I’ve had quite a few emails asking when I’m going to comment on the U.S. disaster elections, but to be honest I don’t think I’ve got much to add to the noise, and it probably conflicts a little with what I’ve been trying to do with this site. And anyway, I’ve already spoken about our local version of G.W. in It’s time to stay, John Howard and The search for the last Liberal voter, the Liberal Party being the Australian version of the U.S. Republican Party.

So let me instead weave in a related story, try to tie up the loose ends, and return us to our regular programming.

About a month ago, I was in the backyard attending to my beetroots, and L* comes out, looking proud of herself, and the following exchange took place:

L*: Hey, notice anything about the back room?

R: The back room? Umm… no why?

L*: Have you noticed how it looks a lot neater?

R: Uhh, what do you mean neater? You mean the back room where I keep all my collectable computer gear?

L*: Collectable? Umm… I’ve been throwing a box out each week since we moved, because you said they all had to go.

R: You what?! Yeah! They all had to go INTO STORAGE!

So it turns out that she’s now done me a favour in throwing out all my old AppleII gear. Out went all my hard drives, source code, finished products, my backup hard drives and cartridges. My AppleIIgs Tenspeed prototype, my custom built (by Zip Technology for GraphicWriterIII development) Zip GSX 14MHz, two high speed SCSI cards, two RAMFasts, a bunch of rare Australian RAM cards, an Apple Integer Card with my custom serial port debugging roms built in, two Transwarp GS cards, an original first edition Apple CD ROM drive, two industrial strength power supplies, a 110V to 240V power transformer, several other cards and AppleIIgs machines including my Woz edition which I used to develop pretty much every product I wrote for the AppleIIgs.

Lucky though, she was about to throw out the old laser printer which no longer works and the old green screen with the bad flicker. Phew, saved in the nick of time!

Pretty much all the gear mentioned on my history page is now gone, sitting in a city dump somehwere as land fill. Thousands of years from now, someone is going to dig up that stuff, think to themselves “What is this crap?” and subsequently bury it all again.

So the last few months have been a bit of a watershed for me, a turning point if you will. Well, at least after the crying and screaming subsided, and when L* was finally allowed to move back home again.

With no more AppleII gear, the home and U.S. elections looming, and several other changes to my world, things were looking up, a time for change, a fresh start… and then the world suddenly plunged into another four years of darkness. I feel ripped off.

The blogosphere learned a good lesson this week about isolation and visibility. I’ll leave you with two of my favourite perspectives on the election (and yes, I’ve read a lot of them): Gina Trapani’s personal before and after journey into politics; and Dave Pollard’s post UNDERSTANDING THE PEOPLE, PART 2, and to show what is wrong with this world, I quote:

Yesterday eight million anxious, fearful white American suburbanites, male and female, who didn’t vote in 2000, pried themselves out of their isolated, insulated, heavily-mortgaged, two-income-trap homes, and voted for the devil they knew over of the devil they didn’t. And then they went home and prayed. And as a consequence, we have four more years of George Bush.

Jason Scott is putting the finishing touches on his BBS Documentary, covering the history of the BBS scene from 1978 to the present day, or at least when the web sort of took over from the BBS.

Released on 3 DVDs, with 200 interviews and taking 3 three years to produce, looks like Jason’s done an amazing job, especially getting hold of a lot of the original innovators like Ward Christensen.

Although I haven’t actually seen it myself, I’m sensing a big hole in the research with respect to the AppleII, and more specifically Australia, which had a huge BBS scene. However this is our problem, not Jason’s, as we never really found the time to answer his questions or document the local history for him. Seems a shame to do it after the documentary’s come out, but he’s pestered us enough over the past few years, or least I’m guessing that Andrew was as well.

The only mention I did get is for Eclipse (yes, we had the name first), a pretty cool project, but not much of a landmark release for Australia. In fact I don’t think anyone ever ran it locally, as by then the whole scene had pretty much collapsed. And to rub it in, Andrew gets top billing, which I guess is probably fair considering he basically took over the project once I’d gotten over it. Eclipse was a development platform, including plug in drivers and a Pascal/REXX hybrid language designed specifically for BBS use.

Anyway, if you have an interest in the 1980s BBS scene, take a look at Jason’s site, or even grab a copy of the documentary. And if you’re interested in hearing about the Australian history, then perhaps keep pestering me to find the time to write it all up. Although some of it is covered in my personal history of the Australian Apple II scene.

Saw a mildly amusing tshirt this morning on the way to work in Sunny ol’ Canberra, which I’ve since found after googling it, did the rounds a few years back. No matter:

There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and those that don’t.

Like I said, mildly amusing, perhaps because I fall into the former camp, and am still able to quote ASCII and 6502 instruction codes at will.

Looks like The Lane Cover Sticker Syndicate Inc. Pty Ltd. is at it again. Here’s the sticker they left on our mailbox this week. A bit hard to see, because my camera phone’s not that good at macro shots, but you can see the amateurism and the white mark still left from the previous sticker. Bastards.

Amusingly enough, our local (coalition) member wrote to us this week, saying that if re-elected, he would contribute $10 million in federal money towards filtration of the tunnel. We’ve had signs all along our main roads for the last few years complaining about filtration, erected by the Sticker Syndicate, but this morning those signs changed to “Coalition gives $10 million to filtration, everyone else $0”. However if you got out of your car and walked up close to these signs and read the small print, you’d see that they’re actually Liberal party advertising posters posing as local community public service announcements. That’s slimey, and taking advantage of local residents. Not exactly what you’d expect from a local member, or maybe you would.

This is the same politically minded federal government who says they won’t fund hospitals because they’re a state budget issue, yet with an election looming, are suddenly able to fund a local state government filtration project. Nuts. I’d call that hypocrisy, but at least the money’s being offered.

Recently I’ve been increasing the number of blog posts which talk about impro, not intentionally, but in response to the number of Google referals I’ve been getting recently now that Scared Scriptless (web site design still pending) is back up and running at the Clarence Hotel in Sydney. I’ve also been a bit shy about posting in public about it, why I’m not too sure, but an increasing number of players are telling me they bumped into my site, so I’m guessing it aint too bad, and it is safe to come out of hiding so to speak.

Anyway, today I had another one of those classic Theatresports degrees of separation moments. Last weekend I went to a non-impro wedding interstate, where I met a Science Communicator who was a nose bogey giving guided nostril tours at the Edinburgh Science Festival. Amusing, and a nice claim to fame, she outa do impro. Then another non-impro person mentioned a Science Communicator friend of theirs who was currently doing a Theatresports course. Nice coincidence, and I left it at that.

So tonight I’m at the show buying a drink at the bar, and this guy says he liked my gibberish endowments scene. A short exchange later and I find out he’s doing an impro course, and is a muso as well, and as we’re always looking for talented musos, he gives me his business card. Hmm… the first name sounds familiar. Bam! It’s the Science Communicator guy mentioned at the wedding, he knew about the wedding, knows where I used to work, and had already heard second hand the story about the nose bogey girl, yet didn’t know about me or who I was. No connection, but amazing coincidence.

Freaky coincidences like this seem to haunt my life, and at times it makes me question whether there’s more to it than just coincidence. But then I remember that so much of our lives is not coincidence, that perhaps the significant thing is that on average we should actually have more coincidences in life than we do. What a strange thing is existence and the human condition.

Apparently this photo of me after directing the Scriptless final a few weeks ago is funny. Yeah, amusing, but you should have seen what Rob and Amanda were doing!

This is one of the reasons that I’m a cat person, and more significantly not a dog person. Celebrate individuality and the creative and adventurous spirit. Accept no substitute.

Gee, what a week!

When you get to my age, it becomes increasingly rare to have one of those “most X in life” experiences. However, last week was probably the busiest week of my life, and trust me, I’ve had my fair amount of busy weeks in the past!

With not only significant day job project deadlines, but also six pretty big part time/hobby projects either due or beyond my delaying control, the week culminated with a pretty important on-stage appearance, for which sleep was going to be fairly critical. Even by the previous Monday, six days out, d-day minus 6 if you will, it was obvious that sleep deprivation, or deep sleprivation as I called it on d-day minus 1, was going to be the theme for the week.

Anyway, this means that blogging should perhaps increase again, sleep should improve, and I now have this sense of standing atop of summit, looking back down on the remains of projects and deadlines that were ticked off last week, and the ultimately not too impressive performance on the final day. This was all topped off by d-day plus 1 being a pretty important anniversary for me, which changes the perspective somewhat.

I’ll remember this week for a long time to come, for while to those around me it probably seemed fairly insignificant, it was indeed the busiest week of my life, when every waking moment was actually working on something that needed to be delivered to someone by a certain time.

When was your last “most X in life” experience? Perhaps that should be my mantra going forward, to have them more often than I have been of late.

The photo you see here is the new big red pop filter we have on the announcer microphone at our radio station. I bragged a bit about it the other night on the show, but for your own personal viewing pleasure, here it is in the flesh! So to speak…

The question I gotta ask though, is did the person who put it there know that pretty much every show for the next week is bound to do a whole bunch of knob jokes? Or did this simply slip from their mind while some enterprising young pop filter salesman had a giggle with his mates about the astronaut who bought the infamous red pop filter which had been sitting in their display cabinet for the last 5 years.

Anyway, while it makes you think to yourself for a few seconds every time you go back on air, at least it is more amusing than the standard regulation black. Could this be the beginning of the boom period for the pop filter manufacturing industry? Stay tuned folks, this could get nasty!

I don’t know why it happened, I don’t know how I found it, but the hyperlinks to some of my noise files were broken, and are now fixed. Enjoy. If you can.