actual msg sent out some time back by a chief of staff at my paper who shall remain nameless:

Hi.......I know this is becoming quite monotonous but we REALLY DO NEED
EARLY COPY tonight. The paper is huge and most of the subs are drunk.

I think he was joking. then again, chiefs of staff rarely joke.

someone should tell Blogger I like their little ad at the top of my page. it makes me feel important. and I ain't paying no US$9.95 to get rid of it.

My newspaper failed to use this. So y'all can have it for free. It's a bit out of date.

This is a fan letter.
Last week, while the death of the singer Perry Como hogged newspaper headlines,
the passing-on of an equally great performer of the mind, Douglas Adams,
languished on the obituary pages and in briefs columns.
In cyberspace, Como's death made hardly a ripple, while over at
www.douglasadams.com, probably the world's first real cyber-wake was in full
swing. Messages of tribute poured in at the rate of more than one a minute,
sometimes one a second, for days on end.
If you're unaware of who Douglas Adams was (probably because you've just
popped onto Earth from a parallel universe identical to ours in all respects bar the
existence of humour), he was the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
He's the reason AltaVista's language translation service is called Babelfish, and the
reason the words "forty-two" said at the right time can drive the average geek into
gales of laughter.
The book, published in 1982, was based on a hit radio series, and spawned a
television series and several sequels.
Like any good sci-fi writer, Adams combined wild prediction with a veneer of
plausibility - in his world, things made sense, even if they didn't follow traditional
logic.
He imagined an improbability drive that sounded uncannily like a quantum
computer, an e-book that would put your Palm Pilot to shame (the Guideitself) and
artificial intelligences that sulked. His Earth was an irrelevant planet that was
demolished in the first chapter of his first book anyway; a sense of perspective was
one of his strong points.
But it was the wayhe wrote that made the difference and won him his legion of
fans. The email shorthand "LOL" (laugh out loud) could have been invented for
Adams' writing.
It's hard to choose just one from the tens of quotes that live in my mind after
reading the Guide five or six times and several readings of the rest of the four books
in the trilogy, (Adams wasn't very good at maths).
But this one comes close to summing up his style of an earnest setup and a
deflating punchline: "It is an important and popular fact that things are not always
what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the
wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck
about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always
believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same
reasons."
Adams, who by all reports was a hard man to get to finish a book ("I love deadlines.
I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."), did manage to publish several
other fiction works, and a moving book about threatened species, Last Chance to See.
In recent years he was involved in designing computer games based on his books.
His Meaning of Liff and Deeper Meaning of Liff found useful roles for all those good
words that hang about on town signposts doing not much, as well as giving names
to phenomena we all knew but couldn't label. (The British town of Kettering lent its
name to the pattern left on bare legs after sitting on a wicker chair, for instance.)
Adams was 49 when he suffered a heart attack on May 11, leaving behind a wife
and young daughter.
The tributes on his site range from devastated to would-be humourous, recycling
his jokes about stars "spending a year dead for tax reasons", towel jokes and the
ubiquitous "so long and thanks for all the fish".
But there's another, more appropriate, line, from Last Chance to See
Adams was
writing about why we should care about "rhinos, parakeets, kakopos and dolphins,
but it could serve as his own epitaph: "the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier
place without them."

yankspeak 101:
taxi = cab
lift=elevator
first floor = second floor
sauce = ketchup
holiday = vacation
autumn = fall (and fall may mean spring if you come from the southern hemisphere and they're talking "fall quarter" as in actual dates)
university = college
bitumen = blacktop
maths=math
24 by 7 = all the time
dollar= two dollars AU

things that have been bothering me:
the photo of a G8 protestor dead on the ground, surrounded by paramilitary police
the photo The Age ran last weekend of a tram fare evader pinned to the ground by "inspectors" from the tram company.
some articles The Age also ran last week saying that privacy was seriously compromised by new databases, talking about new Australian privacy laws (sorry for the lack of links, maybe later), and saying that privacy was a sacred right in the West.
the phone calls I keep getting at dinnertime trying to sell me stuff "Hello, could I speak to Mrs Sinclair please?". No, you can't, 'cos I'm not "Mrs Sinclair".
A book I haven't read yet: Naomi Klein's No Logo

the more people get treated as commodities for the global machine, the more some of them - only some - resist with whatever means possible.
it's like the environmentalists - the really hardcore ones that sit up trees for years
for every overwhelming force there's a kind of immune-system reaction in which counter-forces arise. Humans make the planet sick, humans make society sick, and the planet and society fight back with a modified version of humans.

I think I'll rename this blog Angry Girl.

I'm at it again: the neighbour's horrible development got a permit last week. now we have to spend lots of time and money organising an appeal. and we will, a) because I can't stand the idea of that lovely tree being replaced by a two-storey block of flats and b) because the value of our house will probably drop $50,000 when there's a horrible building there. so a few hundred on application fees/professional town planners seems like a good investment.

oh, and the council did make them modify it. it's 10 cm away from the boundary now, and the first (second for Yanks) floor is now 150 cm in instead of 100. big effing deal.

some sensible advice on writing

then again, in my own paper's internal newsletter, from our publisher and editor-in-chief: "online is not a new form of media. It is a merely a new delivery mechanism."
(holds metaphorical head in metaphorical hands and sobs loudly)

then again, in my own paper's internal newsletter, from our publisher and editor-in-chief: "online is not a new form of media. It is a merely a new delivery mechanism."
(holds metaphorical head in metaphorical hands and sobs loudly)

oh, please! Blogger has dignified this New York Times article (you'll need to register: lie) with a pointer.
it finishes "No longer a worrisome curiosity, the Internet is simply another of the means by which people find out what in the world is going on."
"Dave Kansas, formerly editor in chief of TheStreet.com, is now traveling in Europe."
Dave may be a very clever, switched-on person. But this article is written for the we-don't-understand-the-Web people to make them feel like they do; like it's just like RL only on a computer. it's so NOT.
maybe Dave needed more quick $US for more cervazas.
I need to think about this more; it is "just another means" but Dave makes it sound like the medium ain't the message.

I love this: "thank you for giving us the opportunity to leave you in peace".
they always HAD that opportunity!
the spam in question was from VeriSign, btw, which I had thought was a reputable company that wanted people to trust it.
hello, VeriSign: spam does not make people like you. it even less makes people trust you.

address deleted: ** jennysinclair@hotmail.com

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to leave you in peace. You have
been removed from all of the PostMasterDirect.com lists and should
receive
no further mail from our service. There is the off chance an additional
email has been queued for you already, however the chance is slim.

If you have subscribed under a different email address, there is still
the chance you'll receive mail under that address. If so, just forward
any mail you receive to deleteall@postmasterdirect.com to unsubscribe
that address.

If you feel you have been removed in error, simply visit
http://www.postmasterdirect.com/sub to resubscribe!

Thank you for being with us!

PostMaster Direct http://www.postmasterdirect.com/

and when for no particular reason I fed this into zapper
"the quality of mercy is not strained.
it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
upon the place beneath.
it is twice blessed
it blesseth him that gives
and him that takes
tis mightiest in the mightiest.
its becomes the crowned monarch
better than his crown"
it gave me: a group against the death penalty

what's the world coming to? A mad person shoots a security guard at a perfectly nice abortion clinic, and when people stop to help distressed motorists in the Northern Territory, they get shot at, tied up and generally terrified.
somehow there's a common thread here ...

hey, I got 91 for my cybersocieties subject at uni! of course I was being marked too high; I'm a 75-80 student these days, what with work and all. maybe I'll put up a link to my essay about how we all need a ratava-avatar link to combat identity theft and commercial prostitution and Big Brotherness of our very selves. when I get the essay online, yeah, I might do dat.

and this guy has an animated cube that solves itself before your very eyes! a kind of cubeblog, I think. He claims a record of 1:11. that's minutes:seconds, not hours:minutes or even days:hours. I have never got beyond two layers.
oh, and his site is weird. the page is black and all the action's in the popup window. check it out.

serious Rubik's Cube geekiness

I have given in and watched Big Brother Australia, only a week before it finished. Sara-Marie, the big-bottomed bumdancing bunny-ear-wearing shrieking blonde, was such a phenomenon I had to see what happened. She got evicted, and went from the house where she's lived for seven weeks straight into a TV studio full of screaming teenage girls all dressed up as her. so of course she screamed too.
The host didn't handle it too well. she wanted order and attention, but got screaming. it was quite a TV moment, even for a non-TV person. or am I?

it had to happen. poetry. sorry.

I heard news of my old boat:
“sold” said the 6’2” sailor
in the silver minidress
and I thought of polished timbers
red wine and pasta
waking at night to creaking, slapping, groaning.
Dolphins off the starboard bow.
And I thought of other sailors.
I remembered a boat, half-finished,
a labour of love or stubbornness
in an immigrant’s back yard.
Dry dock. 200 metres from St Kilda pier
and how we never sailed her.
But Wise of Time
who took me to Tasmania
on a Bass Strait made of glass
is sold.
Who knows where?

And I tried not to think of that sailor
who took me there.
The boy in the Barbarella minidress
leaned over me in my tie and painted mustache
breathed beer
and said “you’re cute. But you’re too short for me”
and cackled like a crone.

So I went home.
To my husband.
To my dog.
To my warm bed.
Five kilometres from the coast.
Wise of Time.
I never did understand that name.

am I sane?

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Moderate
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Moderate
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Low
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Moderate
-- Click Here To Take The Test! --

this will be handy next time the DNS won't point to Blogger: 64.41.146.214

if I ever get like this, shoot me.

oh, I know she's a good person and probably a good mother and all that, but. but. but.

what I don't get about this is: if the wine was about US$45,000, and the total bill was $62,000, where did the other $23,000 go? that's one hell of a tip

hooray! we're going to Perth! Agenda: see Monets, drink ourselves silly on West Australian wines and watch the sun set from our country hotel balcony.
pity that on our frequent flyer points, Ansett will only give us a 12.05 AM flight home... never mind. in order to burn more points, we're going business class; plus my lounge membership expires the day after we get back, so we'll be quite swish really.

ripped off: Sony have released the new AIBO.
And what did they send me? a printed press release and a CD-ROM. Where's my free robot dog, guys?

having just re-read my site description, I noticed that apart from references to Vegemite content, it promises "how to save the world".
for a start, how about saving the spotted quoll?
new environmental plans basically give it up for dead. there are still some left, dammit! how can we say "oh, there goes the largest mainland native mammal species. never mind" as if it DIDN'T MATTER??

I just don't get it sometimes.

better now.

one of the festering sores of Australian politics and Australia's identity is the lack of what therapists call "closure" on the way this land was taken from the indigenous people.
the current focus of this is the refusal of John Howard (our Prime Minister) to say "sorry" for what was done.
today's paper has an extract from overland magazine, outlining the massacres of the 19th century. it points out that the massacres were not official policy - they were a tactic of individuals, companies (farmers) and government officials.
which got me thinking that maybe an official apology is not the right thing. we need a dispersed sorry movement to match the dispersed outrages of the past. and in many cases, the not-so-distant past at that. it always annoys me when John Howard says present non-Aboriginal Australians are not responsible for what was done in the past, when as recently as the early 70s Aboriginal children were being removed from their mothers. is there no-one over 30 in this country?

at 10.30, I felt fine. at 11, I arrived at work feeling a bit chilled and bruised. by 12.15 I was walking back to my car with my teeth chattering.
the 24-hour-clinic doctor (my dear Ralphine wasn't in the office) said I have an upper respiratory tract infection. I am to take penicillin, stay warm and rest. so I'm only doing three interviews tomorrow.
I don't think it's legionella, although there's been a bit of that around lately, even at my work. Isn't it amazing that someone would dedicate a whole Web site, voluntarily and clearly in his own time, to a nasty respiratory disease?

So I am reading about Monet's garden in an overheated bedroom and watching the tree loppers cut back the beautiful trees outside our house and drop them on my car in order to protect cables owned by Optus and Telstra, which is ludicrous, because no one in this street uses their pay-TV rubbish, and Optus even denied to us that they had broadband internet available in our street, when we can clearly see their cables.

now we have ADSL from Pacific Internet, which is nice and fast and doesn't rely on separate ugly cables - although it does rely on Telstra's login servers or some such, which are useless part of the time.

I think I need some comfort food...eggs on toast, chicken noodle soup and jellybeans. I know I'm really sick when my body rejects caffeine.

another thing there should be a word for: Web sites you find yourself at but have no idea how you got there. I'll call them Qualls.
this is one; a New Yorker writer who thinks. not that the others don't, oh God, I'll get myself in trouble, I think I'll just shut up.

I have a new meme; it's just a funny way of doubling a scarf over and folding it through itself, but suddenly it was on everyone, male and female.
so I thought "I'll do that" and presto! I am part of a replicating technique or idea. fashion is a funny thing and sometimes it doesn't come from Vogue

oh, and the "unbeknown to us" below? young Gavin is about to find out that I do exactly what I say I'll do, and I'd told him that I was going to do that.
I expect I have some repressed anger issues and if I was an American I'd be in therapy. But I'm an Australian, and I'll just take it out on someone; in this case, the richly deserving Gavin.

did I mention he was so rude to me on the phone that he actually made me cry? and like any good feminist, I can be my own white knight: "I'll beat him to a bloody pulp for you, ma'am".

ps: that is a figure of speech, not a threat of violence, OK. although one sometimes wonders ...

aargh. the idjuts at the bin company ignored both my emails, so I got the nice Jim's man to take the rubbish away.
The VERY NEXT MORNING some fool turns up with a bin and thinks he's going to take a small pile of sticks away. My clever nephew, thank goodness, told him not to.
So now I'm heading for a tribunal hearing.
not that any of you care, but I'll just blog the emails since then - now that Gavin Eddy, bin master extraordinaire, has decided he can reply to emails after all.
let this be a warning to all you customer service people out there. which Gavin is clearly not.

don't bother reading this: it's just for my satisfaction and to get it out of my head so I can get back to work


Dear Gavin,

a few points:

The bin was not full to its potential; a large part of the contents was grass, which compresses easily, and it was not quite full to the edge. I have photographs of the remaining material and a witness (the person actually loading it) who can support that what was left was not a particularly large amount - it would definitely have fitted into the removed bin, but it was oo much to go into a domestic bin.

At no stage did I ask for an empty bin; the issue was not volume, but timing, and I suggest you speak to Mat about his definite assurances on that issue. He informed me that that the bin would be left for 48 hours, I checked with him again and relied on that and the written invoice. If that had not happened, we could easily have put the material in the bin on June 19.

You could have emailed me back, as I suggested, if you did not want to speak to me. I might point out that I was the person who stopped talking on Friday, and you were the one who said "I'm not going to listen to you." You seemed more concerned with getting your side across than with hearing mine, which is even more important to resolving disputes. The timing issue of getting the property cleared was crucial, which I tried to tell you and to express in my emails.

The rubbish was removed on Tuesday June 26, in line with the intentions I expressed earlier, so whether I took the calls on June 27 is not relevant.

I regret that you decided to ignore both my emails, but as I've said, I feel that I was first misled, then ignored. With no response to my two emails and with no real prospect of the rubbish being removed, and after being quite upset by the way you spoke to me on Friday, it seemed to me that All Over Bins had no further intention of assisting me or even communicating with me.

As a courtesy and in line with the VCAT guidelines, I will send you the invoice and my supporting material in the next few days; about a week after that, if I haven't received payment, I will have to institute proceedings and let the tribunal sort it out, which no doubt will be very time consuming and boring for both of us.

Regards,

Jenny Sinclair

>From: "Gavin Eddy"
>Reply-To: "Gavin Eddy"
>To: "J Sinclair"
>Subject: Re: Gavin
>Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 15:09:21 +1000
>
>Dear Jenni,
>
>Thank you for your emails of Tuesday and Friday, I apologise for not calling
>you but as I experienced in previous calls it was difficult to put across a
>point of view, something crucial to resolving disputes.
> You were informed that we would get another partially filled bin to you
>as soon as one became available, this happened today but it was too late,
>(unbeknown to us)
> We left two unanswered phone calls on your phone this morning
> To provide you with an empty bin would have been overkill and more than
>we would have been obliged to do
> The driver who picked up the bin informed me that the bin was full and
>the chances of getting any more in it were unlikely. (thats why he took the
>bin)
> As far as we are concerned, we provided a 2.5m3 bin and we picked up a
>2.5m3 bin that was used to its potential, and that we paid full tipping fees
>on. We have no problem with our conduct in this matter and receipt of your
>Jims Mowing invoice will not meet with payment.
> Your are welcome to take what ever action through what ever agency you
>see fit.
>
>GAVIN EDDY.
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: J Sinclair
>To:
>Sent: Wednesday, 27 June 2001 0:24
>Subject: att: Gavin
>
>
> >
> > Dear Gavin,
> >
> > As I indicated in my email of Tuesday morning, after not hearing from you
>in
> > response to either my email of Friday or Tuesday, I hired a contractor at
> > lunchtime yesterday to remove the hard rubbish which had been on the front
> > lawn of the property for six days.
> >
> > I understand that a person came past this morning with a bin.
> >
> > It's unfortunate that you didn't call or email me in the five days since
>we
> > spoke. I did try to let you know that if I had a firm time within the
> > deadlines I was working to, that would fix the problem, but as there was
>no
> > response from your end, I didn't have a choice.
> >
> > As it is, I paid Jim's Mowing $50 to remove the material yesterday
> > afternoon.
> >
> > I now have two choices; to send you a copy of that invoice and ask you to
> > reimburse me, or to go to VCAT for a full or partial refund of my payment
> > for the original bin, on the basis of all the events in my earlier emails.
> >
> > You can call or email me if you like; at the moment I plan to send you a
> > copy of the invoice and a request for payment, unless I hear from you.
> >
> > Jenny Sinclair
> >
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________________
> > Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
> >
>

If I wasn't already married, and if he wasn't (I think) married, my back/neck would propose marriage immediately to my physiotherapist's hands.

it's like being a lump of dough getting put into shape.

oh, it still hurts. but not nearly as much.

need ... more ... coffee ....

Dilbert says to his boss: "is it OK if I take naps during the day? Or would you prefer that I make important decisions while groggy and delusional?"

when I rule the world, the afternoon nap room will be a standard office fitting. strategically situated outside the nap room door will be a fridge filled with Coke, Mars Bars, Cadbury chocolate and possibly Tim Tams. maybe some sultanas and green tea for health nuts.
my quality of work is inversely proportional to the length of time since my last nap. or something.

ouch! all I want is to lie on a bench with my face on a paper hygiene protector and have my friend Michael twist my neck so hard and fast it emits a loud unnatural crack.
if you don't understand why, you've never had a dodgy neck, have you?
the pain, the pain...

yeah, OK Ev, I voted. and the superior numbers of Blogger are already showing.
RED ALERT! there are fewer than 100 Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombats left. they are all in one small national park, the dingoes keep eating them and they're not very bright. but they are cute and fuzzy.
unfortunately I can't find a way you can send them donations, but the researchers' site is here.
why don't you care?

if I haven't blogged over the weekend, it's possibly because there is nothing in my heart except anger about skip company people. Brian was only the beginning - Gavin, the owner, told me after two days of non-skipness, "I'm not going to listen to you". he also spoke to me rudely, loudly and at great length, which upset me more than it should have. I will probably end up going them in the consumer tribunal.
in the meantime, there is a big pile of rusting junk on my front lawn. I wonder if I can sell it on ebay?

the word that best describes my mood today: Feisty. Well, maybe angry. slept terribly, have a huge article to write today, and THE SKIP GOT TAKEN AWAY!!!
leaving us with a dead cat and lots of junk that was yet to get thrown in it.
apparently the driver's verbal assurance that I had it for 48 hours and the piece of paper which also said I had it for 48 hours did not override the original call-taker's failure to tell me that the minimum hire was 48 hours. when I called, I said "a day" assuming that that was the shortest (cheapest) hire. no one informed me otherwise. when it was dropped off I discussed the 48 hours TWICE with the driver and was v. pleased at the extra time. so we left some things to today. but they still took it away.
leading to a rather heated phone call to All Over Bins in which one Brian Wilkie said to me "Are you going to listen or do I just have to listen to your constant ramblings?" At which I asked for his name because "this conversation's not going very well and I want to take notes"
eventually Jim, the original booking person, got on the phone and agreed to provide - get this - a partly full bin for another day. they seem to suspect that it's all a scam on my part to get another 2.5 cubic metre's worth of rubbish, when all I have is a dead cat, some old tin and a few bits of Luigi's concreting equipment that is surplus to requirements.
you just can't get good service these days.
oh well, at least the argument about whether or not the driver should have said what he did, whether I had a contract and whether I cared what the driver should have said or not saved me a) cancelling my cheque and b) starting a long and boring fight in the Small Claims Tribunal.
one just doesn't take this kind of shit from people any more.

The most exciting thing to happen to me today: the arrival of The Skip, into which, I hope, my nephew will throw all the junk around the yard that's been bothering me. it sent me into a state of very mild anxiety about what to chuck and what to keep, and I'd rather be at home doing that than at work on this lovely day.
The second most exciting thing to happen to me today: I forgot to pack my stockings when I rode into work, and had to run about the place pretending to ignore my white, hairy legs for a few minutes before I got to the emergency tights.
don' t you wish you had my life?

blogs I want to come back and read later, that appear to be written by intelligent people: one ,a piece about how the structure of the hand influences human history and Matthew who is on fire and falling still, but on a different server now.

maybe it's the crashing headache I had Saturday morning. Maybe it's the subtle whine of the fan and the way it reminds me of work.
but another non-computer weekend has passed, and I don't mind at all. the boys (Andrew and my nephew Marc, who is staying here until he works out what he'd rather be doing) are off getting a PS2 to occupy them, but apart from blogging, I'll be planning my garden and reading my book of gay Australian short fiction.
poor old garden. anything I plant would be run over by the backhoe when we finally renovate, so I've been "waiting" for a year and a half now. if I'd known it would take so long I could have raised several generations of chickens/tomatoes/sunflowers there. don't wait. it may never happen.
as it is, two beautiful 30-year-old grapevines will probably be destroyed before they can sprout leaves next summer (that's if we ever get a building permit).
But Marc got out there amongst it today, following up on what I did two weeks ago. Pathetically, I want to train the four remaining grapevines on each side (that's eight) over a series of arches and pretend it's like the grand allee in Monet's garden at Giverney. To that end, Marc dug up the nasturtiums that have run wild all over Luigi's beautiful brown soil, and planted them along the vines, where only two weeks ago there was knee-high grass. In summer, the nasturtiums will spill over the edge of the path in waves - or that's the idea.
now all I have to do is organise air that sparkles in summer, and a creek that I can turn into a picture-perfect water garden...

who's Luigi? It's a long story. for now, enough that he is responsible for the grapevines, the olive tree, the magnificently cared-for soil that will grow anything, the dodgy tiling and wiring and more concrete than you can poke a stick at.
As Marc's Italian boss on the farm he was working on said to me: "We Italians: we came, we saw, we concreted."

another search engine note: I have never written about www.gohip.com and never will. so I don't know why my blog comes up when you search AOL for that URL. I can only assume their computers are slowly going mad. if you want that URL, why don't you just type it into your browser, huh?

just to get this out of my head; I saw an article the other day claiming that meaningless work rituals, like always using the same coffee cup, boost productivity. so far, so OK. but then it said that some huge number of people will insist on using the same toilet stall EVEN IF THEY HAVE TO WAIT!!!
now that, I can't believe. it's just a toilet. what did their parents do wrong when they were getting these people out of nappies?

the weather is normally considered not blog-worthy, but then again, most of you don't live in Melbourne, do you? sunshine, blue skies, driving hail, winds so strong they blow the smoke back down the chimney, bone-chilling cold, scudding fluffy clouds - it's all in a day's work here.
we have a saying in Melbourne : if you don't like the weather, wait a minute.

ok, I've shamelessly listed myself on the Blogger rent-a-quote page. the rave from which my quote is drawn is here

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.