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...