Sven's life in Oz

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been going to the NSW State Library for a series of talks by published authors, journalists and other successful writery types on how to write comedy for different media.  It’s been an enlightening little series with food for thought, confidence boosts and literary hi-jinks, fuelled by nervous energy and free booze.  (The series was sponsored by Taylors’ Wines, and very nice they were, too.)  As with all these things, there’s always a nervous twenty minutes before the thing starts where you can’t decide where to sit, and then have to make idle chat with a stranger while you wait for the speakers to arrive.  Last week Caroline and I had a lovely chat about the British weather, and this week I was all pscyhed up with some not-so-juicy banter when Steven sat next to me.  He was eating a small mountain of triangular sandwiches so I did the British thing and pretended not to notice him until he was ready to introduce himself.  This was going swimmingly until I accidentally made eye contact just as he shoved the last dainty cheese-and-salad wedge into his mouth.  I had to say hello and introduce myself, then embarrassingly read his name tag while he tried to clear his mouth.  At least we had a little chuckle about it before the speakers started.

No sooner had the first guest taken the stage than Steven sprang into life: out came the MacBook carefully wrapped in a zip-up, felt-lined, laptop sleeping bag.  I was jealous watching him peel that lovely article out of its figure-hugging carry case, open it up and see the screen come gently, warmly into life.  I sat there with my little moleskine notebook and stolen ballpoint and tried not to look too much like an inbred pauper.  I glanced over as he settled himself in, plugged in his Telstra 3G mobile network modem, and connected to the internet.  I did wonder why he needed an internet connection, but not for long.  Just as the speaker got underway, up popped TweetDeck.

I love Twitter, I really do, but not as much as this guy.  For the next two hours he tweeted every quote, every comment, and every joke made.  He tweeted the speakers, he tweeted the venue, he tweeted every book, magazine or television title mentioned.  And it didn’t stop there: he tabbed between TweetDeck and Google so he could look up links for each of his tweets, just in case you were interested in buying a copy of  ’So Feral!‘ on Amazon after learning he was at a speech by the author.  I was amazed.  At first I thought that perhaps he was providing a service for twitterers who wanted to come but couldn’t.  But then he started responding to other people’s tweets about things totally unconnected.  (As you can tell, I had quite a good view of his screen.  And I found his twitter page when I got home.)  He even set up hashtags for his little tweet report: if you want to read anything about the SLNSW on Twitter now, you’ll have to see his thoughts on the other attendees first.

Is it just me?  Tweet beforehand, tweet in the breaks, tweet your thoughts afterward, but Mother Teresa on a biscuit tin, do you have to tap away all through the event?  Am I getting old?  Is this what people are doing nowadays?  Typing away into the internet, making digital notes available to all while the rest of us sit there taking old-fashioned notes in a little black notebook.  Because if it is, then I just don’t think I’m on board.  I like my notebook, I like my biro, and I can’t possibly concentrate on the speaker and the twittersphere at the same time.  And your tappity-tap-tap is quite distracting, too.

Dear Friends,

Sorry not being in touch sooner. I have received one or two reminders to get back in front of the computer and tell you all about Australia, but it has been a little hectic here and the more time that passes the more there is to say so it gets harder and harder to know where to start! Thanks to everyone for your kind messages after my grandad’s death – it was very difficult being so far away, but also easier in some respects and it was lovely of you all to send your wishes.

You can watch a BSL version of this, or read on. (more…)

Last week, after four years of faithful service, my iBook took one last moment to load a photoshopped image of your truly, before giving up the ghost, rather suddenly, and passing on to the big Apple Store in the sky.  My iBook is officially dead.  I took it for a post-mortem at the local Apple Store and they suspect a dodgy logic board as the cause of death.  They can’t be sure, of course, without a detailed internal examination, but that is the most likely cause.  And it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time.  I registered for my Australian Business Number last week after I got my first freelance writing job in Australia; I’ve got an article for 3sixty due in a fortnight; and a short story that was starting to fit together was saved on the Mac hard drive.  I even bought a new power lead (not cheap) and a 500GB hard drive (surprisingly cheap, actually) to take the pressure off the poor thing.  Mercifully, all my data is on the new hard drive, but I can’t get at it because it’s formatted for Mac OSX and the only other computer we have in the house is a sinfully slow Windows Vista PC.  Still, looking forward, which of these two options do you think I will be going with?

Replace the logic board for $1300.  The friendly chap at the Apple Genius Bar was quite certain that this was the problem and quoted me around $950 for a new logic board with $350 for labour to get the thing up and running again, but he added the rather ominous closer: “…and that’s if it is the logic board. of course.”  I just don’t think spending $1300 on something that is potentially going to sort out the trouble is a sensible investment, do you?  What if the logic board was doing its job just fine and its something else?  I can’t help but picture the logic board as a micro-Mr Spock, raising his eyebrows at the suggestion that he might be at fault (with acompanying french horn sound track for dramatic effect), before pointing out that the power distribution has been playing up ever since we entered this nebula and it is most likely a problem with the EPS relays.  Those things are no end of trouble and I’ll put money on them as the cause of my current woes, if, of course, my iBook has any.  And if not, well then there’s the problem right there.  Remind me again why I don’t work for Apple?

Buy a brand new MacBook Pro and have all my data moved across, because if the problem is the logic board, then mad old micro-Spock may be having his Bendii Syndrome breakdown just at the worst possible time, but at least the hard drive is still intact.  If I buy a brand new MacBook Pro (for approximately $4,000) then Apple will gladly extract the hard drive from my crappy NCC-1701 iBook for free, and gift it to me to install everything I thought I had lost on my brand spanking new 1701-E.  Spock will be duly dumped in the bin.  And if I’m a student (or have an identity card which suggests I might still be employed at an academic institution, such as I do) then I also get the educational discount (which is roughly equivalent to the tax I would be paying) and I get an iPod thrown in free, too.

Whilst I try to scrounge up $4,000 for a new computer, I’m squatting on Jim’s PC.  If anyone has a spare $4,000 they fancy sending me, I’d be very grateful: much longer using Windows and I’m going to put my head through the screen.

Life without any furniture is hard enough.  Life without internet access is almost impossible.  It’s like having having an arm chopped off (but without the pain, or the blood.  Perhaps this isn’t the best analogy).  Since Telstra won’t connect us till next Monday or Tuesday at the earliest, that leaves us all day Friday, all weekend, and maybe even the start of next week with no connection to the world wide web.  There could be e-mails waiting, twitters unread, or blog comments demanding attention and I wouldn’t know about it.  It simply won’t do.

The benefit of living in an up-and-coming apartment block in an up-and-coming area of the city (apart from the astronomical number of outlet stores in the vicinity) is that everyone in the building has wireless internet access.  Of course everyone password protects their internet, but there’s always one that didn’t RTFM and it’s just a matter of finding that spot where you can hitch on their signal for a few days and hope they don’t switch off their modem while you are BitTorrenting ‘The Tudors’.

This being a mac, joining a network is straightforward – just look at the list and pick one.  (I don’t know if a PC is more difficult, but when the Shut Down is in the Start menu it’s safe to assume the worst.)  There’s the usual suspects – netgear, D-Link, belkin etc – and these are your best bet for a free ride: if you can’t change the name of your router you probably can’t change the security settings either.  Sure enough, I write to you now courtesy of a lovely little network named ‘linksys’.

Next come the named networks; these are probably password protected and harder to hijack.  Still, a casual browse through the names gives you some idea of the people around you.  What an eye-opener!  Aside from the common or garden ‘Pete’s wireless’ or ‘Number 15′, our building seems to have some pretty ropey stuff going on.  ‘Jamescruise1′ is positively tame when listed underneath ‘man-pit’,  but both of these pale into prudish insignificance when faced with the mighty ‘Call 04120384X5′.  Perhaps I’m allowing the previous names to influence my thinking on this – ‘man-pit’ is hard to get out of your head – but how many innocent reasons are there for having your mobile number in your wireless network name?

It’s a 21st Century pool of Tantalus: ring it and resolve the mystery, or leave it.  I’m seriously considering the first option.  What would you do?