dataphage:blog

Happy new year

2012-01-01T16:06:00.003+11:00

Oh yeah, we look good.

New year's night at the fireworks at Dee Why beach

Ginger

2011-11-04T09:42:00.001+11:00

Weekend morning

2011-09-30T11:12:00.001+10:00

What if they both learn to read?!

This is commonly the way weekends begin these days.

It's wonderful but this is Tom before coffee - not a pretty site.

A year ago today!

2011-09-11T20:20:00.000+10:00

My word how time flies when you're having fun!

Waving to the guests

We've done a lot in the intervening time - including this. Yes, you can keep up with Violet's progress on her blog and through her tweets.

Sunday afternoon walk

2011-08-27T07:36:00.000+10:00

Tiny

2011-07-18T17:26:00.001+10:00

Bling

2011-07-15T09:22:00.002+10:00

And it gives me special powers too!

My new jewelry

Muppets trailers

2011-06-17T08:44:00.001+10:00

This movie that the (now Disney owned) Muppets are making had better be good. Of course there may be no movie at all and the teaser campaign ultimately concludes with nothing but a damp squib.

update: new official non-spoiler trailer

Radiolab: Talking to machines

2011-06-09T14:15:00.002+10:00

Got an hour or so to spare? This is a great listen.

More info: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/

Official recognition

2011-06-07T12:19:00.001+10:00

Advance Australia Fair

2011-03-27T16:29:00.001+11:00

On 11 March we became Australian citizens. Which means we never have to leave!

The ceremony itself was a rather peculiar affair which reminded me a little of my graduation. It was one of those peculiarities of local government that's obviously a regular and not insignificant event but which has to somehow stay fresh for the regular participants and might occasionally struggle a little to do so. Migration is a serious contributor to Australia's population and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics consistently exceeds natural growth so these ceremonies must be pretty frequent.

The mayor of Randwick presented the certificates and another councilor acted as MC. There were various community members there to represent wider society including quite a few (elderly) former servicemen. For what could be quite a stuffy and tedious affair it was handled quite well and was quite touching in it's earnest sincerity - which I should have expected - formal without being stuffy.

When you arrive at the ceremony you have to go and put your name on the electoral roll (sensibly, voting is compulsory here) and are directed to your seat, on which rests a bag of goodies. It contains:

A welcome note from your new federal MP
An information leaflet from the Australian electoral commission and,

A cue card with your citizenship pledge on it

A cue card with the national anthem on it (verse 2 shown)

A folder with details of Australia's national symbols

This folder contains a booklet solely devoted to the many Australian flags, the commonwealth coat of arms, the national colours, the floral emblem, and

A leaflet about, and an arrangement of the National Anthem

The pack also contains

A DVD of 4 arrangements of the national anthem and a CD of 9 arrangements of the same

You can order these from the Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet if you would like them. Sadly I have not yet watched them or listened to them however as I now have 15 different versions of the anthem I'm sure I could lend you one or two if you're careful with them. As Advance Australia Fair is clearly a thing to be shared as widely as possible I have put two more versions below. The first is directly streamed from the downloads section of the It's an Honour website linked to above.

The next is a bit more in line with what I do for a living and is employees of the section of the NSW government that deals with disability issues learning to sign the national anthem.

On Saturday we voted in this country for the first time. A slightly different experience than voting in the UK due to the use of proportional representation and the fact that, because voting is compulsory there are actually people there voting! One of the ballot papers was bigger than an A3 size piece of paper due to the need to list all the parties and seemingly every member of electable age. This is slightly baffling to a newbie who may, after 6 years of living here, be decently acquainted with the main parties and their general policy direction but is probably not too familiar with the individual personalities involved in a constituency they only moved to 4 months earlier and was only registered to vote in 2 weeks before (what I should have done, especially as an eLearning Manager is gone to the NSW electoral commission website and looked through the resources there which would have told me a bit more in any case).

As there were many Australians gathered together in one place you either have to organise a sausage sizzle or one will spontaneously break out. The school serving as a polling station had very sensibly organised one so I did my second civic duty of the day and bought a sausage sandwich in aid of the school.

Focussed

2011-02-25T10:25:00.002+11:00

Sydney is a city with more than its fair share of contemporary architectural oddities but there is one I encounter almost every working day and so stands out from the sci-fi inspired towers and glass blocks. It’s not obvious, it’s not always even apparent and I am almost certain that it is an accident of design.

The gently concave shape of the Sheraton overlooking Darling harbour, combined with its mirrored windows and westerly aspect, mean that in the afternoon and early evening the sunlight is reflected and focussed at a particular (hot)spot on the pathway across the road. As I walk past this on my way home, depending on the weather, I am either gently warmed or subject to quite intense heat from the presumably unintentional solar furnace. Remarkably you can actually see this effect on the aerial photograph in the map after the jump (only you can't any more because Google have updated the photo - bugger).

View Focused in a larger map

As an architect’s demonstration of the urban application of solar energy it seems somewhat passive-aggressive, so perhaps it is an attempt to distract cyclists and send them hurtling over the railings. Perhaps the Sheraton and the designer are entirely unaware of the phenomenon. Thousands of people must walk past this a day so I can’t be the only one who’s noticed it. I shall stick a QR code pointing to this post at the spot and see if I get any responses. If you are reading this post and have noticed it and/or have any information please leave a comment.

Perhaps I shall also investigate a little in my own time. If you hear of me arrested for graffiti or snooping you will now know why...

...to be continued (maybe).

2011-02-13T12:19:00.004+11:00

There's been a shift in my thinking regarding internet based/enabled services which I think is probably reflected in other people too. It's really simple, if it's good I am willing to pay. What this probably means is that I and others like me are starting to recognise that the internet technologies that looked like toys for so long are now recognisably useful tools. This might also mean that the web is finally becoming the platform/ecosystem that it has promised to be but never fully became.

Businesses have paid for cloud-computing and hosted services for some time but my feeling is that persuading individuals to do so has always been difficult. Consumers are used to the internet being free and are generally resistant to any change in that. However, I think that is now changing and it's due to the Freemium model that service start ups have been using; get the majority if the functionality with just a free account and if you then want the whole package you pay a subscription. It's a 'try before you buy' business model the advantage of which is that if you're good you'll do well, the disadvantage being that if you're not quite good enough everyone finds out quickly. The services are now just that bit better than they have been. Given that I try almost all of them I have been driven to pay for some of the good ones.

Things I've paid for which I think are useful and I would actually have trouble living without are:

Evernote
This is a memory tool which captures notes, photos, documents, web-pages etc. allows you to organise them, tag them and search them on just about any mobile device or computer. Doesn't sound like something you need? It didn't to me either but then I started using it and now I would find life very difficult without it. It even threatens my beloved Moleskine notebook as my favourite note-taking tool. I use it personally and for work. If you've ever used OneNote then it's a bit like that, only you aren't tied to one computer for all your information. There's a video below of the CEO talking at Le Web to give you a flavour.

Google Apps
A full suite of office software hosted on the internet that just keeps improving, for $50 a user a year. I use this for this domain and for work and neither would operate correctly without it.

Last.FM
This is a music recommendation service that also allows you to stream music over the internet. The office I work in is not a quiet place and this last feature increases my productivity but about 400%. It also allows me to share what I've been listening to with other people - you can get a feel for this from the last.fm widget in the left sidebar.

There are other candidates on the shopping list, the current favourite is:

DropBox

Which is pretty much what you'd expect; an internet enabled file-folder system of varying sizes that synchronizes across computers and devices which allows a variety of hacks. However with judicious use of Evernote I'm wondering if I really need this. Ideally the two would merge...

Are there any others worth paying for that I'm missing?

Venting Spline

2011-01-01T10:14:00.001+11:00

Spline is not a bizarre antipodean-ism that I've picked up. I don't think I've quite assimilated to the point that I can comfortably dipthong to that extent. You see the stuff that looks like licorice rope? That's spline. Spline is the ridged plastic tubing that you wedge into a groove in a screen door to hold in the insect mesh. I have been repairing screen doors. That thing that looks like a pizza cutter is in fact a 'spline roller', it rolls spline. The helpful little illustration on the packet hows you how this is meant to work. Of course being a DIY task it almost works as described.

After long years of being very slow and ineffective at DIY I have developed a process that works for me. There are other parts and guidelines to it but a working example is almost always the most effective way of communicating something.

Before engaging in any DIY tasks ensure that you have:

A working telephone
A credit card
An accident and emergency ward nearby
Paper towels, plasters antiseptic etc.
Someone who can drive you to the above who isn't worried about hard to shift stains on the upholstery (blood, oil, vomit etc.)
A Stanley knife
Bulldog clips &/or duct tape - all DIY tasks universally require bulldog clips &/or duct tape
A colourful vocabulary of expletives and a schema for matching them together in new and unusual ways
A beer in the fridge - to drink at the end

The actual process for a specific task, using the one at hand as an example goes like this:

Attempt to get someone else to do it
Wave credit card around in the hope that other stakeholders in the process get the message and call someone else to do it
Ensure beer is in the fridge and cold
Buy ~~ingredients~~ parts and tools needed
Listen to sage advice from man in DIY shop who seems to know what he's talking about without understanding a word of it. When quizzed on whether you got that mutter something non-committal
Ignore instructions on packets and lay parts out on the ground to see if you can work it out.
Tear out all the old mesh and try not to laugh at the word 'spline'. This feels like progress.
Lay new mesh over door and force spline in to corner to hold it in. Realise that bulldog clips &/or duct tape would be handy to keep the mesh straight
Spend 10 mins looking for bulldog clips and tape.
Curse at dog/cat/spouse for running off with key part needed (part may be fictional if necessary).
Start feeling inadequate and read instructions in state of resigned despair.
Align spline down groove and pull taught. Taught is one of those words like 'style' and 'poise' that is of absolutely no use to all but the most gifted of amateurs and is included in instructions to trigger the use of the colourful vocab. If you have this ready use it now.
Use spline roller to roll spline in to groove. No, not like that. Try again. No it's not straight, adjust bulldog clips &/or duct tape. Cue more colourful vocab. and realisation that this could be achieved with a screwdriver and a bit of patience.

A digression may be made here where the first generic error of DIY can be brought in to play: go at it too hard and stick a screwdriver straight through it. This can apply to items as diverse as any of the things you have bought to complete the task, pets, flooring and other scenery and assorted body parts. This can lead to a trip to A&E, or back to the DIY store (preferably a different one so you don't have to confess that you didn't listen to or understand the advice and broke things). This step can be repeated until you run out of DIY stores to go to, A&E wards to visit, blood, patience, or you complete the job.
Realise that the spline roller is there to stop you sticking a screwdriver straight through and attempt its correct use. Ow. Realign grip so that vertical pressure is applied in a way that feels like if you slip you will hammer your thumb into the ground and snap your wrist. There, that's pretty effective, if slightly scary, and as an upside will give you the grip strength of a weightlifter.
Stop muttering the word 'spline' and giggling.
Complete first window after an hour, note slight but important disconnect between instructions and reality. Resolve to send manufacturers a slightly snotty email on clear process instructions and productivity levels.
Trim excess mesh with Stanley knife. Mind your hand/pet/spouse, one of these is in the way.
Either repeat all of the above until job is complete, or learn from mistakes and complete the rest of the task in a third of the time it took to do the first part. Your criteria for deciding on this can be whether there are other even less appealing tasks to do or if there's something tasty to be eaten/drunk in the near future.
If you have managed to get through all of the above without cutting yourself, alienating yourself from family life or destroying something that you shouldn't have been anywhere near, you can choose whether or not to cut yourself with the Stanley knife. This sounds extreme but actually allows you 10 minutes grace when you won't be asked to do anything and can skip straight to step 20. It doesn't hurt much and it isn't really that inconvenient. If you do decide to cut yourself the thumb or index finger of your non-dominant hand is considered traditional. The idea here is to spread a very small amount of blood over the widest possible area, preferably including your face, a light coloured t-shirt helps here too. It is often best to "let someone else notice it before you do", that way you can say "Cut myself? No, I don't think so... Oh, bugger." This is very satisfying and almost guarantees 10 minutes of peace for step 20. Again, a light coloured t-shirt helps.
Open and drink beer.

Now that's how to spend a public holiday.

In an unrelated matter; in previous years I may have stated that it would be a cold day in hell before I settled down to a suburban existence. I feel I should point out that Britain is having yet another freezing winter and that I am doing DIY and mowing the lawn in Sydney's Northern beaches. Food for thought.

Santa

2010-12-24T12:08:00.000+11:00

Santa has a brand manual.

Merry Christmas!

Santa

Your ill informed half-baked opinion matters...

2010-12-14T16:07:00.000+11:00

...to you and really the rest of the world doesn't give a monkeys. I wish TV news would learn this, and blissfully I am not alone.

Sculpture by the Sea

2010-11-08T18:35:00.000+11:00

Sydney does some things very well, this is one of them. Sculpture by the Sea is an annual event along the coast between Bondi and Tamarama that showcases modern sculpture - these are the good ones...

A busfull of fun

2010-11-04T18:13:00.002+11:00

Obsolete

2010-10-28T08:50:00.001+11:00

At some point these were good pieces of technology. There's got to be a something that can be done with them. Maybe there's some 80's/90's version of steampunk that will happen soon...

Stone me!

2010-10-26T06:41:00.000+11:00

Found on the wall of the downstairs toilet in Walton Castle, Clevedon

The Owl & The Pussycat

2010-10-03T21:05:00.002+11:00

Ali & Sarah read The Owl & The Pussycat at our wedding...

Let's teach this child to drink!

2010-07-18T09:33:00.001+10:00

How the World Cup Ball is made

2010-06-01T09:00:00.002+10:00

Wave is now live

2010-05-20T10:48:00.000+10:00

Sick of email? Me too. Wave looks like a better option by far.

Dear @google please now sort out the bloggy bot

Blowhole

2010-04-28T17:59:00.002+10:00

A sculpture in a Melbourne playground, called Blowhole

@dataphage

iPad, it will blend

2010-04-06T10:27:00.000+10:00

Since you're going to be sick of hearing about the thing fairly shortly here's a bit of iPad destruction to come back to when you're feeling vindictive.

Merry Easter...

2010-04-01T08:35:00.001+11:00

...and may the Jesus bunny roll away your golden chocolate egg, or
sumfin'

Another great painting...

2010-03-21T09:30:00.000+11:00

...that I don't own.

Temple snows

2010-03-16T15:00:00.001+11:00

Another photo from Japan

Zenkō-ji in the snow

Snow monkeys

2010-03-15T18:52:00.005+11:00

It's tough being a monkey

Link to the live camera where I took this: http://www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp/livecam/monkey/index.htm

Smoke and mirrors

2010-02-19T05:38:00.000+11:00

Soon they won't bother filming anything more than stock footage.

With rights come obligations

2010-02-07T11:53:00.001+11:00

iiNet Ruling | Piracy Fight Takes a Body Blow

HOLLYWOOD studios and record labels are being forced to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new way of combating online piracy after the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers are not required to police copyright infringement on their networks.

The music industry says it may have no choice but to sue individuals for illegal file sharing unless the federal government intervenes with a solution to its piracy woes.

Let's just look at the last sentence there. Read it again. What it says is that a large, rich industry that holds almost more copyrights than any other is asking for Government protection because it feels unable to defend its' property and is taking the passive-aggressive line that if it doesn't get it then it will have to sue individuals. If you sue an ISP for "authorising" illegal downloading you may as well sue the power companies as well. After all they provided the electricity, they knew people might be doing it with the electricity they supplied and they too failed to monitor if people were or were not doing so. Suing individuals is what they should have been doing in the first place, they don't want to because individuals are the customers.

If you have rights, responsibilities come with them. In law when you hold a copyright and you wish to continue to hold on to it you are obliged to defend it. It is not the job of federal government or anyone else - with the possible exception of a an industry body with careful oversight - to police your rights for you. You can report rights violations as a crime and then the actual police will step in.

Warning: it's going to get a bit dull and polemic after this so I've put the rest behind the read more link

Content publishers need to get their heads round the idea that in an age of digital distribution you need to rethink what you enforce your copyright on and if indeed it's the copyright that you should be using as your revenue stream. If you are going to use copyright to make money then you need to be prepared to sue customers, because they're the ones who will be copying it. The nature of copyright piracy has changed, the mass copying and distribution of CDs and other hard media by financially motivated criminal organisations has been replaced by small scale sharing between socially motivated individuals.

Digital media has exposed the fact that we all make and share copies of things, not as our primary activity, but as part of being sociable. In the strictest sense of the law that makes us all criminals. When everyone is a criminal it's either time to change the law or give people a way to behave the same way legally. Few people like to break the law. Either copyright law needs serious attention or the content publishers need to engage more fully with digital media. Traditional media is still lost in trying to drive value through it's old channels and has largely failed to engage with new ones. Everywhere subscription services or reasonably priced individual downloads have been available they have all but halted piratical downloads. Add a social aspect to media and you've got it made; allow them to show what music they've played recently, put their reviews alongside the movies they've watched and show them to other people in their friend list.

The other responsibility implied in holding a copyright is that you have to maintain its value. Prosecuting people that find value in a copyright seems a dubious way of doing that which may even threaten the value of the copyright. Allowing that value to propagate through a more relevant and contemporary medium seems like a much more sensible option.

Interestingly the court ruling appears marginally at odds with government policy. The Australian Federal Government is going to impose a mandatory internet filter at the ISP level later this year. It will be interesting to see if a legal challenge to this could be launched based on whether it's the ISP's duty to filter content.

Brewing swiftly on

2010-01-23T12:01:00.000+11:00

Happy Christmas, Merry New Year and all that. Flippin' life gets in the way of blogging it really does.

I recently came to the realisation that I have been making beer at home on and off for about half my life, or about the last 16 years, with general success (I've only ever thrown away 2 batches in all that time). I had been making my beer either from kits or from malt extract and some fiddling around with hops. Despite what preconceptions might be of homebrew the kits can make damn fine beer if treated well and I was quite happy with this until The Realisation. With The Realisation came the thought "maybe I can do this a bit better and improve things".

I am a tinkerer and have been ever since my first Lego set and, as anyone who knows a tinkerer will tell you, this thought is normally the kiss of death for anything and can have consequences ranging in severity from a an afternoon of deafening profanities to a trip to Accident and Emergency. With this in mind, I did a fair bit of research and some exploratory work, I talked to other people about it, I did some experiments, bought some equipment and ingredients. There was a whole day of deafening profanities. A few weeks went by as the beer fermented. There was an afternoon of moderate cursing followed by cautious optimism when I bottled the beer. A few weeks went by until I deemed it time to open one.

Halleluliah gawdallbloodymighty, it was good. It was so good that it made me wonder what I'd been doing all these years mucking around with kits and extract. Em and I finished off this summer wheat-beer in record time and I made a proper English Bitter - the kind it can be a little difficult to find in Oz - that was even better than the first batch.On the surface of it this may seem to be good news but it comes with some big drawbacks.

The first is that just before starting my experiment I had, in anticipation of only moderate success, brewed up about 60 liters of beer I knew would be good so that I would have something to drink no matter what. 60 liters, that's more than 100 pints of beer I now know is not as good as good as it could be. I need those bottles empty to put good beer in, but I'm now not so keen on drinking it all. DAMMIT!!

The second drawback is that I'm now utterly hooked. As anyone who knows a tinkerer will tell you a tinkerer finding a hobby can have consequences ranging in severity from afternoons at country fairs filled with very boring conversations about obscure technical nonsense, through garages full of car parts, all the way to a fully functioning steam engine in the back yard. I am a geek by nature, I will have to know all about brewing, all about its' history and I'll have to get all the kit and get it working to absolute perfection. This is inevitable, it will happen and there is little anyone can do about it.

In the short term this means I need another fridge, not to put finished beer in but to put fermenters in to control the temperature, so I'll need a thermostat too. Then bottling won't be enough on it's own some of those styles are really meant to be kegged, so I'm going to need a kegging setup with a tap font, drip tray and its own cooling system. Having invested in this much kit I'll need to make sure the beer does it justice so I'll have to build a full Heat Exchanging Recirculating Mash system and get a plate chiller. Clearly all this in't going to fit in a 2 bedroom apartment so I either need a lockup somewhere or a new house....

You see my problem.

Thankfully my hobby mostly keeps me out of trouble, produces something tasty, desirable and that quickly disposes of itself. I may have to work on a way of [legally] - making money out of it so that it pays its' own way...

There will be pictures to go with this post as soon as I get them off the camera

Oooooowwwww!

2009-12-02T20:51:00.000+11:00

Full moon over Opera House

Ephemeral happiness

2009-11-27T10:45:00.001+11:00

Candles and revelation together at last...

2009-11-22T08:58:00.000+11:00

Dead eyed dawdlers, the place is full of them. They have artfully untidy clothes and facial hair. None of them paid to get in, none of them paid for the sugary alcoholic drink in their hands and they certainly wouldn't have asked for a beer especially with the taps covered in tin foil. Is it okay to wear aftershave if you clearly never shave? Maybe but you should definitely dial it down a fraction - my eyes! Yeaahhh, classy. I guess that's what passes for the music press these days.

Pose and preen, we all watch the carefully constructed pop poppet prance with her skintight PVC suited dancers. This is pure display, a show for the media to earn your article. Lips are synced and cameras played to but we're just here to provide some atmosphere. I get a little angry - this feels like a stage managed lie and I don't really like the music that's being used to lie to me.

I look carefully at one of the bar's decorative features in search of some perspective, a birdcage filled with melting church candles, and the context becomes clear. An easily constructed, stylish and safe ornament out of reach of the idiot punters. A hint of fire to catch the eye concealed by bars to prevent any burns. You wouldn't have it in your home but it's not bad on a night out.

Door handles

2009-11-11T21:42:00.001+11:00

...on a glass door

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Paper Blogging

2009-10-31T11:52:00.000+11:00

Speechification: James Ellroy

2009-10-20T19:41:00.000+11:00

If you don't subscribe to Speechification please listen to some of the older posts and consider it. This is just one gem amongst many. I post this one because it will provoke strong reactions - possibly.

Embedded below is James Ellroy on Studio 360. I'll let it speak for itself I think.

Dust storm

2009-09-23T06:41:00.001+10:00

This view would normally be of Botany Bay, only there's a dust storm over Sydney this morning.

I haven't coloured this shot either. It's a bit weird.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

And we have convergence...

2009-09-19T10:59:00.000+10:00

End of the iPod era

I wanted an iPod but why didn't I buy one? Oddly it seemed like an extravagance at the time and I suppose it still would be. On the other hand I didn't hesitate to buy an iPhone which is several times the price of a top-end iPod even if it is spread over the course of 2 years.

The reason I bought an iPhone 3GS the instant it was available to me is pretty simple. An iPod just plays music. The iPhone is a pocket computer with a phone, camera and an iPod built into it. You can run your life off it surprisingly easily. That only covers the native functions on the device too, the real killer function is the ability to install software from other developers so I now have access to Wikipedia, a dictionary and thesaurus and books in electronic form as well as any number of other useful things. Which is what I wanted but considered unattainable in a mobile only 2 years ago.

It seems rather obvious that once something like this is available that the idea of a regular iPod is going to lose its lustre and that's exactly what's happening. Apple aren't selling too many of the original type iPods. The iPod touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone that can connect to the internet via WiFi and run many of the same applications is selling very well.

Geeks like me call this device convergence. The terminal in your pocket is becoming the single device that you need and it is going to keep collecting functionality. This is both good and bad.

Every time I go past a schoolkid with a rucksack groaning with textbooks I can't help but think that it should be replaced with an iPhone-like device and very easily could be. If that were the case kids would then have always on, on-demand audio-visual learning on a location-aware device. Once you have one of these devices and you begin to think about the possibilities of the thing they become truly staggering. We're only beginning to see the possibilities of the location based technologies in particular. These things are going to change the way we behave and largely, I think, for the better. Mobiles are the information service of choice in developing countries and if access to even low-end versions of this kind of device could make big changes in how information flows around these areas. These are big visions for a small, very expensive thing and it won't happen soon or in an easily predictable way.

There is an obvious downside too. In Japan there is a payment system built into many phones that works like a smartcard that allows you to pay for taxis and other services using your mobile. That's a big jump for a cash-based culture and it will only expand in application. But imagine if you lost it or had it stolen.

2009-09-13T08:43:00.000+10:00

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm bored and I've gone off the boil.

Going on holiday seems like such a good idea but eventually you have to come home and go back to work. Whilst I'm enjoying work at the moment there are always frustrations that get inside your head and cause trouble.

What I haven't done for a very long time is any writing. I have a short story and two longer pieces just sat around doing nothing and no inclination to get working on them. What I do about the apathy I don't quite yet know (and typically can't be bothered to think about). Restarting the writing will help, getting some other things into line and getting off my arse and actually doing things will help.

It's probably also time I stopped drinking during the week, though going to industry events doesn't really lend itself to that. Lot's of critical projects coming up at work will also help me feel like I'm achieving something rather than waiting for things to happen.

This post is entirely for my own benefit and is to remind me that there are things happening and that I need to focus on that fact and just get myself together a bit.

Painting

2009-08-29T11:06:00.002+10:00

This is actually a photo of a painting. If you look at the lower right
you can see where I've not held the camera quite straight and you can
see the edge.

Edit: I've now got a closeup to show the brushwork on this

Close-up

Coffee problem?

2009-07-23T15:26:00.001+10:00

Breakfast companion

2009-07-01T07:20:00.001+10:00

Breakfast companion

Cool shoes

2009-07-01T07:10:00.001+10:00

Cool shoes

Potato economy

2009-06-16T18:16:00.003+10:00

Working on puns check back later.

Update:
Mushy peas to be minted
Gherkins so pleased they went out and got pickled, potatoes also got mashed [help me my brain's melting]
You'll never go hungry but you'll always be poor.

Multipen

2009-06-06T08:39:00.000+10:00

Have you any idea how hard it is to buy just one pen? No, you haven't, because you pinch them from work. Not just because it's cheaper but because it is nearly impossible to buy a single pen from anywhere once working hours are over.

I wasn't looking for anything special either, no Doctor Who pens that automatically write in alien languages, just a simple ballpoint (black for preference). I went to a service station and remarkably there were no pens at all. As many toothbrushes and razors as a guy could want and considerably more porn but no pens. I could have cleaned my teeth, shaved my nuts and wanked myself silly but the suicide note would have to wait.

I tried two supermarkets both of which were happy to sell me multiple pens but not a single one. I could have 3 pens or I could have 17 pens for the price of four but not one. The bookies would lend me a pencil but there were no pens I could take:

"Too sharp mate. Mightier than the sword. Can't give weaponry like that out after dark."

Eventually after a suitable amount of cursing I found myself in a third supermarket where I could buy one pen - with four colours. It's too big, too blue, it has oil-based ink and I hate it but any port in a storm.

Music and movement

2009-05-31T17:02:00.000+10:00

About 6 years ago I joined a comedy goldmine of a gym not far from my place of work next to Tower Bridge in London. Situated at the point where the financial district joined Tower Hamlets it was a place of extraordinary contrasts where East London wideboys and stockbrokers slugged it out both in the weights room and the squash courts in an oddly jovial manner - they had much more in common than I had expected.

When I left the world of regular exercise some 4 years ago the gym soundtrack was the kind of "popular dance" music that is played only in gyms and the 'pack 'em to the rafters and sell 'em rubbish" meatmarket chain nightclubs - one of the songs is even called "I'm a cheap drink kind of girl". On returning to gym membership I have discovered that little has changed, except maybe the girls in the music videos now wear even less. The music itself combines a repetitive synth track with with minimal repetitive vocals in a high register (normally female). In the intervening years the only thing that seems to have changed with this kind of music is the use of a vocoder. It's not an improvement.

The comedy at most gyms is to be derived from the extremes of humanity on display and just how oddly people behave in a situation that is essentially public but where selected social mores are ignored. This is probably more pronounced to me because ai find that the Aussies tend to be quite a private bunch however uninhibited and easy going they may seem. In the gym in London the showers were communal and it was all the rage to flop about the changing rooms wearing nothing but a cheeky smile until actually ready to leave. In the very nice newly built gym I go to here there are separate cubicles and the towel round the waist is the post-shower garment of choice.

There is one very notable exception; a body-builder so large that looks like someone shaved a silverback gorilla and didn't quite finish the job. The gorilla likes to stretch out post workout in the steamroom. To do so he stands on the first platform, which is about 75cm high, in the nude. This puts parts of him that no-one in their right mind would want to see at eye level. There is a large mirror opposite and simply nowhere to look when he's doing this. Having finished stretching out he then stands in front of the mirror and performs a variety of flexed poses. When the "fitnesss manager" called me the other day - his name is Brad, obviously - and asked me about my goals I told him that one of them was to be able to tell this freak what I think of his eye-watering behaviour and then be able to run fast enough to survive doing so. Tellingly Brad didn't laugh.

Phone indecision

2009-05-23T11:28:00.003+10:00

My phone, which has served me well enough for about 3 years, is starting to show it's age along with a few battle scars from too many long drops onto hard surfaces. Essentially I am rationalising the profound urge to buy a shiny new toy.

The shiny new toy in question might well have to be an iPhone but there's another contender the HTC magic which is nearly as sleek and beautiful in design and comes with the added bonus of being much easier to connect with all the Google services I use constantly. However my spies tell me that the new iPhone coming out next month will actually replace sliced bread in the most hackneyed of cliches.

Hmm, this is a wait and see moment but I really don't want to have to wait longer than I absolutely have to. Documented below, and largely to get them out of my head are my reasons for each one:

HTC Magic

Oooh shiny
Google services very easily
Open source software means better long term techno hippy smugness
Touch screen

iPhone

Oooooooooh shinier
There's an app for that
Multi touch screen
iTunes etc.
Every other bastard has one and I want in even if they are over-designed toys for posers

By the way, yes I do know that all you use your phone for is sending text messages and phoning people and that this makes you happy enough. I don't care gimmethtoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoygimmethetoy!

Sydney Comedy Festival

2009-05-11T13:04:00.000+10:00

I've been to a few things at the Sydney comedy festival. A video of one of the more offbeat ones is below:

(some) Puppets can tell the truth without getting flustered...

Change hurts

2009-04-22T08:19:00.002+10:00

4am thought

2009-04-15T05:24:00.000+10:00

It's strange what can trouble one at 4am. Woken up by work thoughts my brain rapidly decided it didn't want to stick with the topic and wandered off on a random digression:

Normality is more extreme than you imagine, this is why the news is almost always bad.

Normality is consensus concept and so is maintained by general perception and is not a tangible or given, neither is it measureable, evenly distributed or universally available. People's experience of normality is vastly different based on location culture and life experience.

As you live in a mediatised culture your expectation of normality is most likely set by a mixture of media representations and social expectations/experiences. Unfortunately media content is saleable and is largely sold on the premise that it is news or new information. This selling needs to takes place even when there is little or no news or information and so minor information is hyped as important and even when it isn't. This is much easier to do with bad news than good news as our innate survival instincts have a greater push away from risk than they do a pull toward benefit (risk might kill you but a benefit is likely to be marginal except in rare cases where it could provide a competitive advantage - this would refer to basics like sex and food really).

Note to self: This is an incomplete thought and needs work.

Hot stuff

2009-03-24T19:31:00.001+11:00

Turned all of these into chili sauce last night. The sauce is so hot it has symptoms.

Less interesting but more useful

2009-03-17T06:37:00.000+11:00

There seems to be a general trend on the internerd summed up by the title of this post. As technologies and techniques come to the mainstream and gain general acceptance they start to look less like toys and more like tools. This means that (some) people start using them well and that people that don't use them so well either stop using them and switch to a more appealing medium or just go away and do something else.

Since the rise of FaceBook and Twitter - 2 services on a collision course - there has been a marked downturn in interesting writing on the internet. Why write a 200 word blog post when you can do 140 characters 7 times a day and achieve much the same thing? The move of applications like word processing and spreadsheets into the online space and the sheer amount of time people spend using software as a service applications (I use 2 fairly constantly at work) has meant internet use for fun is also regarded less as a toy even though more people are spending more time using it this way than ever before.

There also seems a general acceptance that online interactions now have consequences and aren't harmless. Everyone seemingly has heard a story about a FaceBook status setting or picture causing trouble, both apocryphal and true. However both NZ and Australian lawyers can now serve court documents via FaceBook and only last week a man was acquitted when his defense lawyer used as evidence data collected from the arresting officers online social networking activities.

The overall effects are by enlarge to make people quality filter what their published online actually activities are, even though they may be doing more, and make sure that there actually are filters in place both incoming and outgoing - activities suitable for a select minority have security settings that restrict them to that community. The incoming filters are also more accessible and more widely applied - if I don't want to hear about your latest move in scrabulous or your last.fm plays I don't have to.

However the easy sharing and filtering of information and social activity in established services has meant that the blogosphere is noticeably quieter and startups are more obviously useful. Those who have been doing it a while and doing it well are still around. Those who didn't do it so well or whose heart wasn't really in it seem to have found another way to express themselves that is closer to their hearts. A time of economic downturn is probably going to heighten this effect with money and time being concentrated by service providers on building things that people use and that providers can make money from. The downside of this is that the random elements, the runaway esoteric successes are going to be short lived or quickly assimilated into a bigger entity. The internet is going to be a bit less interesting but more useful for a while, but it really was time for it to grow up again anyway.

Moleskine

2009-03-11T03:05:00.002+11:00

Why did I wait so long to get one of these?

In fairness to myself it's because they have really wanky marketing which is borderline misleading. I've always resented the way that they are so obviously appealing and disliked the fact that they cost an absolute fortune for what they are, that people that do use them tend to bore me about how good and how useful they are. They are also fetishised by productivity geeks who write in them in different colours for different things and separate them into sections with tabs.

What changed my mind? I realised how many notebooks were getting shredded by just being carried around and that was wasting ideas and important notes. I haven't carried or used a paper diary/organiser for more than a year, though this seems to be a cyclical thing. I have had to admit that a Moleskine plus a cover for it has resulted in a big rise in retaining thoughts and ideas - I'm even considering trying the multi-coloured ink thing to see just how annoying it actually is or whether it's a good idea, though I suspect the personal and work aspects of my life would argue about who got the black ink and who got stuck with blue (my neuroses might be too deeply seated to cope with that). The pocket at the back is so damn useful once you get used to carrying the notebook around with you.

So here I am moleskined up so the inevitable list of productivity hacks that must come last:

Business cards in the file pocket - run out of business cards in your other stylish accessories? Oh look a spare!
File cards/spare paper in the file pocket - you wouldn't want to tear a page out would you?
Symbols - I haven't got much past my normal @ for action or task but I'm rapidly also getting towards $ for items to go on my wishlist and an information symbol for things to look up or research. I might need one for ideas too...

Byron Bay

2009-02-28T09:26:00.002+11:00

Gottaluvit. Full of hippies, self included.

Downtime

2009-02-23T13:48:00.003+11:00

Normally I spend 3 hours a day traveling to and from work. This is essentially dead time in which I do nothing; I listen to podcasts, I read books. I recognise that these are possibly luxuries that other people would struggle to make time for but the point is I can’t do anything else. Also I exhausted my fairly small library quite quickly, I don’t spend much money on music and whilst the internet has made it easier to find things *cough* quite cheaply *cough* I still haven’t really bothered.

The solution seems pretty obvious i.e. buy a car. However [insert environmental whinging here] and [insert ongoing cost whinging here] so I wasn’t that keen. Until I did the following bit of thinking.

Everyone values their free time but they never put a metric on it. Everyone says they wish they had more time to spend [insert activity or in the company of family here]. So I thought about the spend part of that sentence and actually put a cash value on it. For the sake of argument I valued my time at a reasonably modest $35 an hour. This means I spend $105 of my time each day traveling. Owning a car would give me back 2 of those hours on average saving me $70 of personal time per day. That’s $350 of personal time a week, or extrapolated to 48 working weeks a year, nearly $17,000 of personal time. Getting a car now seems like quite a good idea, an investment even.

Caveat and note to self: This is a gross over-simplification and does not mean that getting a car will make you richer in cash terms unless you can convert those hours into money, which you won’t. Rates are subject to change without notice.

Residual thoughts: What other effects might giving your time a cash value have? How else might I value my time? Given this value what would I do with the extra 2 hours a day?

Pathological

2009-02-20T13:39:00.001+11:00

Strange experience for this week:

Sat in the waiting room of the path lab waiting for a blood test. Lots of people sat around trying to keep the worried look off their faces looking through glossy magazines full of glowingly healthy people.

When I arrived I was the only man in there. This I suppose is down to women's far more intricate and complex plumbing, wiring and maintainence cycles.

Waiting rooms are always peculiar liminal spaces that are neither one thing nor the other and engender a limbo state of mind. Go here, wait. Be tested, wait to find out your results and then find someone to tell what it means.

Photos from Borneo

2009-02-03T17:43:00.007+11:00

Well January was a dead-loss as far as this website goes but to get me going in February here's a quick slideshow of the best of Emily's photos from Borneo.

View Album

Get your own

Drumkit with a view

2008-12-23T13:58:00.002+11:00

Offline

2008-12-19T06:38:00.000+11:00

This is going to be interesting. We are headed to Borneo for a 3 week Christmas holiday that includes jungle treks and boats and all manner of adventures into caves and up rivers. We badly need a break but I don't think either of us has really absorbed the fact that we won't have or be looking for use of the internet for close to 3 weeks and most likely won't be using mobiles for that time either.

I don't think we really appreciate how much we use these things an an hourly basis. I've immersed myself much more deeply in the internerd this year, though I haven't written too much about it on here (I will, honest), I'm not sure what effect it's going to have. Perhaps make me more independant of things with flashing LEDs on them!

I will post things to various services from the mobile when I can. So anything worth finding out about will be on Jaiku (get yourself an invitation to Jaiku here). I've got this set to echo to Twitter which everyone else in the world seems to use. I don't use it because unlike Jaiku Twitter doesn't currently support text-message replies outside of the US and Canada.

What I'm saying is that I'm not around for a bit and I might get withdrawal symptoms and then feel weird back at a computer on my return. That's not the least of my worries, I have a severe coffee habit and the withdrawal symptoms from that are an inability to concentrate, blinding headaches and irritability. Just what you need treking through the jungle...

95:5 Tempered

2008-12-14T16:52:00.000+11:00

I've got a bit of a temper me. I try to get round it, I do my best to hide it, normally with fairly limited success. I have recently discovered that if I don't drink so much - specifically on an empty stomach - things are not so bad. Also cutting down the coffee and eating at regular intervals seems to help.There are a few things that still get my goat no matter what. Pedantic jobsworthery and self-importance will undermine almost any good mood. Bad driving, my own or anyone else's, is also guaranteed to ruin a good day.

I am trying to rid myself of many aspects of being a grouch with varying (read minimal) success. I have always operated on the 95:5 rule i.e. 95% of everything is rubbish and often people will go out of theri way to ruin the remaining 5%. I tend to regard people who don't share this worldview with suspicion and contempt, the bloody hippies. However I am having to contend with the fact that when I go out of the door in the morning thinking I will have a good day more often than not I do. When I leave the house thinking I have a bad day the story is much the same. This has got to the point where I now have to concede that the biggest factor affecting what kind of day I have is the attitude I approach it with.

As a lifelong 95:5 cynic this apparent affirmation of positive thinking is a little, er, challenging for me as it disproves the ratio (unless of course 95% of my opinions are rubbish (actually that sounds about right, ignore me I'm just doing a bit of belated growing up here).). I have no desire to become a detestable hippy but it seems I'm well down the road. Never mind, it could be worse, at least I won't get as angry!

The pint of no return...

2008-12-13T07:27:00.000+11:00

...is the name given to the drink after which you will drink until drunk. Or number 3 as I like to call it. The phrase seems to come from a book by a recovering alcoholic.

Debugger

2008-12-05T16:30:00.001+11:00

Brought to you by Unfuk

Ticket

2008-11-17T18:28:00.001+11:00

I really like the minimal 2 colour design of my weekly travel pass

Beware Unsavory voyeur

2008-11-14T09:22:00.002+11:00

Down on the upside

2008-10-08T16:16:00.005+11:00

Oh, I see what you've done...

When you start looking for them the world is full of odd things like this.

So shoot me

2008-10-05T08:23:00.003+11:00

Guns n Guns

Sometimes reality does the comedy for you.

Defeated by desert

2008-09-25T06:48:00.001+10:00

Defeated by desert

I do hope my colleague forgives me for putting this up but the photo is really good, and you can't actually see who it is...

Converging, diverging: a warning

2008-09-21T18:40:00.000+10:00

I am living a double life online. I have 2 signons to the internet accounts that I use to run my life.

One does most of the playtime stuff - like this blog - the other does the less playful stuff, like work and finances and other boring tosh. The two are artificially separated and are begnning to collide, I can't keep them separated for much longer, the work I do increasingly involves many of the activities I do online anyway. Increasingly I want my work to show up online with the things I do on a daily basis.

What has, up until recently been a carefully stage managed separate pair of entities might begin to exhibit some of the almost schizoprenic activity that they really contain - you have been warned!

P.S. anyone with any experience on handling multiple online identities and converging them in one place could chime in in the comments and give me a few tips on how I do this because at current I have 2 workblogs, this blog and an ancilliary one I'm considering killing off, 3 websites to manage, a life to lead and a job to do. It's all a bit much and I've inflicted the majority of it on myself.

Too complicated?

2008-09-14T10:34:00.003+10:00

The world always threatens to become too complex and make you feel like you're a troglodyte sat banging rocks together in the dark.

Unsurprisingly the opening of the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) on Friday has certainly done that for the majority of the world. When the worlds largest and most expensive experiment is a cathedral full of kit too - complex and integrated to call any part of it an individual machine - buried under the French/Swiss border and when you have to divert the course of underground rivers to build it (done by freezing them - unbeleivably difficult, an astounding engineering feat but all I can think about is the environmental impact), things may actually have gone a little too far. It's very hard to give a context, rationalise its creation and point to what need there is for this thing.

The press have not been as much help as perhaps the scientific community would like on this point. despite the extremely erduite and lucid plain english explanations from the very earnest and concerned scientists - who seem well aware that they've lost the rest of us on this one - the press and so the popular imagination remains stuck in around 1954. The majority of the focus has been on one single (non) issue: "Will this experiment suck us all in to a black hole?"

If you start talking about exotic particles, all of which seem to have the most wonderrful names (a 'charm quark'? brilliant) or about the higgs mechanism and why we can't quite figure out actully what mass and therefore matter really is when you get right down to it, then everyone glazes over (the only Planck length most people care about is in the DIY store at the weekend). Talk to them about black holes and the end of the world then you've really got their attention. However despite repeated assurances with very long numbers representing orders of probability it didn't really get through that the liklihood of the LHC producing a singularity (black hole type thing) was only marginally above that of you triggering one by getting up in the morning and making a cup of coffee.

The blame here doesn't entirely sit with the press. If the scientists had been a trifle less honest there might have been less interest. If someone asks you, "is there any chance this thing could suck us all into a black hole?" it is more prudent just to say "no" than tell them the absolute fundamental truth in language that they are going to have trouble summarising for a public audience.

Just for the record the answer is that they are doing experiments at such high energies that it is possible that small singularities might be created but these will be contained within a vacuum a long way from any other matter and behind a magnetic field so strong that it could pull your fillings out from 50 metres away which will mean that they decay in such a short period of time that you'd have trouble proving their existence. I hope that clears it up.

Why am I wittering on about this when clearly the world didn't end in any proveable way (more than it seems to be doing daily in any case)? Because if you don't explain things properly people get over anxious and start acting stupidly. It seems that at an Indian suicided over the news reports on television. This is undeniably sad and symptomatic of tabloidisation of media and the ugly refusal of accountability that this brings with it but there's also a personal element - if you are that anxious about the world and incapable of rationally going to find more information rather than panicking then you really are in deep trouble.

My other big problem with the LHC and the issues round it is that it seems no-one seems to be trying to relate the science to a benefit for people and all we are seeing is the main focus of the thing itself, to find out how the universe fits together. Such existential issues don't trouble most people on a daily basis but if it is explained that some of the technology that buds off from these experiments changes the world in unexpected ways that have nothing to do with Bosons and Leptons then they might appreciate it a bit more. The last particle accelerator that was built at CERN produced the technology that spawned the Internet. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but even so that technology has changed our daily lives.

Using a by-product to justify an expensive and otherwise apparently irrelevant process has been done before and is a bit of a lame argument and it brings me to the last problem I have with the LHC. Despite all the technology, the potential benefits and my curiosity about how the universe works the actual concept is still a bit crude. What it does is accelerate protons round and round in opposite directions until they are as close to the speed of light as can be managed, smash them into each other and looks carefully at the pieces to see what they are. There are two ways to look at this and I am torn between thm. The LHC is either the greatest technological achievement of humankind - which is a position I am close to - or it really exposes how little knowledge we have about the world if all we can do is smash it up to see what it's made of.

Humankind just has to do better than this last position. We can't keep spending billions on things like this with the world decaying round us and justifying it with by-products and the benefits the eventual knowledge will almost certainly bring with it. It's quite possible that we might not be around to enjoy them given the amount of time that could take. The LHC might unlock a fundamental secret of the universe but if you look at it carefully humankind is actually still just sat in a cave in the dark smashing rocks together.

Umbrella bin

2008-09-07T07:49:00.002+10:00

So many broken umbrellas they won't fit in the one bin.

Software and booze

2008-09-02T17:06:00.001+10:00

The contents of one of my desk drawers. This says so much about my life.

Buried boat

2008-08-17T13:13:00.001+10:00

Someone seems to have buried an entire boat at Frenchmans bay, much to the amusement of the children at the beach today.

Rock snot

2008-08-10T11:39:00.001+10:00

Just say no.

Threefold Inaccurate Catholics

2008-07-15T17:25:00.001+10:00

I do hope that the same courtesies being extended to the Catholic Church will be extended to the World gathering of Pastafari that I propose takes place in Sydney next year. As a devout Pastafarian I will expect the city to be shut down, helicopters to hover constantly overhead and Spaghetti Carbonara to be available on every street corner. I believe it is everyone’s right to believe in the omnipotent supernatural being of their choice with as little evidence as they like and disrupt the lives of millions of others accordingly.

There are many things that I find innately annoying about World Youth Day, starting with the arrogant inaccuracy of the name:

World; amazingly not everyone is a Catholic. The name may mean universal but there are an awful lot of Indonesians, Indians, Chinese and pretty well the whole Middle and Far East to whom this really doesn’t apply. There’s quite a few Anglicans too, they used to burn Catholics…
Youth; it is a matter of record that unaccompanied minors and catholic clergy should not mix. In fact The German Shepherd himself is going to apologise for this very thing whilst he is here. This means that the city is filled with the only thing worse than devout children; the kind of devout adult who would volunteer to take them to WYD08
Day; day! It goes on for at least a week of rubbernecking pious bastardry.

Those attending WYD08 are known as ‘Pilgrims’ which I also cannot stand as it makes me adopt a John Wayne voice as I shove them out of the way (and sometimes into the harbour, I only wanted to see if they could walk on water…). Also in the age of cheaply available air travel is the word Pilgrim really appropriate? Surely the whole idea of pilgrimage is that it was meant to be hard, you were meant to go on foot and you were meant to discover things about the world around you and about yourself. What do I discover when I travel by air?

I don’t like most people
I don’t like airports
I don’t like aeroplanes
I do like a glass of wine and a decent movie

These are all things I could have discovered by travelling to my local shopping mall to pick up a DVD and a bottle of plonk, not travelling halfway round the world for a glimpse of the pope and to chant halleluiah tunelessly in another country.

The effect thousands of additional people in a city they don’t know very well has had a less than positive impact on the public transport system. The events in the city are supposedly timed not to coincide with the morning rush-hour. Unfortunately if you are pious enough and jet-lagged enough there’s no real way of predicting just how early you will get up do a little God-bothering sightseeing.

At least the propensity to wear the flag of their nation of origin and brightly coloured clothing and accessories makes them very easy to see through a rifle scope.

Beware, pole!

2008-06-30T07:56:00.002+10:00

Can you guess what colour Sydney busses are? I don't quite know why I've started collecting signposts, possibly because I see so many every day.

Premium Economy

2008-06-19T21:51:00.004+10:00

There is a new service level on airlines and it is Premium Economy. These are not two words that sit well together and I suspect that the phenomeneon may be symptomatic of a greater sociological ill; we want it all but we're damned if we'll pay for it. Air travel should be expensive, it brutalises the planet and creates/supports an enormous number of jobs. From personal experience Ryan Air I can tell you that if you pay peanuts someone charges you for the monkeys.

So far I have discovered Premium Economy on Quantas, Thai Airways and Virgin Blue (who the hell thought up the brand name Virgin Blue for heaven's sake, it sounds like a dodgy website).

Just a quick note to the airlines; putting a contaminated sharps bin in the airoplane toilet might be very right-on but it doesn't send a great message about your cabin-mates. Just thought I'd mention it.

Whalesharks!

2008-06-17T06:47:00.001+10:00

After a year's gap and at about the third attempt we finally managed to swim with whalesharks this time last week. I'll put some pics up when I have them developed and'or I can work out how to pinch stills from a DVD.

Also I am not dead, I was merely on holiday. That is all.

Beginners travel for free

2008-05-21T18:11:00.001+10:00

Being an advanced passenger I'd already bribed the skipper for a quicker journey.

Get your Johnson out

2008-05-06T06:11:00.005+10:00

Oh I say, how utterly ludicrous

3 Years ago, almost to the day, I left London:

Goodbye London, look after yourself!
We will Tom, have fun in Australia

A few months pass, and then:

KABOOM screams etc.
Er, what was that?
Terrorists, nothing new, as you were

3 years pass:

Oh Tom, we've decided to ditch one anachronistic old dinosaur of a mayor for another far more ridiculous one that will hugely damage our international reputation and make us the subject of stereotype ridicule for decades.
Never speak to me again.

Simplify

2008-04-29T07:57:00.001+10:00

The person writing this sign knows the right word and thinks you should too.

5 % Bull

2008-04-24T06:57:00.003+10:00

Previously she'd asked me, quite incredulously, did I know that five percent of greenhous gasses came from cattle farting. Yes, I said, I think I'd heard that before somewhere. But five percent, that's a lot.

Whilst lying in bed, starting to drift off:

Five percent?!That sounds like a load of bullshit.

We were helpless with laughter for the next 10 minutes.

Mister E Bunny

2008-03-30T09:12:00.002+11:00

The concept of the Easter Bunny is just plain wrong. An extract from a recent interview:

Mr Bunny may I congratulate you on another successful Easter. How long is it now that you've been hiding chocolate eggs for children to find?
Eggs, yeah. Chocolate, right. You're...er... still eating those, right?
Oh yes, and most delicious they are too.
Oh yeah, go-on enjoy it. Let it melt on your tongue.
Er, Mr Bunny are you okay? Your tail is twitching in a most alarming manner.
Tail? Oh, yeah right "tail". (laughs) You still haven't got it have you? Oh yes, smear it up your face. Oh God, look it's sticking to your teeth!

Of course it could just be my twisted imagination that reacts badly to the idea of a rabbit hiding "chocolate" eggs with treats in for children but it does sound a bit suspicious. Doesn't it?

I had to ask...

2008-03-19T19:22:00.002+11:00

My reaction to Authur C Clarke's death was:

John Peel, Hunter S Thompson, Authur C Clarke - who's next?

I had to ask. Sorry.

Maybe it's time to do something creative.

Anxiety

2008-03-08T06:43:00.003+11:00

Symptoms:

Waking up before the alarm and waiting for it, watching it, trying to anticipate it
Peculiar and inexplicable skin complaints
Drinking too much
Dreams where I'm back at university and behind on my work (3 times this week)
Arguing with bus drivers before 7am on a Saturday
2 to do lists and no idea where to start

Treatment:

Holiday

I recognise this, this is stress isn't it? Thank Christ for that, I thought I was going nuts.

A note to cyclists

2008-03-04T12:00:00.004+11:00

Clearly a fetish

I'm not talking here to the ride it to work and back kind of cyclists, but to the multi-coloured lycra clad type. What you do is not a sport. It closely resembles a sport but consider: you need specialised equipment and lubricants to participate, the classic version has obscure french terminology, there are various shapes of foam rubber involved which you - excuse me - sit on! It is commonly done in large groups where participants seem to spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of the person in front of them.

Any activity that requires you to dress up like a perverted clown to massage your prostate with a custom formed piece of latex is not a sport it is a fetish. Particularly if you if you get up early in the morning to do it and shout to each other outside my bedroom window before I am awake.

Mountain bikers can stop feeling smug at this point, you do all this in the mud and rain and have clothing brands with names like "Muddy Fox".

Whilst I'm at it I'm sure there are several other sports that are little more than an excuse to engage in otherwise suspect physical encounters and hang around in changing rooms:

Wrestling - Putting on a leotard to grapple each other to the floor and hold each other down. This is quite obvioulsy a fetish and greco-roman wrestlers need to be reminded that these wrestlers originally used to be naked and oiled.
Judo - Really this is a sub-set of wrestling that shows off the Japanese capacity for taking things a bit too far. This is wrestling that you need to put on pajamas to take part in and then grapple each-other to the ground in an attempt to hold one-another down with your faces in each-other's armpits. Clearly a fetish.

Oooh chase me, chase me!

Rugby - Using a funny shaped ball as an excuse to chase each-other around and wrestle each-other to the ground, in the mud! Until recently this was done in practical hard-wearing clothing. Now it seems to be done in skin-tight Lycra.
Climbing - Uncomfortable harness that is particularly tight around the groin area, rope, silly little rubber shoes and again skin-tight bloody Lycra.
Speed skating - This is a really weird one, a fetish where people with huge thighs to dress up in what amounts to a skin-tight Lycra gimp suit to chase each other around on ice. Bizarre.

Oh I'm comin' to getcha'

I'm sure there are more, I'll add them as I think of them.

Autumn

2008-03-01T00:01:00.003+11:00

It is now Autumn in Australia, I can't say I noticed Spring or Summer, we seem to have skipped a year's supply of those and just had nine months of Winter. Oh well, it can't be sunny all the time.

I got through the second 29^th of February of a 6 year relationship without that question being asked. Is this a good or a bad thing? I'm not sure I know. What I do know is that Emily will be peeved that she forgot to terrify me by threatening with it all day long, hah!

Where does Guy live?

2008-02-29T08:27:00.002+11:00

Good God, I've made a hairdressing joke. Sorry.

Finally

2008-02-28T17:11:00.000+11:00

Well thank heavens that wasn’t a colossal pain in the arse, by which of course I mean that it was. Getting your house wired up to the internet seems to be as difficult as everything else in this country. It has taken me more than a month from buying the connection and the kit to get things working properly. However the effort looks like it has been worth it and I now have an internet connection at home.

Let’s hope it lasts!

Write it down

2008-02-19T17:46:00.000+11:00

My [other] constant companion is my notebook. The poor thing is beginning to feel the strain. It contains all the general tasks of life, thoughts and ideas that I rush to capture before they evaporate. I always intend to organise them later.

My fear is that it has become an indicator of my mental state; a collection of disjointed scraps and notes associated only by virtue of their collection in a single location. Tattered and frayed, dog eared and overworked it threatens to give way at any moment. Missing pages are missing memories, whole days passed in a blur or torn out, deliberately put beyond recall.

You can see why I'm worried.

Time to consolidate, organise and rearrange. I might sort my notebook out too...

Sorry Day

2008-02-15T08:48:00.007+11:00

13 February was been a big day for Australia. The Prime Minister officially apologised to the Stolen Generations. This term refers to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people forcibly removed from their parents and sent to live either with white foster parents or in camps governed by white people. This was a nationwide and state-by-state policy in Australia ostensibly to protect children at risk of harm but in fact enforced as a brutal piece of 'ethnic cleansing' and out and out racism as has been seen at any time in history. It lasted a hundred years or more.

Apologising for this atrocity has been a sticking point with governments ever since the idea was suggested. A large part of white Australia feels that it has nothing to apologise for; that Aboriginal people do nothing but drink, sniff petrol and laze around. Apologising to indigenous people for Australians of this viewpoint is feeding a victim mentality and validating the perceived lack of endeavour. This is, obviously to me, ignoring the fact that the parlous state of a lot of indigenous communities is a result of the interference of another culture.

This is not to ignore that child abuse, alcoholism and petrol sniffing are immense problems in many indigenous communities. These are symptoms of much bigger problems to do with poverty arising from the treatment of the indigenous population. A distributed hunter-gatherer culture had a concentrated capital economic white culture imposed on it that attempted to force its own values to the fore, removing autonomy and self-determination along the way. This was also done without providing a framework for development or progress – i.e. opportunity to access education and employment – without which many of these communities lapsed into third-world level poverty where they remain today. The average indigenous life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of the white population.

There are reasons for this too; many indigenous communities are very remote making it very difficult to provide these opportunities even when the impetus to do so is present (from either side of the equation). The traditional ways of living, which supported these communities in the past, had been devalued and eroded by the encroaching culture, hopelessness and an apathetic helpless inertia was the result.

It is against this background that one federal MP when asked whether he supported an apology commented on camera that there were places in Australia where he thought children should be removed from their parents (his emphasis).

Nice one Kev

The wording of the apology needed to be right. Australians of any background are straight talking honest people and any half-hearted effort would have rendered the exercise pointless for absolutely everyone. The word sorry was particularly important as an apology can be without regret and regret as well as recognition of the past ills are what was needed. In the photograph is Sally Pierce who was herself removed from her parents. For years she has worn a black tee shirt with the word Sorry on it, after the PM’s speech she changed it.

Below I’ve included a couple of things, some thinking on what the apology might mean from the Special Broadcasting Service, a video of the PM’s speech, the full text of it and some reactions to the speech again from SBS.

Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.
For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.
We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

Kiribili sunset

2008-02-09T19:38:00.002+11:00

Tasteless bathroom

2008-01-23T20:50:00.001+11:00

Wow! That's bad.

Virgin Blue: Huge Thanks!

2008-01-23T15:43:00.000+11:00

I am normally on the complaining side of the equation when it comes to customer service and I am rarely impressed by the way companies deal with me which makes it particularly noteworthy when they do it well. On Friday I was not just pleasantly surprised but utterly blown away by the lengths to which the check-in staff of Virgin Blue at Sydney Airport went to help us.

Our online check-in failed to work but we had run out of time and had to get to the airport as quickly as possible. It was raining, hard. The traffic ground to halt a not even a kilometre up the road. We got to the airport and the transfer bus from long-term parking failed to arrive and then got stuck in a traffic jam of taxis. We missed the flight and would have had to buy a ticket for a different flight and not use our tickets for the Australian Open that night.

The ground crew not only didn’t make us buy another flight, they moved heaven and earth to get us on any of the next three flights out of Sydney and they did it despite the fact that we were both, frustrated, angry and upset (I was rude too, but Emily kept her head!). Thanks to them we missed only the first set of the women’s singles match that night – the first of three – and saw all 5 sets of the men’s.

We would probably have gone straight home and not gone to Melbourne at all had it not been for the people that helped us. Instead we had a fantastic weekend away, saw a day and a half of top class tennis. I can’t thank them enough.

On Browsing: Herbivorous consumption

2008-01-04T08:21:00.000+11:00

Browsing is an activity where concentration and attention span as well as a deeper qualitative appreciation are hostile to the activity itself. It also means that people are more sensitive to negative forces, browsing has both push and pull forces and the push is instant and final and the pull is creeping and fickle.

"I'm a selective consumer me."

It's probably a bit unseemly to quote yourself but when I wrote this I started thinking more about browsing as it seems to be an increasingly important part of everyday experience.

Dictionary definitions aren't much good when you are looking to describe and understand something as prevalent and widely applied as the concept of browsing. At best you will be left with an awkwardly narrow definition and at worst discover that the term you are looking up has several different uses that vary only slightly in a semantic sense but when used as a basis for thinking about the thing it describes in a real world context produce a multitude of obfuscating subtleties (try saying that with a mouthful of jelly!). The definition I have come up with is:

Browsing is the act of continual selection and sampling dictating what will be consumed and what will be discarded.

This feels like a capital economic description but is derived from natural history's description of the eating habits of herbivores and I've pinched this as a metaphor for thinking about the process. The very fact that to me this sounds like something that might come up in a marketing seminar points to what is important about browsing; it is a choice mechanism based on sampling. The actual item or experience to be consumed must be part consumed or experienced in the act of making a choice. Choice only occurs when there is more than one option to consume and browsing is how we appear to cope with an enormous variety of choice offered: too many options actually inhibit a quick and clear decision, sampling and acceptance or rejecion have become the norm. We have been turned into herbivorous consumers by the overwhelming quantity of options available.

Browsing also seems to be an effective means of avoiding a definitive choice. With a little of this and a little of that you can browse all day without settling on a single option. It could lead to overconsumption, particularly if you continue with the idea that you are looking for a single perfect thing or simply get lost in the habit of sampling and moving on. Apathy and inertia are an unhealthy combinaton.

The act of browsing seems to have become an activity in itself; window shopping, channel surfing and web browsing for fun. What becomes of a choice mechanism when the final objective is removed? The activity seems a kind of aimless meandering, a feckless self absorption and commitmentless waste of time. Without an aim continuous browsing will probably lead down roads marked out by the most basic and instinctual drives, the lowest common denominator. I'm wondering if this is why there is so much sex on the internet - a medium where you have to open a 'browser' just to be able to access most of the content.

There is another name for herbivores in natural history: prey species. It is only by herding together in vast numbers and/or reaching a really enormous size that they manage not to be devoured!

More thought needed.

To do list

2008-01-02T09:17:00.000+11:00

Unlike 90% of the rest of the world I return to work on 7 January. My beloved does not and today has nose firmly pressed to grindstone. This has precipitated the dreaded To Do List.

I am not the most reliable person on earth so a to do list outside of work is more of a vague indication of possible activity rather than a strict list of tasks to be accomplished. My other half is not so lackadaisical and the stern looks and telling off I will most likely receive in the almost inevitable event of my failing to complete everything on it will be unpleasant in the extreme. There's no point begging for mercy, she'll be at work all day and I'll be at home watching the tennis and guzzling sausages.

It's not that the list is particularly onerous - it has only 10 items - the problem is that I've not been at work since Christmas Eve and the majority of tasks to be completed in that time have been the same:

Drive somewhere
Eat something
Drink something
Sleep

How am I to deal with 10 tasks that are all different and have sub-tasks that require actual thought? Plus the fact that one of these tasks is 'Ironing', that isn't a task, it's a sentance (and no time off for good behaviour either)!

Congwong beach

2007-12-28T09:40:00.002+11:00

Round the corner from the new place

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