Friday, May 04, 2001
A lost Ian Fleming novel has been found [via Lake Effect] in which an amnesiac James Bond is recruited by the Russians. Over the course of the book Bond undergoes several bouts of plastic surgery, switches accent, gains and loses a prominent mole, slides from farce to gritty violence and back again, sleeps with several hundred double-agents, saves the world from nuclear destruction 18 times, trashes five million pounds' worth of sports-cars, defects twice to different studios, stays the same age for forty years, and develops a mysterious affinity for appearing in public only at Christmas. The authenticity of the work has been questioned.
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'Great big bags of sound, squashed up into a CD and slowly dribbled over you when you press "play"' has to be one of the best one-line reviews I have ever read. Right up there with a review of a Sigue Sigue Sputnik single years ago in RAM* ('This is horrible.').**
I can't hope to match it with my few feeble words about Ash's newie Free All Angels, but: if you loved 1977 and thought Nu-clear Sounds was slightly disappointing, you'll love this noisy, tuneful, charming, experimental, guitar-hammering, teenage-freakout return-to-form by the unfairly talented Tim Wheeler and co.
* RAM = Rock Australia Magazine (RIP).
** Could equally apply to most music released at the time.
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The Grandma test for your Net worth in the Age (yesterday; I'm getting behind in my posts) asks:
If you use the Internet at work, perhaps you should consider using the 'grandmother test'. That is, think about what you are looking at online. Would you show it to your grandmother? Would she find it acceptable?
Dr James Fearing, who proposes this test, obviously never met my grandmother. Otherwise he would be suggesting that we take:
- The Driving-Uphill Test: would your grandmother find it acceptable that you're changing down a gear rather than 'giving it a bit more choke'?
- The Pressure-Cooking Test: would your grandmother find it acceptable that you put the bobbler on top of the pressure-cooker before 'the steam had run clear'?
- The Grandma's-Cooking Test: would she find it acceptable that you hadn't mixed the resulting burnt bits at the bottom of the pressure cooker through your soup?
- The Waste-Not-Want-Not Test: would she find it acceptable that you intended to throw out a rubber glove with a hole in it rather than cut it into giant pink rubber bands?
- The Demon-Child Test: would she call you a 'demon child!' if you found any of the above unacceptable?
Good ol' Grandma. I miss her.
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After writing that back-tracking piece the other day, a couple of things occurred to me:
When I was checking my files of old mail to confirm what I was doing on certain dates, it was something of a shock to hit 1992 and run out of files. By which I mean computer files; all my paper files are in storage a thousand kilometres away. And anyway, I don't have copies of the letters I wrote before late 1992, because I used to write them by hand. Or if I typed them into a Mac I'd often delete them after printing them out, because floppy space was precious.
I've totally come to rely on the fact that my entire adult archive is recorded on a handful of CDs. Before that, it's as if I hadn't been born. Shades of Moravec.
The other thing was that slicing my life up into discrete points like that gave me a disturbing sense of looking at somebody else; some of them I could hardly think of as happening to the same person. Even last year is slipping into somebody-else-ness. It's not a new feeling, or even an unusual one I suppose, but it was strange to have it brought out so strongly.
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Thursday, May 03, 2001
Further evidence that it's worth paying attention to islands. But then some of us already knew that.
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The sad news of the death of freakytrigger.com, once the home of I Hate Music and other goodness, led me to this fine statement of intent with its poignant last paragraph. Cheers.
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Last night, when I was telling Dad over the phone about our observations of the Melbourne real estate market, he mentioned that he and Mum had seen a three-bedroom house on half an acre in Geeveston (Southern Tasmania) selling for $37,000. Which is about 10-15 percent of what it would go for in Melbourne on a block half the size.
I mentioned this to Steve, our flatmate. 'We could buy that right now. No mortgage.'
'Yeah,' he said, 'but what would you do in Geeveston?'
'You'd live,' I replied.
'And do what?'
'You could be a writer or something.'
'Are you a writer, or a something?'
...Now there's a question.
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Wednesday, May 02, 2001
On May the second last year, Jane and I drove home from work talking about our plans to visit Madagascar in July, a trip we'd wanted to do for years. We had cleared the leave with our employers—not a foregone conclusion for me, since I'd only been with mine six months—and were a few days away from booking the flights. We reached our Canberra home, picked up the mail, and walked in the front door with it. I noticed one of the letters was from our estate agents, and figured they must be about to do another inspection.
Wrong. The owner had decided to sell, and we had eight weeks to get out.
Which was exactly the length of notice my employer had written into my contract. I was contracted for two years, but we had figured that we'd leave Canberra to try and find work in San Francisco in early 2001, before Jane's contract ended; the tech boom surely had a couple more years in it yet. (The first stock-market hiccup had occurred only weeks before, and the implications hadn't sunk in yet.)
We couldn't face looking for yet another place to rent in Canberra, only to move again six months later. We couldn't bear the thought of giving up our trip to Madagascar for another year and perhaps forever. We didn't want to buy the house, although we had first option, because it was in Canberra, where we didn't want to be. And because of the timing we effectively had only a few days to decide what to do.
As we talked over the options and mapped them out on a sheet of paper spread across our dining table, one became increasingly attractive. We called it the 'Thermonuclear Option'. I would quit. We would go to Madagascar. Jane would come back here, stay with a friend (who had conveniently been saying she was thinking of getting a flatmate) and keep working. I would fly on to America and look for work. If that failed, we would try London or Melbourne; either way, we would be moving on. Turning adversity to our advantage.
We've been living under the mushroom cloud ever since. For one year our life has been one long period of uncertainty. On 2 May 2000 we had no idea where we'd be in a year's time; on 2 May 2001, staying at a friend's place in Melbourne and applying for jobs all over the place, we still don't.
But, looking back, we—and I—haven't had that certainty for a long time.
Next May the second I'd like to know—really know—where I am. In this place, for this long, doing this. So I can tell myself that all of this uncertainty got me there.
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Oh man, I want one of these. I can handle a 12.1" TFT display—I'm used to 800x600 after 18 months on an iMac. And only US$1300! But I'll need the combo CD-RW/DVD drive, even though I never watch DVDs on this graphite iMac... and 256 meg of RAM, even though 128 is fine if you're running Mac OS 9 (gotta be ready for OS X)... and a 20 gig drive, even though I've barely half-filled this 13 gig one... and a spare battery, even though I'll never take it anywhere... and... oh look, that adds up to five grand Australian. Oops.
Or I could buy an extra 128 meg for this iMac and an external FireWire CD-R, live without the portability, and save four grand.
Or I could keep it the way it is, save five grand, and live in continual fear of the hard-disk crashing.
Or I could sell the iMac, get off the web, buy an exercise book to write in, and start smelling the roses.
Ha! Just kidding. Hard-disk crash, anyone?
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It occurred to me some time back that the best justification for the Browser Upgrade Campaign and for wilfully ignoring Netscape 4.x is that most designers, being only human, can only hope to manage a certain level of complexity, and that optimising pages for somewhere between six and nine major browser/platform combinations is about the limit of it. As soon as a new incarnation of the major browsers comes out something has to drop off the other end, or else the task of design becomes impossible. At the moment we have IE 5/5.5 for PC, IE 5 for Mac, NS 6 for Mac/PC/Linux, and Opera for Mac/PC; eight browsers, nine if you add iCab or some other quirky browser of your choice. In this landscape, Netscape 4 has to go, or the possible permutations will kill us. The import hack is self-defence, y'r honour.
All of which (and more) Owen says more artfully at his new page explaining why he built the Box Lesson.
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If you'd told me ten years ago that in 2001 I would be getting computer-translated emails from Argentinians asking me how to go four-wheel driving in Madagascar, you know what? I wouldn't have believed you.
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Tuesday, May 01, 2001
Somewhere along the line, the journal aspect of this log has been sent underground. I seem to write more about what I'm up to in emails than I do here. Which is perhaps as it should be for now, given my immediate priority.
But it does mean that I'm storing up a pile of news to be dumped here as soon as Something Happens. Well, not 'news' so much as 'internal narrative'. My internals have been narrating like crazy these past weeks, and it finally feels like they're starting to make sense.
The question is whether I'll have it in me to go over it all again when the time comes, or whether I'll just want to forget it and sail ever onwards to the next adventure. It'd be a shame to lose it all, though.
Hmm. Maybe I should be keeping a—gasp—private diary. (Oh please, no. Not when I finally finished that 70,000-word Madagascar diary only a month ago.)
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I seem to be sighing a lot in my posts lately. Must stop doing that. (And starting sentences with 'Anyway,...'. And 'Well,...'. And 'And...'. And inserting parenthetical asides. And talking to myself. Whoops, there goes the weblog.)
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Monday, April 30, 2001
iCab 2.51 is out, and now features partial support for CSS1—but it's a bit wobbly on the box model. It also slips past the import hack, which means that this page looks totally screwy when viewed with it. Sigh.
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Some books come with an implied label saying 'Suitable for Ages 8 to 80', like an old Sands board-game. Others come with an unwritten use-by date: 'Best Before Your 21st Birthday'; 'Read This at University'. Some make no sense until you've reached a certain age or done certain things.
I've just read James Hawes's Dead Long Enough, which should carry the instruction to 'Read in Your Thirties While Having a Mid-Life Crisis'. Yes, you could read it earlier, but you'd read it as a tourist watching the strange customs of exotic lands. It's a book to be read after you've been around a while; after you've had some dreams and felt them slip away.
Hawes has been pitched on the back cover as the 'funniest British novelist writing today', but there is nothing funny about this book—and I don't say that disparagingly. It takes a while to get going, and the plot doesn't really go anywhere until half-way through, but when it does: bang. Serious insight. The kind that most twenty-somethings won't recognise, and that the 40-plus will consider facile.
But it's not for them, it's for us; by which I mean, of course, for me. If you're somewhere in your thirties, physically or emotionally, this is a book for explaining you to yourself.
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©2001 Rory Ewins