ForsakenDAemon.net

Mother, friend, partner, coworker, best friend, housemate, boyfriend, patient, supervisor, boss, brother, doctor, client, the list goes on.

The number of names I have for people in my life is truly staggering.

Sometimes these names have power – for example, the patient/healthcare professional dynamic is important, in terms of trust, professionalism and the implicit knowledge gradient that it encapsulated.

Without the distinction between patient and healthcare professional, care is essentially impossible. I wouldn’t tell a guy on the street about the intimate details of my home life, but I expect it from my patients and clients, to a certain extent, every time I walk in through the doors of a clinic.

The name implies a pattern of interaction – pleasantries, history, evaluation, recommendation, implementation, farewell. Lather, rinse, repeat, for every monthly, yearly, n-ly appointment from here until the end of time.

Aside from the obvious benefits of expected patterns of interaction, the name also implies an obligation towards care. If I don’t want to be there, the name of ‘healthcare professional’ obliges me to be there, providing care and supporting my patient to the best of my ability.

However, this pattern of behaviour, while useful, has the fundamental drawback that it locks two people into a cycle that one of both may dislike or find unhelpful.

In healthcare, the advantages often seem to outweigh the disadvantages – and, indeed, a sizeable amount of research and development time has gone into ensuring that patient-healthcare worker interactions are useful and productive.

In more general interpersonal relationships, however, the question has to be asked – how much does this name reflect the relationship as it is, how much does it reflect the relationship as I’d like it to be, and how much difference is there between the two?

Particularly in complex, multicategorical relationships, are names or categories helpful or restrictive? Is it more useful to treat this person as my friend or my mother, particularly in a situation where different aspects of those two categories are coming to the fore? Is this person my coworker or my friend? What makes this person a boyfriend/girlfriend over a friend (besides the obvious physical aspects of an intimate relationship)?

Indeed, is the distinction necessary? I wonder whether we would be better off focussing not on what we should do, but on why we want to do – behaving in a manner that reflects that particular person, and the individual relationship that we have with them.

No rules. No labels. No holds barred.

No worries, mate!

Martin Kingsley

At first sight, it should be a simple problem – write a web services backend to a provided HTML5 frontend to handle OAuth logins to a couple of different services, intelligently storing the authentication information and allowing posting to those services via the integrated frontend.

Oh, $DEITY was I wrong.

Firstly, OAuth has a kind of triple handshake thing going on that means that I have to reengineer the front end to load the required login pages and then handle the callback. Okay, that’s fine. Doable, if nothing else.

Then turns out that the thing that’s passed back isn’t the actual string that needs to be stored. Okay, background call to get the actual string, that’ll be fine.

Then, apparently those strings expire. Oops, nobody mentioned that. So, when they’re not valid any more, you have to pass back the original string and get a new one. But you can’t just use that, that would be silly, so both have to get stored.

Is it any wonder I’m pulling my hair out right now?

I sometimes wonder whether the purpose of an open standard is just to make it so everything is equally annoying. Which is helpful, I’ll grant them that.

The problem arises when the web frameworks that will eventually have to function within that system either aren’t set up to handle them at all or try to do too much for you.

For example, Grails has a beautiful OAuth plugin, which I’m sure works great for websites written in Grails, but which continually throws weird redirects and stuff around when I try and modify it. Cue several hours of rolling my own. Several hours I don’t have, I should add.

Ah, well – at least I don’t have to write separate handlers for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. If only flickr would get on the OAuth bandwagon, I’d be a happy man!

After wondering for a long time what to do with this blog, I’ve decided to rebrand. I’ll be bringing my articles and some of my old blog posts over over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out some of my current projects, including An Awkward Pause, Creative Innovation 2010 or The Hub Melbourne.

- DAemon

Short Sweet+Cabaret
The Butterfly Club
10 July 2008

The world’s biggest short theatre festival, Short+Sweet roars into Melbourne this week with Short Sweet+Cabaret, its first foray into the world of cabaret performance.

Held at the home of cabaret in Melbourne, The iconic Butterfly Club, the short cabaret festival showcases emerging and established cabaret artists from around Melbourne and Australia generally. With 17 new works in total, each of only ten minutes, the shows are varied, exciting, fresh and innovative.

Packing 12 performances into two hours has been a challenge for the Butterfly Club, but the effort seems to have been worth it, with some very polished and promising performances on the opening night. A wide range of performances took to the stage, from classical cabaret takes on How To Dump Your Boyfriend to a quirky take on geek love in Face Value

Elenor Jane Adams’ absurdist take on superstardom, Little Miss Janey-May Dimples Presents: F**k You Shirley Temple, was the first great surprise of the night for me, with a strong storyline and an impressive commitment to her character. Elenor struck a nice balance between insanity and humanity, endearing herself to the audience in her brief time.

Melding politics with performance is never an easy task, but it’s one that Karin Muizneiks and Erin Newington attack admirably, with Hell’s Cabaret taking on crime, punishment and gay marriage in one 10 minute whirlwind. Although their performances were occasionally unfocussed, the concept is brilliant, and the girls have a great chemistry and two highly expressive voices.

Emerging cabaret artists can come from anywhere, with Tom Dickins’ Cab-O-Rage sat squarely in the night-life of Ballarat. A well-fleshed out story with clever staging, the piece suffered slightly from nerves, but was nonetheless engaging, and promising for the future of cabaret outside of metropolitain Melbourne.

Hayley Ramsay’s hilarious portrayal of a drunken bridesmaid in Not So Secret Bridesmaid’s Business was a particular highlight, with a solid script, good use of music to advance the story and a great sense of comic timing. I hope to see this piece again, if only for the hilarious bridesmaid’s dress!

With a wide range of styles, stories and skill levels, Short Sweet+Cabaret is a great showcase of new and emerging artists in the Melbourne cabaret scene. Fun, exciting and at times touching, each show of the festival is a pot-pourri of creativity.

All My Sleep And Waking
La Mama Theatre
9 July 2008

Following the story of a family watching their father die of cancer, All My Sleep And Waking is an in-depth look at what it means to be a carer for someone in the later stages of their life.