by request:: An Informal Review of the HTC Desire (Part 2)...

i've had a couple more days to play with my new toy, and after several nights of disinterest and distraction-fuelled demotivation i'm left with little excuse not to sit down and talk about it, so here we go again...

the thing that sits in my hand...
hardware + software = product: of course they have to work together. look at Motorola in recent years - have you ever been walking down the street and seen a mind-blowingly beautiful girl walking arm in arm with a bloke who looks like a Neanderthal who was dropped on his head one time too many as a child and thought to yourself

"no, seriously, how the hell did that happen?"

that was the Motorola RAZR. brilliant piece of hardware. it was no thicker than my Nokia at the time, but was still a dual-screen clamshell. the keypad was responsive and elegant, the screen bright and easy to read. the software, on the other hand, felt like it had been thrown together as an afterthought. it was unintuitive, slow and bordering on sadistic. it was a Rocky & Bullwinkle phone - designed and built by separate teams who were patently unaware of each others existence and thereby never compared notes.

i'm pleased to announce that in the last week the hardware on the Desire has felt, in a word: solid. it has a heft to it that means it doesn't feel like it's going to fall to pieces in your hand, the rubberised back-plate has a soft, tactile texture that doesn't seem like it's going to squirm out of your hand like a wet fish, whereas the textured aluminium frame around the screen complements it nicely. the glass screen has, thus far, managed to resist scratches, although i need to wipe it down with a microfibre cloth every once in a while to remove the residue from my greasy fingers. this is to be expected - you're designed to touch the thing and you can't spell "wog" without "greasy" - it comes with my genetic heritage.

it's worth noting that the camera is fairly decent. i've seen the shots that the iPhone takes and it makes me wonder why people bother. the 5MP shooter on the back of the Desire is well and truly good enough for Government work. the tiny CCD's in these things will never be as good as their full-sized counterparts in DSLR's, but then that's not what you expected, is it? it's a happy-snap camera and should be treated as such, but having the facility to take a quick shot of someone to add to their entry in your phone book is cute...

i'm liking having the small row of actual buttons along the bottom of the face, if only because it gives me access to the functions they provide at any time without taking up valuable screen real-estate. the screen is Beautiful to look at - photos are clear and crisp, although you do get banding in graduated colours. oh well, i'll survive. the thing is that it's 3.7" diagonal leaves very little space, and fingers are only so small and real estate gets eaten up QUICKLY. i was perplexed for quite some time about the point of the little optical track-ball (of which i liked the addition. the less moving parts the better) until i needed to quickly go back in a text message i was writing. it gives you access to granular cursor movement which is near-on impossible with my finger. in general, it's a well put together little gadget, and the design decisions HTC have made have mostly been for the win.

there are a couple of niggling flaws that have irritated me and made me wonder why, when they've come THIS close to awesome, why HTC didn't put in just a little bit more effort. for starters, i now have Yet Another USB Cable to lug around. i'm not sure at this point in time whether this is another standard, of if HTC have just decided to fuck me for no good reason, but in a world where i have enough Mini-USB cables to just leave one everywhere i go on a regular basis why i now need one with a slightly different end. at least they provided it with a mains-to-USB converter, but still. then you plug it into the phone and notice that there's a 2mm gap between the moulding of the cable and the phone. it looks like it's not plugged in properly, but no - the light's on and a forceful push doesn't yield any further movement, so it MUST be right.

while we're talking about power, the battery life is also a bit of a bone of contention which no one's managed to come up with a decent answer to as yet. there isn't a smartphone on the market that i'm aware of that doesn't need to be charged more often than i need to eat. it DOES nicely get through the day tho - if i take it off the charge first thing Monday morning i reckon i could get to half-way through Wednesday before it ran out of juice, which isn't bad in the overall scheme of things, but still. i do miss the days of my old Nokia 3210 which would last a week between charges with moderate use. perhaps i should invest in a small solar charger...

the back plate has received its fair share of scorn on the intertubes - i didn't mind overly much, but then i'm used to having to take the back of my phone to mess with batteries and the like. what bugs me is that if this same company built an almost-identical phone where you could change the Micro SD card on the fly, why the fuck do i have to take the battery out to do it on this one? i understand that i will Rarely If Ever change said card, but... my Blackberry could do it. the Nexus One can do it. how hard can it be, people?

apart from that, i'm pretty happy with it. i've been carrying it around in the pocket of my hoodie a lot of the time and it seems to have suffered not a jot from the occasional knock and bump against things. that said, i'm also yet to drop it so i'll just have to wait and see what the results of THAT little misadventure are when it happens.

ok, so it's pretty and all, but what's it like to USE? 
well built hardware, intelligently thought out software, strong integration, these things are wonderful and all, but if it doesn't fit into daily life then all you've got is a very expensive toy which you pretend to use and inevitably sits on the shelf or in a drawer somewhere being of less use to you than tits on a bull.

for starters, it's quick and easy to check. i've spent a fair bit of time fiddling and customising and so on, but it's the work of something like 3 seconds to pull it out of my pocket, unlock the screen, glance across the icons to see if i've received any messages, flick over to my calendar, flick it back to the main screen, lock it and return it to my pocket. i consider this to be fairly reasonable, especially since in that time i've managed to visually confirm the following:

the time
missed calls
SMS/MMS messages
emails
my next calendar appointment/reminder
received Gtalk messages

that's a fair bit of information available at a glance.

when i walk in the house, or into the office, or arrive at various friends' places, the wifi automatically connects and synchronises to the various online resources i use. i have, at time of writing, not shelled out or a 3G data plan, and while i'm in no rush to do so i expect it's not far around the corner just for the sheer convenience (and because i can claim it off my tax - this is something of a motivator).

i've found that i pull it out in those brief tens of seconds where i'm waiting for something. i've installed a couple of newsfeeds (Slashdot and Engadget being primary) which update themselves and then sit quietly in the background, so instead of staring out into the distance when i'm waiting for the kettle to boil i can quickly flick through a couple or articles. i use a portal-app which connects to Skype, so i can now use my phone as a Skype Handset. if i want to have a video call i just chat while i power up my laptop, log into Skype-proper hang up and redial. it's just another way that i manage to make myself more connectible to people who it'd be FAR too expensive to call over the cellular network.

i have NOT, however, installed any games. there's one game that came pre-installed and which i can't seem to remove and about half of the people i've handed the phone to so they can have a look at the latest hotness (it'll be yesterday's news in another week or so - such is the nature of technology - but for the time being few people in Australia have had a real chance to play with Android so there's a lot of curiosity) will find it inside of a couple of minutes and have a play. frankly, if i wanted to play games on the go i'd give Nintendo money for a DS. i come under the category (more or less) of a "hardcore" gamer, rather than a "casual" gamer. i want immersion (and preferably explosions and gunfire or at least limbs flying off and blood splattering the landscape), so little games that fill in 5 minutes at a time are of little interest to me. there are things to read, information to assimilate, news to be updated on. i like to be connected and informed - this is what is important to me and so i have configured my phone to provide this in a dense, easily accessible format.

one other UI element that bears mentioning is the integration that Google have provided within Android. when i first started setting the phone up i imported my old contacts into the phone's database, connected the mail client to gmail and logged into Facebook through the provided application. Android is smart enough to realise that you may well have a lot of the same people across these various contact lists, and so it gives you the option to link them together into one meta-record. THIS, is too fucking cool for words, since now all i have to do is look someone up in the contacts list and get access to their phone number, any address they've emailed me from, ever (and that includes the online records in my gmail - i type in Julia and i get not just my friend here in Canberra, but a recruitment agent in London i've not had any contact with in over a year. this is seriously fucking awesome), as well as giving me their latest Facebook status, right there in their contact listing. if i want to know more i can click on that and it brings up Facebook so that i can comment on it, or see what else is going on. it's stuff like this that gives me a big, geeky hard-on, and it gets even better when i show that to iPhone users who proceed to lose their fucking minds with jealousy and say things like "Holy Shit... I can't do that!" 

so has the Desire fit nicely into my life? yes, yes it has. for me it's an Enabler. for example, now when i make a batch of pikelets i can quickly and easily take a photo and share the moment with my girlfriend (who lives on the other side of the country) cheaply, and easily, without finding my camera, taking the shot, having to down-res it so that it won't take 5 minutes to send and receive... hey, look at me in a silly pose! i'll send her a copy! click, send. done. being 3700km away from each other for several months is painful, but now we send photos of ourselves back and forth on our smartphones and it doesn't seem so far.

so has the Desire made my life easier? yes, yes it has. has it done this any better than alternative products in the marketplace? possibly, possibly not - not having an arsenal of different phones that i've been able to test has made that particular question difficult to assess, but i'll say this much: i couldn't have done it as well or as easily, or wrapped it around my finger so nicely if i'd bought a fucking iPhone...


on why i hate Apple...
half my life ago when i was a young lad, my first ever job with at the Apple Centre in Perth, Western Australia. those were the days when every Apple product was a beige desktop with the rainbow Apple logo, laptops and portable devices were a matte black, Microsoft was The Enemy and Bill Gates was the Great Satan. it was one plucky little fruit company (another in a long line of technology startups that started in a couple of uni students' garages) against the Evil Empire. i was decidedly uncool amongst my friends because i Had A Mac, so while they were playing the Tie Fighter: Defender of the Empire and Mechwarrior i was playing Ambrosia shareware games and drooling over whatever Bungie were bringing out next. i loved my Mac - we'd never had an IBM-PC in the house and i had no idea what the fuck to do with DOS. working in the Apple Centre was a dream-come-true, and not just because they let me buy stuff at cost+5%. i'm sure i must have spent as much as i earned on kit and it's only because my folks subsidised my technology purchases (on the proviso that dad got all the good kit and i got the leftovers at least 50% of the time) that i had any cash left over at all.

the PowerMac 7500/100 i bought for $3000 had 16MB of RAM when i got it (i gradually upgraded it over the years with second-hand parts i traded customers for) and a 1GB Hard Drive. it lasted me for about 5 years of constant modding, upgrading and fiddling around before the motherboard finally gave up the ghost and it refused to boot and by this time i'd moved out of home and learned this little thing i call "fiscal reality" (which more or less comes down to the fact that you only earn so much and you can't keep begging your folks for cash so that you can have cool toys AND eat) so when i needed to replace it so that i'd have something to do my uni assignments on i bit the bullet and decided that it was time to learn how to do things in Windows so i got a friend to help me select parts and we built my first PC by hand. it was a learning experience, but a worthy one. there weren't a lot of Mac-specialist jobs going, i knew i'd be graduating in a year or two and i'd need to have some Windows skills or i'd have a hard time earning money. that, and i wanted to play games and up until that point games were something that happened to other people - people who had Windows PC's. Windows 2000 wasn't the prettiest User Experience on the planet, especially when Mac OS X first started showing off its glossy face to the world, but it certainly didn't lack options for fiddling and i learned fast

so the years passed and i became a Windows God while Gil Amelio got the boot as Apple CEO and Steve Jobs came back in from the cold (where he'd helped build a failed tech startup called NeXT and a wildly successful animation studio you may have heard of called Pixar) to be the "Interim" CEO and we started to see the various multi-coloured iMacs appearing in the world and i'd occasionally wander into an Apple Store somewhere and ponder whether i could afford to pick up one of these nifty lampshade iMacs or one of the new PowerBooks that were coming out in brushed aluminium (i couldn't).

then came the iPod, and it was awesome - all the portable MP3 players on the market had been gelded with minuscule amounts of storage, shite battery lives and zero audio quality. the only decent one i could find on the internet had small hard drive (a couple of gig from memory) and was made by a French company called Archos. i wanted one as desperately as a 13 year old boy who just hit puberty and has suddenly worked out the recreational use for breasts, but there were no Australian resellers and getting one in from the US was ridiculously expensive. then, suddenly, the iPod was EVERYWHERE. i was happy enough with my old Sony MP3 Discman so it was a while before i did some research and realised that the iPod was a fraud. sure, it was the greatest thing since the application of knives to bread except for one thing: it had one important flaw which was iTunes - the only way to get music on and off the thing, which meant that when i went over a friend's place i COULDN'T just give them a couple of songs by a new band to check out, and they couldn't return the favor. to make matters worse, when i installed iTunes to muck around with it i found to my digust that it had gone and rearranged and renamed all of my music and i couldn't find anything anymore. iTunes meant Control - and the entity in control was not me. this didn't seem to bother the average punter. they wanted their music on the go. they wanted it to be made easy for them, and Apple provided, not by making it easier for them to learn and become smarter, but by enabling them to be ignorant.

don't get me wrong - i'm an Egalitarian at heart. you shouldn't have to be a member of the technorati to be able to use a computer. it's just that i'm also a Darwinian with a firm belief that we should be striving to move forward as a species. giving the less educated/savvy/interested the tools to enable them to participate in the Great Technological Revolution of the Information Age is fantastic. REMOVING THE ABILITY OF TO STRIVE FOR MORE, on the other hand, is contrary to my guiding beliefs.

THEN, Apple released the iPhone, which took this philosophy of Control to all new heights. here was a device with so much potential, half of which Apple wouldn't let you access. take Bluetooth, for example. it's a short-range communication protocol allowing devices to connect wirelessly and (vaguely) securely. on my Desire i can use it to connect to my computer to transfer small files quickly and easily, or connect to my car's handsfree kit, or beam photos back and forth from my friend's phones. on the iPhone you can only collect to headsets. sometimes. when it feels like it. Apple say they're "ensuring a positive end-user experience". what they're doing is ensuring that you can only use the device the way THEY can you may. it's like you're renting the device from them, rather than buying it. imagine buying a car and being told you're only allowed to drive it between the hours of 1PM and 11PM, and do to otherwise would void your warranty? or if you pulled up to a petrol station and weren't allowed to put in petrol because you drive a Ford and the station will only sell fuel to BMW's? what the fuck?

then the iPad came out and any enthusiasm i may have had for those arseholes had finally evaporated into nothingness. it's a device that i've been waiting to be built for years - a small, light tablet that i can carry around and use as a portable life-extender. to be able to quickly whip it out at a cafe and read the news, or upload photos from my camera on the fly... but it doesn't even have a fucking card reader. what the fuck is the point? for the same price i can have a little ASUS EeePC that takes a minute or so to boot up, but on which i can do everything i need, AS WELL AS type at a rate of 1200 words and hour. it's a toy that the media can whip up a frenzy about, which could have been so useful, and has instead been limited to being a bright shiny toy that you don't even own properly because the only way to get your media onto it is over the internet or from fucking iTunes. it's the Christian-Communist mentality that says "do what we say the way we say it or we will cast you from the Garden". yes, i just called Apple Communists. get over it. prove i'm wrong. the point is that it COULD have been incredible. i look at it and can't help but wonder when the adult version is coming out. the version with all the features, the things they could have added at the cost of a couple of dollars extra, but they didn't include them. it's not because they had to cut costs, or because it was technically infeasible - they Specifically Decided Not To, because this they wanted to nerf their own product.

and the world praised them for it and flocked to hand over their money, because here's yet another unchallenging product from the company renouned for making shiny, pretty toys. they treat us like we're fucking children and in return we love them for it. gods-bless us.

at the end of the day what offends me most is that they are willfully limiting our ability to learn and grow. the whole "hacker" movement was driven by a curiosity to know what was going on behind the curtain, to reveal the Wizard and find out what the wheels and levers did, and then to recombine them to make them do something no one had ever thought to do before. it's Innovation, and Apple is intentionally stifling it, as if to say "how dare you look under the bonnet and see how we do what we do? how dare you have the conceit to second-guess us and think you might be able to do it better?" if Apple sold a car it would come with the bonnet sealed shut, and this offends me. it locks people into a single ecosystem that's even more closed than the Microsoft/Intel monopoly of the mid-90's and prevents people from having the opportunity to play and grow.

technology is and has always been a tool for us to improve our lives. we bend it to our will, not the other way around. it should be a framework that gives us options, rather than limiting is in how we are permitted to use it.

that's my underlying problem with the Fruit Company from Cupertino - they've gone from being the company that gave us a Second Way to manipulate information and become a Totalitarian state, determined to kill off outside innovation and keep the common people in a constant state of consumerism, baying for the next shiny bauble, rather than encouraging people to move forward and create. they are the embodiment of the divide between the creative and technical elite and the seething masses. it's a betrayal of the ideal that when the geek inenherited the earth we'd bring everyone with us rather than encouraging them to keep quiet... and i may be naive and i may be idealistic and i might be completely fucking wrong about the ability of my fellow man to cast off the shackles of ignorance and move forward into the light... but then if that's wrong i don't want to be right.

and that's why i hate Apple.

so where do we go from here? 
so i have this phone and it's buzzed a few times while i lie in bed listening to Incubus, writing this and... you know what? it makes and receives phone calls. it allows me to write and read SMS messages. and emails. and receive Skype calls, and share photos and read the news, find True or Magnetic North and even tell me what street i'm standing on. once was the time it would take me at least 5 different devices to do all that and now it's all wrapped into a nice, neat little package. that's pretty fucking cool. has it become integral to my continued existence as a human being?

we're not talking about a cure for cancer here, or a viable solution for world hunger, or a system of living that overthrows the corporate-masculine-oligarchy. it's a fucking phone. a mini computer that condescends to make calls. that said, it's a bloody awesome tool which i'm finding extremely entertaining and unbelievably useful. there's more mucking around to be had before i'll feel like i'm done. for example, i want to find a way to set it so that when it connects to particular wireless networks certain applications stop or start, so that when i get home it automatically logs me onto Skype and makes me available to receive calls, but disconnects at all other times. that would be useful, and the voice recognition protocols are pretty haphazard for anyone who doesn't have an american accent.

still at the end of the day i bought a Desire because i wanted one, and it's about as good as these devices are going to get for the next month or two so i'm pretty happy with that. if i had to make the choice again i would, which is about as high-praise as you can give to a piece of consumer tech, isn't it?

by request:: An Informal Review of the HTC Desire (Part 1)...

i can haz a present!
i stumbled into work yesterday morning to find a Tyvek envelope with FedEx written all over it. 2-4 days: my arse - i ordered this thing 8 days ago and it was shipped 2 days later. LIES, i tells you. i should have been more excited and tried to tear into it with my teeth but an all-nighter in the office on Saturday night meant that i'd had to sleep through Sunday and i was still paying for it on Monday morning so my customary beer-mug full of coffee had to come first.

Tyvek is a bizarre substance you don't see often in this country. it's aquaphobic like plastic, tears like rip-stop nylon and cuts like paper and like most of the freakishly awesome materials in this world it's trademarked by Dupont. one of my more colourful friends used to make it into origami wallets.

inside was another, padded envelope (overpackaging, much?), protecting a smallish white box with the requisite warranties and whatnot, cables and, presented neatly on top just begging me to grab it and arc it up was my brand new HTC Desire, fresh off the production line from their factory in Taiwan. in one of their many disjointed attacks on the telecommunications world, Google contracted HTC to build them a phone of their own. their Android OS was taking on an appearance in the marketplace of a scitzophrenic monster with more faces than a thai demon with 3 or 4 different revisions floating around on a dozen or so devices from something like 5 different manufacturers and they wanted to put out a device that Did It Right, and so the Google Nexus One was born. it was, for all extents and purposes, pretty fucking awesome. a clear, bright touchscreen with a decently-high resolution, 1GHz (not that the Hertz-rating means anything in consumer electronics anymore, not since the IBM PowerPC 601 chip first came out, or the AMD x2 Dual Core processors later) processor called "Snapdragon", half a gig of RAM and the usual Alphabetti-Spaghetti-Soup of communication-related acronyms - WiFi, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, GPS, BT, etc etc etc. HTC are pretty used to this by now - it was only a couple of years ago they started making phones with their own name on them - before that they built shit for other people to slap a badge on and call theirs.

now, however, they're getting agressive in the marketplace and went "we've got the designs, we've got the kit, why the hell now make own OWN version? so they did and called it the Desire. there were a few changes - the N1 has dual-microphones, one to listen to you and the other to listen to, and thereby cancel out, the rest of the world, as well as a series of electrode connectors on the base so that you can just drop it into a cradle for charging instead of always having to plug it into a cable. the Desire, on the other hand, has a little extra memory and no Google branding on it. oh, and that cradle sells for ~AUD$80 and can, therefore, go and fuck itself. the N1 was also, at time of ordering, AUD$100 more expensive, so guess which way i went on THAT decision? i like Google and their (increasingly rickety) "Don't Be Evil" motto, but not $100-much.

with due consideration of the specs out of the way and my massive mug of coffee cooling quietly across my desk, i plugged in my new toy to get some charge into the branded Lithium-Ion battery while i backed up the contacts and so on from the beat-up old Blackberry Pearl 8120 i've been cruising around with for the last year or so, got my SIM into it quicksmart and turned it on, watching with glee as the splash screen came up accompanied by a bright, loud, happy chirp and the notably paradoxic message "quietly brilliant".


this is how it begins...
gone are the days when you turn on your new phone and the most you have to do before you can actually make a fucking call is set the time. now it's a full-on customisation. a few things struck me straight away: one of the first questions it asked me was whether or not i wanted to connect to mobile internet. no rude assumptions here - not everyone has a data plan, you know, and PAYG 3G Data is ridiculously expensive in some places so let's be polite and ask. i like this, as i have no Data Plan. do i want to connect to a WiFi network? yes, yes i would thanks, and would you believe it - it connects to the office's Server Engineer Only (No noobs!) 802.11g network and associated ADSL line quicker than i can write out the actions. NICE!

a couple of screen taps and i'm staring at the big, fuck-off clock and the shiny, gay-as-a-summers-day background you'll see in any of the advertising material. i didn't even have to set the time. the network is synched with time-servers around the work and will be FAR more accurate than me so it just uses that. i don't have to tell it where i am, either. it's worked it out so there's no need to bother me. would i care to take a tutorial on how to use the onscreen keyboard? i think i'll be fine. my new phone is on, juiced and begging to be touched and stroked. it's a touchscreen - that's what it's fucking for. it's like a little kitten sitting in the palm of my hand with its chin raised and an expression that screams

"i'm EVER so cute so PLEASE pet me!"

so i do. and i feel dirty, but if indecently assaulting electronics is wrong then i don't want to be right...

it's a phone... but is it?
i feel a bit off calling these things "phones". in as much as a phone is a device with which you "call" other phones, enabling communication across great distances and perhaps even send and receive text messages, the Desire is indeed a phone. but then, my laptop does the same thing. is it a phone? if it looks like a duck walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck, right? now my old Nokia 5500 Sport (which to this day refuses to die and lurks in my "Handy Odds & Sods" drawer (what Michael McIntyre would call a "Man Drawer")) is a phone. it makes and receives calls and text messages, can even take photos and be convinced, with some coaxing and cajoling, to send pictures over the cellular network. it has a calculator and a calendar and a couple of games, but at the end of the day its primary purpose in this world is to enable me to communicate with people. the Desire and its ilk - dating back to the old Compaq iPaq's (yes, before HP ate them alive), phone-enabled Palm Pilots, Windows Mobiles and, of course, the iPhone - are not, by this definition, phones. what i'd just started covering in my grubby fingerprints is, in fact, a small computer which also condescends to make phone calls. let's face it - Moore's Law has been rolling uninhibited for nearly 40 years now, and so what i carry around in my pocket has enough processing power to happily negotiate Apollo 11's landing on the fucking moon. i say this with no ego or immodesty - electrickery has just evolved so far that the device i use to call my mum has 1152 times the RAM of the first computer my dad bought when i was six, and 728 times the onboard storage of the old single-sided floppy disks we booted it from. oh, and it costs less than a third what that old Apple Macintosh 512k did (if you disregard 24 years of inflation). gods-bless progress.

but i digress. see, i'm old enough that i remember when phones were these things with big-arse bases, actual bells that rang when a call was coming in (hence the whole idea of a telephone "ringing" they had Fucking Bells Which Fucking Rang) and you weren't to touch because even looking at the damn thing cost money. but then, i also remember when the Internet was brand new and the only good sites on the thing were porn, porn, the Gillian Andreson Testosterone Brigade, porn and a couple of Star Trek vs Star Wars fansites., when spam was a disgusting ham-analogue and you got your knowledge of the world around you from these wads of dead-tree we called "books". yes, i am a fucking dinosaur. when i got my first mobile phone i thought it was the most amazing thing ever, and would keep pulling it out of my pocket and looking at it in case the magic smoke escaped and it'd disappear up its own existence. now i'm looking at a block of aluminium, plastic and glass that is better connected to the world than the Alienware behemoth of a laptop i'm typing on. it's not the future, because i have it right here and now. it is, however, a sign of things to come, and an idea about how we're all going to become a whole lot more interconnected. it's not a phone, it's a "smartphone", which basically means what i've already described: it's a mini-computer that also makes calls. let's just leave it at that and not go into the marketing-speak of "superphones" lest we reach the point where the "uberphone" marshalls its forces and marches on the Rhineland on its way to invading all of Europe and the destruction of all lesser-phones.

but wait, someone's already doing that - they're called Apple.

ok, enough of the phosophising and reminiscing about simpler times, tell us about the fucking phone!
so what's the first thing a geek does when he gets his hands on a new piece of equipment? they start rummaging around in its guts and see what it'll do of course, so i got stuck in wrist-deep looking for its cervix to see if i could make it sing. i have to admit that i was, and in fact had been, underwhelmed by the configurable options. i'd read many a review before i spent my own money on this thing and all the professional reviews (you know - the ones who never have to pay for their own fucking toys) had ejaculated paragraphs about how the HTC Sense interface was customisable and so on. after digging around for a while i came to realise that what they meant was "you can move icons around and stuff". sure, the are 7 screens you can fill with app-launchers and widgets-various, but really all that comes down to is that you're playing jenga with icons until you come up with a combination you can navigate easily. of course, we're talking about people who've been conditioned by Apple's "Thou Shalt Not Touch" iPhone Walled Garden (which i'll discuss more later) that actually having some control over their own goddamn phone must have come as such a shock that they needed to take a little while to lie down and change their underwear. that said, the HTC Sense overlay on Android is pretty damn sweet. i've played around with the basic Android Home Screen and it's alright, but Sense takes a lot of the pain out of the configuration, and adds some of its own magic to the experience. there's a widget for just about anything you want to access quickly - i now have the the big-arse clock displaying along with the current weather, various buttons to turn on/off my wireless functions that drain a LOT of the power, my Google Calendar (synched seamlessly to and from my online account), basic controls for the music player (which keeps playing when i do something else, but pauses when a call comes in. take THAT iPhone 2G/3G bitches!), a Speed Dial launcher with my most-commonly called peeps on it, an overview of my gmail inbox (again, mirrored from my online account) and a screen dedicated to my SMS inbox. it's a work in progress - things will come and go and get rearranged until it's all where i want it.

one of the little features of the HTC Sense widgets is that the weather view changes with the forecast - when it's cloudy outside you get clouds float across the screen when you unlock it. if it's rainy you get raindrops as if it were a windscreen, complete with windscreen wipers that push them away. it's cute, and if i thought it drained too much of the battery i'd kill them in an instant, but i've only had it for 2 days so far and while i know it's probably going to be like the little nasal giggle you thought was adorable when you first got together with your partner and gets old after a year or so, i'll leave it on there until it does... or something better comes along. that's what the Market is for.


the Market - wherein our intrepid adventurer braves Secksi-Time apps, "clever" sound effects and micropayments in search of useful doohickeys that enrich the Android-phone-owning experience...
you've got to have an App Store these days. Apple did it when they brought out the iPhone and it worked pretty fucking well for them, so now where Apple goes the rest of the market follows like a floppy-eared puppy-dog, snuffling around in Steve Jobs' leavings, looking for any money he couldn't be bothered bending over to pick up as it flows like autumn-leaves from his overflowing pockets. that said, it was a ridiculously smart move. until they came up with it, any time you wanted to add functionality to your portable device, be it a Portable Media Player, PDA or phone, you needed to plug it into a computer, juggle the various synchronisation tools and file formats, run the installer and Plug & Pray, and that's after digging through hundreds of virus-ridden websites looking for the app that MIGHT do what you want it to do and MIGHT work on the specific model device you'd dropped your hard-earned on... i did with my old Palm Vx (and Palm III before that) for years, and various Nokia phones after that and i'm here to tell you that it was a fucking Nightmare, so Apple said "Hell - let's do away with the PC altogether? It's internet-connected, why not have everything go straight to the phone? Do not pass the Start Button, do not collect 200 viruses?" and lo, the people were amazed because when they were using their phone and realised that what was missing from their lives was an App that made fart-noises or mimicked drinking a beer when you tilted the handheld, they could indeed have it, and have it in the time it took to type "flatulence" into their onscreen keyboard.

the Android Market works under the same principle, just with a few less body-odor-related Apps and a slightly-lower quality control. Google famously do not censor the Market, but i'm pleased to say that the quality doesn't seem to have suffered too much. there's a robust peer-review function where users can comment and rate the apps, and this pushes shittier apps lower and lower and better apps higher and higher. there are also filters you can use to show only Paid or Free Apps. i, i will take this opportunity to admit, am something of a Freetard. it's not that i WON'T pay for things, it's just... i have to really want it, and there are enough apps around that do what i want that have been written for fun, practice, uni assignments, publicity or just good old-fashioned benevolence that i've not been stuck looking at the One True App that Jesus de Christo from Barcelona wants 5 Euros for the priviledge of using (until your new OS is incompatible or your switch platforms, or the Market-Gods choose to take the App away from you because they favor it no longer). it's a fairly painless experience to use and download from, and being a Google product it has a fantastic search-function.

don't ask me what the Fart Apps are like - i have am yet to become so tired of life that i've been driven to downloading any. i emit enough noxous odors as it is without electonic assistance, thanks for asking.

that will have to do for this evening. in our next thilling adventure i will explore such delights as Call Quality, Typing On Keys That Don't Bounce (aka - what it would be like to live on the Enterprise-D in Star Trek), Generally Living With The Thing And How It's Changed My Day-To-Day Habits and the hate-filled tirade that is Why I Now Fucking Hate Apple...

Snippets #18: it's that time of year again...

a little over a year ago i sat down to say thanks to number of people who had, in one way or another, influenced my life for the better... whether they'd intended to or not. it's been a long year since then and i've gone through some shit between then and now and while i'd like to stand tall and say i got myself through it... well, if i did i'd be lying. we move through each other's lives, steps in a dance that brings us together for seconds or decades, bouncing off each other, each of us a particle in life's Brownian Motion.

so here's to those i've met and remembered and those i've forgotten, to those you cursed me with their friendship and those who blessed me with hatred, to those who got me drunk and those who kept me alive... especially when they're the one and the same.

Pietre - for showing me just how easy it was to go out for the evening with someone i'd met 5 minutes beforehand.
Dad and my Sister - for showing me how high you can rise and how far you can fall.
Andrew - for getting drunk with me in 3 different countries.
Jacq and Nick - for helping me get back into circus tricks.
Speedfox, Daywalker, Cathy H and The Greyman - for being reliably up for a beer, sitting on the kerb outside the Red Lion and making my last few months in London awesome to the max.
Shadow - for always having something to teach and something to learn, for making my phone ring and always having a pot of tea on the go.
Sandra - for making it so easy to come back to Canberra.
Andrew Duggan - because firing me absolutely made my day, week, month and year.
Rachel - for making my last job interesting and being a particularly awesome reference.
Matt - for showing me it CAN be done, and putting up with my shit at his wedding. 
Moonbug - for hanging out with me in yet another part of the world. where next?
Ondine - for being remarkably adaptable.
Shaalwyd - for always having an available ear and turning my life upside down in your driveway.
Matthias - fur Spasse auf Berlin. 
Mal - for giving me absolutely no excuse for not being able to play Wish You Were Here.
MCG - for being part of some of my more entertaining stories and taking me to see the Little Mermaid. 
The Boy - for never, ever changing.
Brit Pete - for giving my old leather jacket a good home.
Cesky Krumlov - for being such a lovely little town with such great, cheap beer.
Tiernan - for ensuring that there's someone out there who's even crazier and more inappropriate than i am.
Emma - for eliminating the "boring" from my life just when things were starting to get dull, and preventing me from giving up my gypsy lifestyle just yet...

you never can fit it all in, just say what you can. whenever you try to write the "definitive list" of anything you'll finish off, stop your laptop and be lying in bed trying to sleep when you realise you forgot something obvious. as per last year, anyone left off the list can whinge at me directly if so inclined, or alternatively are welcome to take the "go fuck yourself" option: the choice is yours...

the Peter Raven Self Improvement Project....

it occurred to me about six months ago that apart from learning new skills for work and wandering around Europe i hadn't actually picked up any new skills since... um... shit, you know, i can't remember the last new skill i learned, you know? riding a motorcycle? what was fucking forever ago!

a while, anyway.

now, i work in the tumultuous world of Information Technology, where a new product is released onto the market on average once every five minutes globally, where Sun and Adobe insist on updating their Java and Flash platforms any time one of the developers farts (if the number of notifications i get to update is any indication), Apple release yet another piece of unreasonably popular bling every 12 months and Moore's Law has continued to hold true since 1965. it's a good world to live in - i get paid a frankly mind-boggling sum to play with gadgets and boss electrons around, but the amount of reading you need to do - reviews, manuals, whitepapers, etc - is pretty daunting. you're not going to keep up with it all unless you put the effort in. on top of that, there's the constant upgrade path - Windows 3.11 led to 95 led to 98 led to (the living abortion that was) Me led to 2000 to XP to (Me's spiritual successor) Vista and now on to 7. meanwhile, Windows in the server and corporate-space, NT grew up to 4.0 before converging with 2000, then on to 2003 and the stunningly originally-named 2008. on any given Tuesday i'm likely to need to know whether or not i can install Windows 2000 Server on this particular piece of kit, or whether i'll need to use Windows 2000 Advanced Server instead. can i install this app on the Windows 2003 Standard R2 x64 server, or will we want to deploy a VM running the x86 version instead? it's a lot to keep track of, memorise and use, and so by the time i head home i tend to want to do Something Completely Fucking Different like video games, drinking and having sex with women - you know, those good, wholesome pursuits of any lad in their mid-to-late 20's.

then i bogged off overseas and had several months of bumming around with less of the work and and a whole lot of fuck-all to do and i realised that playing video games got a bit old after a while, drinking was expensive and having sex with women... let's just not go there (because i hardly did). hell - apart from this little body of wordage i was a consumer - recipient of a torrent of input, and outputting little more than photos and the occasional whine of "woe is me, i can't get a job and beer is expensive".

getting back i had a number of grand designs, and one of these was that in 2010 i going to learn stuff again, namely another language and a musical instrument. i'd enjoyed French and German while i was travelling, and after digging through my fileserver again i realised i had a whole series of German lessons on it so that sorted that. Shadow's brother is a mad guitar fanatic and was overjoyed to take on the task of helping me learn, so that too was sorted. since then i've managed to get through the first 6 (of 30) German lessons (they're listen-and-repeat and go for half an hour. i do them when i have the opportunity) and i'm Making Progress with the acoustic Mal lent me to practice on.

it's been good fun - especially since i take almost any opportunity to use the German i've been learning on people, and the first time i cranked out a vaguely recognisable version of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd... damn it was a satisfying feeling. it's also reminded me of the joy of learning - for the last few years all the new stuff i was filling my head with was either a) work-related or b) history of the places i was visiting. half of my down-time over the years has been spent doing techie stuff anyway - it's not unusual for me to work 9 hours, then go home and spend another 3 stripping down laptops, refurbishing and rebuilding them. having something unrelated is helping to bend my brain in new directions. sure, sometimes i have to force myself to flick to the next lesson on my Personal Sanity Device when i'm on a decently-long drive (which now lives in my car rather than in my pocket, but that's how live works sometimes) or pulling up some Tab on my file server and actually pick up the damn guitar but... i'm having fun, and having fun being an active participant rather than a passive one like i would be if i were reading a book or watching a movie.

i'd like to think that i'll managed to have a decent grounding in German and be able to play a few tunes decently well by years'-end, but fuck it - i'll not be disappointed if i can't as long as i keep having fun in the meantime... and if this gets me back in the habit of learning new things... well, all the better, really!

mental block...

i had something i wanted to talk about, i know i did, but after half an hour lying in bed trying to work out what it was  i can't for the life of me remember what it was. i could ramble on about housework and video games and generic weekend amusements, but i won't bore you with the details so i guess this is all you're getting for now. i'm sure i'll remember what it was, or i'll thing of something else... such is the way of these things, really...

say something, anything...

i'm suffering from the oddest variety of writer's block at the moment. i know exactly what i want to talk about during the day, but when i get to the part of the day where i have the time to actually apply brain to keyboard i think i'd rather say fuck it and sleep. this is getting a bit bothersome, so instead i'm just going to throw things down as dot points so that i can at least get SOMETHING written down:

• my job is vaguely entertaining. it's also occasionally frustrating, but the joy of getting paid on a weekly basis is that before you know it you're receiving a hit cash injection, which makes is a lot easier to maintian your motivation.
  
• Matt's & Julia's wedding went smashingly well (see earlier post). i woke up with a massive hangover the next day, although that had nothing to do with the wedding: afterwards Sandra and Alison invited Skye over and we sat up until disgustingly late getting through 6 bottle of champers. after which things got somewhat messy.
  
• yesterday evening E and i celebrated our 400th email. i don't even want to know what the tally of SMS's and phone-call minutes would add up to. i'd question the figures, but Exchange logs don't lie...
  
• speaking of which, i'm seriously looking forward to the Easter long-long-weekend which i happen to know is 16 days away, not that i'm counting. at all. in any way shape or form. i mean... 400 isn't THAT many, right? it's only 100/week...
• after enjoying not having a backlog of broken tech to fix, i seem to have found myself with 2 laptops and a mobile phone to repair. i'm not sure how i accumulate these things, but what the hell? it'd be nice if i could earn money from this sort of thi... oh yeah, that's right: i do. a LOT. moo hoo ha ha!
  
• i mean, we mostly email while at work, so that makes it 10 each way, each day. it's not THAT much. and Shadow: that's enough out of you, sunshine!
  
• my poor Audi's had a hard time, having been mishandled by the fucktards at Goodyear in Phillip. seriously - how hard can it be to tighten the nuts on a fucking wheel when you put it back on? it can't be too much to expect, surely. their incompetence was a contributing factor in me running off the road in the wet the other weekend. i'm just lucky i didn't do any serious damage to mein Deutsch auto, although i did have the boys down Canberra VW Centre in Belconnen check it over. THEY at least do good work.
  
• my guitar lessons are going vaguely well. i realised the other day that i can actually play most of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd - slowly, off-tune, but recognisably so. now if only i could engage my brain sufficiently to sit through Lesson 6 my German lessons...
  
• i'm fucking tired and never getting enough sleep. i'm yet to find a good solution for this - even when i have a nice quiet night in at home there's always something to do, someone to call, something to read...
  

and on that note i'm going to try to do something about that last point.

Snippet #17: on outdoing yourself...

i have a reputation when it comes to weddings, primarily that of being a shit-stirrer of the highest order. to date, i've been a Bride's Man once, Best Man twice and MC thrice. i've given speeches on four different occasions where i've generally insulted one or both of the members of the couple, questioned the bride's sanity, even expressed surprise that the bride was wearing white on the day. i've referred to the groom as being "a fat, useless layabout who'd never amount to anything". i've likened commitment to handcuffs and relationships to pits of despair that are doomed to failure... and somehow i've always got away with it. i've written the word "FUCK" in confetti. i've sold cigars to the groom's party. i've jokingly suggested that i'd show the bride's little sister a good time. and the groom's aunt. i've sung the first verse of "What about me" while using my kid brother as a prop. in short, i have a penchant for shennanigans, but somehow people keep inviting me to their weddings and giving me a microphone or a stage.

Matt & Julia got married yesterday in the nicest ceremony i've seen in a long time, and the first in may years that has had absolutely no religious over- or under-tone. it was solemn, and joyful, and completely perfect for who they are. of course, i was doing my best to keep the jokes flowing and Matt distracted. we just had to get him through to the kiss, and when he did it was like the clenched stillness lifted and a cool breeze blew through the clearing. from there on it was just a reception with too much beer and wine and all was joy.

we eat and people are having a great time, rolling into speeches which everyone kept short and sweet. i'd like to hope that it looked like i had more of a plan than i did - i more or less worked out the order of events as the evening went on. i got everyone's attention and cracked jokes between speakers. Julia's dad then Matt's mum, Elise as Julia's Matron of Honour then me as Best Man, after which i asked if anyone else wanted to say anything at which point Tiernan leapt to his feet and was informed that no, he was NOT permitted to speak. Julia un-ban-hammered him for a couple of minutes, until he started getting inappropriate and i ushered him back to his seat (we'd rehearsed it beforehand, when they told me i wasn't to let him speak. i couldn't help it - it was too good an opportunity to miss). Marcia took her cue and raised a toast before Matt & Jules made a show of cutting one of the 100 cupcakes Jules had made the day before, and with all the other formalities done i went to hit Go on the MP3 player Matt had given me for the Bridal Dance. i get it started and they start to dance awkwardly, so distracted by the fact that they're dancing in front of 87 of their friends and family that that it takes them a moment before they realise that what they're dancing to is not, in fact, Phoenix by The Butterfly Effect. i'm standing by the jukebox with a growing grin on my face as i watch them stop, ears pricked up, trying to work out what's wrong, the realisation dawning on them when the lyrics start

"Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down..."

that they have just fallen victim, at their own wedding, to a RickRolling.

i've told this to people over and people ask me how i'm still breathing. how the fuck did i survive? to be honest, they reacted exactly how i'd expected them to: i got a high-five and a hug, after which i legged it. see, when i'd seen Rick Astley on the list on Matt's Creative i couldn't help myself. i knew i just had to. the crowd seemed divided into the camp who had no idea what was going on, the group who thought that "Never Gonna Give You Up" is a lovely song and the rest of them who got the joke. by my reckoning it's the biggest, maddest thing i've ever managed to pull off at a wedding. the trick now is going to be finding some way of beating it.

the trick, you see, is to be audacious without being out-and-out insulting, make sure your gags are appropriate to the people you're playing them on and above all: make sure they're utterly harmless. i've gotta say tho, that i'm feeling pretty good about that one. there can't be too many peopel who can say that they RickRolled a wedding and by my reckoning this will keep my infamy-rating high for quite some time to come...

mi vida loca...

ok, so things got crazy. er. crazier. i know my life is fairly well known for being more than moderately fucked up at the best of times, but this is getting ridiculous. 3 weeks ago i got on a plane for Perth - i spoke of this. i was unenthused. 2 weeks later i was back in Canberra wondering why i'd returned. the original plan was to hang around a week then fly out again, get back to the real world and bed in for the long haul. 4 days after landing i was quietly cruising the job ad's scoping out what Server Engineer jobs were available back out west. i'd been sitting around late on Saturday night having a conversation that went along the lines of:

"So... when do you leave?"
well, i WAS looking at getting out this thursday.
"Really? Well I've got Thursday through Monday off work..."
is that so? well i've not booked my flights yet...

so i hung around. sound familiar? all i can say is that it's nice having a flexible schedule. by the end of the following week i had 2 job interviews lined up in Canberra for the following Wednesday so i bit the bullet and booked flights for Tuesday. 8 hours of transit on Tuesday. 2 interviews Wednesday. 2 job offers Thursday. 1 contract signed on Friday and i started a 4 month contract on Monday at a frankly ridiculous pay rate. it ends on 30/June and has no possibility of extension, but that's ok since it's entirely likely that i'll be on the next flight out west.

yes. that crazy.

so what happened in Perth? i'd planned on having a quiet time, bum around, see people when i felt like it but otherwise take a chill pill and Wait Awhile. maybe get in a dive off Rottnest. it never works out that way though and i wound up being busy as busy as busy. seriously, next time i'll drop the pretense of relaxing and stock up on caffeine in advance... except that next time i'm likely to be be hanging around considerably longer than a week or two.

things seem to be dropping into place - as i've said far too many times over the last month or so: we have convergence. i was in Perth at just the right time to be in just the right place and meet just the right person. i came back to Canberra and walked into a job that fit in with my plans perfectly: enough time in Canberra to get everything done that needs to be done, that'll pay enough for me to put together another nest-egg and will finish early enough to have the time to score a short contract in Perth before i jet off for a while in September. it's like i've been saying for years now - when things are meant to happen they just work, and for the last few weeks it's all been effortless. i wasn't feeling settled in Canberra and suddenly that's a good thing. i was getting itchy feet and now i've got a reason to scratch them. the reasons i left Perth all those years ago have crumbled into dust and scattered in the wind (although they still don't have deregulated trading hours. fucking parochial bastards) and if it's too irritating there there's already a Get Out Of Jail Free card being waved in my face with the potential of leading me to Melbourne. or just back to Canberra. it's not like i'm short on options. i could see if i could wrangle another jaunt in London if it came down to it.

yes. that crazy.

it's funny... or at least, i've been laughing. i couldn't have planned anything this much fun and for once my gypsy lifestyle has worked in my favor. the sad thing is that no matter what i do i'll be breaking someone's heart. i stay in Canberra, people in Perth try to convince me to come back. i move to Perth and people in Canberra are going to make sad-faces at me. i figure that if i'm going to upset people no matter what i do i might at least make myself happy. it's either that or fuck everyone off and go somewhere completely different, make new friends in Vancouver or wherever and proceed to break THEIR hearts when i eventually get antsy and fuck off into the distance again.

i don't really want to do that. one day i'll settle down and stop wandering... but i get the feeling that it'll be something that just happens rather than something i plan. i'll turn around one day and realise that i've been in the same job for a couple of years, living in the same house in the same city and find that the biggest surprise will be that i'll have absolutely no desire to move on again. in the meantime i'll be taking the opportunities that present themselves - there's nothing to stop me paying the rent on my room in the sharehouse and bogging off until further notice...

if only because i have nothing better to do...

every time i get on a plane, ever since i first traveled on my own and not under the watchful eye of the generic parental units, i walk down the gangway and as i step through the heavy door i extend the index- and middle-fingers of my right hand together, kiss them and press them against the fuselage as i pass through. every time i get off again i repeat the procedure with my left hand. the hand isn't important per se - it's just that this is the bit i can easily reach. the funny thing is that no flight attendant have ever commented to me about it, or even visibly noticed - not even on Virgin Blue flights where the hosties seem to get paid to have a little bit more personality.

beforehand i tend to wind up sitting in the departure lounge staring out the window, invariably eyeing off the plane that's about to take me wherever it is i'm going. once i get there i'm off without a backward glance, but before the flight? this is when i got time to kill. the problem is that i have a fairly good brain for mechanics, so i wind up appreciating the engineering that goes into these beasts of burden and invariably this means pondering what can go wrong. things like a hydraulic hose on the landing gear that was missed by maintenance which bursts when the gear retracts, preventing the gear from deploying for landing. or microfractures in the engine mounts that cause one of them to shear mid-flight "Donnie Darko"-style, causing the plane to spiral out of control. a calculation error in the GPS that makes the plane think it's higher than it should be and auto-correct into the wrong airspace. don't get me wrong - i've no fear of flying whatsoever, and the closest to fear i've ever come to when flying was the last time i flew into Melbourne: i was on the Red Eye Horror out of Perth and was so exhausted when i left that i passed out within a minute or two of the seatbelt light turning off, pillow between my skull and bulkhead, snoring away until i woke with a start to howling engines and a bump. i stared out the window in confusion thinking we were crashing and wondering why it was light outside, freaking out quietly until my brain engaged, i realised that i'd slept through the entire flight and we'd just fucking landed. we're not going to crash today either. i know this because of the pure and simple knowledge that this is not in fact a good day to die. that day will inevitably come, but my headbones tell me that it isn't today and i trust my headbones.

i remember when Going Somewhere was a major production - organise for this or that to be done, lock the bike up secure and out of sight, secure the car. organise with the housemates, emergency contact details, promises that i'll call mum (or the girlfriend when i have one - it's funny how often some of them wind up sounding like my mum...) AS SOON AS I LAND. have days planned out in advance, who i'll see, where i'll be, what i'm going to do. sometimes it's been a logistical nightmare, so complicated i've had to map it all out on a spreadsheet, printed calendars from Outlook complete with phone numbers in case i'm delayed and projected travel times so that i can be at each appointment on time and not miss anyone out.

i'm chockers for thursday, but i've got coffee at The Moon in Northbridge from 8:30 until 10:30 tonight with Potato Paul and if you can make it to that i'll have time for you... yeah... no, he's cool... no, i can't really push back any further, i'm meeting my brother for our annual drunken midnight stroll through Lathlain... wait... no, how about tomorrow night? we'll do a run to Alfred's Kitchen... i'll pick you up on the way through at 11, k? right. gotta go, i need to get to Spearwood now...

compared to usual, this trip to Perth has been almost lackadaisical in its planning... or lack thereof. i booked this flight yesterday at about midday. i still haven't got around to booking the flight home, in part by design but for the most part out of sheer laziness and apathy. i've got a few things on for the next couple of days i've not set too much in stone. i have my entire schedule in my head and it's not because i've got a better memory, it's just that i've kept it simple and open. my friends seem to be well trained - i advertised on my Facebook status

Peter Raven is preparing for another Tour of Duty in the battlefields of Perth...

and had a pile of people list out what times on what days they're free. it's no help for them to ask me when i want to do stuff - if they tell me when they're free i can make it all mesh... 90% of the time, anyway.

i'm not even sure why i'm going. the official reason is that i have a couple of weeks before i start work, so i might as well. Binky seems to think i'm coming over to be her savior or something. mum's convinced i'm coming to help keep her sane when my grandmother comes to visit. i'm not even really in the fucking mood. as Little Andrew was driving me to the airport (he picked me up from home and then ferried me to coffee so we could at least keep that appointment - part of the reason i booked QF719 (the 7:30PM direct flight over) was because i knew i'd be able to go to my weekly coffee at Essen beforehand) i could have sworn i told him screw it dude, i just ran out of "Give A Fuck". hang a right up Majura and make for Horse Park Drive, yeah? but either he missed it or i had a momentary disconnect between brain and mouth and it didn't make it out. i jumped out at the dropoff, thanked him and waited while he tore off in his beat up little Corolla and nothing more was said about the incident which obviously hadn't happened in the first place.

i DID need to get out of Canberra for a while - that much is for sure. i very nearly wound up hopping a flight on Delta to San Francisco, then continuing on around the bay to Santa Cruz so i could spend a week cluttering up MCG's couch (i may get around to talking about my second meeting with MCG (see Paris: unexpected delays may occur in transit...) in Copenhagen someday, but for the time being it will have to remain shrouded in mystery) but she wound up being ridiculously busy and not really in the position to entertain so the plan got the coathanger-treatment and i moved on to reconceive a better one. i pondered fucking off to Cairns or something and going diving, but being between jobs i'm watching the cash a fair bit and trying to reserve as much as possible so i can rejoin the 2 Wheel brigade as soon as humanly possible. my Old Man's bike's been sitting idle, on the other hand, and my old kit is sitting in my luggage down in the hold. parenthetically, i should probably add that my old helmet, jacket and gloves take up something in the order of 50% of the volume of the contents in that bag. if not for the fucking lid i'd be backpacking it. i pulled it out of the cupboard today, pulling on my old cordura jacket (the leather one being WAY too heavy for air travel), summer gloves and helmet and suited up for the first time in nearly a year and a half, re-adjusting everything to accommodate my considerably less rotund frame and caught myself looking at my gloved hands as i flexed my fingers and gripped the imaginary handlebars in front of me, revelling in the feeling of... rightness... or was it righteousness? i need to get another bike, and soon.

Perth's about the same cost to get to (or cheaper) as Cairns from Canberra, but it's a fuckload cheaper proposition when most of the fun i have there is social and most of my expenditure consists of beer and petrol. that, and i might be able to get a dive off Rottnest if i play my cards right.

either way, i've been somewhat unenthused... no, that's a lie. i've been struggling to give a fuck, which is strange because a week ago i was ready and rearing to go. then the afternoon rolled around on Monday and i lost the will to do much more than stare listlessly at the clouds on the horizon while i sat on the back slab drinking coffee, remembering when i was out amongst it... just... as much as i was missing being out in the world the actual impetus to get out of my chair and out of that fucking town had left me, every idea i had screamed "EFFORT!" and the needle on my "Give A Fuck-o-meter" started straining against the peg marked "Sie keine haben".

i struggled through last week, battling falling energy levels and high blood sugar. a week of fasting, careful eating, a trip to the quack and large quantities of prescription pharmaceuticals later and my sugars were dropping again, i was sleeping properly and i was moving around again, but somehow i lost the drive and i lost the care. still, i managed to pull my credit card and book the flight, i even managed to get on the fucking plane, so i can't be doing too poorly, right?

i don't know... i've been running on autopilot a lot lately. i have a sudden flurry of activity where i analyse every nuance of a conversation, then switch into Spinal mode where i do and say whatever first comes to mind and that seems to work just as well. i just roll with the punches and let my subconscious be my guide, living life like the drunk guy in a movie who's staggering down the street and seems to miraculously miss every banana peel, broken paver and pile of dog shit along the way, notices a dollar coin on the ground and when he bends to pick it up ducks his head just in time to miss being hit by an errant beer bottle. it seems like i've dodged a few bullets in the last little while, not because i have particularly good reactions, but because i just happened to get distracted by something shiny and not be standing where the bullet wanted to go. how does this relate to fucking off to Perth? fuck knows. being a Man Without A Plan isn't too bad a thing when you get in the groove and Mass Effect 2 on my Alienware laptop distracts me nicely from the the complete lack of and idea what the fuck i'm doing, as well as my inability to reliably line up a date for saturday night. i'm onto my 4th cup of the gritty brown whore's afterbirth-in-a cup that Qantas insists on calling coffee and i'll be landing in an hour or so now and i'll sort it out when i get there. might as well make the most of it. i'm either going to Perth because i have to be there or i have to be away from Canberra - which it is i'm far from caring about right now...

when life turns you around so quickly you suddenly realise you're staring at the back of your own head...

have you ever stood on top of a mountain looking into the distance and wondered where it all went wrong? it's usually not too hard to trace back the steps, tally up all the times you zigged when you should have zagged, when you said just the wrong thing to the wrong person or went in half-cocked and find the total sum of your mistakes. this is where you look at the untidy calculus of your own failure and vow to do things right from now on and all that nonsense that keeps you moving forward in life and on to the next fucking debacle.

you know what's really fucked up? it's when you're sitting outside with a coffee after one of the most fantiastically awesome weeks you can remember while the cool change rolls in trying to work out where you went RIGHT. you look at the trigger points and think nah, couldn't be...

like how you started frequenting the same cafe every week on a Wednesday and through sheer happenstance met some interesting new people...
or you decided to be friendly to someone who looked a bit lonely and made a new friend...
or how you showed respect to someone who deserved it, and received it back tenfold...
or how you spoke your mind at work once too often, leading your bosses to give you the shaft...
and how getting the shaft was the best thing that had happened to you in ages...

see, a week ago i lost my job. it came time for my end-of-probation meeting, i was asked to meet my boss (who'd come down from Sydney for the occasion) offsite and was told politely-but-firmly that they considered me a poor fit for the team and so would be terminating my employment as at that moment. this was a bit of a surprise to me since they'd relied pretty heavily on me over the last 3 months, but fuck 'em. i was going to ask for a massive pay rise with the threat that overwise i'd walk, so the result was the same. an hour and a bit later i was sitting at coffee with 2 interviews lined up for the next 2 days, chatting with Lil' Andrew and Cathy (whom i barely knew, but seemed good value) and pondering my future. Andrew i've known for years - he's a nice kid and he's made a point of coming to meet me for coffee on my weekly Cafe Essen runs because craves same the regular social amusements i do and he seems to be using it as a catalyst because he's regularly inviting other people to come along which is how Cathy wound up being there. 2 hours later i had someone to go drinking with on Saturday night. by the time i got to Thursday morning's interview i had another one to go to later that afternoon, and i'd received a message from Wiza, the Intern back where i'd been working saying

"hey, where are you?"
i got fired yesterday, hasn't anyone told you?
"WHAT?"
meet me up tonight, i'll tell you all about it

by the time we met up that evening i already had a job offer.
by that time the next day i'd sat another 2 interviews and had another offer on the table.

2 days had passed since i walked off site and i already had job offers. it's like when you break up from the girlfriend who was pissing you off, but not so much that you were quite ready to dump yourself, step out in the blinking sunlight of singledom to find out that you've somehow started to exude sex-appeal and all the pretty girls want your phone number.

Sandra and Alison are in fine form when they get home and want to go out on the town and i tag along as designated-driver (we're going to go dance, can we leave you with our-) handbag minder until they decide they've had enough at 2AM and it's time for bed. i've not been out on the town for a few games of pool and a bit of a groove in so long it feels as if the last time i was in a night club i had to dodge Neanderthals on the way to the mens, so i was having a great time, even when the girls were happily dancing with each other and i was propping up a wall and sipping the Light Beers the girls were bribing me with.

Saturday arrives and i have a chilled out day with my traditional morning coffee and the last chapter of Bioshock (which i was replaying in preparation for the sequel to come out) that leads into a pleasant evening sitting by Lake Burley Griffin sipping Gin & Tonics with Cathy while the sun sets and Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog back at mine when the wind picks up too much to be comfortable and ends with me dropping her off in Civic after politely declining an offer to come out dancing. 2 nights in a row's a bit beyond me at the moment - i'm no longer quite in the form i was in back when i was in central Europe. catch you up next week? you betcha.

on Sunday i sleep and chill out and watch some TV that's piled up while i've run around like a crazy person. on Sunday i tentatively accept a job from a company i'll call Q who's 3 business lines are "IT Virtualisation" (translation: Computer Black Magic), "Commercialisation" and "Motorsport". yeah, they've got their own fucking Rally team. Rachel (who works for the client i was looking after and has more clue in her head than the entire company who just fired me combined) is good mates with Denis who runs Q and has been badgering me to take the job with the vague promise that they'll "make it worth my while". fuck it you know, why the hell not? i decide, and hit Send on the email.

Monday's spent hanging with AB, doing surgery on my old laptop and modding it to accept his graphics card. it's a free upgrade for him and a chance to offload a hand-me-down for me so we're all winners. i catch up with April which i've not made time for in ages and i grab kebabs with the boys. it's low-grade amusement, but it's relaxed and the tension of the last few months has been leaking out like the condensation from my Audi's air con. i'm in just the right frame of mind for Tuesday. it's Australia Day and Wiza from Indonesia is about to get a taste of a good ol' fashioned Australia Day Party. she'd dropped me a line early on Monday asking if i had plans for Tuesday, so i invited her along.

it's a slow start - i'm sleeping like crap and it's killing my mornings so i don't pick Wiza up until midday and we're not there until 1PM, by which time the party's in full swing and Matt & Jules' place is packed to the rafters. i can barely get in the fucking front door, my arms full of drinks and Wiza trailing in my wake wondering what the fuck she's got herself in for. i can't take a step without returning a greeting - hey, how you doing? fancy seeing you here and i'm not 2 steps into the living room before i'm screaming WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE!!?? because bold as brass in an armchair sits Jocelyn who lives in fucking Perth! through the living room minefield and into the dining area i'm not surpised to see Amanda. The Redhead. The Ex-Girlfriend Formerly Known As Kitten. i'm not surprised because Matt's a fucking champion and he messaged me when she arrived so i wouldn't get blindsided. i eject out the back door shortly thereafter, all the beers now in the fridge apart from the one in my hand. i've made my arrival and take shelter from the heat down the side of the house and enjoy the breeze while the party ebbs and flows around me. i could circulate, or i could sit right here and let people come to me so i sit and drink beers and talk to whoever shows up, dishing out and receiving insults from anyone who comes into range in equal measure.

after a while Amanda emerges and seeks me out. the last i'd heard of her she'd managed to get knocked up to some guy, married him and named the resulting spawn Samantha. i cop the sympathy plea pretty quickly - the guy's an arsehole, the marriage is in a shambles, she's moving back in with her sister (who's own marriage was on the rocks when last i saw her 2+ years ago), he's threatening to take the kid away, blah blah blah. i am unmoved. i cannot be swayed. i've heard this fucking story before and the last time resulted in us diving in the sack less than 2 hours later, thus commencing our infamous "second go of it" which eventually resulted in me buying a one-way ticket to London (fuck - i never quite got around to thanking her for that - i should do that next time i want to put the boot into her). i have no sympathy to give here, but somehow i manage not to be directly insulting.

that sounds horrible. give me a call sometime and we'll grab a coffee somewhere, i say to her.
"Yeah, that sounds great! Except I don't have a phone at the moment..."
really? well that sucks. i'm sure you'll sort something out...

yes, i'm being uncharacteristicly petty. you'll have to forgive me. or you can build a bridge and get the fuck over it. it's not that i hate her anymore. it's simmered down to a thick, creamy ambivalence with big chunks of disdain that emerge when she makes the mistake of assuming that i might still give a fuck about the hole she dug and buried herself in up to her teeth. i'm just happier than a necrophile with a key to the morgue that there is no possible way that her child was fathered by me, is all i'm saying.

ok, i'll admit it. i'm a little bitter, but with a crisp finish and the aftertaste of a cricket bat in the face...

meanwhile, i'm having a hell of a time. everyone's having fun and i'm in fine form. Matt, the Tinman and i are bouncing jokes off each other at an post-graduate level, and every once in a while Rick has us all rolling on the floor amongst the empty beer bottles and cigarette ends. even glancing across the group to see Wiza having an animated conversation with 3 of my ex-girlfriends doesn't put a crimp on my day, but eventually the sun starts to dip and i remember that i promised to take her off to find a good spot for sunset photos.

we hit the Cotter, but the light's wrong. she's loving the chance to see the bush and i'm having fun playing with her DSLR, but the clouds have rolled in and killed the light so we head for Mt Ainslie - it's a cliche, but a worthy one and the sunset we get is totally worth it. we find a nice spot on the rail and take it in turns to rattle off photos and talk composition and lighting until the fireworks kick off, marking the end of an awesome day. the rest is just dinner on the way to dropping her back at her place and a wind-up chat in the evening breeze while we re-hydrate and just past midnight i collapse into bed with a smile on my face and massively high blood sugar from drinking the wrong sort of beer steadily through the day.

next thing i know i'm waking up and it's today. i stagger out of my room in a haze that i'd love to blame on drinking too much, but which i know is because i've fucked my diet and let my sugar levels slip well and truly into the "forget pills, find some fucking insulin before your feet fall off" zone. while i come up with a game plan for how i'm going to get them back down again i check my email and drink the coffee that i crave more than life itself and find out that Denis has accepted my politely phrased demands and agreed to pay me the Golden Figure.

see, 4 and a bit years ago when i was working in my first real Government job at the tender age of 25, someone asked me "what are your career goals?" now, at the time i was pretty happy with the world. i had a hot little Redhead in my bed each night, a gorgeous, fast bike and a sharehouse that was like one rolling party. i was young, dumb and full of... potential, so i said the first thing that popped into my mind:

well, i don't know LONG term, but by the time i'm 30 i want to be a Senior Tech and/or a Team Leader and i want to be earning [insert a suitably large, round number here].

somehow, as time went by, this became more and more serious and it started driving me on. how was i going to get that sort of cash? for starters, i had to be better than good, so i went out to be The Best. i had to take on more responsibility, so it took on Everything. when it came time for contract re-negotiation i went in hard and when they argued the point i was out and in a higher-paying job before the door had a chance to swing closed, and so it went. my confidence was rarely more than half a step ahead of my arrogance, and together we fired up like a caffeine-guided missile right up until i turned around one day and said nah, fuck it. i'm off to London and the focus changed.

when i got back in the country i didn't think too much about my old 5-year plan. the months of begging for a job in London had left me in the mindset that a job was a job and if i managed to not take a back-step in pay then i was lucky. 3 months later and i'm back in form with enough cash that i'm not desperate for the next gig and the theory to test that if you don't ask you never get.

so i asked. and i got.

Senior Server Engineer. promise of Team Lead for projects. pay rate bang on the number i pulled so blithely out of my arse way back when i was just an arrogant little shit in a polo shirt.

in a week i've gone from Zero to to Hero with a pinch of Caligula rolled in. the Perfect Storm of having made the right moves at the right times and the right people deciding to lend a helping hand for no other reason than that they can and they seem to think i deserve it for some reason you don't completely understand.

a week ago at coffee Andrew and Cathy asked me what i was going to do and i couldn't tell them. go to Perth for a while, maybe? or i could apply for jobs in Melbourne or Wellington or something... take the chance to look outside Canberra for a bit. it took less than hours for all those thoughts to get knocked clear out contention, as if the Universe decided to interrupt and say "Bad Pete! Sit! Stay! You're going to hang around Canberra until further notice whether you like it or not!" for a moment there it looked like losing my job was going to give me a good excuse to look further afield. further reflection seems to indicate that i'm exactly where i'm supposed to be until further notice and really, who am i to argue with the Universe?

taking stock amidst the settling dust...

some months ago i stared at the blank screen of my Eee and realised i couldn't fill it. my fingers jabbed at the keys for a while and a trickle of incomprehensible uselessness chased the cursor what i sat on the Ausabout bus until i gave up and stared out the window and watched the Austrian countryside slide by. over the next month i opened the text editor a few times and it returned my blank stare with an impassionate LED-backlit glare until i time and again admitted defeat and went off to do something else. the words didn't want to come so i left them where they were and moved on.

tonight i found myself staring up into the matt-grey sky and felt the falling droplets evaporate the moment they touched my skin while i wondered where it all went wrong. but they didn't go wrong. or right. they just went their own way and i let them carry me on while i waited for something to happen.

pulling back into Canberra was like waking up again after a longer-than-normal dream, Shadow standing at Canberra Airport looming like a brick-shithouse wrapped in teddy-bear fabric with a grin on his face wider than the sky over the desert, Sandra dashing up the stairs in front of the house and hurling herself at me for a tackle-hug. the old town hadn't changed and to be honest i'd expected nothing else. i couldn't remember the names of some of the streets, but i could remember the way without having to think about it. some people i caught up with couldn't believe i was standing in front of them again. some people had barely noticed i'd left. a week after landing i had a car and a job and a place to sleep and in the 3 months since i've been pretty much just rolling along in a semi-aimless fashion, waiting for something to happen.

nothing in particular, mind. anything.

i've had a couple of trips to Sydney - one at the behest of my new employers, one to meet up with the Grey Man who'd come back to Oz for the xmas break. i got through Perth and watched my kid brother get married. i passed through Melbourne and saw friends i'd not seen in 5 or 8 years. i'd gotten everything that would require me to be Not In Canberra done and out of the way so that i could focus on sitting around and doing fuck-all for a while, all planned out so that i could get my feet properly on the ground and put some roots down.

of course, it took not even 2 months for me to start going stir-crazy, pulling up lastminute.com.au every once in a while and having a speculative glance at how much flights would be to Wellington or Hiroshima or Cairns, pondering how the remnants of my Bike Fund would last if i put off getting back onto two wheels for another year and burned the cash going somewhere. fucking anywhere. see, while the old girl's exactly where i left it, the people in it are moving on faster than laksa through an octogenarian and i can't help but feeling that i'm just one more wedding away from being a dusty shadow fading in the rear-view mirror. my friends had been in the process of settling down, getting married and having kids (in no particular order, mind) for a while, but when it's happening in front of your eyes you tend not to notice so much. fuck off for a year and the progress becomes far more pronounced. when yet another friday rolled round where everyone was "having a quiet night in with the missus" or "looking after the kid" i gave up and buried myself in my room with a bag of salt & vinegar chips and the latest role playing game on my laptop, or sitting outside staring at the stars while the backlight from the screen flickered with Facebook updates and pictures of motorcycles i couldn't quite bring myself to take for test-rides.

i've found myself stuck in a limbo of my own construction - settling down and building a nest means i can't easily schedule trips to interesting parts of the world, fucking off to travel means i can't easily settle down and doing either would feel too much like admitting defeat so i've wound up in a holding pattern while i try to decide whether to land or to chase that bright spot on the horizon. it's all well and good being a confirmed bachelor when you've got plenty of other single friends to enjoy it with, but when it's down to you and the sad lonely sons of bitches who've been single about as long as you've known them... well, it's time to face the fact that you're hairy, ugly and generally undesirable and should probably just give in to the inevitable dingy bedsit filled with comics, computer parts and cats. there's only so far being the funny, well-travelled guy will take you and after that you're back to staring into another blank screen while the Lynx deodorant fades beneath your own personal eau de desperation.

the thing is that nothing went wrong - i got in and my life reconstructed itself around me... it's just that the old comfortable coat doesn't fit so well anymore. after months of grovelling and begging for work in London the job market couldn't employ me fast enough, but chasing the career just isn't exciting me like once it did. hanging with the old crew has been brilliant, but i just can't get enthused about buying a house when my head's still elsewhere.

there's one thing that constantly resolves out of the static, but it's like smoke, dissipating when i disturb the air by trying to get close, fairy-gold fading to dust in the morning light. there are no answers to be found there and it gets me no closer to understanding what i really want to do with myself long-term. 10 weeks through Europe, then a week in London, a couple of days in Hong Kong, a week in Perth and then another in Melbourne - not a day was wasted in over 3 months, so every day i spend going through the motions here feels like my life is slipping away from me, falling through my fingers... until i remember that this is what most of life is - those boring, unproductive days where you wake up, go to work, spend 8 hours doing something before going home, entertaining yourself before you fall asleep to do it all again tomorrow. i should probably get used to that if i'm to avoid going batshit-fucking-bananas.

so, of course, my survival instinct has given me plenty of buffer before i have to actually make a fucking decision. i'm off to the US in September this year for Shadow and The Boss's 20th wedding anniversary. i can sit tight with the excuse that i'm "saving for the trip" when really i'm really just avoiding laying down tap-roots until something gives me a nudge in the right direction, whatever that happens to be. either way, for the time being i'm trying not to think about it too much, in as much as that's possible for me. it really is a case of "look at the shiny-shiny!" - the more distracted i get, the happier i am. how long i can keep that up? well that remains to be seen...