I’ve just signed-up for Broadband ADSL2+ with Optus. What I’m laughingly calling my Vodafone internet account has been knackered for almost 3 weeks now, with no sign of them fixing it. I’m up for MASSIVE bills if I exceed quota.

Why didn’t I go with TPG or iiNet?

TPG wouldn’t do naked DSL. It seems the Hellstra exchange is out of ADSL2+ nodes. As a good friend said, why the hell should Hellstra upgrade the exchanges for other companies? A good point.

TPG can only do ADSL accounts. Fine, I thought, give me one of them.

To get an ADSL account, I have to get a phone line attached, with an ongoing charge of $40 per month line rental for a service I won’t ever use. This is fundamentally pointless.

iiNet had no-one available to take my call, due to gearing down over Christmas to ensure they maintained their high-standard of service during the rest of the year. This isn’t a great change from the last time I tried to call iiNet about a net-related issue.

I have an iPhone with Optus. So, I thought, I wonder what they can do for me.

It turns out, quite a lot actually. $49.95 gives me:

• 21GB for 12 months (14GB on-peak, 7GB off) , down to 14GB (7 by 7) in the second year
• Naked ADSL2+
• No up-front fee (well, it’s included on the first bill which is cool by me)
• Linked to the mobile account
• Speed limited if I get close to quota with messages to warn me

I’ve signed up. And I’m not going to apologise for it. I’m truly a different person now.

So say we all…

I am a frustrated writer. It’s the kind of low-level irritation that, if it were an audio frequency, would be carried for miles and miles by the perfectly configured woofer; it’s that bass frequency that you can hear from across the continent.

Here’s my frustration:

As a writer, I can churn out stories relatively easily (given the right circumstances and the presence of the Muse – more on her later). A fortnight ago I wrote 10,000 words in 3 days, which is pretty good given a book is on average 80-100,000. The muse was with me that night. She’s hanging around nearby but I’ve yet to get her attention; she’s a bit drunk on what looks like a quart of absinthe… yes, Absinthe, she just swigged the bottle and giggled, the bitch.

What I find irritating is that there seems only to be one way to get work “public” – to rely on publishing companies that are inundated with manuscripts, or to try to find a magazine that has a gap or likes your work.

I’ve whined about this issue to friends: artists have the option of galleries (and I’m not talking the major ones as they’re the equivalent of the publishing companies). Art is something you can look at, regard, like or dislike in a community setting. There are many different open galleries that can exhibit your work.

Musicians have a similar way of getting work out there. My fabulous housemate is at an open-mike night in Northcote tonight (I’d be there too if it wasn’t that I finished work only about an hour ago and was ravenous to the point of tears. Not going into that at present). A musician can stand on a street corner and strum. If I stand on a street corner and start reading, odds-on I’ll be heckled as a religious nut. Could be amusing though.

I’m aware this could be sounding like sour grapes. It’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to.

A writer is, by definition, a lonely person, slaving over a hot processor creating work of potential genius… for… what? Sure, we can submit work to competitions. We can try and get things published, but there appears to be no way to cut out the middleman and just perform the work in some way, get it out for general consumption without involving the money-men and what’s “likely to sell”. Publishing is, after all, a business.

Am I wrong? Have I missed something?

I just can’t find anything. Writers groups have meetings and chat about their work. It’s a community, sure, and by joining one I get a stack of magazines I’m not interested in, cheap courses that I don’t want to do, the right to go along to meetings (which is nice) and I can even get, in some cases, a professional assessment of my manuscript (for a few hundred dollars that I don’t have. I’m a penniless writer as well as a frustrated one). It’s like when I joined the Australian Society of Technical Writers; what did it get me? A place on a mailing list and nothing else in particular. I’m thinking in purely selfish terms here, I’m aware: the society is great for many people, as are writers groups. But I know (pretty much) how to write, and throughout my life — regardless of courses on offer, being told I should read a great big book cover-to-cover — I’ve learned how to do things by simply DOING them: Practice Makes Perfect. I’m simply not interested in courses on writing, in someone standing at the front of the room telling me “this is what makes a story good” and “this is what makes it bad”. I’m not for formula, I’m for innovation through experimentation. And I know this won’t necessarily make me a bucket of money, either. I’m in it for the enjoyment of the writing; I’m in it to see where the muse takes me.

So what’s the answer?

It’s looking increasingly like I have to get off my arse and just do something myself. Have duplex printer, will produce zines. The magazine I produced with good friends back in 2004-5 worked to a degree. The magazines certainly disappeared from their spots in cafes. And I even managed to sell some. Perhaps that’s the short-term answer to my bleating: take it to the people.

Opinions greatfully accepted at this point. Me, I’m going to eat my rapidly cooling dinner. Au Revoir.

Was having an email conversation with His Nobleness over the weekend, and we got onto the subject of Anti-Depressants.

It’s always been my position that they CAN have value, but only if they are backed-up by hardcore work to get to the root-cause of any problem. When they’re mixed, when the patient is constantly bombarded with “try this one then, try this one then”, their brain chemistry is just getting screwed-around and no-one knows the true damage that this can cause.

The brain is not like the Liver; self regenerating, self cleaning.

So it was with some interest that I read this article today in The Age, which states, in a nutshell:

- Prozac and other antidepressants are little more than placebos

- The drug companies (surprise, surprise) tend not to publish the results of drug trials where the drugs do sweet F-A.

The question I have is this: Why is anyone surprised?

w00t for the power of the citizenry.

But that’s not the reason I’m posting this entry.

I’m posting the entry because of the apparently slack standards of news services. This — and many other reports I’ve seen lately — appears to have been either:

(a) written by several different people and not copy-edited

(b) cobbled-together from several reports around the world and not copy-edited

(c) not copy-edited

Notice the common-denominator in the above points.

Seeing the same piece of information repeated several times in the same report smacks to me of apparent laziness.

And in the award for Shameless repetition, we have:

“…Qian Xun was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

“…She was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

The award for the most gratuitous use of the same fundamental points goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police with his pants around his ankles and his hands tied with his own belt after being captured by a group of angry Chinese Americans…”

“…”They had basically taken his pants and tied his legs up and taken his belt off and tied his hands up, so he was very much in custody by the time our officers got to the scene,” he said…”

“…”Local authorities got wind of the incident and arrived on the scene only to find the suspected murderer hogtied and detained by a number of men.”…”

The award for emotive geography goes to:

“…The abandonment of Xue’s daughter caused outrage in Australia and New Zealand, and led to the establishment of the Little Pumpkin Trust in both countries…”

“..Qian’s half sister helped establish the Little Pumpkin Trust in Australia and New Zealand…”

The award for television over-exposure is for:

“…Authorities in America had recently said they were closing in on the fugitive, and his image had appeared on America’s Most Wanted…”

“…The website for the America’s Most Wanted television program says Xue was caught after Chinese-American locals recognised him…”

“…”The arrest was based on the news reports and the internet and America’s Most Wanted,” Hession said…”

The Where’s Wally award goes to:

“…Xue had now been transferred to the Dekalb County Jail where he will be held until US Marshalls take him into custody…”

“…Xue is now in custody while it is determined what legal jurisdiction he faces….”

The Stating-the-bleedingly-obvious award goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police..”

“…He is accused of Liu’s murder…”

“..Xue, who is suspected of killing his wife, has been charged with being a fugitive and for being wanted in New Zealand…”

I’m sure there’s more, but the point is well and truly made: it’s an abominable news report and the “with Staff Reporters, stuff.co.nz and Agencies” is little more than a disclaimer rather than giving proper credit to the sources of the report.

This is really sloppy journalism, but I’m up for alternative interpretations (other than a 5-minute deadline, which is just tommyrot on an online newspaper).

Froot-loops.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUrCF7fpViw&rel=1]

Choice quotes:

“…If we can just save one person’s soul…”

“…I don’t know if you’ve seen Kirk Cameron’s ‘Left Behind’…”

“…Noah’s Ark is real, and the Millenium Falcon is fake…”

“…When they die, and they’re judged, then they’ll go to hell… according to my beliefs they’re going to go to hell…”

Okay, we’re back, in the continuing story of the HP printer and computer that could but refused because the software was shite.

When last we spoke (#131), I’d successfully uninstalled XP Sp2 and effectively rendered a large proportion of software on the computer useless.

Now I’m installing the HP printer software. It’s a 9110 officejet btw, a hulk of a beast sitting like… well, it’s the size of a bloody kennel to be honest… on the desk next to me.

And now we wait. The progress bar is… well, we’re validating, so it could take a while.

However, I am cautiously cautious, which is what one gets after four separate attempts to get the stupid thing working.

I think I’m going to get some more tea.

So here I am again at my friend’s place trying to get two HP printers to talk to a newly reinstalled Windows XP SP2 setup on — no less — an HP laptop.

I’ve tried the casual hope-it-prints-and-I-can-go-home-to-play-with-the-cat (not the pussy, which is another image entirely), but this has failed, and I’m in for the long-haul.

Okay, so job number one is to uninstall the software.

This is where things get funny; upon selecting “Add Remove Programs” I get the flashlight-of-doom. Hello?! This is a newly reformatted and reinstalled system! I expect the damn flashlight to appear on a machine that’s at least 6 months into its lifespan, not a scant month after reinstallation.

Then we get the laughably OTT warning messages from the software I’m unistalling.

Yes, I know it won’t work if I uninstall the software. Trouble is, it doesn’t work WITH the damn software.

Am I the only one who finds the increasingly doom-ladened messages from software laughable when uninstalling it?

If you uninstall this software, your hardware will no-longer function. Also, your dog, cat and first-born child will become agents of satan and impale you in your sleep with rag-dolls soaked in methylated spirit, and then set them all aflame to the chants of “Oh Satan, lord and Master, give us this day our daily toast.”

I mean, honestly, get a bloody grip.

So, while I sit here alternately scoffing a rather nice asian rice and vegetarian stir-fry thing (with battery bits which I am assured are not fish, but tamarind), typing out this blog entry and glancing upwards periodically to watch the mind-numbingly slow progress bar sliding across the screen like a glacier in the ice-age, I wonder why.

Why what you might ask?

Why HP is creating such dross these days. Why it’s so damn hard to get their own software — supplied with the hardware, and that supplied by their barely navagable website — to actually do something as blindingly simple as print a damn document.

If I had a dollar for every hour I’d been working on this stupid problem, I’d be on a beach sunning my dazzlingly gorgeous body (and you’d have a gorgeous bod after 23 days of Bikram Yoga, let me tell you) on a beach in Acapulco, while swarthy male men-folk fall over themselves to be the next person to serve me a blindingly alcomoholic drinky.

But then I wasn’t. I’m in Melbourne being fed Chinese. Which would be nice, apart from the fact I still don’t have this stupid printer working.

Ah, it’s uninstalled. Onto the next stage of my evil plan: clean-up the registry.

Except there’s two folders and neither of them are clear enough for me to want to take a risk of turning this PC into the doorstop it so resembles.

Okay. Plan B – there’s some sort of HP software cleaner.

ooo, a carrot. Yum.

Sorry, got distracted with eating while waiting for the HP site to load.

Oh and in another win for idiocy over common-sense, the HP tool which will tell me if I need to update HP software will only work on IE 5.o and above.

Like the bloody tax-office; what’s the obsession with Internet Exploder anyway?

But I digress.

Clicking the back button on the web page just repeats the same test and I get the same stupid message. Click back on the Firefox interface instead… Dumbasses.

Okay, another tack again: some information I’ve come acrosss suggests that XP Sp2 might just cause some issues.

So drastic measures are called-for: let’s frag Sp2!

Hmmm, still unconvinced those non-fishy bits *were* non-fishy bits.

On the whole though, a nice meal. And there’s my lukewarm peppermint tea on the counter, too. Hmmm, cold tea; just the way I like it.

While the SP2 uninstaller grinds on like all those people out there who still think saying “Luxury!” followed by some bizarrely inane comment is still funny after, what is it, nearly 40 years, I shall add this.

Several of my cunningly discerning readership have pointed-out that endless PC bashing is unfair to PCs as a whole, and that they’e had just as much problems with Apple Macs.

To this I say, I believe you; I really do. It seems that any PC that comes within coo-ee (an Australian vernacular term meaning “within spitting-distance”, which is far more gross than you might actually think) of this little black duck seems to pop a cog when I start using it. I was a feared systems tester in one of my former jobs for this very reason; my abilities to not just break, but pound and nuke-til-it-glows various pieces of software was legendary. All right, semi-legendary.

The point I am attempting to make is this: My experience with Macs makes me love and admire them as easy to get along with and rarely do they actually make me swear. My experience with PCs is as diametrically opposite to that of Macs that it might as well be in an alternate universe wearing a goatee beard and cackling wildly about what it will do with me come daybreak.

Maybe that’s not the best way to put the point. I’ll try again.

PC’s don’t like me. I don’t like them. When we’re in the same room it’s an unpleasant experience for both of us, and frankly we’d rather let the relationship shrivel-up and die than spend another moment with one-another. We have no shared assets, resources or small humans running around causing chaos; it was fun, but it stopped being that a long, long time ago.

Oh, look: the status bar has disappeared on the uninstaller, and we’re “running processes after install”. How spiffing.

Good grief, now it’s playing the glocenspiel at me! What’s that all about? One minute you get more talk bubbles than a bloody cartoon strip, the next minute you get two-tone glocenspiel going off like Mike Oldfield in a cyclone.

Okay, it’s now 8pm and it’s performing the cleanup. I don’t expect that to take seconds, do you?

Damn, no more food. But the tea’s still there.

w00t! It’s finished.

To restart your computer, click Finish.

Only too glad. Fingers crossed…

Interesting paper on women in politics by Kathie Muir, from the University of Adelaide. You’ll need Adobe Acrobat to view it though.

It’s disturbing how mysogynistic — no, perhaps it’s too hard a word let’s say instead “backward” — news services — and many people — are regarding women in positions of visibility in society.

Take Noel Ashby’s opinion that too many female recruits hurts the police force in Victoria.  Perhaps his version of the force — overbearingly male dominated — might be hurt, but oddly enough, the force might grow to become a bit more inclusive and have a better foot in the community by including more women (I won’t say minority group, because on average, women outnumber men; 51% is the number most often used). It might also be improved by adding people from other groups; aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islanders, Vietnamese, Chinese, ex-refugees, homosexuals, the religious; when the police force properly reflects the society which it polices, it might actually find itself in a far better position to do its job.

Then there’s John Westacott, channel 9‘s new boss opinion that “…To make it in this industry, you gotta have f—ability. To make it in this game, women have to be f—able…”. Nice, inclusive and not at all sexist, mysogynistic or backward. Course, it’s notalot worse than former chief Eddie “Everywhere” McGuire‘s comment that a former female employee should be “boned”.

What is it with men in positions of power in this country? I understand that the minority who get the bad press don’t do the majority any good, but on the other hand, where the hell do opinions like this come from?

Some people blame the mothers for not teaching their sons to be more respectful. This sort of opinion not only makes my eyes water involuntarily, trying to work-out how it can be a females fault that a male is being an arsehole, but it also gives the male in question open slather to be as nasty as he wishes; it’s not his fault, it’s his female parent. What?!

But at the core, I wonder about the male psyche in this country… I wonder about any place where a male can get away with being so horrendously disrespectful and abusive to any other human being.

And I wonder most about the other people around them that nod and do nothing, say nothing, and by this very act, become complicit in the abuse.

Another Apple rave.

What makes me really laugh about this — and every other article online I’ve read which declares how nice Apple equipment is — is the rabid and aggressive response from the PC fanbois out there in interweb territory.

It’s so … what’s the word I’m looking for…? Defensive, that’s it. They’re terribly defensive; like they assume that because someone touts how easy an opposing computer is to use and how nice the hardware looks, that it’s a personal attack on the very soul of their preferred computer system.

One of the major things I notice is that the fanbois tend to attack the person and not the argument, thus:

 ha! on 02/12/2008

 

“I’m A Lot Less Savvy And Smart Than I Thought.”

“OK, I’m an idiot, a near retard with no self-control.”

And we’re supposed to believe this drivel you write about, self-titled retard? Go find some play-dough or something, leave thinking to the big boys.

and…

idiocy

- submitted by Anonymous on 02/12/2008

 

you are the biggest idiot ever… idiocy is an understatement.

Now, I’ll admit that I don’t make a habit of reading Windows articles, so there could very well be apple fanbois out there doing much the same. My experience of Apple verus PC is that life is nicer on the whole with the former rather than the latter; and I’ve been using computers for 30 years, and professionally for 15.

But who am I to comment?

These guys are one of the biggest advertisements for what’s wrong with religion.

Rabid, fundamentalist… not muslim… christians who’d put a bullet in you if they could get away with it.

Like Douglas Adams said:

“…nearly 2,000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change…”

Where exactly is the message of “the great white saviour” (middle-eastern origin, but don’t let that be an impediment to the Jesus-is-a-white-man industry) in the Westboro Baptist Church? Cast not the first stone, anyone?

Hah.