20 cents short of a beer

I don't want that! It's bloody kiwi. Too many currencies.

Harbour Traffic

Harbour 2

There's a huge amount of harbour traffic today. I presume everyone's trying to get in or out of port before APEC.

There's a huge amount of police launches patrolling out there too.

Bleeding edge news and Tuesday blues

"I could use a hug about now"

With the APEC summit about to happen in Sydney and an opportunity for Australia to showcase its' position as a real economic and political player on the global stage the biggest news story over here at the moment is obviously going to be about a drug taking rugby player.

Last weekend Andrew Johns was arrested in London with an ecstasy tablet in his possession. That's right, one tablet. This is surprisingly convenient for him as if you get caught with one tablet in the UK you can say it's for personal use, if you get nicked with even only one more than that you get done for possession with intent to supply. A man of Johns' size, and apparently considerable experience with controlled substances, will probably want more than one pill to get his rocks off all night. Someone, possibly someone wearing a blue uniform, has done him a big favour and stepped on the rest.

Johns has pleaded that he has been battling bi-polar disorder and that he was using alcohol and drugs to self-medicate, something his doctor almost certainly told him not to do. For a start alcohol is a depressant and won't really work, the drinking experience would feel hollow and shallow and make the problem worse, especially if you drink predominantly filthy Australian beer.

As a second point MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, whilst effective immediately, with even casual use has the side-effect of a nasty comedown when it wears off. With continued use you get delayed comedowns that take place a day or two from the high. These exhibit themselves as a rather dark and tearful mood a few days later - commonly known as the Tuesday blues.

There are a couple of points here that I don't like:

1. Johns' symptoms are as much a result of his self-medication as they are anything else. Given the length of time he's been using it will now be impossible to distinguish between these and the original depression. This doesn't matter however, the treatment will be the same.
2. Successful intoxication of any kind requires knowledge. Johns should have done his homework before stealing the key to the medicine cabinet.
3. Self-medication my arse. He did it to get wasted, just like the rest of us do.
   
4. This isn't exactly news now is it.

A sportsman exhibiting risk-taking misbeaviour? How unexpected. Amazingly he also has a ready excuse designed to provoke sympathy rather than a backlash, gosh I couldn't have predicted that either. Channel 10 has a rather unfunny sketch comedy called The Wedge in which there is a character called Mark Warey, a generic sports star who is constantly apologising for his bad behaviour. If bad sports star behaviour and subsequent apology and sob-story is such a staple of the social cannon that it appears in a slightly sub-standard comedy show as a weekly event then this can't be considered particularly shocking or revealing no matter who that sportsman is.

In a country about to host one of the world's most significant economic summits where the government is using anti-terror legislation to monitor protestors, where the country's largest city has had the central district fenced off to prevent protestors being able to get within 500 metres of anyone significant, where the federal government has stepped in to Aboriginal communities and effectively rolled back previous native land title legislation for a 5 year period there are much weightier things to talk about that are directly in the public interest.

Eclipse ambivalence

Tonight's total lunar eclipse made me think two things:

1. Wow look at that, amazing!
2. Er...what's all the fuss about? Yes, the moon's gone red, but it was upside down anyway so no big deal really.
   

On the first point it really is quite astonishing to watch the Earth's shadow fall across the moon and the scattering effect of the atmosphere make it appear a rusty blood red. Once you know that's what it is, it does make you feel sufficiently small. Of course if you didn't know that, it might make you feel something untoward and bizarre had happened and that you really should go and work out your frustrations on the peculiar lady down the road and her sizable collection of cats and brooms. Dammit she was probably the reason your turnip crop failed, get the kindling.

The second point is a bit harder to nail down. Once you do know the reasons for the moon turning red, should you really be that impressed by it any more? If you happened to be in the right spot on each occasion you could see this twice a year. Being amazed by it when you know that as well doesn't seem too far removed from standing in a muddy field howling at it, which some people were actually doing.

This is possibly why the majority of people left after ten minutes of staring at probably one of the most beautiful natural phenomena they will ever see to go home and stare at the television for a few hours. Weirdos, how can you ignore that? The moon went red for heaven's sake; it was incredible!

Apologies for lack of pictures, the phone wasn't quite up to the task. I'll steal from the newspaper websites tomorrow.

A long way home

36 hours door to door; not bad for a journey of 17,000 miles plus, but as always the last 8 hours were the hardest and I was close to suicide by the time the plane finally landed.

I’d been doing relatively well having sat next to a couple a bit younger than myself from London to Dubai who kept themselves to themselves and tried very hard to pretend they weren’t kibitzing at my completed crossword. I tried very hard to pretend their public displays of affection weren’t making me feel ill, probably with an equal degree of success.

A few tips for those travelling through Dubai airport:

• The best value duty free is the Bombay Sapphire Gin: $11 US for a litre and it’s a proper strength at 47%.
• The hotel bar takes 8 different currencies and makes a mean double espresso.
• Avoid talking to cross eyed Americans – they’ve taken huge quantities of Xanax and are unaware of the consequences of drinking large amounts of beer in combination with this and prescription sleeping pills.

From Dubai to Bangkok I sat next to a woman who must have been in her 70’s who couldn’t work out the touch-screen entertainment system. Once I’d shown her how this worked she watched Spiderman films for 6 straight hours. Maybe she just liked young muscular men in skin-tight lycra, maybe that’s why she was flying to Bangkok where a small amount of a UK pension will probably purchase many muscular young men in skin-tight lycra, the mind boggles.

A few tips for people travelling through Bangkok Airport:

• Do not compare this airport to any other in the world, it will only depress you.
• The moving walkways are talking to you, they are telling you that the walkway is about to end and are triggered by IR beams across the path. This might seem obvious now but after flying for 16 hours or so being at Bangkok Airport feels like you’ve been dropped into a scene from Bladerunner, if you don’t know small details like this you might start trying to figure out which of your travelling companions are simulants.
• Smokers should kick the habit before getting on a plane. If you haven’t the smoking rooms will make you wish you had. I gave up smoking years ago but even from the outside they look like an experiment in "pressure and stress" from Guantanamo bay.

As so many westerners can say "my luck ran out in Bangkok". I returned to my seat to find that septuagenarian Spiderman fan had been replaced by a man whose shoulder breadth was probably greater than his considerable height. We had a new pilot, a Dutchman who thought he was funny. If there is one thing the world doesn’t need it is airline pilots with a sense of humour, specifically Dutch ones. The child in the seat in front of me who had been a source of considerable amusement on the previous leg of the journey had run out of patience and become a screaming machine with no off button and had been joined by two more of the same. I drank as much alcohol as I could persuade the attendants to give me to try and knock myself out only to be woken every 20 minutes by the ‘please fasten your seatbelts’ announcements, the Arabic version of which sounds like someone clearing a particularly painful obstruction to their airways, or a fresh bout of screaming.

By the time I reached Sydney I was in such a state of unshaven disarray that I was twitching involuntarily and charging about the place with a slightly haunted look on my face in search of my luggage and the duty-free that would bring the blessed ease of unconsciousness once I finally got home. Every airport security officer in the world has been taught to look for that kind of behaviour and so I was stopped about every 20 metres by a uniformed, and sometimes armed, official who asked me where I’d been, where I was going to and details of the flights I’d been on. These questions are intended to make sure that you aren’t about to set yourself on fire shout "God is great" and detonate your shoes but after more than a full day of travelling it’s quite hard to be chirpy and give concise accurate replies. Nonetheless I made it out of the airport in record time only to find that it was raining heavily. I got in a taxi to find it being driven by a young man who looked like he was about to set himself on fire shout "God is great" and detonate his shoes. I set aside the racial stereotypes and chatted to him all the way home to keep myself awake.

That wasn’t the first time I’ve had a gin and tonic at 9am, but it was definitely the only time I’ve actually needed one at that time of day.

6 degrees of separation

Silly me, I thought social networking meant a trip to the pub (this may be why my boss has described my networking skills as "pretty modest" but he seems to treat networking as a trip to the pub as well so I suspect this is something else). Apparently the web has changed much of this and social networking is now achieved by technological means as well.

To try and get a handle on what I might use these for I have been trying out various "Social Networking" websites. Some over the past couple of months/years some only very recently. I am now on twitter, Linkedin and Facebook as well as MySpace, Flickr and just about anything else with a crap name. I stopped short of Bebo, I don't want to be part of a social network that sounds like a teddy bear (although I am on Orkut, which sounds like a character from terrible Eighties cartoon He-Man).

There are hundreds of these bloody things, they can't all be useful. I can understand when they have a set purpose like Linkedin (business connections) and Flickr (photos), but Facebook, although enourmous fun for the first 5 days of membership, seems too broad in application to be useful, as is MySpace which seems to have become infested with musos as well as aggravating teenagers. MySpace also has the distasteful honour of being owned by Uncle Rupert, it is also poorly designed, hard to use and forces you to put your name and photograph next to adverts. I don't use that much.

The biggest problem for these sites is that each one seems to want to be the master account; it assumes that you will be logged in to that site and that site alone to update your personal details, status, photos, what you had for breakfast etc. I spend a lot of time online but even I draw the line at being logged in to a website pumping adverts at me all day.

One of the main reasons I use Google's services for the majority of my online life is that it is all behind one login all the time and that I can update most things from one place or go to the exact spot I want with a single click and get everything I want to do in my personal online world finished before I finish my morning coffee. This is slowly becoming more and more possible as each site publishes an API and I know for a fact that some online service providers are building software that will aggregate all these things to a single spot. This is a spectacularly difficult endeavour and as a result there aren't any plans to turn this into a product as yet - but you can bet anything you like there will be, because I'd use it.

I had hoped that by looking on each of these sites I would discover which was more used by people I know and could stick with that. Having uploaded my contacts into each one and searched the databases I have discovered that everyone is hedging their bets; everyone uses a few of them infrequently. This tells me that the whole thing is either a waste of time or that this is a space that needs not just consolidation but a good idea of what it aiming to do and a better idea of how people do it. Might I suggest some offline time to facilitate this process? There's nothing like actually socialising to teach you how people network socially, or trying to find a new job to teach you just how much easier this could be made.

Despite myself I quite enjoy the online social networking thing. The sites use the '6 degrees' principle to great effect. Once you have made a connection with someone you can see all their connections and send 'friend requests' to them. It's slightly nauseating in a primary school 'will you be my friend?' kind of way but it can serve to put you back in touch with people you haven't seen in quite some time and has the addictive collecting and slightly competitive feeling to it that football stickers used to have before I grew up (had Watford not lost that FA Cup final to Everton in such a terrible way I might still be collecting them).

These sites also allow you to make a very public tit of yourself and give other people enormous scope to do the same. Posting photos of yourself and others wide eyed and legless allows everyone in your network to see them unless you are very familiar with each site's privacy settings and use them carefully. I am not the kind of person who thinks their social life should need tight administrative protocols and I react badly to having to use them. Also the confluence of professional and social is a tricky area for me, it can make me uneasy and it takes me a while to shake the feeling that I should be behaving in a manner that 'isn't me'. Social networking sites are starting to blur the boundaries between a social networks and professional ones and that makes me uneasy for the same reason.

Not for me

Digger

Diggers like beaches

The recent storms - in addition to killing 9 people and causing shipwrecks - spread most of Maroubra beach accross the road or plastered it against the concrete walls that border the sand. Earth moving equipment was brought in to re-level the beach after the storms and only today has it been silent

I must admit I had a temptation to joyride the thing in this photo. Sadly at time of taking it was mid-morning and I couldn't see the keys anywhere. Now it is late afternoon and I've had a few of Australia's finest I'm tempted to try again. Look out for news of my arrest.

Pets

"For pity's sake HELP ME!"

I grew up with pets; 2 cats and 2 dogs, the occasional fish, horses, my sister had a hamster that went very quiet one day and was found, toes in the air stiff as a board with no further use for his annoyingly squeaky wheel. I pleaded not guilty and was duly acquitted.

"I'll kill you all, when I get loose!"

As an adult I do not feel the urge to have pets particularly. I am on my own on this particular point; the threat "dog or baby" has been used on more than one occasion and is starting to sound like a bit more than an idle threat. However Dog has recently taken a back seat to Toyger. No I haven’t misspelt that dyslexia or no. She wants a Toyger.

Yes dear, very pretty.

A Toyger is a domestic cat specifically bred to look like a miniature tiger. Which sounds excellent apart from the fact that they are horrendously expensive at $1000 a go. Why would you need to breed a domestic moggy to look like a tiger anyway? They all believe they’re tigers, why bolster the fantasy?

"I'm thinkin about eatin you..."

I have said no to a Toyger on the grounds that they too expensive, too steal-able and we go on far too many holidays to have a pet. I have been receiving these pictures of Toyger kittens by email. Stupidly I made the mistake of showing them to my colleagues (all women). I am not getting much support. Sadly things have since escalated and Toyger quickly gave way to Kinkajou and Sugar Glider. Heaven help me.

Dear Microsoft...

Let the fun begin!

Being just an ignorant end-user I was under the impression that the updates that my computer periodically downloads from you were meant to make my computer more secure and work more effectively. In this first regard your most recent set have most certainly succeeded. If I can’t do anything with it how could it ever get malicious software on it?! It is a stroke of genius, a triumph of lateral thinking on which you are to be congratulated. Little was I to know that the update process was also a game of deduction and reasoning to educate users and keep us on our toes. Again I congratulate you on going well beyond what would normally be considered customer service to provide education and entertainment, as well as just a reliable and thoroughly useable product.

At the outset, I must admit, I had some small concerns about the second point above. The effectiveness of my computer post installation was initially somewhat reduced, in as much as it would give the appearance of working as normal and indeed for the first twenty seconds to a minute of use would operate much as before. Unfortunately, after this time it would pop up a warning window with an incomprehensible message on it referencing some abstract section of code that it was attempting to use and that it could not locate. Distressed, I attempted to come to its’ aid, alas to no avail. I found that my computer, plucky little thing that it is, had struggled to its eventual demise.

I will confess to being a little disheartened at this point. I began to wonder how I was to reinstate my poor PC without being able to access the internet, or run any of the restore functions or check the hard-disk for errors. So began the game! Feverishly I hunted for information, I consulted with friends and colleagues, I scoured the internet for information at work, I read countless articles detailing where I might find the error - many of them saying that no further updates or support would be available for my machine. That was a cunning move, and one I hadn’t seen coming! Surely, I thought, they can’t want everyone to upgrade to Vista already. Therein lay the solution to my problem! Self evidently this could not be a cynical ploy to force people to install a new operating system, that would be marketing suicide. Why would any company cripple its’ most widely used and compatible product to try and make people buy a new version of it, a ridiculous notion!

More fantastic updates!

I set about finding an answer, keeping my wits about me. If, as was seemingly the case, the crippling update was, as it could not be, a fiendish scheme to make me upgrade my software, then perhaps these articles telling me there were no further updates to be found were a double bluff and there were in fact additional updates to download. It hit me, a cry of elation escaped my lips and my colleagues cast wary glances in my direction, but I cared not for I had my answer! I had merely to wait and the solution would come to me. There were updates, useful ones, still to come and all I had to do was make sure that the computer had space for all the temporary files it needed. The instant I got home I deleted all the useless bloatware that I had installed – you know the type of thing, photo management software, the suite of software that makes my mobile telephone work with the computer (how could I have installed that hopeless frippery? After all it wasn’t a Microsoft product how could I have expected efficacy?). This cleared space for my poor computer to download its necessary updates and attempt to install them, something it achieved at only the fifth crashed attempt! Remarkable.

Imagine, if you will, my delight today to find that my work computer is now asking me download and install fresh updates. I can hardly wait! What delights of research, what twists and turns of analysis and logic am I to experience now, what intricate subtleties of compatibility am I to learn now? I could not be more pleased, though I wonder if my employer shares my glee. I suspect he may wish the process was perhaps a little less entertaining, the spoilsport!

Keep up the good work!

Hospitals I have waited in

It appears to be a fundamental truism that on average one must visit a hospital at least every 18 months (obviously a bit more often for health care professionals). On this occasion you must sit and wait for a period of no less than two hours. The most recent of these for me was at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick. The staff were excellent the best of them being the attending doctor, despite looking about 12 years old, it was a privilege to watch him work. However...

I despise waiting and I'm not fond of hospitals. Eventually, no matter how serious the reason for being in a hospital, you attempt to alleviate the anxious tedium of the waiting room by entering into an advanced level of schadenfreude in the form of a guessing game:

"Ooh, look at the one in the pink dressing gown! Bloodshot eyes, barely able to stand and carrying a bucket of puke. The dreaded lurgy or a cry for help?"

This is particularly true of accident and emergency wards where there is an additional element added to the game necessarily added by the triage process. Patients are rated into [it'll all end in] tiers to denote how urgent their treatment is and to allow the staff to prioritise the right people:

1. About to die. Intensive care required with the possibility that bits might need to be sewn back on.
2. In immediate danger, could be a bit messy, attending doctor should be prepared to get sticky
3. Pretty bloody urgent but not in immediate danger. They'll be OK for 10 minutes but keep an eye on 'em
4. "You nailed what? To where?! Ate/drank what? You dipstick."
5. Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning

• Anything else - sticking plaster with mickey mouse on it and Mummy kiss it better.

You rarely see tier 1 or 2s in the waiting room. The helicopter/ambulance crew generally having scraped enough of them together for a delivery direct to the ICU (I wonder if the same rules as pizza apply here; if you wait more than half an hour do you get your treatment free?). You do see some tier 3s and some very funny high-end tier 4s. The best of which this time round was a very south American sounding man who was dragged in across the shoulders of his girlfriend, his eyes not focused and not quite capable of standing on his own.

Eee ate a mushroom in the bush and now ee is intoxicated!
A magic mushroom?
No, jus a mushroom. In the woods.

The idiot was dragged away to have his stomach pumped. Sadly my first thought was "we are interfering with natural selection and I'm not sure we should have on this occasion".

Whilst I understand that the position of triage nurse calls for an extremely grounded and pragmatic personality the two on duty here could have used a gentle reminder about privacy. One poor girl, brought in doubled up in pain, was shut in the consulting room to preserve her dignity, but not before the nurse had bellowed out that treatment would be "stuck in your bottom". I presumed it was an intramuscular injection but who knows, a dill pickle suppository may be more effective.

Probably the stand-out moment though was when we actually sitting in the ward waiting for everyone to be in the same place at the same time again. A & E wards are terrifying places at the best of times and this one has good road links to most of the eastern side of Sydney, and a helipad on the roof. The majority of patients were elderly brought in with suspected heart attacks but there were some in there who had clearly been spread across the road only an hour or so earlier.

The unseen octogenarian in the next cubicle over was having a tough time of it. The doctor returned to him and explained that he was going to have to do a rectal exam; "what that means is...". There was a rustling of sheets and a short, utterly silent pause. And then, "ooooh, aaaaarghhh, oooh!". I would have laughed out loud had they not been talking about a full blood transfusion to keep him alive.

Beans

You know you're drinking too much coffee when your barista gives you a sample of the new beans to try out! Thanks Tim!

At last real beer

Mmmm beer...

Just had my first taste of proper English bitter in nearly 2 years. I didn't realise how much I missed it. Good thing I've made 23 litres of it!

Just pants

My car insurer has just sent me this tasteful pair of undies. Still no policy document though...

For you Mr Blair

It's a good thing I can't get on the net to vent my spleen. I would like to rail against Tony Blair but I can't. Instead I shall simply remind everyone that it was a man calling himself a socialist that enforced student loans and ignored 2 million people on the streets of London to go to war illegally. He has today said that he thought he was doing the right thing.

Edit: How will history judge Blair? - more on this later.

Presence (feedback I didn't need)

Apparently presence is an issue for me. At work, at home, in my life in general I seem disinterested to the point of total absence.

My life goes on around me nonetheless. The driver is not just asleep at the wheel but has stepped out for a swift half and left the handbrake off. The lights are on but...

If things continue without my attention it would suggest that my attention is not really required. Was it ever? Have I got this far without effort or even a guiding influence? How should I measure progress if I've been coasting?

If the life continues without the person living it, the body a husk and the eyes dead then what actually am I? Some Derridian nightmare; the walking signifier of my own nullity. A semiotic paradox placed in life by a quirk of spacetime/joker deity - the actual presence of me signifying my total and utter absence.

Don't look at me for an answer, I'm not here.

The Lucky Shag

Just popping in for a quick one; drink, that is.

Volume two!

Someone beat me to it.

Perth, Rottnest Island

Perth skyline

Being from the UK it seems a little odd to fly for a shade under 5 hours and land in the same country as you started in. If you flew to the same height as we did going from Sydney to Perth you could probably have seen the majority of the British Isles, we couldn't see much other than the southern coast of Australia which you could see the perfect map outline of. This country is so huge that I have trouble properly comprehending it. At one point we flew past what appeared to be 'quite a large town' in the middle of absolutely nothing, it was Adelaide (though to be fair to British eyes the South Australian capital isn't much more than a town).

Perth itself is a peculiar city. The CBD is tiny, comprising a total of about 5 city blocks. From the air it looks even more like a model than cities normally do.

Quokka/Rott

There are a few good things to see around Perth, noteably Freemantle which is a seaside town with a great Sunday market which we didn't go to and Rottnest Island (or Wadjemup in the local Aboriginal dialect). Rottnest means rat's nest in dutch and it was dutch explorers that gave the place its name. Why would you call such an idyllic place a rat's nest? Because of the quokkas. Take a field mouse, cross it with kangaroo and you have a quokka. They seem quite unafraid of people and will happily eat or drink from your hand (not that you should really get them drunk...). They curl up into a ball when threatened, leading to a now eradicated local sport of quokka soccer.

Rottnest is a beautiful place, we rode around the whole island in about 2 hours on hired bicycles stopping to swim at a near perfect beach (it's also quite hilly so the ride wasn't particularly easy on the prostate). Sadly we didn't take enough pictures here and I need to be edited out of the ones we do have so they might be a while in arriving on this post.

More later...

Deterrent

Sign in a bookshop.

Quokka

A funny little thing I found on Rottnest Island, and a Quokka.

Bell tower

Holiday

This could turn into one of those annoying memes that people use on their blogs but I'm going to do it anyway; you know you've had a busy month when:

• You've used up half a box of business cards
• You look at things that would normally scare you with their urgency and decide that they aren't that bad really
• A full day of tasks is addded to your diary for the week and you think, "ah, oh well no one else can do it..."
• You are clipping things out of the Sunday paper to go into your presentations
• You wake up on a Saturday thinking, "I should probably have delegated that to someone else..."
  

It's time for a holiday and me & the Mrs are off to WA to see Ningaloo reef, the Margaret River, Rottnest Island and Perth. Naturally because we both need a nice relaxing holiday we are trying to do as much as possible. This will include snorkelling with whale sharks, which might be a little intimidating. I'm taking the mobile with me so there will be occasional picture posts on here, though I'm not sure how well it will do underwater...

A mistake realised

First there's the moment of realisation, the open-mouthed shock. This is swiftly overrun by the hot prickling up of sweat from your scalp that instantly cools to an icy chill. Starting as a trickle down the back of your neck it gains momentum and becomes a freezing torrent that rushes down your spine before diving into your guts and viciously squeezing the life out of your stomach. The blood squeezed from your viscera is pushed to your face causing a hot flush and the cycle begins again.

If the mistake is bad enough this feeling won't just be a temporary one but a near continuous loop that makes it difficult to fall asleep and impossible to stay that way. It will last as long as it takes to fix the mistake.

Shotcode

dataphage:shotcode

Sometimes technology moves more quickly than you really like to think about. The picture to the left is a shotcode. With the aid of a download to your phone from the shotcode website you can then take a picture of these graphics and the phone will automatically direct its browser to the site that it represents. The one to the left is for here.

Personally I find that a little creepy but I'm going to have fun leaving these all over the place, though I might not go this far.

Various things

Central Sydney in a storm

Whilst I wait for the coffee to bring me back to life and before I engage on some of my long-planned but never acted on writing projects, one of which is now a sprawling epic of seven paragraphs, a quick update. Unbeleivably I have been doing things and not writing about them.The picture to the left is a shot from a friend's balcony accross central Sydney, in a thunderstorm. We went to her house to play poker, we left at three the next morning. The prize was a hangover and I won it in style.

The hot seat

The Laneway Festival was great fun and I can recommend looking up almost all the acts on the lineup as they each have something different (there are links to YouTube and MySpace on the laneway site if you feel so inclined). A small section of Sydney, just a block back from Circular Quay is shut off and turned into a mini music festival on the streets with two large stages, one dj stage from the back of a pickup and one club venue in The Basement. The sofa in the picture was a doomed seat. At first it seems to be the best placed in the entire venue; not far from the least crowded bar, soft and comfy, close to the relaxed music coming from the dj etc. However it was a warm day, a very warm day. I played tennis that morning and when I finished at ten it was 43 Celsius on court. This seat had the highest turnover of occupants. I was watching and timing, nobody lasted five minutes.

Grow my pretties...

We have begun to grow herbs and the like on our back balcony. We have Chives, Basil, Coriander, Thyme, Parsely and Oregano growing from seed. After considerable success with it in London we also decided to see if we could grow Chillis. You can see the result of scraping out the seeds from a chilli straight from the fridge into the compost and a week of watering and sunshine, we have about 30 seedlings!

When we were given a couple of chilli plants in London we lived in a house that had a terrible mouse problem and the little bastards completely ate our plant right down to the woodiest twig. We had to nurse the small stick that was left back in to leaf and eventually fruiting. It now resides in Hertfordshire and is doing very well I'm told. I will forever be wondering about that mouse. I had mental images of a rocket-propelled rodent that made me giggle like a toddler.

It was this incident that ultimately spelled the end for the mice. The non-aggression pact was rendered null and void and the use of force authorised, if not completely encouraged. One week of peanut-butter baited traps dealt with the incautious and letting our neighbour's cat into the house seemed to have dealt with the rest. I'm not particularly sure how effective a hunter Wonky the boss-eyed moggy would have been but we didn't see many mice after that.

Top Gear vs Alabama

Hicksville Alabama

I have lots of erudite and witty observations to make but right now I am hung over; subtlety is a forlorn hope and wit a forgotten dream. Watch this instead, it's very funny indeed.

Soft as shite shandy drinking broadcasters.

Sydney harbour fish

Oh, you can catch it; but you might want to think twice before eating it.

Amsterdam in Sydney

Amsterdam in Sydney

It's a rare occasion that I take the ferry to work any more. I miss the quiet moment this gives me before work; the cup of coffee and danish whilst I watch the world go by, and the view, I miss the view.

The ferry from Circular Quay to Balmain goes past the ocean liner you can see here, which has the opera house on the opposite side, left under the bridge and round the corner.

On a sunny day it is a superb journey. You get to look at the idiots on the bridge climb, see the kids going to Luna Park and go past the cargo terminal that butts onto Sussex street. You see everything that happens in the middle of Sydney and be apart from it with your coffee and your Danish. A priceless moment of peace to contextualise your thoughts before arriving at work. I miss that.

Dodo, dodo, internet that dies!

If you were a brand consultant what might you tell a client that came to you with the idea of naming their service after an extinct flightless bird?

"You got here just in time! Sit down and we'll think of something better in even just the first five minutes of the meeting."

genius

But no your client is in a dizzying frenzy of marketing fervour believing themselves an absolute genius.

"No, no," they might say, "we've had so many good ideas around this. We've got an ad campaign with a REALLY annoying jingle and a brand mascot that looks nothing like a Dodo. We're going to hire people to wear a fuzzy suit that makes them look a bit like a very misshapen version of the mascot and harass people about broadband connections on their way to work, where they have a fast connection all day! It's going to be brilliant!"

I know what I would say at that point:

"Get out of my office you cretin! People will think you hired me and my name will be forever besmirched with your idiocy!

Why are you here anyway exactly...?"

I don't know what Dodo Internet are thinking with that as a strategy. I can't speak as to the quality or consistency of their service as I was so thoroughly put off by their brand identity that I wont be going within 15 feet of their mascot and wouldn't be caught dead using them as an ISP.

England take on the Windies

On Maroubra beach. Amazingly we won. The teams are all retired internationals. The downside is that the beach is that bit crowded, and the seating banks are complete eyesore.

Whoops...

I appear to have inadvertantly imbibed the entire contents of my hipflask whilst watching A Better Tomorrow (honestly there is no way you can watch this film sober (though my cantonese has improved maarkedly)). To attempt to counteract the deleterious effects of about 4 double measures of finest Irish whiskey I have just drunk the first of two 750ml bottles of water. It's going to be a long night.

Australia day...

...was fantastic fun and whilst the hangover is still a little in evidence this morning has been one of those mornings that makes you glad to be alive.

I've been sat at Coogee beach watching someone's border collie jumping at the water from the showers. There are the usual hard-core of ocean swimmers ploughing their way accross the bay who won't be out of the water for an hour yet, not even the shark alarm phases them. I've finished a much needed bacon and egg roll and am trying to drink the coffee that my addiction craves but that is simply too hot for such a sunny morning. The bus I wanted home has just left behind me, I've decided to walk anyway.

As I'm scrawling this in my notebook it's 7:30am and the sun is already so powerful that I'm squinting with my sunglasses on. Without exagerating, the light has a unique colour that makes the world appear as if drenched in golden syrup.The pacific, for once living up to its' name, is glittering and the beach squeeking under my bare feet is already warm and unusually deserted.

One of the things you are never told about Australia is the smell. The eucalypts give the country a uniquely distictive odour. In the moments before a rainstorm they have the rank reek of a tomcat's favourite alley, territorially marked. After the downpour they give off a a sinus clearing mentholated perfume that makes you take enourmous lungfulls of crisp morning air. After a big storm the scent can last for days.

A lot of the hard edges to Australia, whilst they remain on many of the people, have come off the country itself. Bushfires still wipe out huge areas of the country and drought threatens the livelihood of everyone inland but as a whole Australia is in a boom time. The greatest resources here being the country itself - more or less a licence to print tourist dollars - and the people. The reason that Australia punches so far above its' weight in so many different ways is because the people here will back themselves to take on anything or anyone and will honestly give it their best shot.

Whilst walking back accross the clifftops, beaches and the rocks, scaring crabs back into their pools, getting indignant looks from skinks and seabirds alike, I realise something that has probably been very clear to everyone else; I'm going to be staying here for a while.

My Country is the poem probably most quoted on Australia day.

Australia day at the races

Vibrating condoms

All I wanted was a soft drink and look what I found! Bonus.

Anchor, what?

Surely that anchor is too big for a boat that size.

Apple announces iCandy

Steve jobs today unveiled the latest in Apple's suite of digital technology, a sweet, or rather a sweet dispenser. Apple is bravely stepping into a market arena long dominated by PEZ and seen by many as one that is ripe for a serious hardware manufacturer to bring high-end functionality into. The announcement brings to a denouement months of speculation in the confectionary press that Apple were about to make inroads into their market – famously there were even mock-ups of what iCandy might have looked like published in Chocolatier Today.

According to Mr Jobs this won't just be any sweet dispenser but the one sweet dispenser anyone will need or want. “iCandy is a total confectionary solution in a single, desirable and easy to use device for grown-ups that does away with ugly and cumbersome front-end,” said Jobs. “iCandy combines the functionality of other sweet dispensers with the ability to pre-select the flavour and texture of the item dispensed as well as order new sweets online through the iSweets software that comes with it.”

It seems that whilst iCandy will dispense many other forms of previously available sweets, sweets that are purchased via iSweets will come in a sealed container that can only be opened by placing it in the iCandy device. Speculation has started that this will mean that the previously much vaunted business model of partnering with manufacturers such as Haribo to produce a significant new channel will not gain the market share predicted. “People won’t really bother with the iSweets store outside of the occasional curiosity purchase,” says Richard Laybrook of Toffee and Butterscotch News, “probably preferring to put sweets from packets they already have into the device”.

The unveiling of the actual iCandy device received astonished gasps from the audience who despite their journalistic objectivity couldn't get enough of the rounded corners and shiny effect on the interface. One of the questions from the audience focussed on the design culture at the company and whether this device had reinvigorated what had been seen as a stale and stagnant process at Apple. The criticism has been that new devices and new versions of devices are simply given more rounded corners, a shiny effect on the interface and released to market in a new colour. The iCandy with its shiny effect and rounded corners was clearly a huge departure for Apple available as it is in black, white and silver on the same device and will soon be available in nearly 4 colours but remained true to the Apple aesthetic. "Yes," quipped Jobs, "the strongest flavour of iCandy is Apple."

A technology blogger in the front row, who was clearly a week late, questioned Jobs on whether or not this was in fact anything new at all and wasn't he guilty of lumping together many technologies that were approaching obsolescence in a very thin, very shiny new case, giving it good packaging and sticking the letter i in front of a generic name to make it sound cool? Wasn’t this, he continued, a symptom of over-investment in product design, marketing and the miniaturisation of old technologies in favour of genuine innovation? Unfortunately Jobs reply was never heard as a several burly Apple PR execs reminded the blogger that he had an urgent appointment elsewhere that wouldn’t require his press credentials which he gladly surrendered to them after almost no struggle at all. Another question asked if Apple HQ was really the most appropriate place to release the product when the Confectioners Association of America was meeting only a two hour drive away, but everyone pretended they hadn’t heard the journalist and nothing more was said.

Further speculation as to Apple’s future direction was ignited this week as a company lawyer contacted the estate of Isaac Asimov to enquire as to the trademark status of the iRobot name.

iCandy will be available in America in July 2007 once it is fully feature complete and will be rolled out into Europe and the world by May 2008.



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Last night at the festival bar

Festival Bar

Not the world's greatest photo, but an interesting light effect.

Barracuda sound System are playing onstage with just about every band member from Watussi there too, and a couple of people from the audience. Total number of people onstage must have been close to 30.

Wot I dun on my holidayz

Sand dredging off Lakes Entrance

It was a very un-australian Christmas Day in Queenscliff where we spent it. It only reached 14 Celsius all day and there was rain and hail. Queenscliff is just south of Melbourne which has a reputation for the least predictable weather outside of New Zealand.

On the drive down we took a quick detour to Canberra to meet the Cheetahs at the nearby zoo. They actually let you in the cage with them. They have one hell of a purr and genuinely appear to like human attention. More pictures when I've dragged them off Em's camera.

We drove back along the coast after a quick stop in Melbourne to watch England lose the ashes and a detour via the Yarra Valley wine region. I like wine. I like drinking it when someone else is driving me between vinyards. Unfortunately this is the most expensive way to do this as you end up buying far too much of it. We were relatively restrained and bought no more than three bottles at each place.

New year was spent at a guesthouse/hotel just North of Wilsons Promentory on Australia's South Eastern corner. The isthmus is a huge national park and a designated wilderness for a large part of that. It is also beautiful, but there are snakes, bad snakes.

The drive up the coast was also stunningly beautiful despite the bushfires. We stopped at a couple of places worthy of note. Raymond Island has a huge Koala population for the size of the place, we counted 19 in an area about half the size of a football pitch. You can get really close to them and remarkeably they were sitting up and paying attention. Koalas don't normally do anything at all.

Montague Island is another national park reserve and a place of great significance to the local aboriginal people. A lighthouse was built on it 125 yrs ago from granite blasted from the Island itself. The boat ride out was fairly interesting, it was not a calm day.

I'm not sure I'm ready for a new year. I wasn't quite finished with 2006 and now it's gone.

Hiatus

Away for Christmas and new year. Occasional mobile posts only!

Interesting times

I must be serious, I've spent money on it, well $10 anyway.

I have registered dataphage.com through google apps for your domain with registration, which also gives me email addresses, web hosting etc. For the time being there is a badly republished version of the content here on the site.

I'm not sure what I'll do with it and I'm waiting to see what other google services are tied in with it and whether I can migrate everything over. Ideas on a postcard to the usual address.

Zeitgeist - the new apathy

"Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom." - Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

There is a not so new apathy spreading everywhere I go. A feeling of disinterest, dis-empowerment and despair that is evidencing itself as a kind of feckless self-absorption. Cynicism abounds, there is a dearth of originality and what talent there is seems intent on rehashing on commenting on events elsewhere, egocentric diarising or a kind of neo-nihilism that lacks enough sophistication even to call itself Dada . Reality is eating itself.

This isn't just a general feeling but an all-pervading malaise, a pernicious meme that has infiltrated and taken over. It's almost as if an alien invasion has begun:

Phase one: kill their spirit, make them chaotic and they will walk willingly to slavery just to regain a sense of order

I am not a shut-in with a tinfoil helmet and an assault rifle but someone who has realised that they are part of the problem. The hope of there being a solution is vanishing quickly as it rests almost entirely on a sense of personal involvement, ownership and action that is vanishing from people's agendas, mine particularly.

People have become their contextual value to organisations: a vote, a victim, a sale, a rented opinion. In all but a few areas there is no feeling of collective enterprise, community is the distant and fading memory of my parents. It has been reconstituted as a pale reflection of itself in the near consequence-free virtual environment. People isolate themselves with iPods and mobile phones. Ironically the very means of communication somehow shutting in the person rather than facilitating their outward expression.

If you've read this far then you have some sense of what I'm talking about but haven't yet given it a name or thought about a coherent resistance to it. It is the removal of people from reality, homogenisation of perspective, over communication with little or no content and what this does to the rest of the world. When cynicism is common sense, apathy an instinct and distinctiveness a dying hope something is clearly wrong.

Overthink

There has been an absence of more verbose postings on here for a little while as more and more often I seem to be triggered into thinking about concepts that I bring up in the longer ones. For example after the post on Music and Thinking I started a piece on browsing that has taken on a life of its own and had me sat around looking pensive for some time (people thought I was constipated, I was just confused).

I keep returning to philosophical ideas that I covered at University to do with contemporary life, self and identity and trying to contextualise these with working life, the internet and the idea of personal happiness. It's producing some interesting thoughts. They all seem a little obvious at the moment but I'm going to keep following them and see if they produce anything insightful. I haven't had any time to write any more fiction and I might try and make some time to do this too as I've had some half decent ideas, however these are all tied up with the ideas so they may be a little pretentious, but that's never stopped me before!

Raising a few eyebrows

I had no idea this was a competitive area.

And so Christmas began

Oh dear there's another layer.Life is like a box of chocolates; some bastard's got the one you want and you have to get your hands dirty looking for one you might like.

Heavy

But what happens when your knees go?

Edit: you'll need to click on the photo to see why I even bothered with this.

More fibre

Lie

Music and thinking

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furious pig - I don't like your face

Why is it that I no longer listen to or buy music? I think I used to enjoy it, certainly I spent a lot of money trying to enjoy it. I'm bored by listening to the things I own, after all I've heard them before. CD's seem too expensive, and you have to be careful how you download mp3s, it can get you sued.


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Kimya Dawson - I like giants

I seem to be seeking out variety at the moment. I've abandoned what I might have considered a discerning ear in favour of constant change. I listen to to FBi radio here in Sydney which refreshes its playlist weekly and is stakcked with new msic, a lot of of which you can't hear anywhere else (the link is worth a look, you can listen over the internet). The DJs tend to be younger than me and some of them are a little bit unworldly but their chatter is somehow soothing.


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Astronomy class - Heatseeker

Perhaps it's like Scott Adams says, music is like a drug. At least overdose isn't terminal in most cases, though you do worry how many car crashes are attributable to The Chemical Brothers. I think I've stopped listening to music because it stopped being ineresting. The music industry has become too much of an industry and is definitely suffering in the information age where broadcast is the same as presence and distribution is a casual, almost thought free exercise.

I don't blame the internet for the downfall of the music industry - the medium is not the message - but I do blame a commodity based approach to creative work by that industry. It seems contrary to the nature of creative people and the reason they create to turn their output into property that no longer belongs to them and over which they have little or no authority. Such is the nature of a capital economy.


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The knife - Heartbeats

I have lost most of my interest in music because of a lack of access points to new material and because a lot of it seems stale. Maybe that says more about my outlook than it does about the music but I don't think so.

One of the reasons I don't put commercial radio on or buy the CD's that are peddled on it is because the world we now live in is governed by browsing. 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 (more on browsing in another post, I seem to have quite a lot to say about it).


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Scala girls choir - I touch myself

Music is now something we use to fill up transitory spaces in our lives and a background to a different activity; every commuter has an iPod, every bar, coffee shop or newsagent you go into has music playing (browsing again). Perhaps I don't want to overload senses with a sensory experience from outside the event or maybe I don't want to dilute the moment but I seem to feel that adding music detracts from the moment more than adding to it. This is probably becauase we do use music to enhance experiences that would otherwise seem dull and its presence therefore infers to me that what I'm doing is dull and needs livening up.


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Alvin Lucier - I am sitting in a room (1969)

Music also seems to inhibit thought. Hearing is not as highly processed by your brain as sight, which is thought to be one of the reasons mentally ill people have auditory hallucinations. Sound arrives in your consciousness half-processed giving it strange levels of access to your mind. Environments actually can be too loud to think and I quite like to think although it seems I do a little too much of it. Stuff it I'm going to put the radio on and watch the cricket.

On the margin

If the thoughts you have on the edge of a party are restricted to 'this is a bit shallow' then have another drink. I'll talk to you another time.

Excellent

The nice people at Blogger/Google have sorted all the problems I was having posting to here from the mobile. In celebration here is a postcard shot just for them.

Edit: Link so the apropriate people see it.

Drink writing

Never ever drink and write, ever.

Fish and drinks

Dogfish resting

Last night the company Emily works for held their Christmas party at Sydney Aquarium. The aquarium is one of Sydney's top attractions, and deservedly so. It may cost $25 to get in but the sting of this wears off the instant you see the platypi (platypusses?) which are right inside the main entrance. I didn't have the presence of mind to take any video footage of them sadly, but I did take some from the oceanarium which you can see above.

The party itself was held in a room that you get to only at the end of walking round the aquarium and before the gift shop which sells a wide variety of high-quality tat. One whole wall of the room is glass looking into the largest and most fully stocked larder tank in the place. The overall effect is a bit like a ten foot tall screensaver. It has a bizarre hypnotic effect that transfixes normally hyperactive ritalin candidate children into awed silence. Why they don't have a webcam focussed on this I can't imagine. They do have 2 rather boring webcams focussed on the crocodile and the fairy penguins (stop that thought, the penguins are rugged Aussie types).

hypnotised by the tank

Quite a large number of the canapes served at the event seemed to be fish or fish based. I couldn't quite get the image of the waiters with a fishing net and waiting deep-fryer out of my mind.

The worst thing about parties where the drinks are free is that it always seems like a good idea to go somewhere afterwards to carry on. It never is, ever. The next thing I knew I was looking at my watch and wondering how it came to be 3am and how much crap I'd actually been talking. Judging by the feel of my head this morning I was talking quite a lot of crap. The Christmas party season has started, there will be at least another two to go to. I hope they don't end up finishing at 3am, but I know at least one of them will...

So Close!

The nice people at Google/Blogger have nearly got it all wrapped up. I am so close to being able to post on here with the mobile I can almost taste it. However for the moment you can find the new mobile posts here. I will eventually get everything appear on the one page as I’m not a big fan of having a too many web presences (yet somehow I have ended up with loads).

Now back to getting the maps thing sorted...

Best of the Linkdump

A quick list of the best bits from the linkdump for the previous week. The linkdump contains things that I find in newsfeeds or from random web browsing. It sits in the sidebar and is the bit of this blog I update the most frequently normally with at least one or two posts per day.

World's most dangerous road - From La Paz to the Yungas in Bolivia. An over-used cliff edge road commonly covered in fog.

A working Air Guitar - Another great Aussie invention! A "textile based interface", or a tee-shirt you can use as an air guitar.

Hurricane on Saturn - Two thirds the size of Earth.

Little People - Tiny street art installations. Just in case you haven't seen these. I think the entire world must have linked to this last week.

Jazz

How is it that I never really had too much time for jazz before but now that I'm in Sydney I seem to encounter it everywhere. Loud and coarse, flowing fractured and smashed I seem to see it in every form except, thankfully Dixieland.

Fittingly I never seem to see Jazz whilst sober, as I am lead to believe, neither did some of its' greatest proponents. Not that I would advocate someone like Charlie Parker as a role model for anything other than musical proficiency but there is definitely and an intoxicant nature to jazz, even if it is buried deep under layers of post-ironic Hammond organ.

One of the more notable features seems to be that it makes any group of people almost completely unable to keep still. If you go out on a night with about five people in the presence of music and alcohol it is a statistical certainty that one of you will dance, a 20% likelihood for any one individual. When you go out to jazz event this seems to go up enormously to about four out of five, an 80% likelihood of dancing. This seems to be completely independant of the quality of the music and no fear of peer rebuke or criticism of technique will stop it. In fact it seems the presence of good dancers seems to discourage people. Half the fun is looking a bit silly.

Another feature of the Jazz I'm seeing is that it is played and enjoyed by an extraordinarily varied age range. The band I'm watching whilst scribbling this in my notebook are in their late twenties and early thirties. The audience is somewhat older and I am beginning to suspect that this might be a pickup joint for over forties singles, and they all seem to be casting glances in my direction. Thank God I didn't come here on my own.

Fresh as a daisy at 4am

There's nothing quite like waking up at four in the morning to give you a new perspective on life.

Personally I find it refreshing and invigorating when I snap awake slightly earlier than God. It normally signals the start of a productive and useful day in which I achieve many of my personal targets and reach new levels of fulfillment.

Bugger.

Didn't take the medication today...

I am troubled by a recurring dream, or rather a series of dreams with a recurring theme. In these dreams the universe gives has hidden and embedded a vital part of itself as a person. This person has a task to complete which releives them of this essential element of the universe. The task is never complex but it must be performed for time and space to continue. I suspect, but I can't be certain, that everyone has a task. Often I am the person with the task, but sometimes I am just involved with them in some way.

Each person is persued in their task by a thing which can hide itself as anything or anyone (it prefers people). The object of this creature, or whatever it is, is to stop the task being completed. The quickest and most effective way of doing this is to kill the person with the task. It does this by morphing its head out of whatever it is hiding as and smashing this into the head of the task holder once at unbeleivable speed, there is no chance of survivng its' attack. Its' head is a fire-axe shaped blade with a steep serrated convex edge made of a mother of pearl or white obsidian substance. It has been doing this forever and will continue to do so into infinity. The creature has a name that every task-holder is aware of but that I can never remember when I wake up. Every task-holder is aware of the creature and the task only for the duration of their task. They are equally aware that they will inevitably be killed by the creature should they encounter it.

Once the task-holder is dead time loops back around to the point at which they recieved the task, until either they complete it or it becomes apparent that they cannot complete it. If they can't complete the task then time loops back around to the very beginning of time and begins again almost exactly as before, but not quite. The person who couldn't complete the task is never born or is never given a task. I don't know how I know this as I would normally wake up either as this happens or from the raw shock of seeing a sudden and normally unexpected death - the creature kills using surprise and cunning but it will only ever kill the task holder.

When the task is completed someone new gets a task and the creature has to find them. Each time a task is completed anyone who was aware of the creature or the task continues in their life without being aware of either or having any memory of it. In fact they may reach a state where, despite the task remaining complete there is no record or trace of this contained in reality.

The dreams are extremely vivid and I wake up with a start and sometimes with a cry. I'm pretty sure I snapped awake one morning this week with a howl that shook the building. I'm not always sure that I'm having one of these dreams until the creature appears and it scares the hell out of me when it arrives. In fact it is so real that I half expect to walk round a corner and get nutted by a bizarre white axe thing.

What particularly troubles me is the varying degrees of information given to me by my subconscious. Why does it give me so much information that I couldn't possibly have derived from reason and so little about the specifics of the situation.

Now, I know that I'm not normal, but this isn't normal even for me. I might take it easy on the sauce for the next day or two and see if this helps. Exercise too, nice fresh air and healthy food. Otherwise it looks like it's time for a nice cosy rubber room and one of those jackets with the long sleeves that tie behind your back. Nurse, the screens...

Roo

Roo as it is found in the supermarket

Kangaroos occupy a strange place in the Australian psyche. Whilst the creature is their national symbol, thousands of them are culled each year and whilst there is thriving kangaroo leather industry that sells accessories to tourists, the majority of the meat goes into pet food. Aussies it seems are a little squeamish about eating skippy.

To try and and get people to change this ridiculous bit of anthropomorphic idiocy the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia ran a competition to rename the meat last year (and yes skippy did come up). Whilst the change was never intended to be actioned it was a good bit of PR which highlighted the fact that Australia is missing out.

Son, grab a beer & light the barbie

Kangaroo meat, as you can see from the picture at the top, is about the same colour as venison and is very similar in taste. However it is much more tender and much more easily cooked, it is also exceptionally lean there is almost no fat. The meat chars to an almost caramelised outer shell when cooked on a very high heat. In the picture below I've not done much more than sear it on each side on a griddle pan. It is best eaten as rare as you can take it and benefits from about 10 minutes resting time after cooking. It has a slightly gamey flavour that goes beautifully with mushrooms, garlic, thyme and other strong flavours. As befits its' nation of origin it barbeques beautifully!

Roo as it is found on my plate

Australia really needs to get over itself and take another look at Kangaroo. Oz has the world's second highest obesity problem per capita (after guess where). You would have thought that a low fat meat that barbeques better than any other that I've tried would be perfect.

Airport tips

We went to Tasmania for a long weekend a few weeks ago. It is a land of beer, wine, peculiar wildlife and many cheeses, some so virulent that they set off the explosive detectors at the airport. At least that's my story, the reason that I got checked for explosives probably had more to do with my general demeanour.

I'm not comfortable with flying at the best of times but having raced to fill the rental car with petrol before returning it and finding that the chip in the widscreen was going to cost us the nearly as much as the rental again put me in a bit of a tiz. Then running to the terminal to be told that we had run to the wrong terminal didn't improve my mood hugely.

The most annoying thing about air travel at the moment is that if you don't maintain a kind of detatched calm throughout the entire process, no matter what logistical or bureaucratic obstacles are put in your way, then you are guaranteed to be stopped at some point and either searched or explosives checked.

Surely the odd ones out in this whole process, the ones that should be searched in intimate and probing ways are the people who can remain calm. That kind of inner peace isn't simply sickeningly smug it comes from something really very profound, like knowing you only have a few hours to live before your martyrdom transports you a paradise where a million lustful virgins are waiting to attend to every freakish whim...

When I had to fly to Canberra for a meeting this Monday at stupid O'clock in the morning I picked up a few tips on air travel that I thought I'd share with you. Of course the best tip is the most important and really is a golden rule for life so I have excluded from the list below. It is:

Never attempt anything without first having a good strong cup of coffee and a decent breakfast, ever.

Once you have this sorted the rest falls naturally into place and you won't need any of the tips below:

1. An aluminium briefcase looks good and is very practical, it can also be used to store your screw-together rifle or home made semtex, get one tomorrow
2. Walking through the metal detector carrying your aluminium briefcase is a good way to meet in uniform, if you're into that kind of thing
3. When they tell you to take your shoes off tell them how many days you've been wearing the same pair of socks before saying "you really don't want me to do that mate" will save silly misunderstandings
4. When the nice man asks you to "please step this way sir" giving him a distant "wot me?" look and taking 2 seconds to process the information makes him speak very slowly and clearly, it is only polite to respond in the same manner
5. When being checked for explosives you may be asked, "have you ever seen this test before?" customs men really appreciate experience, so answer with a polite "all the bloody time". Whilst being explosives checked:
   1. don't try and peek at the monitor screen, it's impolite and if you do have some exotic substance on you, you will be given ample time to explain, your bagage is already on the plane they will wait for you, they know how much you need to be on the flight and they empathise
   2. don't try and take the swab thing from the nice man even to speed things up, it's his toy, let him play with it first
   3. try and remain calm, perhaps by imagining you are transported to a paradise where a million lustful virgins are waiting to attend to every freakish whim, maybe even whisper this to yourself under your breath
6. If you are not used to seeing guns follow all of the tips above and whilst going through the security checks stare intently at the automatics in the hip-holsters of the policemen, you never know they might show you one more closely

Sadly the Tasmania trip was before the Canberra one and I didn't have the benefit of the insights above. On being explosives checked I fixed the customs officer with a cheeky grin and said "it's the bloody cheese isn't it?" in my best posh english accent. When he reached for the bag I inadvertently spluttered out "careful man, there's a culture in there, you don't want one of those here". Whilst I was definitely misunderstood I don't think this one me many friends. However I made plenty more new friends shortly afterwards when Emily left me behind, blithely waved both boarding passes at the ground crew and set off accross the asphalt, still holding both boarding passes. I made lots of new friends then.

Bored

I think I may have reached my boredom threshold. Having battled with my commitment and motivation level at work I am actually having to make the admission to myself that I am really very bored indeed.

Not the 'not busy' kind of bored but the kind of bored where you look at your life and think 'what the hell am I doing?' For example I woke up at 5:30am today , worried about the amount I have to do today and it's all easily acheivable but I just don't want to do it, not a moment of it. Things have been this way for some time and it is something I need to address.

I am now looking at ways to improve this in my current role before I start looking for anything else or changing direction. If you aren't going to try you shouldn't have got in to it in the first pace. I am going to start using some of the elements from a strategy meeting last week and some of my own thoughts on methods I might use to sort myself out.

I'm going to start looking at new products and where we might sell them and to whom. I'm going to be looking at how I can improve the general dynamism of the company and what we do about the way we spend money on chasing things that look good but we can't do. I've also got to try and get away from one of our projects as it is quite clearly a dog with fleas, big fleas (unfortunately it is also the MD's pet).

As with any sort of consulting/change program this needs to be done with a positive aspect on anything negative and I am going to have to take a little time to find from whence can be derived. Organisations move in the directions they ask questions about so I need to start asking the questions. People tend to move in the direction of their interests and skills, so I'd better make 'em interesting questions...

...more later, just what's on my mind this morning.