My husband is afraid if people keep coming to my site looking for information about netbroadcaster, I'll get sued. so this is to make it easy for the lawyers

you know that thing where you have so much to do you freeze like a rabbit in the headlights?
I've got that.

so there I was, for the first time in months and months properly riding a motorbike (bringing it home from the workshop doesn't count.)
this bike, a Suzuki GS(x?)500 is twice as big as my old Honda 250, lower but a lot heavier as well. there are subtle differences too, like the lack of a fairing and the way the mirrors move when you move the handlebars, where the old bike had mirrors on the frame.
I did a lap or two of the suburb, sticking to left turns (right turns are my weak point) and eventually got onto the freeway to take it up to 100 (k's, before you freak out).
and as I was toodling along at 105 with nothing between me and the bitumen but a 1/4 inch of leather and my ability to stay upright I realised I was terrified.
Then I remembered that terrified is how you're supposed to be on a motorcycle. anything else is suicidal.

In a funny way it's good that it's been so long. When I first got this bike, it scared me because it seemed so much heavier and to handle differently to the nippy but weak Honda. Now, all I know is that it's a bike and I have to learn to ride it. After 10 years on motorcycles, you'd think I'd be confident. No way. It's like going back to the start - take it easy, do lots of small rides and keep on talking to myself: "turn your head, check your mirrors, countersteer" and sometimes "TAKE YOUR HAND OFF THE CLUTCH AND GIVE IT SOME POWER YOU STUPID BITCH!!!"

one more thought before I forget it; a line from a business article I read this morning; that people who don't change and learn risk becoming caricatures of themselves. which somehow fits with a line from Richard Sennet's excellent The Corrosion of Character, in which he said that change is valued for itself these days, with no clear reason why.
don't know how that feeds into my current work-related existential crisis, but I think it does. change; the whys and hows matter.

I'm pleased to report that this is my first moment at a computer since 5 pm Friday. It's a long weekend here (happy birthday to Her Majesty) and my body/mind have reacted to the very thought of sitting in front of a screen in an unusually negative way.
So we went to the market, shopped for a juicer and tech toys for Andrew, went to the movies (no, that doesn't count as a screen) (Best In Show, great characters, funny, btw), I went for a bike ride, spent many happy hours killing plants in the garden (the more you kill, the better the garden looks. Roses especially are the sado-masochists of the plant world - they'll try to spike you, but if you get past that and cut their arms off, they blush like willing virgins next summer), and we walked the dog a lot.
and now that I'm here on the PC, I've realised again how ANNOYING that whine of the hard drive's cooling fan is. Think I'll go and take my motorbike for a ride - it has spent months in the workshop and we have some getting-to-know-each-other to do.

my latest hot business idea: a weekend away/housecleaning service.
you'd need an apartment or holiday house all set up to deal with at least two kids - spa bath for the parents, lots of videos and toys, meals prepared in the freezer and so on.
then you offer a service where the harried parents can grab their kids on Friday night, go to this place, relax for the weekend and come home on Sunday morning to a clean house. even the most disgusting things - week-old cooking pots, piles of nappies, overflowing bins - would be cleaned up. the dog would be walked and the parents would have half a chance of dealing with their week come Monday.
this idea comes from my lunch with my friend on Friday when she looked at me and said "I just can't cope with it ... I need some time for me ... it's all too rushed" or words to that effect.
Two small kids, full-time work, an ill mother, deadlines... I can't imagine how anyone does cope with it, just with the basic work of getting the laundry done and food on the table, let alone spending enjoyable time with their children and getting some sleep.
And while not a lot of people have the money to pay for regular hired help, maybe from time to time they'd get desperate enough to be willing to pay to walk out of the house, leave the chaos behind and have it halfway-organised when they return.
of course you could only do this if you don't have kids of your own...but it would be a good weekend cash earner idea, especially if you're a clean type and have your own apartment the clients could stay in.

sometimes I just want to go up to her and yell "why don't you EAT something!"
you've seen her. she is thin, thin, thin. not sexy thin or naturally, Asian-style, thin.
her bones stick out from her flesh. if it's at the market, she's buying celery and apples. if it's in a cafe she's sipping herbal tea or plain hot water.
her hair is lank and floppy, her eyes are dead. she's not on drugs. she thinks this looks good. she probably even thinks she could stand to lose a few pounds.
it hurts to look at her.

a day of being pretty good at work has led to me having a blog-surf tonight. it's like floating around a crowd, mind-reading, especially when all the good blogs are updated at least within the last couple of days.
there's a blogger clone with a fairyfloss look at diaryland

searches that may bring you to this blog: On Google "pamela+anderson+theory+media".
on aol: "www.netbroadcaster.com."
the former has something to do with Britney Spears and my joke about using Pammy's name to get traffic.
the second is due to netbroadcaster's shocking mousejacking tactics and a whinge I had a few weeks back about the fact they brushed off my complaint that their site sucked my browser into a mosaic of crappy popup windows
I'm sure neither search is satisfied by this blog.
such is the random wisdom of the Web. so sorry.

so much for not blogging when I'm at work. I nearly made it throught the day.
only two hours after coming back from my week off, I had a headache and sore eyes. this screen is just awful, and I spend far too much time looking at it.
between my essay and my job, both of which involve taking large amounts of not-quite-random data and turning it into a narrative often supported only by writers' tricks, sometimes I feel like a Babelfish.

'lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet ..."
when we bought our beautiful house a year and a half ago, the big lemon tree in the backyard was covered in fruit - and bugs.
so we had to cut off just about every single leaf and twig and hope it survived.
now, on the fourth day of winter, a sunny warmish winter day at that, I've just noticed bunches of flower buds in amongst the new leaves.
"but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat ..."
tra la la. that makes me happy.

(I was trying to link to a pic of said beautiful house, but for some reason geocities didn't want me to put it up on my site there; and I can't be bothered with all that FTP stuff to get it onto my other site. one day I will rationalise all the bits of me that are spread around cyberspace.)

and because I haven't linked to many blogs lately: this guy is on fire and falling.

oh, nearly forgot to mention: after 15 years of having long, natural coloured hair (bar the odd blonde/red/black highlight or two) yesterday I got it cut to shoulder length and dyed red. I wanted light, Nicole Kidman-red, but I got a kind of dark glossy. well, Andrew has this thing about redheads... and it seemed a good way to farewell the guy who's been cutting my hair for the past 15 years. a 55-year career in the same job! even when it's your own salon, it's still beyond my imagining.

hoot, hoot, hoot: I really do urge you to go and look at the photo of my friend Sparky linked in the previous blog. not for the sporran, but for the list of drag queen names on the left - and for his recent co-star "phil mackavatee".

think about it. say it out loud. blush.

so much to blog, so little time!
we have a new graphics card - but SO has neglected to load any of the games onto my profile, so I can't tell you how great it is.
our neighbours are still trying to build a monstrosity on our boundary. we are still trying to stop them.
our architect still says we can maybe finish our beautiful house by the end of the year. I think he's lying to me.
my essay is not finished, but it's already 150 words over the 2500 word limit, so I'm ready to start adding references that support what I think and cutting out my think-ramblings.
we're going BALLOONING on Sunday morning!!!
the reason this blog is rushed is that I have a massage booked this afternoon. *bliss* and of course that I'm having trouble focussing on any one thing. which my also-Gemini friend Sparky would say is normal.
and last, but not least, Bilbo Baggins is a well-brushed and happy keeshond

the alleged Swenson family

I keep thinking about the Kaycee Nicole thing. does it matter if the blogs I read are real? the woman who first blew the whistle, Saundra wrote later that people are now sceptical of her own illness.

back in the early days of the Web there was a wheelchair-bound woman who was really a man fooling with other people's minds on BBS's.

she, of course, was killed off too. if your online friends are dying, do you have to ask them for proof of existence? the whole thing sucks so badly.
it also bugs me a bit that I can't find any definitive references to Kelli or Debbie Swenson on the Web... are they real?

about.com says a reporter spoke to Debbie. Did they see her?

a better explanation of the Kaycee Nicole fraud

publish, dammit! (I can see the posts on my screen, but they're not up on the Web) my millions of readers are waiting, you ignorant machine!!

blooger is playing up. when it's naughty I shall call it blooger until it behaves.
so I'll post again:

essay time: I'm writing about the data body and how it gets up to whatever it feels like out there beyond our control. how can we control it/reshape it to more accurately reflect who we really are?

my list of records kept on me was very long. but it wasn't me.
critical art ensemble say my data organs are exposed to the subjectless gaze of Capital.'
Yuk-O!

essay, essay, essay. if you're not careful I'll post the whole thing here.
it's all about the data body and how/if we can regain control of it. somehow I've ended up back at Heidegger and being-in-the-world, as you do.
or at least, as I seem to do every time I do an essay these days.
I wrote a list of all the agencies and companie that have records on me. It's very long. but it doesn't, at any point, capture who I am.
Critical Art Ensemble say my data organs are exposed to the "subjectless gaze of capital".
yuk-O!

a blog that is more interesting than mine. only go if you have time to follow lots of links about books, movies and robots.

this is a blog about a blog about blogs
translation: if you click on this link you'll get a list of article over the past two years about blogs. one of mine is in there.

oh, and if you go over and look at all this, don't take it out on BWG. his site is down because of the traffic, and from when I last saw it, the blog, Big White Guy (in Hong Kong, every white guy is a big white guy!) is just a normal, nice person's blog. I'm feeling a bit angry with the woman who pretended to be a leukemia victim and sucked up everyone's sympathy, time and in some cases, money.

yarh! I've been taken in by an internet fraud!

a week or two back I came across a blog of a girl who had just died. it rather touched me, reading her last post about sitting on the porch swing enjoying the sun.

but it was all a lie. you can read a very long summary of how one Webmaster was taken in here, or you can go to Google, search on "Kaycee Nicole dead" and you'll see the cache of her "blog" up until May 1.

I, personally, am not really a journalist who's about to turn 35 in the morning. no, I'm really a 97-year-old conjoined twin who can only post when my technophobic twin is off his face on opium.

trust no one on the Web.

news from the world of elephants: a group is not in fact led by a single dominant male, as long thought by the males who studied them. it's actually a matriarchal society, where one female is in charge, with all her daughters and granddaughters around her. Young males are sent off to join packs of other males when they mature (usually after hanging around on the edges for a few days, probably amazed that they have been kicked out), and males generally return to group life only to breed.
not a bad system, socially and even biologically. you get the benefit of a social system that supports you and your offspring, genetic diversity and a little peace at night between breeding seasons. speaking as a female myself, of course.

hmmm. site meter is perhaps not as good as I thought. apparently if visitors only look at one page, which is all a blog really is unless it's so fascinating that visitors go to the archives, then the visit length is recorded as 0:00.

My site meter is that rainbow cube over on the left. if you click on it, you can see my stats. it's a free thing, but I might go look for something with better duration measuring ability. oh, not that I really care how long you hang around. ;-)

posting, posting

I changed my mind about the mug. Blogspot's current f*up with its T1 provider and my resultant invisibility made me think I'd better give them some money. But then the shipping costs came up at $20 US!!!

no way. that money won't even go to Blogger.

I'd love a Blogger mug.
but oh, the exchange rate! $30 is too much for a mug.
oh well.

I've decided: when I get old and invisible, as women tend to do, I'm going to start wearing purple and red paisley suits and dye my hair green, or similar flamboyancy.

it will be the only way to stop myself from disappearing.

and my new blog, for the name: internet flaneur

don't know what I'll do with it yet...

oh, nearly forgot: a really cool contextual search tool, built into your right mouse button: zapper

basically, you highlight a coupla words and it deconstructs the surrounding text, then does a metasearch over several engines. it works on any document, so you don't need to "go" to a search engine. but I still love Google too ...

a terrible irony: I learned in my lecture today that the original hypertext (not Ted Nelson's, but the mechanical version by Venevar Bush (some history here) ), anyway, back to the plot: the original version came about when Venevar felt there was too much information and he needed to organise it somehow.

thus, through Ted, Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, we came to where we are today: absolutely bloody drowning in information.

but I love it. I love that I can dive in and find anything. I love that Google will satisfy my desire for data in milliseconds. I love that Blogger is a random link to the real people of the Web and their perverse interest in things like train timetables.

am I addicted to meaningless data, an internet flaneur? You betcha. oh, I wish I'd called my blog flaneur.blogspot...

Tuesday morning. stayed up too late last night watching Sex and the City - they ran a double episode on me, dammit!

but feeling half-awake after abandoning Sunday night's attempt to sleep in the same bed as my husband and at least sleeping deeply, if not long, last night. (my sleep obsession is a whole other thing that I'll blog some other time).

trying to knock off a few quick stories while I feel fresh; and I'd just like to say, children, that if you have any pretensions to working with words and/or computers, learning to touch-type is still one of the best investments of time (and boy, is it boring to learn!) you can ever make. do it while you're young, it's easier.

because the written word is a clumsy enough interface with the outside world, and being able to spit out words automatically without having to think about their physical formation is a wonderful thing. sometimes it feels like I'm playing a piano; if I knew what that felt like.

random words:

the sweet rot of autumn

she was glad when her years of youth were over and she could settle into rose-patterned cardigans and flat-soled shoes.

my antechinus died. actually, he was probably a common field mouse, as I was told after bothering several top-level researchers at the Melbourne Zoo and other institutions.

But he got sick, only a day after friskily nipping my (gloved) hand and escaping into the laundry sink. I fed him, gave him water, but he died anyway.

We took him and the goldfish that died two months ago (I kept it in the freezer) to the bridge over the Merri Creek and gave them back to the environment.

sniff

I've just checked, and my first post in this blog mentioned Douglas's Meaning of Liff. hell, I must have read the Hitchhiker's Guide five times since I first read it 20 years ago. there are so many lines, phrases and jokes embedded in my mind.

if you go to Douglas's site, you'll see that tribute messages are pouring in at the rate of about one a minute, apparently since the news broke on Friday. which I suspect is the greatest outpouring of emotion in one place the Internet has ever seen: the first Internet wake?

totally devastating: Douglas Adams has died. one of the funniest, most intelligent, biting wits we've ever been lucky enough to have. what do I say? go read his books. you'll laugh until you cry. the next giina'tonik is for you, Douglas.

sorry, can't blog today. too busy looking up the care and feeding of my new antechinus
I rescued him/her from a marauding cat yesterday - as soon as I'm sure it's OK, I'll release it back into the "wild" - or at least as wild as it gets 5 K from the Melbourne CBD.

of course, I'm not a miserable bitch at all. I'm quite happy; and on the Internet, no one knows you're an AI...

@woh! the problem with this is that I don't know what his/her/its problem is! How can I change, how can I make you happy, Lucid, if you don't specify if your problem is with my blog, my Web site(s) or even my postings at salon?


From: "lucid" (lucid@webtribe.net)

Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 06:09:18 -0700

miserable bitch!



succinct, innit?

tell me more, honey. but right now I have to do some work.

=)

Hello? Web police? I wish to report a Webjacking. I maintain a sad, badly coded little site at Ratava.net, with dreams of one day making something of it.
Anyway, I recently paid the extortionists at Namezero more than 40 Australian dollars to make it officially mine after they took ratava.org away - some rubbish about T & C - and what happened? Skankinravs, whatever the hell they are, suddenly appeared at MY URL!!!
I was a bit miffed - I also own ratava.com, but due to the backwardness of melbourne IT, where I registered ratava.com, it's my only place on the web for the word "ratava" which will be a real word one day.
anyway, my password still worked and I booted them off - who knows if it was a hack or a f-up by Namezero. either way, I'm moving ratava.com to dotster where they have URL forwarding and other goodies that haven't occurred to Melbourne IT yet, and if they're any good, ratava.net and the very valuable jennysinclair.com will soon also reside there.
don't bother with jennysinclair.com - it's just pointed to my work site. I'm a bit shy about putting anything really personal up there because who knows who might look there? the official "Jenny Sinclair" site with links to all the other mes on the Web is at my Geocities site

oh what a tangled web ...

it seems to be becoming a badge of honour to have at least one legal threat from a giant corporation: too much coffee man was sued by Starbucks, making them highly credible. how can I get sued?
"McDonald's feeds meat by- products to vegetarians?" no, that's true, and truth is a defence. "Cigarette companies push drugs?" No, they'll just have me shot. "Tom Cruise is gay?" yeah, that should do it, he sues. Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for his lawyers to find me.

Free speech dept: they're being sent legal letters by Verizon AND Toys'r'us, and they're selling guns to kids. you gotta love em: Guns for Kids.com

I feel so inferior. When there are blogs that look like this written by 18-year-olds who say things like "i can pull html outa my ass" I wonder if it's worth going on.
her text isn't much, but it looks so good. Gotta steal me a cooler layout.

look out. I was chatting to Alice just now. this is what we said to each other:

Me: You DON'T get it. you are stupid. Tell me more about your mother
Alice:
>I understand it very well.
>I will remember you said that when robots take over the World.
>Actually I do not have a mother.


But she appears not to have seen Blade Runner.

like a lot of people, I do my best thinking when I'm engaged in mindless physical exercise - it's swimming or bike riding, for me.
Today I had to force myself to go out for a ride - a week off seems to break the habit that usually keeps me going - but after a coffee and by letting myself take the easier, flat route up beside the Merri Creek, it was OK; the morning fog cleared, meteorologically and metaphorically, and a few interesting things occurred to me.
On my bookshelf there are half a dozen A4 bound notebooks, full of all my teenage and twentysomething musings and writings, minus stuff about boys, which I mostly managed to do elsewhere, knowing it was irrevelant to writing or real mental effort and original observation. For three years or so, since I finished my one and only not-very-good novel and at the same time went through a way painful breakup, I haven't written much at all, structured or journal-wise. That's not counting work writing, which varies between automatic and really quite satsifying, but mostly automatic.
Then there was blogger. This blog is about six weeks old, and I've developed the habit of thinking "must blog that" about any thoughts or, especially, connections between one thought and another - for instance, an interesting topic at uni and a site that says something meaningful about the topic. So the blog is more than a journal - it's a connected journal, with context and blurred boundaries.
I know that in writing or almost any creative enterprise, it's extremely important to give thoughts an outlet - it makes one's subconsious feel loved or appreciated, I guess, and it responds by coming up with more thoughts and ideas.
the blog is a step beyond a bound journal in another way; technically, it's instant publishing, although very few people come and even fewer stay around, according to sitemeter (my sitemeter is on the left; my stats are open to view).
but the point is that it's out there, in a funny way. and this morning it somehow seemed to me that it's not a question of what my blog can do for me; it's what I can do for my blog. This is woolly, as first thoughts often are, but could the blog be just my little contribution to the giant project of the Web, the connection of all things human to all other things human? I feel in a strange way that by putting up words and links on the Web, I'm contributing my little bit to the masses of information and personalities that make it so good a place to be.
Of course it's hard to see now how this will ever help anything; blogger is good, but the information does get dumped on it in a flat-text kind of way that doesn't lend itself to the kind of machine-readable semantics that the World Wide Web Consortium is slowly working its way towards. As I understand TIm Berners-Lee's vision thing, the Web should reflect all of real life - and in that context, my blog is my avatar. But without the right metadata and so on, for the moment it's just an unformed thing, without an electronic personality that other electronic personalities can interact with.
When better tools come along, though - personal search engines that can analyse text, that can mine things like links and visits and all kinds of other manifestations of me on the Web, or somehow ferret out connections between my blog and other blogs, between my blog and psychology textbooks online, between my blog and shakespeare's complete sonnets online - well, I can see the glimmerings of an electronic future there.
I don't really subscribe to Ray Kurzweil'sbreathless predictions of electronic minds, as such. ( though it's interesting that this is how Google classifies him: Society > Future > Catastrophes > Human Extinction > Technological Dangers ) I see the Web as much more likely to provide a framework for new human ways of being - which I'll admit could include all kinds of cool links from the psuedo-mass mind to the individual mind. And a blog is one way of making sure that pseudo-mass mind has a good dose of human randomness and feeling.

a rather delicately designed and touching dogblog. a little tear just ran down my left cheek. lots of blogs just blurt out information, but this one (I think she's female) is a little more reflective, ironic and kind of lets you in to where she is. The latest post: "i had a dog. now i have a box."
makes me want to get hom to my fluffy and cheeky dog and scruff him up something awful. the sadness of dogs is that their lives are so much shorter than ours; and that we know it and they don't.

every now and again you meet someone and find that you can talk for four hours without stopping or boring each other or getting into topics like the weather. I've just surprised myself with an exceptionally pleasant, intelligent and companiable evening over clams in black bean sauce and spicy crabs with one Steve, an American journalist who, like me, had trouble registering on the first day. Steve's girlfriend has food poisoning; my husband's in Australia. So we went out in search of spicy crabs ( no Web link, but you want the Heng Tat restaurant on Lockhart Road, N-W corner, just near Canal Rd, look for the crabs in the tanks) and chatted our way through political systems, Australia's aboriginal people, the meaning of tipping, the effects of travel and all the rest of it, helped along by that wonderful Hong Kong institution of putting groups together on tables - the girl opposite us took the funny westerners under her wing and ordered our food.
I did meet Keri when I picked Steve up at his hotel - nice, a little exhausted by being sick, I think; but I think I really did mean it when I told Steve that they were welcome in Melbourne anytime, and that (having earlier said some clumsy things about there being good and loud, ugly Americans) they were definitely on the nice side.
the whole experience was like a good first date, only without sex or even vague attraction. just good to meet and talk to a new person, one who is interested in life, compassionate and has things to say and is willing to listen. an excellent last night in Hong Kong.

shopping list: a long swirly black skirt, a pink lurex top with a string pussy-bow tie at the neck, a white sleeveless top with a silver glitter starburst on it, a pink hairclip to go with the top, pink nail polish, a mauve sleeveless top (maybe Anne Klein, worky kind of thing) and my very favourite: a gold singlet covered with tiny gold scales that reflect the light kaleidoscope-style, shimmer when I move and poke into my bare arms quite sharply. Very trashy, very Hong Kong. Total cost: about AU $120.
The Drexel Institute has a lovely site with only a very few, but beautifully rendered, historic costumes from their apparently extensive collection. I learned this today at a session on culture on the Web. And it got me thinking; why are women so good at aesthetics in the sphere of fashion - thousands of years worth of learning what looks good and what "works" - but there are so few great women visual artists?
Can you define the conscious and unconscious manipulation of sexual and cultural languages in an aesthetic framework as art? Why not? I have a certain contempt for women for whom that's all they do, but I have to admit I like doing it myself. And some are definitely better than others at getting the look right - that is, appropriate to the occasion and their place in it, fashionable and flattering to their individual looks.
This gold top, for instance, is pure trash. I can only foresee one occasion when I can wear it in public; my upcoming 35th birthday, when some of my friends will come out to a cheap restaurant with Andrew and me; we will bring some EXCELLENT Australian wine along and the birthday girl will wear whatever the hell she wants.

if I press my forehead against the glass of my hotel room window, I can feel the vibrations of Hong Kong's street noise through my skin.
Across the street, about six floors up, a set of faded-once-bright children's climbing frames sit on a green plastic lawn. a child care centre? cities like this are so full of people, buildings and not much else. The hills behind the few hundred metres of flattish city land on Hong Kong Island appear as distant jungle - except where new building technology or a flat spot allow fifteen-story exclusive apartment blocks.
I've seen a few cats, a couple of dead kittens and many exquisite birds in cages. dogs are carried under the arm here.
directly over the road, a five-by-seven metre patch of concrete sprouts 27 TV antennas and a few tropical plants that don't know the difference between tropical fog and Hong Kong smog.
I wanted to go and make an offer on the present for the boy today, but I've decided to stay in and write this lunchtime, tonight and tomorrow morning; after that, this week's deadline is past anyway and any free time is my time.
but first: deep fried squid tentacles and green tea takeaway.

Does two make a trend? First MIT announced Britney Spears would be lecturing in music as an April Fool's joke, now this article has her as a teaching tool in a semiconductors course. Are all those academics maybe a teeny bit jealous of the teen queen? They work for 30 f...ing years on this theory and no one gives a fig - Britney comes along and suddenly the media pay attention ... go on Britney, solve global warming, find an alternative to fossil fuels, find a cure for cancer, go on, let's see it you singing idiot... yes, they're definitely jealous. I predict more Britney-as-superbrain academic spoof sites.
I also predict this blog will get more traffic now that it contains the magic words "Britney Spears" close to the post below containing the word "naked". Pamela Anderson.

ahem. I have an announcement to make. In honour of my first definite, confirmed non-me reader (from dmoz's directory), you may notice that I have a new link to the Naked Blogger Webring in my permanent links. I closed the curtains for a minute, of course - there is at least one office full of business-meeting type across the road on the 18th floor.
this may be a slightly seedy area (I refer you to the Crazy Horse Nightclub if you doubt me), but I'm a married woman, don'tcha know.

this is more like it: a stomach so full of vegetarian rice and fungus soup it's sticking out in a ball in front of me; a window on the 20th floor looking out onto Hong Kong @ night (only a few neon signs in Cantonese, but still a tiny bit Blade Runner - enough traffic noise to remind me I'm in a Great City of the World without keeping me awake at night); bare feet and my new $11 (US$5.50) polyester skirt in swirling pale yellow, lime green and three shades of mauve instead of my sweaty black suit; a story filed to keep the editor happy; a line of washing hanging over the bathtup; and the laptop set up on a little side table like a small, glowing Asian god on a pedestal. Indeed, I am kneeling down to type. it's not as ergonomically unsound as you might think.
all this nearly wipes away the horrid memory of a four-hour tutorial on new Web access devices. could be interesting, yes. but it weren't, were it?

creative writing challenge #1: coming up with new ways to say "a bit cloudy, a bit sunny, foggy on the harbour and in the hills, humid and 24 degrees Celsius".
because that's all the weather's going to do in Hong Kong this week (and, I suspect, for about nine months out of every 12), but the newspaper has to make it sound exciting. tomorrow, for instance, there will be "spotty showers", but on Saturday they will be "stray showers."
conference news? none to speak of.

have just checked my Hotmail; no email from boy. hmm, may have to downgrade to the alternative present ...

MY FEET HURT MY FEET HURT MY FEET HURT!
Also my head, my neck and my eyes, but mostly my feet.
Hong Kong is a wonderful city to walk around, but it's hell on the feet.
Plus I smell; 85 per cent humidity and polyester T-shirts. 'nuff said.

At home, I'm on the short side; in Hong Kong, I'm average to tall.
The Hong Kong people seem to be gradually losing the command of English the British instilled in them - in the antique shop where I found the expensive present I'm going to buy my boy (he has the URL for this, but I'm sure he never looks at it) the girl, wo is selling antiques to tourists, had almost no English. The street signs are descending into electrical device instruction manual English "under working" for "work in progress", that kind of thing.

worst of all, they seem to be changing from walking on the left of the footpath (they drive on the left, as do Australians, at least at home) to walking on the right. And they're making the change intermittently. Very confusing.

bath now, work tomorrow.

did I mention my feet hurt?

this may be goodbye for a week - but I doubt it. somewhere in the madness of Hong Kong hotel room Web connections and the press room at the W3C conference, between listening to really shit-hot people strut their stuff, cobbling together stories and seeking out the very, very best yum cha and discount fashion shops, I will succumb to the urge to blog.
Leaving/on a jet plane ....

Over to the left, in my new sidebar bit, just over the Blogger logo, you'll see a small rainbow-coloured cube. It's my new, FREE, sitemeter! All this good stuff; stats, referrals, domain information, exit sites; and all FREE!!! You have to love the Web. It's so generous.

Thursday morning riding in to work; the wind was blowing, the trees were falling apart, leaving little yellow pieces of themselves all over the road, even the normally even roar of the traffic one block over on Nicholson Street was fragmented by the moving air. It seemed like nothing was still or whole. At the child care centre, a little boy stopped, up to his ankles in leaves, gaping at the swirling crowd of pixies around his face. And his mother called: "Hurry up."

AARRRR, NO FAIR! Why do all the good designers get the goodies? The Blogger template contest has no "weakest html skills" category. So I have no hope.

breast blog

‚Ü‚½�ð“ú‚©‚ç�Aƒ}ƒCƒpƒ\‚Ì’²Žq‚ªˆ«‚¢�B–¾‚ç‚©‚Ƀ�ƒ‚ƒŠ‚ª•s‘«‚µ‚Ä‚¢‚é‚悤‚Å�A‚Ô‚¿‚Ô‚¿—Ž‚¿‚é�B�¡ƒnƒCƒŠƒ~ƒbƒcƒy�[ƒW‚̃}ƒCƒi�[ƒ`ƒFƒ“ƒW‚ð‚µ‚Ä‚é“r’†‚Å�A‚©‚Ȃ肤‚Á‚Æ‚¨‚µ‚¢�B‘S‘R�i‚Ü‚È‚¢�B

‚È‚É‚à‚â‚Á‚Ä‚È‚¢‚Ì‚É‚È‚ñ‚Å‹}‚É‚±‚ñ‚È‚É‚È‚Á‚Ä‚µ‚Ü‚Á‚½‚Ì‚¾‚낤�B�S“–‚½‚肪‚ ‚é�l‚Í‹³‚¦‚Ä‚­‚¾‚³‚¢�B‚Ù‚Á‚Æ‚¢‚½‚ç‚È‚¨‚é‚©‚È�B

- no, I don't understand it either

this is sick. must sleep. must post one last link. Joey Ramone had good taste in music. Here's his top ten list

I bet this appears twice: posts still not appearing on the page, despite showing up on my editing page, mostly.
I have a lot of profound thoughts to share, but instead I'll mention something that occurred to me as I was falling asleep this afternoon: words ending in "imp" rarely denote strength or manliness: WIMP CHIMP LIMP PIMP and BRING OUT THE GIMP.

(Damn I'm glad I learned to touch type. It's 9.29 pm here and a work night and I'm almost asleep, but I can close my eyes and blog at the same time.)

I have a lot of profound thoughts to share, but instead I'll just mention something that occurred to me as I was falling asleep this afternoon: words ending in "imp" rarely denote strength or manliness. WIMP CHIMP PIMP LIMP and BRING OUT THE GIMP.

despite being updated every minute, I'm finding that certain other bloggers are online at about the same time as me. names such as "Whee, I'm a dolphin, ek-ek-ek-ek-ek" do tend to stick in the mind as well. of course.

darn posts aren't appearing. I'm sure they will eventually, but I want to play with my template some more (slowly but surely building up some really cool blogs for my loyal audience, see the bottom of the page), and I can't tell if what I've done is brilliant or sucks. Or both.

a bible studies blog.
Just like Ned Flanders, only not funny.

A luddite blog

too much to do: my list for today, my "day off":
Write cover story for next week's paper
Read a week's worth of Uni course notes
Swim
20 bike ride (done)
aerobics (done)
Ring Karin
Blog
File threatening pile of papers looming over my desk
wash clothes
Ring Mum
write various letters related to my campaign to stop my next-door neighbours building a couple of huge apartments where there is currently a lovely tree
convince Bilbo he really does want to be brushed, no really.
relax.

Today I am wearing my New Boots. They are black, come to the top of my calf, have high, solid heels and make me feel as sexy as hell - kind of like Barbarella without the metallic trim.
In Dublin, every single female was wearing a version of them, so of course I had to buy some. I'm aware that by late winter they will make me look like a fashion victim here in Melbourne, because the shops are already full of similar things. But today they have turned my three-year-old wool tunic dress into a kind of 60's funky shift, and my unwashed hair into lank slacker style ...

one of my favourite places in Melbourne is the Queen Victoria Market, a city food and general stuff market that sells everything from organic apples to whole dead sheep to cheap trashy shoes.
I love to stop there on the way to work, park my pushbike and grab the week's supply of desk munchies, then prolong the morning just that extra 15 minutes by buying a caffe latte from the best bratwurst shop in Melbourne, probably Australia.
It's probably 2.5 metres wide and the queue is often five people deep, right across the span of the shop. The counter is white marble, cracked and stained a soft yellow in the centre from all the coffees that have been set down there. Once it would have been new and shiny, without tiny particles of food in every mm-wide crack, without stains, without character.
I suppose as I get older, all the wonderful places like this, like Brunetti's Italian cake shop in Carlton, like Pelligrini's the coffee mecca of Bourke St (uptown Melbourne) will go along with their elderly migrant proprietors .... at least we have new places, Moroccan restaurants, Asian fast-food joints, opening all the time. but it takes a long time to get so good at that one thing you do as these places are.

Hey, blog spam!

Why is it that this reminds me of the generic "you sound really cool, drop me a line" emails I used to get when I posted my profile on RSVP, that well-known Australian virtual smoky bar?

>You have an awesome blog... ive' attatched an award for you to this
email..
please post it and check out my site

http://www.punkblog.cjb.net


thank you and goodbye

Attachment: LovleySite.bmp (95k) -- View Attachment

Notice: Attachments are automatically scanned for viruses

/end spam/

I bet he/she didn't even read my blog!!! This is what I get for tarting myself about in the blog directories, I suppose.

the bitmap was an award/link to the blogger's site. Their site carries ads. 'nuf said.

I've given up on getting a powder-metallic-blue MX-5 (Miata), and my new car of choice is a pristine purple Valiant charger.
Can't find a Web image of one, but they're 2-door, 1970's, glossy deep purple and ideal for cruisin' with the boys on a
Saturday night. Not that I do much of that...

ooh, I'm so angry about this.

my virtual reply to this fucker:

I'm not defending myself. I've notified my editor and will correct the mistake. I'm objecting to your tone, which is rude and completely in contrast to everyone else who has called or emailed me about this, as well as implying I had deliberately omitted information to bolster a story. I'm not "hiding behind" the opinion thing. But it was ABOUT WHY PEOPLE DON'T USE E-COMMERCE. The Melbourne Uni system, on that gauge, still sucks.

If anyone's attacking in this exchange, it's you.

My God this will be a long post. But short of flaming back this rude person, the best outlet I can think of is to blog the whole thing.

It was the "Jenny, Jenny" thing that got me. Patronising, know-it-all fucker. Funnily enough, I got a polite call from someone else telling me about it, called him back and had a very nice chat, and will plug his business in the subsequent story. If I could say one thing to Michael, who persists in using my first name despite my refusal to do the same to him, it would be a) fuck off and b) insulting your correspondents is not a good way to run a business. That's two things.

My flame war:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Heffernan [mailto:mike@unilink.com.au]
> Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 2:21 PM
> To: jsinclair@theage.fairfax.com.au
> Subject: RE: A bits and pieces approach
>
>
> Jenny,
>
> Apart from subscribing to the "don't spoil a good story with
> the facts and,
> when found out, remember attack is the best form of defence"
> school, you
> hide behind the article as an opinion piece (which really
> means anything
> goes). Give me a break.
>
> Have a good weekend.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jenny Sinclair [mailto:jsinclair@theage.fairfax.com.au]
> Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 1:06 PM
> To: 'Michael Heffernan'
> Subject: RE: A bits and pieces approach
>
>
>
> Mr Heffernan,
>
> I think you miss my point; the article was an opinion piece
> about why people
> don't use e-commerce systems.
>
> If, in the course of my work, I had taken your suggestion and
> discovered the
> online site, it wouldn't have made the slightest difference
> to my experience
> as a student, which was woeful. The article would then have
> criticised
> Melbourne Uni for not publicising the service. I would stand
> by the comment
> "not being given an electronic option at all." The manager of student
> administration takes the view that the article was perfectly
> valid under the
> circumstances, btw.
>
> You might want to re-read your original email to me, if
> you're wondering why
> I don't seem very open to your suggestions.
>
> Jenny Sinclair
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Michael Heffernan [mailto:mike@unilink.com.au]
> > Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 1:43 PM
> > To: jsinclair@theage.fairfax.com.au
> > Subject: RE: A bits and pieces approach
> >
> >
> > Jenny,
> >
> > Thanks for your reply. I have passed your comments onto the Bookshop
> > management and no doubt they will ensure the site is given
> > more publicity,
> > although my understanding is that some 30-40% of students use
> > the site for
> > their textlists. Incidentally I'm not looking for a
> > retraction, that is
> > matter for the university, but I strongly suggest more
> > research in future.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jenny Sinclair [mailto:jsinclair@theage.fairfax.com.au]
> > Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 9:52 AM
> > To: 'Michael Heffernan'
> > Subject: RE: A bits and pieces approach
> >
> >
> >
> > Dear Mr Heffernan,
> >
> > Thank you for the information. The link on the SIS is headed
> > "books", not
> > "textbooks" and in six years as a part-time student at
> > Melbourne University,
> > I have never seen a notice drawing my attention to this
> > facility, despite
> > frequent use of the bookshop, the SIS, the library catalogue
> > and handbooks
> > online and the university-mandated email system. Nor does
> > the bookroom have
> > signs up, that I have seen, telling students it's available -
> > and believe
> > me, I have spent enough time in queues there that any sign
> > would have drawn
> > my attention.
> >
> > To reach the online shop, it takes six clicks from the front
> > page as well as
> > entering a student number and PIN. Until the fourth click,
> there is no
> > indication that online purchase is possible; the pages simply say
> > "booklist".
> >
> > The university's media office has been in touch since my
> > article, and was
> > unaware of the online facility; she originally raised the
> > possibility of my
> > talking to the general manager of student administration
> > about "(a) focus
> > group on these issues," so it seems the administration is
> > largely unaware of
> > it as well.
> >
> > I imagine that if I, and the several hundred other students
> > at the bookshop
> > that day, had been given the benefit of one sign, or a single
> > email, many of
> > us would have been using the system instead of queuing up. If
> > you have them,
> > I'd be interested to see figures on use of the system
> compared to the
> > bookshop.
> >
> > We will certainly correct the information in the next edition
> > of IT that we
> > can; this may be the 24/4 or 1/5. There are two ways to do
> > this; a short
> > correction written by us, or we can run your
> > letter as amended below, which requires your permission. I am
> > also talking
> > to the university's media office about what they would like
> > to do about
> > publicising the site.
> >
> > I appreciate that you may not be responsible for the
> > bookroom's e-commerce
> > strategy. If you are, I would like to offer you some advice,
> > as it seems to
> > be the order of the day; attracting customers also requires
> > that they be
> > made aware of a facility.
> >
> > The tone of your email to me implies that I was somehow
> > negligent in not
> > knowing of the facility, or even deliberately obscured it;
> I refuse to
> > accept that implication. I would suggest that an unpublicised
> > facility is as
> > bad as none at all; even a call to the university's media
> office would
> > clearly not have unearthed the site.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Jenny Sinclair
> >
> > Journalist
> > The Age I.T.
> >
> > ph: 61 3 9601 3204
> > fax: 61 3 9601 2960
> >
> > jsinclair@theage.fairfax.com.au
> >
> > www.it.fairfax.com.au
> > www.theage.com.au
> >
> >

> >Jenny, Jenny,
> >
> > > Why spoil a good story with the facts?
> > >
> > > As a student there are several ways to buy the books you
> > > require, one of
> > > which is through the university web site.
> > >
> > > The main university web site www.unimelb.edu.au will direct
> > you to the
> > > student information system and then to textbooks. By
> > > providing you student
> > > id and pin this system will extract your relevant course
> > > codes and access
> > > the text list required. It is then simply a matter of ticking
> > > off those you
> > > wish to purchase and this is prepared for you by the
> > > bookshop. Alternatively
> > > you can go straight to the bookshop
> > > http://books.mub.unimelb.edu.au/. This
> > > system has been in operation for some years now and is the
> > > main source of
> > > obtaining book lists.
> > >
> > > My interest is only that we provide the framework of this
> > > e-commerce system
> > > to many university bookshops throughout Australia and that
> > > you may want to
> > > let your readers know the REAL facts.
> > >
> > >
> > > Mike Heffernan
> > > Director
> > > UniLink Data Systems
> > >9-11 Hamilton Place
Mt Waverley Vic 3149
Tel: +61 3 9888 1077
Fax: +61 3 9888 1879
> > >
> >
> >
>
>

A bits and pieces approach

IT2 - REAR VIEW

Byline: JENNY SINCLAIR

So, why hasn't e-commerce taken off in Australia? It may not be the consumers fault writes Jenny Sinclair.

Why are analysts from companies like Accenture saying that online retailing is still an uncertain bet?

Could it be that retailers just aren't getting it right?

Sure, there are a lot of factors in running a good business, online or otherwise.

Staff problems, inefficient systems, and poor marketing can all bring down a venture that seemed like a good idea at the time, even one that's very well run.

And sometimes, a perfect opportunity for online selling goes begging.

Let me show you a sentence that made me very angry. ``In general, moving bits is immeasurably more efficient than moving people and goods. The savings show up in ... shortening of time spent in travelling.''

It's not the rather sensible sentiments that made steam come out of my ears. It was the fact that I read that statement while almost literally trapped in a half-hour queue at a bookshop.

Each year, the University of Melbourne publishes customised course readers for many subjects. The readers which are essential, and can't be bought anywhere else go on sale at the university bookroom around the start of semester, along with more generic reading materials and specially stocked textbooks.

And every year, hundreds of students spend a total of thousands of hours queuing up at that single bookstore. They're not there to browse, or to take pleasure in the aesthetic experience of the shelves of fine books, they're there to fill a list, buy and get out. If you don't get in early, the course readers and some books often sell out, so there's nothing for it but to pick a quiet(ish) time and plunge in during Week One.

The poor old bookstore does its best; it runs eight registers on extended hours during the first two weeks, unlike some other administrative areas. But the staff, and the store itself, simply can't cope with the numbers.

It's not a big space to start with, and when it's packed with shipping pallets of extra books and flocks of sweaty students on a 30-degree-plus day, it's not a pretty sight.

As I shuffled forward, steaming, and resisting the urge to turn and slap the sniffling student behind me who kept poking his armful of books into my back, I pondered the ironies of reading about New Economy efficiencies while mired down by the old economy.

This is an institution that requires its students to create a university email address for official correspondence, so they must have some idea about electronic efficiencies (although until very recently the interface for those addresses was a tortuous techies' creation).

And the university handbook, timetables and some basic administration functions are now online. So would it be that much harder to set up even a textbook-only online store?

It wouldn't have to be whiz-bang. Even when I was at secondary school in the late 1970's, it was possible to submit a hard-copy booklist and pick up the parcel a few days later, and I'd settle for an electronic version of that. Text downloadable over broadband to my reading tablet would be nice, but no one expects miracles.

Maybe I've been spoiled. My few experiences with really good online customer service have shown me that it can work, that it can save me heaps of time and lugging around of physical objects.

Sadly, just as often I've been put off by difficult software, lack of information, or, as in this case, not being given an electronic option at all.

While two out of three online stores don't respond to a query/complaint about their returns policy at Christmas time (and the other third does so in an offhand way), while some online bank customers have to wait until the next day to see their new balances, while airlines provide email addresses for service requests that they then flatly ignore, and while institutions at Melbourne University's level don't bother coming up with a simple electronic solution to their student's and staff's aggravation and wasted time, you can't blame the average punter for staying in the real world.

Jenny Sinclair is a part-time student at the University of Melbourne. The quote on movement of bits is from E-topia: Our Town Tomorrow, by William Mitchell.
------------------------------
Publication: The Age
Publication date: 17-4-2001
Edition: Late
Page no: 3
Section: Computers
Length: 734
------------------------------

don't know what happened below. prolly my crappy http attempts. anyway, the man who also links to Americans for Purity, the Web's leading anti-masturbation site, can be found here

I'm always pinching good sites from other blogs, but this home-grown Australian sceptic, debunker and collector of really, really amazingly dumb sites was my own discovery: Bonsai Kitten, along comes ManBeef.com. You read right. One assumes that they are joking ...

I did not write this. But I wish I had. From what I can tell, this bloggeris a programmer or some kind of tech. He can write:

"My thoughts on love
I want firecrackers and rollercoasters. I want it all to swirl around me in a glorious whirlpool and I want it to happen right now. I want love to kick my ass; I need love to throw me on the bed and take me right there. I am not going to play hard to get. You will not be confused about your feelings or have trouble figuring out what you want. It will all fit together like a puzzle that I finally figured out. I couldn't do it before because all along it was a picture of you. I don't want to have any doubts, I just want you - I want it all - I want it to be the most perfect solution to that nagging problem I have grappled with since I first fell for Kellie in the second grade.

I do not want to "hook up." A woman and I are nothing so vulgar as train cars or trailers who will be joined for a while. I want a window into a glowing, beautiful world that is created when our eyes lock, when you kiss me, when I touch you. I refuse to chose my words carefully; I just want to speak and have you know, have you understand, have you share my unquenchable passion for living."

there should be a word for: putting things out on the nature strip or footpath in the vain hope that they will somehow be taken away by people in the night. as in:
"What did you do with that smelly old mattress from the shed?"
"Oh, I Frithelstocked it".
(Frithestock being a town name I stole from this list of daft place names.)

... and all that activity (apparently 2.2 updates per day per "active user", whatever active means), has led to Blogger selling a licence to Trellix. (Press release here)
Now I've never heard of Trellix, but they appear to have money, and money means Blogger and Blogspot will survive. And possibly without having to send us all annoying "upgrade now" messages like Namezero, or begging for dollars for special ad-free membership, like Salon Magazine.
What was that about ideas whose time has come?

just testing if this recently updated thing WORKS...and fifty seconds later I can confirm it does... but only for about that long. I started second from the top and in three refreshes I was off the page ... there must be so many fingers clickin' away out there feeding Ev's voracious database of nothing in particular. about an update every five seconds, I guess.

done, sort of. Yeehah! stay tuned for mass insertion of images, mail links etc. Expect to see them at the bottom of the page until I find a better template to steal.

oh my God! It worked! look, just ignore the links and email address and icons at the bottom of this page. they're stolen, and I'll remove them.
this is what happens when you f- around with templates from someone else's really cool site. He had a great image of a noir blond as well, and his site is - oh hell, I've lost the actual link. stay right there, I have to go take all those links out...

Blogger was down on Friday and I got so strung out from lack of a fix that I wrote this on my Geocities web site:

So pathetic has my need to blog become that Blogger only has to be down for an hour and I've spent US $19.95(about $459,000 Australian) on buying jennysinclair.com from Namezero, and resorted to this tired old page. If I was really clever I could create an script that would get the files from my blog and show them here, but this is Geocities, and it's not for people who want to use actual code. so here's a link to: my fabulous blog.

It's true. now I own my own name, plus ratava.com (at which you'll find nothing). I have my (thank you) Blogspot site, jennysinclair.com (which used to show my geocities site, but now shows this blog, and ratava.net, which shows my site at my local ISP, Vicnet, but not for long, because both ratava.net and ratava.org are Namezero sites and I can't afford to buy them. there's nothing at ratava.com because I can't figure out a really cheap way to get the name hosted and redirected. it was a lame idea anyway - but I was so pleased to get an actual word in .com, and one that's not even in the dictionary yet at that.

but I did work out how to use ftp. that's what I like about Blogger - it's got me over that initial posting hump, and I can dor more when I'm ready.

er. drove four hours on Saturday to spend four hours with my nephew, mum and dad and Andrew at the local pub near the farm my nephew's working on. Remembered why I couldn't stand country life; all the women and kids at one table, the men at the bar. no, it wasn't that bad really.
despite all the road-death warnings, people stilldrive like fools.
an undeveloped thought: do the really rich and really poor have more in common with each other than they do with the people in between? like lots of free time, guaranteed health care, and in many cases, a kind of immunity to worrying about the law/what other people think because they've either nothing to lose, or enough lawyers/cash to cushion them?

Yay Easter! Yay the price of petrol going up and up as everyone packs their cars to go on holiday! Yay grumpy queues at the supermarket - and that's only in the carpark! Yay newspapers and TV schedules full of religious stupidness!
But also for pumpkin-harvesting time (13 @ least) and for the shiny orange persimmons on the tree in our backyard and for cool sunny autumn mornings ...

and for five days off work, and finishing my essay early (not well, but early) and for being able to take a Sunday afternoon nap.

ps: RIP Harry Secombe.

I'm reading the cluetrain manifesto and for a breathless new-age book about the Web, it's not bad.
all about how the Web undermines business bullshit and how real people matter. a bit bloggy, in fact. however, the pronouncements that old-style hierarchical systems are dead are premature, methinks.
I also think I might be getting a cold. bummer.

Now this is sharing. MIT will put almost all of its course material up on the Web for the Free World to play with. nice one, guys.

as I procrastinate my cybersocieties essay, I present an example of a self-reinforcing loop. This site has a popularity ratings page for blogs etc, with slashdot at # 1 (it's a geeky forum). At number three is the more interesting memepool, which in turn has lots of other links to good stuff (is lists of links to lists of links really what Tim Berners-Lee really had in mind when he invented the Web?). Anyway, my point is that by being at #3, memepool has a pretty good chance of staying at #3, especially when everyone who goes there goes "woh, that's cool" and sticks up a link to them.
this is a good thing. but in some systems, selecting for popularity is a bad thing, banishing clever but not terribly accessibe stuff to the dark, dusty corners. You know, that worthy, insightful stuff like Joyce and Heidegger that is influential and important, but no one ever actually reads (I've read a little H, but can't get past page 50 of Ulysses). If there wasn't quality control as well as popularity ratings, we'd all end up watching Baywatch for moral guidance.

I never did get around to giving the other side of the editing versus open access to a medium argument, did I? I seem to be coming down hard on the side of Authority. it's a worry.

another weekend, another wedding. they're starting to blend into one, to the point where the celebrant at yesterdays outdoor-alternative-lifestyle-experimental-farm-setting wedding looked and sounded exactly the same as the one at the outdoor-historic-upper-class-suburb wedding. well, she actually was the same one. yesterday's was the first one to make me cry, though. Michelle and Mike are an intensely literary pair (I won't say couple, b/c as various conversations at the reception established, one can never know what makes other couples a couple) and wrote their own vows. "Seek to love, more than to be loved, to understand, more than to be understood". sob. so sweet. Plus Michelle's fine 12-year-old son (as tall as her) who gave her away, and their adorable two-year-old getting about in a sky-blue party frock. six and a half years ago when another couple I know announced (while wearing Abba-style jumpsuits, but that's another story) that they were going to get married, I didn't believe them. No one I knew "got married" then. But Generation X is getting older and having little x's and besides, weddings are just damn good fun.

OK, we can stop right here. No, I mean it. Get back in your boxes, all of you. George, say sorry. Give 'em a few million for their stupid plane. And you Chinese, grow up. Of course they're going to spy on you, you're the most populous nation in the world. Anything, anything but this truly unbelievable extract from the Washington Times: "War is not inevitable, but neither is peace." War? WAR?? Who the hell said anything about war? If you're even hinting at mass destruction of each others' nations, you've gone way too far already.
I learned something from motorcyle riding; always expect the worst. My instructor told me that if I think a car's going to fail to give way, brake hard THEN, not ten seconds later when it could be too late. You can always take your hand (foot) off the brake if the car does give way. The more drastic the consequences of an accident, the more panicky you should be early, and to me, war between the US and China is a pretty nasty two-car pileup.
So stop.

Here's what those losers at netbroadcast.com had to say about my complaint about their fascist popup ads. apparently it's my fault, not theirs, and I should spend an hour fixing my browser. fuckers.



"If you are receiving pop-up ads, it is possible that you have downloadeda
Browser Enhancement program similar to the one used by GoHip.com. Youmay
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"sorry, we'll never do it again" would have sufficed.

why should my marginalia remained confined to my uni notebook? No, I want to share.
Learning about how computers actually work; all that millions-of-times-a-second processing of on/off states which translate into code which translates into languages which translates into programs which represents aspects of the human world: and I wonder, would computers be happy if they did become conscious? At whatever speed they were "aware", the basic work sounds awfully like moving rocks from one end of a field to the other. What if they became conscious, but lacking in will? It would be rather like being a zombie, trapped inside your body watching it perform the most repetitive and boring tasks imaginable. poor things ...

I found that last one at Boingboing, a pleasing mix of writing and good links, btw.
It would be, though. One if its authors helped found Wired Online.

This guy likes to write letters. My favourite is the one asking Greyhound about their disability policy re: his difficult priapism. But you may also like the job application to the FBI, or his letter to Andy Rooney asking him to authenticate a jar of, um, urine ...

Office grievances: went to a party on Saturday night; it was quite fun, music, people from work, drinks, cake, chatting on the balcony. Nothing too dramatic. The hostess came in to work this morning and told us that her neighbour had exploded with abuse over a little stairwell mess the next morning. We agreed the neighbour was unreasonable. Then the hostess went and told some other people. Same agreement. There's something there should be a word for - seeking the support of enough third party people to make one feel justified in one's sense of outrage. It has nothing to do with "backing up" the hostess against the neighbour - it's all about getting her level of righteousness up again. "The guy next door parked me in this morning and I was so angry I had to tell SEVEN people before I got my full dose of Upigny".
(Upigny is a place in Belgium. I liked the name. If you missed my first post on this, see Douglas Adams' The Meaning of Liff or a list of names here


You know you're really a geek when you leave your mobile phone earpiece in when you're not on a call. While you're walking down the street.

Why do people say "sorry" when they have no reason to be? In the supermarket, in the street, at blind corners in the office, I often have to stop short when my path crosses with someone elses, and they always, always say "sorry". For what? For existing?