Author: Robert Hook

Every Little Damned Thing

I wasn’t going to count down, and I’m trying desperately to not close down, but today is the 1st of November. And every damned little thing that can go wrong, does go wrong.

I have to replace the electric stove, and am replacing the electric stove, since the old one is old and not working well. So I went on Saturday morning to a factory seconds white goods place, and got a simple cheap stove. But I cannot install it myself, because this is Australia, and we need electricians to do that, so I arranged for the stove to be delivered this afternoon, and for the electrician to come later this evening.

Except it’s now after 5:00 and the stove hasn’t turned up and the company closed for the day at 4:30 and the driver has not, as promised, rung to indicate when he would arrive.

And I took the afternoon of work to be here, and am dealing with several significant faults at work, across VPN and mail and chat.

The way things are looking at the moment, the following is probable:

1) the electrician will arrive and the stove won’t be here, so I’ll get charged for him doing nothing, and then have to wait days to get him back again;

2) I will need to work on the weekend or do a 12-16 hour day tomorrow, working into the night, to make up time.

Why does every part of dealing with getting out of this house and onto a plane turn into a nightmare just because third parties cannot turn up on time, will not make allowances for their customers working full time jobs, and charge me hugely for the privilege.

And another thing.

The unrelenting, constant, overwhelming, repeated negativity.

Is it a Brisbane thing, an Australian thing, a human thing, or just the habit of those I know?

I’m on a very short count down to the evening where I go through customs and onto a plane, and fly away into a new life. I know that I am jumping without a parachute, and that I’m trusting to my habit of arsing things through at the last moment, relying on informed laziness. So yes, your words of caution are justified.

But please, could you not be encouraging, rather than relentlessly discouraging? Or at the very least not line up like a Greek chorus to tell me that your cousin said the work situation is grim, that your mum said that she heard that public transport is expensive, that your brother reckons the bottom is going to fall out of the housing market here?

This whole exercise is hard enough as it is, and has been relentlessly grinding for the entire year, without people lined up beside the road chanting “you are doomed, you are doomed, you are doomed”

Another Thing I Won’t Miss

Politics. The particular small-town, small-mind politics that is a characteristic of Brisbane. Oh, I know that there’s going to be small-town, small-mind politics wherever I go, but it’s the politics of Brisbane that I’m well and truly over.

I don’t know what it is about this town. It may be the oft-referred to swift transition from large country town to branch-office city that happened from about 1980 onward. It may be the one-degree of separation that is Brisbane.

That certainly doesn’t help matters. Everyone knows everyone, or is related to them, or dated them, or hated them. Half the re-enactors are goths and half the goths are into steampunk and the morris dancers know all the folkies who play at the re-enactors handfastings. So all the politics are personal, not about abstracted issues. A discussion between two aged protagonists is always a rehash of some decades old slight, and battle lines are drawn up between tribes of newcomers who know only the folklore, and not the reasons why so-and-so will not talk to such-and-such now.

So no. I won’t miss the endless, mindless, reflexive squabbles and cat calling, and the tribal slogans and toy drum tin drum banging over campaigns to conquer mole hills.

This is how it is.

Recent weeks, and recent days, suggest strongly to me that most folk just really don’t grasp what I’m doing. This business of me folding my tents and vanishing into the night is not simple, or trivial, and particularly not temporary.

Let’s talk about the effort involved, to start with. It’s not about packing, and buying a plane ticket. It’s going through the exercise of obtaining a 5 year working visa. It’s making connections with IT agencies in the UK, and fencing schools, and potential places to lay my head before I get settled. It’s working out what my existing insurance does and does not cover, and how I need to re-jig my banking and tax, and whether I need a NIN when I arrive or I can sort it out afterwards. It’s sorting out to rent my house, and getting the stairs fixed and walls washed and garden cleared, and sorting out the new insurance. It’s carrying out an aggresive triage on every single Thing I have accumulated in my life – this to go in the backpack, that to go to charity, the other to be packed in the correct box for later shipping, all of those to wait endlessly for people to pick up and carry away, and the rest to get to the garbage dump.

And all of that to be fitted around a full time job, and the normal round of housekeeping, and shopping, and cooking, and eating and sleeping.

So no, I don’t have time to be going to fencing two or three times each week, nor to go dancing once a week, nor to be going out several times a week.

I don’t think people really grasp that I’m not coming back. If it doesn’t work out in England, I’ll be trying Spain, or the Netherlands, or Canada, or Japan. Or at worst, Melbourne or Sydney. Oh sure, I may come back occasionally for weddings, funerals, babies. But the nature and extent of the effort is not shaped toward a few months there and then back.

That fencing I did at the PSSF end-of-term party on Sunday? That’s the last time I will be fencing with PSSF. Unless you meet me in a different context, we won’t cross blades again. I will probably drop in to the training hall once more, to pick up Delia’s sword and return some books and drop off my uniform, but it will be a flying visit. I will probably go to the October Brisbane Swordplay in the park afternoon, to say farewell to a few people, but then my fencing gear will be packed away ready for shipping.

So there it is and thus it is. I’m on a strict timetable that I’m resolutely not counting down, and then at the end of November I’ll be flying away into the night. Thus it is, and there it is.

Things I will miss, Item the Second

I might miss Brisbane’s facades and buildings. None of it is very old, and much of it is pretty plain, but if you look up as you walk around you’ll see all these facades from before 1920, often with lovely typography on their signs, often with gargoyles or decals, and ferns and grass growing from the cracks in the bricks.

Brisbane has always had a love/hate affair with Old Buildings, alternately knocking them down in the middle of the night and ordering the facades to be preserved. This has often led to facades standing in front of empty lots for years at a time while the developer secretly hoped the old bricks would just collapse and they could get on with the business of installing another Macdonalds and Starbucks. It’s particularly tragic on the south side of the river, where along the bank and near the back some old warehouses and pubs survive, but mostly they are erased.

It might be an artefact of this country having no depth to its history that causes it to let any traces wash away. More likely it’s because this country ascribes rabidly to the myths of the Outback, and the Drover and Shearer and Pioneer, and so only see a rural history made up of rusting stump-jump ploughs and grey-red shearing sheds with corrugated iron roofs.

So if you’re walking around Brisbane, particularly the central locations – look up.

Can has Visa?

I’m fairly sure that I would have found it easier to wash up at Brighton as an illegal immigrant seeking political asylum from a capricious and repressive regime (which I suspect it will be under Prime Minister Abbot) than it is to seek a visa legitimately. It has been a long, fraught journey, and it’s not over yet.

The online application system is pretty good and the supporting information mostly good, but maddeningly vague in a number of very key areas. Particularly when it came to advising what happens at each stage of the process, and what supporting documents are needed when seeking an ancestral visa.

I laboured late into the night, last night, to gather all the pieces of paper that I believed I needed for the “visa interview” at the consulate here today. I put on business clothes, and shaved, and wore a tie. And then when I got there I found out that the interview was just taking my fingerprints and yet another photo, and that I still had to bundle all the paperwork into an envelope and send it to Sydney. Based on the price of Platinum Express Post, the Post-Master-General or his modern equivalent must carry it personally on the back of a winged unicorn.

My understanding is that I now have 8 or 10 days anxious wait to find out if they will grant me the visa. I just want this all to be over.

Swordplay ’11 From Around The Interwebz

There’s been some questions about how Swordplay ’11 went, so I’ll dump some quick links here to things that other folk have already said.

To begin with, Chris Slee has done a great write up saying pretty well everything I’ve either already said, or was going to say. Which saves me saying it. Scott MacDonald has also done a write-up at the ACA web site.

Over on YouTube, Marcus has started uploading the videos he took of the bouts involving GLECA folk, which covers most of the “finals”, and Bob Dodson has put up the long sword and open sword finals.

I cannot for the life of me recall who was in the top 4 of each of the three parts of the contest, although I do recall that it included Ross, Justin and Bob from ACA, James and Mark from SCA, and Cassian from GLECA. My apologies to anyone I’ve missed, my memory is not what it used to be.

With respect to how PSSF members faired in the tournament:
1) Ben went in the sword tournament only, and got knocked out in the first round in a bout with James/Kenji-san;
2) Delia went in the long sword tournament and got knocked out in her first round by me;
3) Delia went in the sword tournament and got knocked out in the first round by Ross from ACA;
4) I went in the long sword tournament and got knocked out in the third round by Cassian;
5) I went in the sword tournament and got knocked out in the second round by Bob.

I hope to post to other videos and photos later.

One of those days.

It’s been one of those. Long, frustrating, not particularly frustrating. Full of scary things and big things and things that throw big shadows.

A real estate agent came through the house today do give me opinions of whether I could rent it out furnished or partially furnished or unfurnished. She left me handfuls of paper explaining this, and encouraging that, and mentioned that I would need to outlay rather more money than I want on some repairs and possibly some modifications. I will have to engage with the opaque mortgage documentation, and front up to the bank, and squeeze it all into the middles of working days.

Meanwhile I still have a ridiculous amount of packing and purging to do, a mountain of day-to-day housework, a garden which has gone completely feral.

My new work computer is very fast, but the missing instructions for installing all the working environment meant that I spent the whole day repeatedly finding out that it was still stuffed up, vey quickly. The urgent issues may or may not have been urgent, and were political, and messy, and people are flailing and everything has to be done right now.

But here at the end of an overlong day I’m sitting on a train, and the middle-aged hippy across from me has taken out her guitar and is quietly noodling away. It’s an old guitar with a great wide strap made of dark brown crocodile skin. Her fingernails are short, and her fingers calloused from playing, and I can barely hear the guitar over the train noise even though we are sitting knee-to-knee. And that’s what I need right at this moment, and it makes the day ok.

Only if my hair is on fire.

I think I need to educate, or re-educate, my cow-orkers to understand what it means when I put on headphones while working. And there are one or two that I really need to tell that I cannot hear them if they come up behind me and speak softly to attract my attention. On the other hand, most of the reason is that I have run out of attention to spare.

There are certain classes of IT problems that end up occupying my entire consciousness and are extremely difficult to let go of when I walk out the door, particularly if they take several days to resolve. Maybe physicists and philosophers have better mental work benches, and can put the work down to re-emerge from their deep congnitive dives without the bends. I can’t.

If the nature of the problem is both time-bound and space-bound, I need to disappear inside my own head. What I mean is when the symptoms of the problem and the behaviour of possible contributors is spread across human-scale rather than machine-scale time, and where more than one thread of operation is in play, where computation is smeared across the possibility space.

I really have no perfect tool for disecting these sorts of problems. My workbench is scattered with a variety of tools for working on different parts of the problem. If you looked over my shoulder you would usually see that I have a text file open called “notes” or “defect xyz”, which is a mix of apparently context-free reminders to myself and a scantily sketched monologue as I propose and reject different theories. You would usually see a paper notepad with faint pencil scribbles, and a variety of abstract diagrams, mostly scratched out. I would probably have an IDE open with code highlighted, and a terminal window showing logs. What you cannot see is what’s in my head: elaborate mental models of what I believe to be the space-like computational state smeared across the problem time. The visible symbols are just reminders, annotations, histories of abandoned models.

There are two implications of this. First, I can’t put it down when I go home, or to eat, or to sleep. A sufficiently complex set of models will take up all my thoughts, there’s just no room in my head for any other sensible responses or rational thoughts. I become a dreamwalking zombie. Second, and possibly most pertinently: if you ask me to take my headphones off and pay attention to you, there’s a very high probability that the mental model currently being constructed will collapse, and I have to start from the beginning again. Your five minute interruption will probably blow an hour or more’s work.

So please. If I’ve got my headphones on, please, please don’t ask me to emerge from my fugue state even if the room is on fire. Only if it has spread far enough that my hair is burning.

Cass Vs Rob

You can see in these two bits of video from the Glenn Lachlan boys what I meant about me not being patient and letting Cassian come to me – you can see the points where in my head I decide that I need to force the issue because it’s getting boring. Which is very silly of me:

This was the initial 4 minute bout

and the “sudden death” because we were even on points