Software and booze

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

Buried boat

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

Rock snot

Just say no.

Threefold Inaccurate Catholics

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:

1. 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…
2. 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
3. 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?

1. I don’t like most people
2. I don’t like airports
3. I don’t like aeroplanes
4. 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!

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

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!

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

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

Get your Johnson out

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

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

5 % Bull

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

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...

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

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

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

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?

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

Finally

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

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

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.

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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.

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Kiribili sunset

Tasteless bathroom

Wow! That's bad.

Virgin Blue: Huge Thanks!

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

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

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:

1. Drive somewhere
2. Eat something
3. Drink something
4. 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

Round the corner from the new place

Pigeon hate

Even pigeons turn their back on you if you haven't got anything for them.

Keys and stress

Now which one opens the postbox...

One of the most reliable indicators for the amount of ongoing stress in your life is the number of keys you carry. As you can see I am going through a time when I have more keys than is strictly necessary.

Tonight my major task is to go and clean the old flat as it is now empty and all the dark, dusty areas can now be reached. Other people have Christmas parties, I have to clean.

A lesson from moving: It is far more efficient to get removal men with whom you have almost no common language – almost all communication is then gestural and tonal and many of the possibilities for misunderstanding and disagreement are negated.

Euphemism?

Er, not for me thanks...

Defictionalisation...

...appears to be a particularly ugly neologism for the process of fictional things being produced in the real world. A few people I know used to have a Buddy Christ.

Leaving aside my horror that a more elegant word doesn't seem to have been found, some vague wonderings about artistic practice and theoretical embodiment, the feeling that reality is eating itself and the noise from the post-modernist philosophers "we told you we were right" party I have only one thing to say:

Where's my bloody lightsabre?!

Bah humbug

As is traditional around this time of year I state that now it is December you are officially allowed to use the C word but not the X one and link to this post and tell you how many Americans reached it by searching for how long you cook a 24lb turkey - more than normal although still not as many as get here by searching for celebrity tongue, which I only rank 5th on for heaven's sake. It's an odd perversion, but a harmless one I guess.

This year, having bought property, I would also like to add that Christmas is officially canceled and that I'm afraid that if you had been expecting anything more sizable than a pint of beer as a present then you are going to be sorely disappointed. My apologies for this.

I have also just realised that it is my Grandmother's Birthday and I have utterly forgotten to send her anything, bum. Sorry Mum, you did remind me and, like the useless pillock I am, I forgot. At least being in her late eighties Gran might forget too...

Backwards busriders

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing in the opposite direction to travel. Not those who do so because all the other seats are taken but people that actively choose to do so, they're a bit different (rare too).

Going backwards makes most people a little queasy, these people are tougher than that. They are so accustomed to public transport that motion sickness long ago ceased to be a problem for them.

A lot of people don't always know where they're going or at least like to be able to see their stop to make sure they get off in time. The backwards people aren't worried by this, they have their routine and they know the route so well, they know it backwards.

The backwards seats are the only seats on the bus that force you to look your fellow passengers in the eye, all at once. Other seats grant the comfort of staring at a seat-back but not these. These seats reveal the bizarre theatre of people on the bus, in public but in a confined, unnatural state of locomotion. Sitting backwards on a Saturday night-bus is an operetta.

These people spend their journey looking from their point of departure watching the world go past them with their back to their destination, meeting it only when they choose to get off. In the mornings this means facing back toward home, watching it disappear into the distance. In the evenings watching work fade into the past.

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing backwards, they're a bit different.

Kevin 07

Labor took the election early last night. I can't say I noticed as we were out and about and horribly sunburnt having been out all day.

It's about time I stopped with this politics tripe and got on with some real blogging...

Election day

My coverage of the federal election here hasn't been what I'd hoped but buying a flat and changing job roles seem to have got in the way of it a bit. However, it is election day in Oz and so I shall be going to go surfing all day and then to a party in the evening as I am not elligible to vote.

Australia's electoral practices are far more progressive than a lot of other westernised nations. All citizens have to vote, even if overseas a plane ticket actually has to be produced to avoid a substantial fine. Australia also uses a proportional representation system in which voters order the candidates to match their preference (a 1 for the first choice, 2 for the second etc.).

For some arcane reason that I don't really understand some seats in the senate are also being decided and for these you can either order the candidates or just put a 1 in a box for your party of choice. You can actually practice voting at the Australian Electoral COmmission's website.

Polls suggest that Australia is in for a change of government but it could be a nailbiter. There's been some great last minute wrangling including questioning the validity of 12 candidates applications with the promise of legal action andhanding out fake pamphlets supposedly saying that Labor support Islamic terrorists.

Honestly, I have no real idea what's going to happen.

CyberPunkEm

CyberPunkEm

We've been at a charity event at the Hilton in Sydney tonight. We have come away with a teddy bear, the flowers from the table and some bloons.

Election 07: So where was I?

If you're worried about the lack of sanity evidenced by writing about politics at 3 in the morning don't worry. I was woken by a bizarre noise from next door that sounded like an entire skelton being dropped on a hard surface from a great height. Worry about that instead.

I was covering the Australian election from an TV/internet and ex-pat perspective when all of a sudden having a life got in the way. Oh yes, and the whole thing became really tedious.

We've had more of the same from both sides. Liberals first:

And now Labor:

We've also seen some genuine thinking by the two main parties. Liberals first, again playing to their economic record versus that of the oposition and doing so against the background of an interest rate rise (the first ever during a general election campaign in Australia):

Labor's latest plays to the uncertainty of electing a Prime Minister who will be stepping down soon (Howard said yesterday that he would probably be in office for at least 18 months):

To give you a taste of what it's actually like here if you're reading from outside Australia all of these video embeds are on television here. You can't get through an ad break without seeing at least two of them.

Street canvassers have been at a minimum and I am grateful that an English accent can give you the instant get-out of not being able to vote. I can't help feeling that with 10 days to go something a bit more dramatic ought to be happening. The fact that it isn't is probably because both of the parties set out their stalls pretty early on and have stuck to their guns pretty doggedly.

Some spending plans were announced on Monday from the Liberals but Labor doesn't seem to have done quite the same thing and in the interest of research and reasonable comparison I'll go through those later in the week.

Why not?!

This sticker is under the driver's side window of all Sydney busses.

Elearning07

Live moblogging an award for slidecasting about moblogging - it doesn't get much more information age than that! Or does it...I also twittered the tinyurl to the organisers. I wonder if anyone will notice in time for tomorrow's session....

Ferry

Ferry

The ferry to Circular Quay from Balmain

Clean your damn car

Insert worm gag here

At the weekend a worm caused a storm in a teacup. The worm in question is not a political candidate but a screen graphic used by Channel 9 to measure public approval of candidates. It takes the form of a line at the bottom of the screen that changes colour and tracks up and down an onscreen graph based on the real time electronic voting of a studio audience of undecided voters.

The storm in a teacup was because Channel 9 did not have permission to use this under the rules the National Press Club applied to allocate broadcast rights of the debate between Kevin Rudd and John Howard. They used it anyway and the NPC killed their feed. Channel 9 then switched to rebroadcasting ABC's feed with the worm patched over the top and claimed that the Press Club had bowed to pressure from the Government in killing their feed and called it a violation of free speech.

Almost everyone is ignoring this non-story except the two broadcasters involved and the international press who love a claim of free speech violation. Channel 9 may not have had permission to use the worm but do they really need permission? The damn thing was more of a distraction than anything, particularly if, like me, you had absolutely no idea what it was.

Oddly though Channel 9 had a news crew inside the online production suite; not something you do without good reason. Might they have had an inkling that this was going to happen and have actually bent the rules deliberately in a cynical ploy to gain ratings? Surely not.

The worm was an issue because John Howard does not fare well under the gimmick. He had only been on screen 3 seconds when the graph(ic) went into a negative reading from Rudd's immediately positive reading. The worm being left out of the broadcast was almost certainly part of the negotiations to actually get a debate aired. Rudd had wanted 3 debates, Howard has cleverly agreed to only one.

Cleverly because Howard is a very professional and polished politician with 11 years practice at being PM. People know who he is and his extempore speaking seems natural, he appears to know what he's talking about even when he is winging it. Rudd is not a familiar face nor do people necessarily feel they know what he's about. There is an air of Blair about him, although he is much less creepy and seems more genuine. Actually on those criteria he's nothing like Tony Blair but you take my point.

Rudd used the time well outlining policy and using phrases like "what my party stands for", "what I would do in office" etc. but on balance I'd have to give the debate to Howard. The PM consulted his notes far less, seemed more composed and didn't make the error of breaking eye contact with the camera or the person posing a question when he had finished talking, which Rudd did. Phone polls by the broadcasters and the newspapers broadly agree with me. Political analysts though split the honours evenly, citing Rudd's better use of detail and Howard's slight hesitancy on reconcilliation with Aboriginal people and troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The worm firmly gave the debate to Rudd. If the audience really was composed of undecided voters then Howard may not be the totem he once was. This election is going to be a hard faught one in the marginal seats and if Howard provokes disapproval just by appearing on screen then he is going to need something extra. For me though the debate was proof that Howard is still tough and definitely more than a contender. [lazy joke about electorate being worm that turned goes here]

Naked PM?

I either have astonishing reach and influence or a talent for stating the blindingly obvious. Today’s video clip is the Liberal Party response to the Labor response to the Liberal unions campaign ad.

Look, it’s Howard and he’s perched on a desk (they must have sawn the legs off). In a bit to out-casual Rudd he’s also jacket-less; how outré! This is begging the question how far will they go? Until Vladimir Putin’s recent photo shoot and since Mussolini politicians don’t really strip off. The fat Italian fascist’s favourite political posturing involved going bare-chested and do manly thinks like mucking in with the hay balers. In a close election are Rudd and Howard prepared to bare flesh? Will we see Kevin in his grundies and a string vest? Will there, the Australian public wants to know, be Prime Ministerial nipple? According to the viral marketers the two are already prepared to change their hair.

As the dominant narrative of the moment the election has considerable use as a marketing too if you can get in people's heads. The election has been expected for so long that companies and their agencies have had plenty of time to prepare and as a media meme an election is all pervasive. Commercial ad campaigns are beginning to mirror the political one.

Apologies, I haven’t actually watched the video above, I’m at work and can’t be bothered. It’s probably Howard saying that he’s not scaremongering but engaged in informing the public about the potential unionist content of a Labor cabinet that would mean the thin end of the wedge for [small] businesses. He probably says something about flexibility in employment and industrial relations and taxes too.

I have noticed from the front page that the theme of embedding your rival’s advert in your own is continuing. Will we also then see this repeated so that by the time a government is elected you will be able to trace the story backwards by finding the adverts referenced in each clip? Has that actually been the case and are you reviewing this post 6 weeks from now tracing things backwards to see how Australia ended up with a naked PM? Interesting.

For speed, and appropriateness of response the Liberals score some points here but this is a definite ‘me too’ advert. It’s the same thing without a jacket (I reserve the right to change my opinion after having watched the video, but I doubt I'll have to).

First blows in the campaign

The first blows in the election campaign fell early in the week. Things are going to move quickly of necessity, 6 weeks is not long to win hearts and minds especially when people already have a well formed impression of your party. Possibly this is why I was a little disappointed with the standard of the opening salvo.

The Liberal Party, rather predictably, weighed in to Labor for its’ Union connections, as it has been doing for the last month.

The move was so predictable in fact that Labor had a reply ready to go which was posted on their website within half an hour of the Liberal ad going live.

Perhaps it is a little early to expect innovation. The Labor – yes, that is the correct spelling here as wrong as it looks – political movement has been linked to Unions since its’ inception (in Australia 1891). That the Labor front bench might contain unionists seems a little obvious.

Whilst the ad is very polished and hammers its’ point home with the requisite force it has opened up with a negative, attacking the opposition not starting from a positive. The Liberals have plenty of positive at their disposal, unemployment is at the lowest rate for 33 years, the Australian economy is booming and the Government is in a position to offer big tax cuts and arguably still manage spending. Why not remind people of that? The polls say they've forgotten.

Strange too that it was left to the Treasurer and deputy PM to launch the advert. Costello is a credible financial manager and is most likely to succeed Howard as PM in the medium term. Immediately before the election was called the Liberal party suddenly had a tizzy fit about who would lead, and for a while it looked like Howard might not be fighting the election as leader. The party eventually decided to hold on to Howard but what does that say about the election prospects of ‘Captain Smirk’? If Costello is not seen as strong enough to win an election and Howard has said he will step down in the not too distant future who exactly are Liberal voters voting for? And, more importantly, why associate this problem so closely with the opening of your campaign?

Howard is notably and noticeably absent from Liberal advert as is mention of any Liberal politicians or policies. Rudd’s response was concise - perhaps overly so - and personal. In a country still so conservative in outlook that any and all newsreaders appear behind desks for even the briefest of bulletins Rudd was perched on the front of a desk with a TV remote in his hand talking to the camera with an easy non-threatening manner (not that I suspect he is capable of being very threatening). It builds on the media created notion of the election as Rudd vs. Howard and it shows Rudd as the voice of his party. The image of the much shorter John Howard trying to perch on a desk flickered briefly through my mind. Rather unkindly I wondered if his feet would touch the ground. I expect Rudd on his desk to become a motif of the campaign.

Round one to Labor.

Headphones

"You can bite my shiny metal iPod"

The doped masses, heads hanging, blank eyes badly hidden behind over-expensive sunglasses sit on the bus together, nodding to the invisible beat of the anaesthetic administered aurally via the white umbilicus.

"Yesterday, I swear I got to work and had no idea how I got there."

Every smart suit and pair of clicking heals living in denial of their symptoms. The brain-surgeon working on itself excising the horror of the daily commute asks only for a little music to cut by.

Election

The two countries that I have lived in for any substantial time are both gearing up for a general election; one definitely and soon, the other probably and not until next year. All being well with visas I will have the peculiar sensation of watching the Australian election, that I cannot vote in, from the perspective of living in the country and in the new year watching a British election which I could vote in, from the other side of the world.

In my native Britain the sitting Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, would be seeking the validation of having won an election on his own merits, having inherited leadership from Tony Blair, but has ruled this out until 2009 saying that he 'needs more time to lay out his vision'. Brown had considered an Autumn election and has faced criticism for leaving the country in suspense about his intentions, most notably from his deputy.

In Australia, where I currently live, the Liberal coalition will be seeking another term in office to return the 10 year veteran of the top job, John Howard, for only a few years before he steps down in favour of, who we don't quite know but probably the current treasurer, Peter Costello.

In both counties questions were being asked about when the election would actually be called. As the Head of State for Australia is in fact Queen Elizabeth II, John Howard is obliged to get permission from the Governor General to dissolve parliament and call an election; something he flew back to Canberra to do this weekend. I have just learnt from the BBC News website whilst doing a light bit of research for this post that he has, as expected, called an election to for the 24^th of November.

Howard had been expected to call an election before now and his reluctance to do so has caused some bitter acusations from the Labor opposition. The accusations are that the Australian Federal Government is using its' advertising privilidge to market government policies and the delay in calling an election was to allow these to run their full course before polling day. There does seem to be some weight to this argument given the noticeable increase in frequency of these adverts on the TV every time a poll comes out favoring Labor and a definite slant in the advertising towards selling the legislation rather than telling people how it works.

The major election campaigning issues which I may do further posts on are going to be:

• Work Choices and employment law (unpopular - favouring opposition)
• Australian involvement in Iraq (unpopular - favouring opposition)
• Assistance for drought areas (popular - favouring government)
• Cuerrent economic position (popular - favouring government)
• Ongoing climate change preparation (varying but mostly favouring the opposition)
• Aboriginal and indigenous affairs (varing and impossible to place also a latecomer to the party)
• Howard vs Rudd - it might come to punches, which speccy nerd will you be cheering for?

The last and probably the critical issue is who can maintain credibility not just personally but throughout their party and their campaign. This is going to be tricky as Howard has probably the greatest credibility of any Australian politician and is a real political street fighter with a knack for finding vulnerabilities his oponents didn't know they had.

Rudd has weathered a few storms on this front with his wife effectively being forced to sell her interest in the Australian arm of the business she runs, and Rudd having a boozy night in a New York strip club in his past revealed. Rudd should not be underestimated though. He might, as Dame Edna Everidge(CBE) pointed out, look like a dentist but he is also a former diplomat with postings in Stockholm and Beijing. During the APEC summit Rudd was able to address the chinese delegation in fluent Mandarin. The night in a strip club story only made him look human and has actually strengthened his position.

This is going to be a tough fought election that has another interesting aspect to it. Every party has embraced the internet as a campaigning tool. Google are running campaign channels on YouTube for all the parties and have an Election 2007 tab for their very popular homepage. Both of the main parties have been using social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook for a while. This is going to be Australia's first real internet friendly election.

I was trying to work dammit!

I was actually doing some work on the internet, for a bit of a change, when there was a flash and a KABOOM and the connection fried. A very sudden and extremely powerful thunderstorm wafted through and interupted every transmitter for miles. Not even the phone worked.

The connection is now so erratic I am writing this in short bursts. This occasionally happens here, it's one of the hazards of living right on the Pacific ocean. A year or two before I came to Sydney there was a hailstorm that spat chunks of ice the size of a softball from the sky. It hasn't done that yet but I wouldn't want to be outside in it.

Film festival special

Last night Em & I went to a session supported by the Sydney Film Festival that was specifically devoted to internet distributed short films hosted by two people Emily has worked with/for. This is great for a number of reasons, my favourite being that I can show you the three stand-out ones right here.

The first one is a Will Ferrell film (!) called The Landlord. It speaks for itself but if you are interested in how they got a child to do this then have a look at the Funny or Die site for 'the making of' and outtakes clips too.

The second film is too odd to describe so I shan't. It is distributed by atom films who support independant film makers through advertising. This means that there are some pre-roll adverts on the video but stick with it, it's weird!

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

The last video clip is a piece of machinima. Machinima - machine animation - for the purposes of this film, is taking the output of your computer and dubbing it as film. The artist in this case has built a Vincent Van Gough picture in the very powerful 3D rendering engine of virtual world Second Life, put some effects on and dubbed it then dismantled it in Second Life leaving only the video clip behind. It is a breathtaking piece of work when seen on a big screen, I'm afraid I can only do small on here.

One of those days

Everyone is in for it today.

I woke up at 5am, the internet depressed me with stories about arguing nuns and some idiot who kept his amputated leg in a smoker.

I thought I was about to pull through but have gone to the cupboard to make a cup of coffee to find that in a careless moment the coffee has been thrown away. Thrown away.

I now have to wait until I get to work before the first cup. I have to arrive at my workplace unmedicated. I haven't done that in years and have no desire to start.

I do hope my colleagues are reading this and can take the appropriate measures. Bribery with caffeinated goods and bacon sandwiches always works.

Birdcage in a fishtank

I like ideas that force a change in perspective. I came accross the image above randomly the other day and it has been troubling me for a few days. It shows a birdcage inside a fishtank.

At first I thought the image was manipulated but someone actually has created a birdcage inside a fishtank.

Something about this still made me uneasy. The thought that it might possibly be cruel to the birds bothered me, but how is this any less cruel than caging them to begin with (They still have a grill at the top of the cage to allow air to circulate)?

Something about the dissonant juxtaposition of two sets creatures, that in thier wild state would be free but here confined, draws attention to the unnatural state and wanton human interference. Particularly with the birds cage inside the tank where they look imprisoned and in danger. Somehow if the fish tank was surrounded by a birdcage it wouldn't seem as strange.

The last troubling thought was the reason for it's creation. I found the image without any contextual information. There's nothing to tell me whether the fishtankbirdcage is intended as a conceptual artwork intended to provoke those thoughts, just a visual oddity intended to make it appear is if birds were flying underwater or simply the product of someone with spare perspex, a tube of silicon glue, a twisted imagination and too much time on their hands.

Danger!

Linkdump digest

With the rather pretentious high-minded ideal below I feel in need of some light relief, so here are some of my favourite things I've posted on the linkdump recently.

This is an advert for a New Zealand porn chanel stuffed with innuendo. It contains nothing you can't put on TV, it's all in your filthy mind! [posted 30 August]

A NASA satellite picture of the recent bushfires in Greece. [posted 30 August]

Staying awake by switching brain hemispheres. Remarkeable, but still stupid. [Posted 13 September]

A robotic presence at work. Genius, flawed genius but genius nonetheless. [Posted 10 September]

Ah, that's better.

Curators of a zeitgeist

William Gibson

The place of blogs in the media landscape seems to be constantly up for debate. The paper-published media seems to have been of hugely divided viewpoint and variously to feel threatened, empowered, to reject the technology before finally embracing it.

The Independent and particularly The Guardian newspapers in the UK seem to have taken the concept and moved a lot of their content online, as have The Telegraph and The Times to varying degrees (from what I experienced of The Guardian when I was back in the UK last month this was definitely to the detriment of the newsstand publication). Whilst this probably can't be described as blogging there are many blogs on the sites.

The Internet over here in Oz is slowly coming round as Internet connections speed up and the newspaper sites are publishing things online simultaneously with the day's first edition (The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald).

The US media has various levels of online access but mostly seems to be sticking to the pay for access model to at least some stories as per The Wall Street Journal - now with extra Murdoch - and The New York Times on the East coast, and a free to access model on the West: The LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle. The Chicago Tribune seems to have a mixture and USA Today seems to have gone all out for online audience engagement.

Leaving aside that the newspapers are now becoming proto-broadcasters with mixed media online content it is quite interesting that almost all of them now have blogs after some fashion. If you believe in the concept and validity of Citizen Journalism then the lines between the the journalists and the bloggers seems to be becoming blurred, particularly on the level of journals covering specific areas such as emerging web technology e.g. Techcrunch (relevant article). The clear trendsetters in this space were Wired in the US and The Register in the UK, a personal favourite. Both of these two have been blogging as journalism since before it had a name.

If you don't believe in Citizen Journalism then you probably believe that there is still a defined and specific craft to writing and a duty to truth in journalism that it is very hard for your average Joe to recreate (the wikipedia link probably won't have much use for you either). You might find yourself in a minority here, everyone thinks they can write. This doesn't necessarily mean they're right , but it does mean 'me too' writers like me proliferate and litter the Internet with dubious opinion and often unchecked 'fact'. Personally I think this is a moot point and blogging is still an emerging phenomenon that is more interesting in a social context than it is in a journalistic one.

Web logs seem to have begun as link lists of interesting sites with diary elements creeping slowly into the logs as online publishing became easier (strangely pictures of cats seem to have played an important part in this). Many bloggers continue this trend posting links and diary snippets daily, sometimes hourly. Those that do tend to hook into certain trends and, if looked at as a whole, seem to have a kind of Jungian collective unconscious that identifies certain themes and ideas that have the attention of the Internet as a whole, which increasingly means the westernised world.

Oddly the best of this types of blogs seem to be by science fiction writers. I can only surmise that, watching the things they wrote about come to pass, these writers are watching in awe and extrapolating further to another unforeseen future.

What got me thinking about this was an interview with William Gibson in today's Sydney Morning Herald in which Gibson says he has switched his focus back to the present as it is far stranger than anything he could imagine (also see this one in The Washington Post). In fact the present frighteningly close to what he imagined. It is almost impossible to read Neuromancer now without compiling a mental timeline of how this future will occur.

As an example, in Neuromancer Gibson describes a past in which a war is waged as much in cyberspace as it is in base reality. Somewhat presciently the war takes place between Eastern and Western powers. This is dangerously close to happening:

• Beware the Trojan panda
• Chinese military hacked into Pentagon
• Did China hack into Pentagon networks?

The quote below is attributed to Gibson though I can't immediately track down its' provenance:

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed."

It's hard to argue with that.

Back on the point I had somewhere; bloggers like this are the reason for the title of this post. They both catalogue and define the milieu of an age that is increasingly about a 'lensed perception'. In an age where information arrives more quickly than it can be processed it's not so much about what you see as the viewpoint that you see it from and the way that you arrived at it that defines what you understand of the world around you.

For me blogging is this curatorial act/trusteeship where individual examples are probably not significant but a categorised broader view will be much more revealing in anthropological kind of way and over a long period of time. Of course cat pictures are always good too!

3 Recommendations with links from the sites below them.

William Gibson

• Russian ASCII goggles
• KKKlouraphobia!
• Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes

Bruce Sterling

• Planetary Imagery: 30 years from Voyager
• Days of cheap food are over
• Hookers swarming on Cragslist
  

Warren Ellis

• Only $11.99
• One species' genome discovered inside another's
• Memories of a massacre

"...dread and ecstasy at one and the same time, this is the modern condition."

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