off of earthlink and get my own dedicated website. The website was mostly some web design experiments and some testing in the new thing called Macromedia Flash. It was really complicated to register a domain back then, the form was damn near rocket science and it cost $80 to register. Then my friend Vincent suggested I run my own webserver from my home computer since I had broadband (before most other people in the country did) and left the computer on all the time. He helped me set it up and from that day absolutwade.com came into existence.

I find that when I get really down, I start to analyze myself and the things around me as being normal or out of sorts. Am I the one doing things wrong or is the world doing me wrong? It's usually an equal chance of either way but I can account for what I do and the world does as it pleases. Since all I can change is myself, I try to focus on that. You can accept the world as being fair or unjust but you still have to find a way to fit in it.

I once read that when we express anger, we are expressing what we hate about ourselves. We all have regrets and have done things we wish we hadn't. Those regrets and the guilt associated with them weigh on us and shape us into who we are. This is actually good for us to a point; our consciousness needs to be reminded of consequences but some of us out there, we're junkies for it. We need to feel regret and pain or we feel nothing at all because being satisfied just isn't all that satisfactory after some time.

Dear 2005,

I regret that my vocabulary, nay the English language, doesn't have enough adjectives available to describe in full detail the amount to which you fully sucked this past year.

Universally, I'm sure you killed off some really cool star systems that could have been useful to the grand scheme of things or at least interesting to look at. But, you killed the Hubble telescope so who cares anyway.

Last week my mom found out that she has breast cancer. Today she goes into surgery to have it removed. It was found in an early stage but still, it was cancerous and she will have to go through kemo after it is removed.

It was a year ago to the day that Australia was said goodbye to in a tearful farewell and New York City was the new permanent address. It seems like it's only been months really, time moves at a much faster pace here. Winter came a short time after arriving and seemed like it just left, now it's just around the corner again in another month and a half.

I miss Australia. I like New York just fine in many ways but it's not the same fit that Australia was.

Last night was spent out at the usual place to drink with friends and then to a party in Chelsea on a residential building rooftop. It was a friend of a friend's going away party to Singapore as well as someone else's birthday party whom I'd never met before last night. It was one of those very New York'ish moments that you see happening on a television program but don't think normal people do.

I was walking along when someone comes up to me and says that dad needs my help. I head quickly in the way pointed to me, it's dark but I can see a man on top of a roof doing some repair; it's dad and he looks tired. A single street light seems to be over him making him well lit but not much else. I climb up a ladder and ask him if he's okay and he says he needs a different job, he doesn't like this one. I said I would go find some one and see what I could do. He stops me and says "You know what I would really like to do is to work on (house) guttering." ...

Leaving Prague today by train back to Vienna for a last night near the airport hotel to catch a flight back to New York tomorrow. Prague was an interesting and fun visit. The culture of people here is a bit different than anywhere else I have been. It was good to catch up with Claire and Ferdie again.

My dad passed away a few days back. I've been struggling over the last few days and on the journey of this trip to deal with a lot of emotions. Very painful emotions. This trip, while planned ahead and couldn't easily be put aside, was a necessary distraction for me to not just fall into an emotional vegetative state.

We arrived in Prague today to the hotel after a long train ride from Budapest. It's a nice hotel that feels very western, modern amenities like internet let me plug back into the world and check in on what's going on.

My father passed away in his sleep last night. Despite everything between us, I loved him. I loved him deeply.

I'll have more to say about this later, just not right now.

This year I traveled a lot and saw some beautiful things. It was a good year overall. I grew beyond some of my limitations and adapted to new surroundings with fewer complications than I expected. I met interesting people all over the world and found a bit more of myself in the adventures.

Nathan is growing older, he will be 8 in February and he isn't a little kid anymore. He has opinions, he has moods, he can have a conversation like an adult. He can even scold me when I say a curse word around him. I get a little bit nostalgic about missing the little kid who needed so much help but then I am proud of his ability to reason, grow, and learn. I am also proud of his big giant heart. He's a great kid.

My kid started hugging me the second I got off the plane and has been hugging me ever since. We played some catch with the ball and I got to see him ride his bike with no training wheels while he told every kid in the neighborhood to come see his dad.

Nathan adapts well. Kids usually do but he has done remarkably well. I'm proud of him for it.

My dad is back in the hospital; He has a spot on his liver and they are looking to see what it is this week. I have been driving back and forth to Chickasha to spend some time with him, visit with his doctor and the rest of the family on what we are going to do.

When I arrived on the last visit, he was asleep on a morphine drip and the television was on by his bedside. Watching my dad wriggle around in a morphine induced sleep was a bit painful to watch. Having to watch Miss Congeniality on the television and feel powerless to change the channel was almost equally as painful.

I have actually stared at this blank page form, for like an hour, just trying to think of something to say. Something witty, profound, enlightening, sarcastic, slapstick, anything at all. I think I am just empty on content.

I saw my parents all week, checked into family legal stuff no one would want to deal with, finally recovered from massive jetlag, went bowling, and gave my son a masculinity complex by calling him Natalie when he kept throwing me back crappy baseball pitches. Yea, That's what love is for.

Dad is being moved from the hospital to a nursing home next week for rehabilitation, which is probably best considering the last time I saw his house, it was rancid. He can't take care of himself any longer so being somewhere around new people and away from his "dodgy" friends who have leeched off him long enough now, can only be a good thing.

I can't for the life of me begin to understand what brought him to this. It's as if he purposely threw his health in the toilet because he does not want to live any more.

Today, my dear friends Tracy and Jane from Perth fame came through Sydney with a five hour layover on their way home from Los Angeles. I drove down to meet them, have breakfast and catch up. It was a great time until I smashed Julie's car into the truck in front of me while driving the girls back to the airport. The men in the truck were nice about it at least. The car is pretty messed up but it's insured. Nobody was hurt except my driving record.

My first auto accident. Bah.

Okay, I'll admit it, I was biased to liking this movie on several fronts before I ever saw it. It's a story about a father and son, it has a quest to find Sydney, Australia, and it's an animated movie by those awsome people at Pixar. Any one of those reasons would have gotten admission price from me at the very least.

On the plane a few days past, it rained calmly and I had some time to reflect on some of the emotions I have had since being far away from the place I call home. I've been happy here. I've been happier here than I have been in a long time and knowing this, I thought it needed examination.

It wasn't the change in geography that brought me the happiness. It wasn't the expectations of what I was doing here nor was it the adventure. It was something more than that.

Friendships are a precious commodity. Lifelong friendships are worth more than anything. True friends stick by you when you make mistakes and don't have excuses when you need help or support.

Tonight, in the cold air, Nathan and I went for a long walk to nowhere special only to get outside for a little bit and hang out together. We talked about things like school, my trip coming up, friends of his and the friends at his old school that he missed sometimes.

I started thinking about how he had his whole life ahead of him and what fun things he could do along the way. He wanted to know if he could come on my trip with me. I told him he was too little to go so far away, but someday I would take him if he wanted to go later.

It's almost ready and I got real sick of the last episode (had broken links anyway). So, I decided to put a coming soon splash page up and a preview of the new journal. Pretty much all my friends helped me on the code with this one but thanks a lot to Paul Westgate and Charlie Fisher who couldn't find better excuses to get me to quit bugging them to make this work right.

Stay tuned, the new site is coming.

So, after running Outland Design for the last two years, I have taken a position as a Web Designer for Ackerman McQueen New Media. I'm really looking forward to working with the group of talented designers and developers, some I already know and have worked with.

Nathan was born today. It was a moment I will never forget. He was small and red and the nurse scrubbed him down hard. I was thrilled to see him alive and healthy. It was the first time I ever cried from being happy.

Welcome to the world, kiddo.

Back from Hawaii and ready to join the job market, which brings me to my newest employment adventure starting this week at Graphic Arts Prepress Lab. Night shift. Yup, I will be the night time output technician doing your film projects at 2am.