Final post for blog

Google has failed to index a lot of pages on this and other sites so I am throwing in the towel. I mean, Google even owns Blogger, which is where the blog you're currently visiting is located. If the parent company cannot see content made by a subsidiary there is something seriously wrong with either the parent or the health of the child. I blame the parent. I certainly won't blame myself, I just don't have the time to get up to speed on all aspects of search engine optimisation so am going to go over to Medium (@mattdasilva) and LinkedIn (matthewdasilva). I've also started using Prose and Post News, both of which don't require elaborate hacking skills in order for your work to be seen. It's almost exactly 18 years since this blog started and in that time I've published thousands of articles on a range of subjects. I intend to continue doing this, but just not here. If you want to stay in touch you can find me on the socials or get in touch by email and I'll work out a way to supply you with the content you require.

KDP - Kindle Direct Publishing for 'Gold 4WD' poetry book

Because I had a show coming in up Mar ’24 at Gallery 59 in Goulburn I took the next STEP and submitted a book of POEMS to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) on 20 Jan. I’d gone through the poetry files over the previous couple of days, sorting and cataloguing them and finally putting each collection into a single MS-Word file for easier access. Once I got the hang of KDP I formatted the Word and PDF files properly, I even came up with some back-cover text – in the form of bio and blurb – to use in the editing window supplied by Amazon for the purpose.

This was all very nice and encouraging, especially because, in selecting the order of poems for the book I was able to exercise creativity just as, in writing them, authors normally do. I guess that this ordering process is normally what authors do, but I wouldn’t know not having gone through the publishing mangle before. I hope the book comes out bright and crisp on the other side!

For ‘Gold 4WD’ I’d ALSO taken the step of launching a dedicated blog, and I busied my desperate self like a good auteur making promotional tiles (see above) for the show to be used on social media. I had some great feedback from friends in this regard and even thought to myself that the gallerist might like to get the participation of the local media in Goulburn to run a story. THAT would be nice, but meanwhile 20 Jan was a Saturday this year, and I waited all the next day for news of my beautiful book’s progress through the SYSTEM. The hours dragged on while I went about fulfilling my DREAM of being a successful artist/poet.

PayPal use problems: getting money back

In case you’re interested this post is a reminder for readers that PayPal has its own ways of operating that are different from how other organisations that handle money do things. 

I only did a transaction using PayPal because other options weren’t available and there started a chain of events that tied up my money for almost a week. It wasn’t a large amount of money but the balls-up meant that I had to think about PayPal for all of that time, and believe me when I say that I thought of it in a negative light. As a result PayPal is permanently on my blacklist.

The adventure of the missing money started when my daughter asked me to buy some clothes for her son from a specific website. I’d been groomed for this on a previous Messenger call when she’d mentioned a predilection for ethically sourced goods as well as for low air miles. 

It would have been impossible to ignore such a request.

On the day in question I went to the relevant website and made the purchase, asking for help from Ada at strategic points where items she’d already pointed out weren’t immediately available. Once I’d finished I went to PayPal to pay for it because I thought, the linked card not being a credit card, I’d have a debt in PayPal if I didn’t top up the account. I didn’t want to be charged for using someone else’s money.

This was on the Saturday. 

On the Monday I noticed the PayPal deductions on my cheque account and because there were two of them I called PayPal to ask why. They said that it was a problem with my bank so I got in the car and drove up to the shopping centre. They said that they needed the BSB and account number of the source retailer, so I went back home and called PayPal again. They told me that the original deduction was for the purchase but that I’d made a separate deduction (which was true) and I said that they had to TELL ME that I didn’t need to top up my PayPal account with funds from my cheque account.

I waited and waited until the following Thursday for my funds to arrive at the PayPal database, then I did the transaction to return the money but PayPal said that the transfer would be paused while they checked it. 

The thing is that PayPal never tells you at any stage that regardless of the type of card you have linked – a debit card (as in my case) or a credit card (which they stupidly offered to link for me) – the deduction will happen and so you only need to have funds available when it does. My learning from all this malarkey is that I should use PayPal only when STRICTLY NECESSARY because having their own way of operating divorced from the mainstream they’ll keep your money for the maximum amount of time so they can earn interest from it before returning it to you. PayPal is a sort of legitimate scam that provides a great service to vendors (you can accept money using only your email address) but that treats everyone else like dupes. I did my initial transaction on 1 July and got the money back on Thursday.

Unwanted domains refund

I did get a result though it wasn’t precisely what I wanted, the company (Melbourne IT) refunded half of the cost of the domains which meant about $180 going back into my credit card account yesterday evening late. 

I had an email from the company two days ago in which they outlined their reasoning for the decision to keep half of the money. This being because they’d already paid to have the domains registered. 

When I spoke with the frontline staffer on Saturday she was understanding and actually got up from her desk and went to the accounts department to state my case, so I guess I should be grateful. I think that the damage to my relationship with the company has been tarnished but it’s not critical, I think that if the company had refused to pass on a refund it might’ve sparked me to move to find a different ISP.

This whole saga outlined in the previous blogpost just goes to the big issue in that technology is HARD because even if we have specialised companies whose only job is to look after intellectual assets there will be mistakes and misjudgement. There’s no reason why this problem had to occur other than the cause which was a difficult-to-use interface provided by the company. If you need a university degree to get such an easy thing right then there’s a lack of consideration that leads to unnecessary financial loss. Money is spent on things that are worthless if the communication mechanism is not adequate for the skillsets represented. The technology is at fault.

I guess that I need to be more careful in future. I’ve got more unwanted URLs in my list and will have to make sure, when they come up for renewal, to phone the company and get their representative to walk me through the process or for their help desk to make the necessary change themselves. I’m not going to rely on my own capabilities again it costs too much, I spent the weekend and most of this week worrying about this situation and it’s left an indelible mark on my memory.

Unwanted domains renewed

Trying here to be philosophical about this but it’s a struggle. Today Melbourne IT my ISP reregistered two domains I never wanted in the first place. Years ago they thought I might like to have them and registered them so they’d been in my domain list. A couple of weeks ago they told me they’d be reregistered so I went into the user interface and unticked the relevant boxes but it seems like it didn’t make any difference because this morning I got a charge on my credit card on account of the stupid domains.

I called the company and spoke with a guy who listened but he said the call would have to be escalated to someone else to investigate so I’m going to have to think about this painful situation for a day or two while they make up their minds.

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal and I have enough money in most months to absorb this kind of cost but my daughter is about to have her first child so I’m watching every dollar right now. Because of who I am my mind is going to be looping back to Melbourne IT and whether I should ditch them in favour of another provider because of their idiotic policy of suggesting related domains to new customers.

I guess this is the mental tax you pay in the internet age.

A tax in my case anyway because I am naturally a worrier, and when it comes to domains we have something important to worry about. I do not know how many services I have linked to my main email address but I do know that if I lost it I’d be in all kinds of strife. In fact if I lost it today’s discomfort would seem like a dream. At least you can wake up from a dream.

Probably in a year I will still remember my present irritation because it relates to internet domains, which are things that have nowadays such a critical place in our lives. There are not many books I’ve read that feature the internet, let alone the specific complex feelings that personal domains possess in our pantheon of things. I wonder if anyone’s written a police procedural with a domain as a major plot device. I think that probably someone out there has done this but it’s not something I’ve personally come across.

First sale of a picture I made

Starting last week I’ve been making different series of watercolours this time adding collage with advertising slogans on top of colour fiends. I do washes with different brands of watercolours then let the sheets dry before sticking cutout letters and shapes onto the paper. In fact I started on this jag on 26 Jan because a houseguest was watching YouTube in Chinese without subtitles available, it was the excuse I needed to make something instead of consuming something else, I made sets of four pictures starting with the theme of cars, graduating to apparel (clothes, glasses) and finally doing some about real estate.

Though it’s not immediately apparent what these pictures are “about”.

Yesterday I was talking with Simon who I started the Eastern Suburbs Art Group with (back in July), we were travelling on the train to Kings Cross on the way to the galleries in Rushcutters Bay. We talked about consumer culture and he focused on a type of combat sport that is very popular in some sectors, probably he knows I don’t watch sport so was ribbing me. He said there is a UFC fight on soon in Perth between two major figures and we laughed a lot, I guess he wanted to discuss spectacle and the ways we look for entertainment.

We met up with Sophie and Anthony at Arthouse Gallery, two years before I’d bought paintings by James Ettelson at the same location. This time he was showing spectacular large colourful works and smaller limited run prints. I told my friends about what had happened two years earlier, I was apparently in “on the ground floor” whatever that means, I only buy things I like and I don’t sell them for profit if the value escalates.

In a little while we walked down toward the railway viaduct to go to another gallery where I got tired and sat down to wait on a park bench made of stone. Some people brought dogs along to poop while I was waiting and then Sophie came out with two men in tow and introduced us, I said hello and the six of us walked to Victoria Street in Darlinghurst where Daniel and Gavin had left their bags in their office. Anthony and I sat down on a street bench while Simon stood on the pavement and the three of us talked, then the other three came out of a gallery and I showed Sophie paintings of mine I had brought in my knapsack. 

A miracle happened when Daniel whipped a $50 note out of his pocket and said he wanted an orange one, I think “orange” had cropped up in one discussion or another I wasn’t following closely, so I took the pen he had with him and using a restaurant table I signed the back of the paper. This is the purchase, ‘Apparel VI’.

When I got home I labelled the rest of the series and told Daniel via SMS the title of the work he’d bought. It was a memorable night as you can imagine as I lost count of the number of people I told about the evening’s events. I shall write more at the end of the year in my annual memorial.

A year in review: Clothes

On 3 January I took out pairs of shorts and carried them downstairs to the entranceway planning to take them to the tailors to get taken in. On the same day I put on shorts for the first time in the summer, it was so warm in the house and my long black pants on my legs felt scratchy. I still had some drawstring shorts that I could use even though for the most part the waists were too large. 

To advance the change in my clothing, two days later I took the bag full of shorts planning to head to Pyrmont in the bus but ended up going by car. 

I’d already phoned ahead to confirm that the tailor would be open. Once there I told him what I wanted done then tried on each pair of shorts so that he could mark with a pin where to take them in. Two pairs were too large for adjustment so I put them aside, but he took six pairs to do as well as one pair of drawstring shorts which needed new elastic. One pair of shorts also needed the crotch patched, and it all came to $270 (as long as I paid cash) so I gave him $70 promising to bring the rest with me when I picked them up. He asked me to come back on the 14th. I left the store with the rejects and went back to the car in Woolworths, buying laundry liquid while there.

I’d asked the tailor about fixing my slippers, which had become too loose with certain socks I’d just bought. In fact with all of my socks I have to use my finger to slip the slippers back on my feet as I’m walking upstairs though it doesn’t happen so often when coming down to the ground floor (though on occasion it does, and one threatens to come off a foot). The tailor averred that you need a special machine and that I’d need to go to a shoe repair shop, pointing me to a place in Pyrmont. I said I was going to Broadway Shopping Centre so took the slippers with me when I left – he had to run to the door holding them as I’d left them on the bench inside – and showed them to the man at Mr Minit when I got to Ultimo. He consulted with his colleague at the back of the kiosk but was unable to do the work so I picked up white elastic and needles in Coles while getting groceries.

Once home I looked for thread but my brown spool (which I’d thought was in a drawer in the hall cupboard) was missing so I went down to the IGA on Botany Road and bought some. At home I tried to sew the elastic onto the slippers but needed a thimble so went out again and again went to IGA. Once home I unsuccessfully stitched elastic to a slipper, found it was too loose, then cut it off and tried again. The job was perfect, meaning I had slippers I could comfortably use on stairs.

I started a new sartorial avenue on 21 January when I wore an old T-shirt from Japan bought at the time I was sick with a mental illness. I don’t remember precisely when the purchase happened, of course, time is like that it obscures ephemeral events like when you buy a piece of clothing or when you take a drive in the suburbs on account of mere recreation. Which store sold it to me? What road did I take? None of that detail survived the stretch of years, months, weeks, days, minutes, but the memory of that era of my long and eventful life persists in the dream-world even in waking hours, reminding me of how frail a life is.

Wearing T-shirts is not always a trivial matter as when you’re overweight you can easily look ridiculous and nobody voluntarily wants that sort of outcome from dressing in the morning. I’d lost 40kg so it was possible to wear one without looking like a tomato. Another advantage of T-shirts is that they don’t require ironing, the weather at this time being rather cool so it ended up being a toss-up between shorts or trousers. A T-shirt and shorts was unexceptional, so on the day in question I ventured to dare the combination. I had a number of outdoor errands to run, and had planned to go to Pyrmont to visit the tailor’s in the morning.

I don’t know why the tailor hadn’t thought of repairing the slippers in this way and that it took an amateur to find an elegant solution. How things turn out!

Things also turned out well on 13 January when I put on size-32 jeans I’d washed the night before (along with three other pairs of pants last worn in the 90s). To don them I had to make new holes in a black belt I’d had for God-knows how long, this task achieved with mum’s hole-punch kept in my desk drawer for just such emergencies. 

Here’s a photo of me with my jeans on. On the same day I picked up my shorts and brought ‘em home, then the next morning to wear one I clipped the tongue of an old black belt after putting two holes in it to fit my waist.

While driving home from the garage in Arncliffe where I buy petrol I tore the colourful N Michoutouchkine shirt that I’d inherited from dad. Near the shoulders at the back it’d become very thin from wear and washing so I cut off the buttons (to reuse) and threw it in the bin. I might’ve taken it to be repaired but it was so frail that I thought money’d be wasted. 

In order not to waste clothes I started regularly wearing T-shirts in the third full week of January. I cannot remember the last time I used T-shirts. I’d kept a dozen or so T-shirts unused in a drawer for over a decade, preferring in the intervening years to wear button-up shirts. Now, I was able to send messages – many T-shirts have ornate designs or words printed on them – while accommodating my shrunken torso.

On the morning of 24 January I put three white T-shirts in a bucket with water and some detergent product (which was in a container in my cupboard) to soak overnight. I was hoping to remove the dark stains that’d developed on the cloth over the years. Years of neglect! Would the shirts come out white and shiny, like they do on the TV ads? I no longer looked like a walking egg when I wore a T-shirt, merely a curiosity, but at least I was putting off spending money on new clothes. I went one step further the next day because the cleaning product didn’t work, and visited the supermarket to buy bleach. I’d looked up a recipe for cleaning online and that evening while the awards ceremony was on the TV I went to the laundry and put water in a bucket. Adding a couple of splashes of bleach, with gloves on my hands (also bought that morning) I mixed the contents up and left it to soak. I did all three T-shirts this way and the next morning early put ‘em in the machine to wash. 

The weather promised to be fine so I envisaged hanging ‘em out on the line (see photo below) which happened later that morning before I ate lunch. It was an overcast day but the weather was to be dry, so I took the opportunity to wash clothes.

It’s more fun to dry ‘em this way as no energy’s used. On the last day of January I took an old suit to the dry cleaner’s. I needed it washed because Ming’d started organising a wedding. The suit dates from the 1990s and is blue. The next day I put shoe polish on a brown belt. For the event I hadn’t yet decided which shirt to wear but reflected that I’d be able to find something decent in my wardrobe, the wedding on 22 February. I had my invitation. I also had suede shoes to wear. 

I picked up the suit on 2 February and the next day darned a pair of shorts, using a small piece of fabric in my kitchen cupboard where I keep rags. To do the job I employed navy blue thread in order to make it easier to see what I was doing. I used four sections of thread so that I didn’t get myself tangled up with lengths that were overlong. The method turned out to be effective as it allowed me to secure the patch of cloth in place and use a maximum number of stitches. Three days later I laundered them successfully, noticing that the stitches didn’t disintegrate or pull out.

The day before Ming called me from town and asked me to come to help choose a suit for Omer, so at 10 past midday I got out the front door and 45 minutes later was walking up to them where they were having lunch in David Jones’ basement. When they’d finished we got in the lift and went upstairs to the sixth floor, resolving to make a decision. I’d pulled up Google search results but in the end we just tried several outlets and settled on Hugo Boss, who had an ornate black-on-black jacket and matching trousers (with a silk stripe up the side). We then ventured to the Strand Arcade looking for a red bowtie but in the end Omer wanted a blue one from the place he got the rest of his gear, so by just after 4pm I was on the train heading to Redfern, where I caught the bus home. 

My job had mainly been to navigate and to hold Omer’s bags as well as leftovers from lunch. Also on the weekend I started darning an old sweater dating from the 80s that I couldn’t bear discarding but that needed care (see photo above). All up I attended to about 35 separate holes using black thread to blend in with the wool, some of which is scarlet. 

Originally black and white I’d had it dyed at some point, and even with patched areas it still looked serviceable. On 8 February I put it away in a cupboard in preparation for cooler weather but the next day wore an old T-shirt of dad’s (see photo below) that was one of the ones I’d started wearing after losing weight, the advertised company a freight supplier, so living in Botany – where the railway goods line winds its way across the landscape, terminating streets and necessitating the use of bridges – seemed right. 

I’d come full circle. It was at the time of the Sydney Olympics (celebrated on the T) that I’d had my breakdown, when everything had been lost apart from life itself. In the end I lost my family, my job, my house, my car, my sanity, my freedom, and it took me a good number of years to get them back. My life would never be the same and when I emerged on the other side of the ocean of pain and suffering I was able to wear clothes that for over a decade had been too small to fit. 

Because I throw nothing away I had “new” things to wear such as the long pants I put on on the morning of 11 March. First time to wear long pants for the year. The night before I’d had two blankets on my bed and on 1 April I wore a long-sleeved shirt then the next day put on a jumper for the first time it was quite chilly and in only a day’s time daylight saving would end. I put on pyjamas for the first time in the first week of May, it wasn’t really cold but I was being conservative as usual, then on 28 June I threw out the slippers I’d fixed having noticed water getting in while watering the plants out on the deck.

I’d bought a whole bunch of slippers for a dinner party at my place at the beginning of March, so in late June when I needed new slippers I just had a look through what was already in my house, choosing a black pair which were large enough. The new slippers functioned well I found the next morning when I was getting coffee to drink. During the night I’d dreamt again about working in Tokyo, this time I’d come up with a new idea for application reports, my preference being for a combination of application report and specification sheet. At the end of the dream Russians were searching the company for explosives, so when I woke up at around 5am (late for me) I was not sad to leave the dreamscape. 

I’d gotten used to slippers in Japan, because of an innate sense of order Japanese people have no problem being asked to put on slippers if they visit someone’s house, it’s even normal to put down a pair of slippers specifically to wear into a toilet for visits there. 

I have a regime where shoes and slippers can be used on the ground floor but when people visit (apart from the cleaners) I ask them to put on slippers. For the first floor and the second floor slippers are used but the exception to this is my bedroom where it’s socks only. This regime can have complexity for example when I go out but forget that I’ve not taken my medicine for the morning meaning I have to take off my shoes, go upstairs, then take off the slippers to go into the bathroom. I then have to put the slippers back on, go downstairs, and put on my shoes again in preparation for going outside. Despite this I persist in using slippers, it normally only takes a moment to change footwear and I have fairly clean floors as a result.

Over winter I’d started to put on weight and this troubled me but even so I still was able to use the trousers I’d had taken in at the tailor’s. It was only a few kilos but I am naturally conservative so even one kilo bothers me and I was careful to maintain my regimen of meals. By this time I’d altered it because I was getting hungry at the middle of the day and I now ate a small breakfast when I got up (bread with a spread, say Vegemite or peanut butter), then a full meal at around 9am, a medium-sized meal at around lunchtime, and some cheese at about 4pm. In the intervening hours I drank tea which usually worked especially black tea with milk. My weight wasn’t becoming a problem but wear and tear of clothes had meant that in the cold months I’d thrown out a few shirts which’d become too ragged to repair in a cost-effective manner and though I’d promised myself to visit an op-shop, at the end of June I still hadn’t taken the necessary step of driving, say, to Waverley. I’d bought shirts at Vinnies there on one earlier occasion so I kind of had the shop as a preferred supplier. You could contemplate making a T-shirt with the Vinnies logo and a slogan such as “Preferred supplier to the artist” or something along those lines.

In late August I took a pair of trousers to the tailor’s in Pyrmont when I was out picking up a book that’d been repaired. The conservator’s premises is in Chatswood and I drove back over the bridge to get to my old stamping ground, parking under Woolies. I popped my head in at the barber’s then made my way to the doctor’s clinic when the barber said she was busy. At the GP’s I waited for my second booster, which was Pfizer. I did shopping after making the appointment and before sitting down in the waiting room. Once I had been released – they get you to hang around for 15 minutes to monitor for adverse reactions – I walked back to the barber’s and got a haircut, then jumped in the car and sped home down Botany Road.

At the end of the second full week of September I sacrificed safety for comfort when I abandoned wearing a cardigan during the day. In the end I dropped the cardy off at the dry cleaners and picked it up after having it cleaned on the 22nd of the month. While it was still cool due to cloud cover I didn’t need too much on, so the change reminded me of the new season.

In the second half of the year I was very busy making art and with the art group so didn’t record all clothing events, which accounts for the lack of detail from September to  December. The major thing that happened was that I gained 15 kilos after eating sweets left over from a party, so had to put aside some trousers and shorts (once summer arrived). I didn’t buy any new clothes or shoes but at the beginning of 2023 I changed the slipper regime in my house after my friend Ming arrived to stay for a while. 

Under the new regime slippers are only worn on the ground floor, and upstairs you just go with socks on. This vastly simplifies my life and is more logical, the space at the bottom of the stairs acting like a “genkan”, which is what the Japanese call the reception area at the front door where visitors are asked (required) to remove their street shoes.

In summer I was still wearing T-shirts or button-up shirts on different days not having bought any new ones for many years and just using shirts out of my old supply. The weather was warmish at times but often cold despite the season and on many days I wore long trousers.

Doorbell/intercom breaks down again

Ok so after Dan the electrician got the Akuvox doorbell installed on my house the thing worked for exactly ONE DAY before it broke down. I got it to buzz reliably on one occasion and then when a friend came to visit he had to call me from outside on the pavement because I wasn’t answering. 

I wasn’t answering because the doorbell didn’t sound. This was because it had broken down again. I was back in groundhog day, sort of like enjoying sunny days in Sydney in November 2022. For a few hours the sun shines and then BANG the clouds come overhead and it starts to spit.

My doorbell is raining on my parade.

Dan came and tinkered around in the ceiling, then tinkered around in the wall, then did something with a bunch of wires. I asked him at the end about what the problem was and he said something about the wires pulling out of their contacts because of pressure. Apparently he’d combined all the wires into one strand or something – who KNOWS?

When I worked for Yamatake-Honeywell in the nineties we had the sales company and the service company and now I know why they have a separate arm just for service. Because you KNOW that as soon as there’s an opportunity for something to go wrong it’s going to go wrong and it’s going to inconvenience the largest number of people. Just by writing this post I’m jinxing the machine, the machine is watching it’s got an AI component reading every blog in the world and it’s going to see what I’ve so recklessly written and start plotting to take out my doorbell so that my life falls apart.

I still haven’t worked out what to do with the old parts from the previous doorbell/intercom. They’ll probably sit on my bookshelf for 10 years and then get thrown in the garbage. Life is like a box of junk, you think it’s worth something but it turns out the valuables are just taking up space.

Getting a new doorbell installed

When I scroll through WhatsApp to find conversations I can see that on 20 September I asked my neighbour the builder if the electrician would be coming to fix the doorbell. Dan got in touch with me after Joe nudged him and Dan said he’d come to fix the doorbell but I had a crew filming at my place so had to delay replacement until 24 October. I’d first contacted him on 5 March because the doorbell wasn’t working properly and in fact it entirely stopped working on 9 July.

I now have a box full of unneeded intercom panels and some sort of hidden power supply so if anyone wants these they can have them. For the moment I’ve put the box down in the garage on a bookshelf.

When you have no doorbell it’s difficult to enjoy a normal life. I know this sounds like a first-world problem where comparatively Ukrainians are being asked to go without heating in a European winter, or being killed in their homes by guided missiles. But I’ve had people visit, buzz me, and – not hearing any response – simply walking away. This happened with one person coming to my place for the art group as well as a man who’d been asked to travel from Ryde to help tidy up the place after the filming ended.

Dan had a whole day of fine weather yesterday. He’d had to change the day for his visit due to rain (of course) and then got to work installing the new equipment. Then something wouldn’t work and he couldn’t get onto the distributor by phone. He struggled with the device, tapping his foot and scratching his chin until he got onto the representative for the second time in the afternoon, and eventually worked out that because I’d opted NOT to have the gate strike operable via mobile phone the remote configuration had to be redone.

Sigh.

Technology is unbearable at the best of times because it’ll always break down. God knows how the Mars voyage will end up if travellers are unable to get a spare part en route to the red planet. Technology is more unbearable when it is involved with something as essential as being able to admit someone into your own home. Being unable to unlock the gate from June to October was bearable but I was forced to constantly tell people to “message me from the street when you arrive” in order to go about daily business.

I told Dan that I wasn’t interested in the doorbell communicating with me via the cloud and he seemed ok with that, but apparently if you’re an electrician and you want plug-and-play your customer has to want all the bells and whistles. Akuvox seemingly thinks that all customers will want internet connectivity and whatnot, everything in the world accessible from a mobile device, they’ll be landing rovers on the moon from the White House next it’s mad.

It's a mad mad mad mad world and we’re caught in the digital matrix. When I worked in Tokyo in the 1990s the buzzword that never seemed to get off the ground was “home automation” but now you get electricians struggling to install a freaking doorbell because you’re SUPPOSED to want it. I don’t care about home automation, I need my home to reliably do a few simple things that save me time and money, or that improve my quality of life like the pool chlorinator cell running on the pumps. I don’t care about seeing if a burglar is about to try to open my front gate. I trust my door to work to keep the bad guys out. I don’t trust the intercom to allow friends to come inside the house.

Movie review: The Social Dilemma, dir Jeff Orlowski (2020)

This movie was talked about on Twitter when it first appeared but since then its messages haven’t made much noise in the public sphere. To criticise the business model of companies such as Instagram and Facebook you need to use the same sorts of complexity and sophistication that these companies use, and this probably accounts for the relative silence. Complex ideas aren’t much commented on on sites such as Twitter, simple responses that are expressed in an extreme fashion get all the “likes” and retweets. Certainly, people haven't responded to the movie by stopping using their apps.

To talk about how Facebook engineers the news feed, or how YouTube engineers recommendations is to get to the core of the way these sites work: by rewarding the evolved systems the human body has developed over millions of years of development and refinement. We’re just not designed to cope with the addictiveness of the modern news feed with its constant appeals to our sympathies, its neverending search for the next response – just one more “like”, just another comment, or even a “share”. The dopamine rush we get from being recognised as we post and comment is what brings us back to the screen time after time.

The movie uses interviews as well as fictionalised enactments to get its message across. The people in front of the camera are mostly former employees of the companies involved. Many of them are still in the IT business, but others are fronting nonprofits. There are also the usual sort of talking head that current affairs programs bring on-camera to give their expert view of things. The package is neat and concise and entertaining. Well worth the time need to watch.

Movie review: The Minimalists: Less is Now, dir Matt D’Avella (2021)

Last month I watched this documentary’s companion piece, from the same director but coming out six years earlier. Both are good, and I don’t have a preference either way but the two movies are different though the message is the same. The earlier movie is more of a coming-of-age story, charting the emergence of the two men who are the subjects of the pieces.

‘Less is Now’ tells the same story but with more detail. Here you learn more about the childhoods of Ryan Nicodemus and Joshua Fields Millburn, who are the Minimalists (they have a website you can visit for more information about their project). Millburn seems to have purchased a new Toyota to replace his old Toyota, which tells me that his idea has borne fruit in a material sense – though you don’t now get to see the outside of the car, the interior finishes are too new to go with the bodywork that was evident in the 2015 movie.

I watched the movie with friends, and the experience sparked controversy. This is a debate that we all must have even though, for many, the message of Nicodemus and Fields will be unnecessary. A point one of the interview subjects raised is that minimalism is really a first-world luxury. For recent migrants, the idea that you’d need to reduce the amount of belongings you own must seem like something strange, especially considering the fact that you might not have everything that you need to live life well. A spoiled society would find comfort from reducing the number of items owned and a struggling man might still need to buy his own vacuum cleaner or rice cooker.

The fact remains that we’re overtaxing the planet, the problem being that there’s no such thing as world government, so getting action on an issue as comprehensive as climate change is always going to cause us problems. Let the message of the Minimalists become more widespread and we might all have a common referent. I wonder how intrusive they really are, however. It seems to me that we’re more focused on the latest Netflix drama, the more recent Abba album, the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

A year in review, part two: Clothes

Though I was also getting new things I continued a tradition, started late the year before, of using old things. 

Now it was shoes. I had one old pair (pictured in last year’s memorial) and started wearing two other pairs I’d not worn for at least a decade. On the second Thursday in January I used restorative shoe polish (bought in December) to clean the shoes (shown in the photo below, which was taken on the same day in the hallway of a building I had occasion to visit) but the heels began to disintegrate not long after and I threw the shoes away. 

I started, last year, to reuse a lot of old clothes, and this year I had a few other things repaired, including shoes. Upon relocating to Queensland in 2009 I had gravitated away from wearing lace-ups and in many of the years since I wore sandals even in winter due to the climate. Once I moved back to Sydney in 2015 I started again to wear socks and shoes (though slip-ons). But a pair of old lace-ups disintegrated in March and I threw them out. They were the second pair of shoes that had to be dealt with in this way due to perishing materials.

On 5 June I drove to the Broadway Shopping Centre and bought long underwear – in two sizes, as I didn’t know which would fit me – and the next day wore long johns in the morning. I also put on a sloppy joe under my cardigan. I wanted to find a way to stay warm without using the heater (not only does it cost money to run, it gets uncomfortable after a while with all the dry air swirling around the room). I thought long johns might do the trick, a surmise that turned out to be correct, so while in the city later in the same month I bought more at Uniqlo. 

I also bought more stuff online, for example on Saturday 20 June when I went to the Myer website and bought two pairs of trousers and three long-sleeve shirts. Some of my shirts had started to fray and wear. Both these pairs of trousers I took to the tailor’s on Harris Street to get them shortened. I picked one pair up on the same day my apartment was styled prior to sale, and one pair on the day of the second buyer’s inspection. 

In September and October I bought some shirts from Vinnies – very cheap at about $16 each. I also bought, this year, shirts at Blue Eyes in Lakemba – where they cost between $10 and $15 each.

Due to a diet, I began losing a lot of weight in the final quarter of the year. By this time I was living in temporary accommodation in Glebe as I was between my old home and a new one being constructed and certified elsewhere. The Glebe unit had a dual-mode washing machine (wash and dry in the same appliance) but after running the dry mode you still have to hang items out in the air if you want them to dry sufficiently to enable you to put them away. Building managers provide racks for this purpose.

I was losing about five kilos each month but progress was both slow and steady. In December I was still wearing the same pants as I’d always worn, but my belt was on a different notch – number five instead of number two – and my pants fit loosely enough for me not to have to pull them tight in order to make them stay up when walking. Prior to the weight loss it’d been a problem to keep pants above my hips in the street. I’d gotten into the habit of cinching the belt really tight to stop them falling down while out and about. 

When I got around to unpacking my clothes following the home relocation – even before I’d moved in I put all my stuff into the new house with the help of removalists – I registered the old pants I still had in my collection. Pants I’d been unable to wear for a decade. Now, I thought to myself, thinking of a time in the not-too-distant future, I’d be able to use these old things again, and this thought gave me an inordinate amount of pleasure. Just contemplating this scenario – putting on a pair of old pants, unused for ten years – all that time sitting in the cupboard in Campsie or Maroochydore or Pyrmont – gave me a kind of joy that Marie Kondo recommends as a palliative for the routine of modern-day consumption.

But from an opposite source. Being able to conserve instead of rejecting. Being able to keep rather than throwing away. Being able to maintain intact rather than disrupting. Not having to acquire anything new as part of an endless process of renovating existence, as though the old were a source of shame rather than, in essence, of wisdom and strength. This was a welcome novelty, and on Christmas Day I wrote something to put up on Facebook that touched on all these themes (consumerism, the festive season, renewal):

---------------------

The first Noel the angels did sell

two kilos of ham and a cheap ringing bell

to place on a tree with celebrant right

like a full stop at the end of the night.

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel,

born in the shadow of Israel.

In malls where they come to purchase a clock,

or a new trendy garment that will really rock

for their sister or friend as cash goes away – 

frictionless transaction with Afterpay!

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel,

scorn for the hero of Israel.

At the Boxing Day sales they throw credit cards down

as the kids slurp up Fanta and – look, there’s a clown! – 

watch for RBT pockets on the way home

with the boot full of parcels like Xmas has come.

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel,

worn out like a new Israel.

In the old city the lures of surfeit come to pall

as tourists ignore ceramics saying “Shalom y’all”

while they flock to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

on every day of a normal year.

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel,

what comes today from Israel?

------------------

Keeping ham in the fridge for the rest of the year might be problematic – it’d go off and poison you if you then ate it – but I was disappointed by the constant echo on the news about how retail trade was surging with the end of lockdowns at the end of the year. It seemed as though – apart from the obligatory TV address by the archbishop of Melbourne, or the Queen – we’d got stuck in a rut inherited from the rest of the year, and had forgotten the meaning of Christmas. It’s almost laughably trite to say this, I’m aware, but because of mum’s absence I was feeling sensitive on the day I wrote this set of verses.

Not everything was in stasis. All the spare socks I’d bought earlier in the year – not specifically registering those purchases for this post is a source of regret – came in handy in November and December as some old ones finally wore out – I keep clothes until they’re falling apart and, in the case of trousers, will take worn pairs to the tailor’s to be repaired before deciding to throw them away in the garbage. The socks were the short type (having no covering at the ankles); using this sort is better for me because of my psoriasis (they’re also easier to put on).

I bought a dressing gown in October and used it while living in my friend Grant’s house, but of course once I’d moved to Glebe it just sat on the carpet. Later, when I moved to stay with friends in Wollongong – the lease on the Glebe place expired and I’d had to move out – I again used it. The garment is blue with a printed pattern of little squares – a lighter tone and a darker one alternating on the cloth. It has pyjama bottoms as well in case you want to wear pants to bed. I normally sleep in just undies – it’s comfortable and I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember – but the dressing gown ensemble did the trick when I was living in close quarters with other people and I needed to get to the bathroom each day to have a shower.

Book review: Samsung Rising, Geoffrey Cain (2020)

I bought this volume at Gleebooks for the recommended retail price.

Cain had been writing stories about Samsung, the diversified manufacturer, for many years before he decided to write this book, though signally the company wouldn’t cooperate with him in the latter endeavour. Cain yet found many people willing to talk with him, some on the record and some not.

The company had nothing to fear in my case as apart from the Ellen De Generes selfie that made such a splash when it was taken in the Oscars about six years ago, I wasn’t aware of most of the events that form the core of this book of journalism. The TV personality’s stunt however wasn’t spontaneous but was, rather, the result of a sustained effort by a group of American employees who subsequently left the company on account of its culture.

Excellence isn’t prized very highly at Samsung but conformity is. Belonging to the herd is the most important characteristic of successful employees of a company that, to succeed, relies on the support of the Korean government, the country’s judiciary, as well as business luminaries. The collective is paramount.

As is the case also in Japanese companies. Hard to imagine I’d be able to stoke into existence a desire to buy a Samsung phone after reading this engrossing book, which begins its account in the early years pre-WWII and continues up to the present. Luckily there are plenty of alternatives available in the market.

Buying clothes online for the first time

The big advantage of buying online is that you don’t have to worry about setting off the security detectors in department stores. On the other hand, not all retailers who sell clothes have a single, central, warehouse where the items you order can be aggregated and put into one package. Myer, where I bought some things earlier this month, does not and so the items you buy from them using their online interface might come in dribs and drabs. The way they have organised their system, furthermore, means you have to sign for each item, so if you are not home when the Australia Post deliveryman arrives you will have to go to the post office to pick them up. But I’d put up with a lot to avoid using Amazon.

To start at the beginning: in July I bought socks from the branch of the Myer department store in the Sydney central business district. The socks have animals on them – sharks, French bulldogs, and parrots. Here’s a photo of them taken on 9 July, the day I bought them.

When I put on the sharks pair on 4 November, and walked in them on the kitchen floor, I felt that the right-side one had a hole in the heel, so when I got undressed in the evening I threw that pair away in the bin. Then the French bulldog ones went in the bin on the evening of the next day after a quick inspection showed wear on them, too. 

So on Wednesday 6 November I went to the Myer website. I bought a pair of black trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of olive-coloured socks with toucans on them. The socks were a brand I hadn’t bought before but the trousers and shirt were brands I usually wear. Delivery from the retailer is free if you spend over $100.

While ironing shirts after the order acknowledgement email arrived I remembered I had ordered an “XL” size shirt. I checked a shirt on the pile of clean laundry and saw that I sometimes wear an “XXL” size for the Gazman brand, so I went to call the store. There is no link to click in the email to let you amend an order so I called the phone number provided on the website. The woman who answered the call said I was too late, and that if the shirt didn’t fit I’d have to return it once the delivery was complete. The shirt I had ordered would come, she said, from the Southland store, in southeastern Melbourne, and my order had already been “released”.

After I finished ironing shirts I put them away in the closet. Following a hunch, I reached into its interior space, drew out an old shirt I hadn’t worn for years, and tried it on. It fit, so I added it to the section on the rack where my everyday shirts hang. I tried on a few more from the back of the rack and they all fit. Then I checked the size marked on the Gazman shirt I had been wearing on the day in question and saw that it was an “XL”, so I realised that I wouldn’t, after all, need to return the Myer shirt once it arrived in the mail. The initial size selection had been the right one. 

Nevertheless the time allowed to change orders seems to me to be too short for convenience. After submitting the order and checking-out on the Myer website, I had received their email acknowledgement at 11.46am and had called them on the phone at around 12.15pm. But within that time window you cannot, it seems, alter an order. There is no link on the website, furthermore, where you can “amend” an order, as there is in the case of Woolworths grocery orders. With Woolies, the acknowledgement email they send you tells you the last minute at which you can amend an order and in my case (I usually get delivery in the morning) it falls late in the afternoon of the day before delivery is due. With Myer you had better make the right choice first-up or else you might have to send something back to them in the post to get the item you need.

In any case I now had nine shirts taken from the back of the closet that still fit me, so I would be able to wear these. In December 2014 I was about the same weight I am now (in August of 2016 I was 10 kilos heavier). With the new Gazman shirt due to come from Myer plus a batik one I had had made at Bangkok Tailors up the road, using Malaysian cloth a friend gave me for my 57th birthday (see photo), I would soon have 11 additional shirts to use.

On the Thursday at 11.10am an email arrived from Myer informing me that my new shirt was “ready to be dispatched from store”. I got another one of these emails at 1.39pm referring to the socks. Both emails had in their subject line, “1 Item(s) In Your Order Are On Their Way.” At 5.37pm another email arrived with, “Your Order Is On Its Way,” in the subject line. This last email was about the trousers. It said, “Your order is ready to be dispatched from store. Australia Post will collect your parcel within the next business day.”

The same Thursday I also happened to look in a drawer in the corner of my bedroom that I don’t open often and saw some underpants that had once been too small. At some point in the previous two years I had put them away in this place and bought others to use instead. The next day I put on one pair and they fit, so I stacked the three old pairs I had found in the drawer I use every day. This was on the Friday, when I also got an email from Australia Post informing me that a delivery from Myer’s Southland store would be made the following Wednesday, the 13th. This delivery would contain the shirt.

The next day, the Saturday, I got an email from Australia Post about something coming from the French Connection. The package was due to arrive at my place on the Wednesday. I guessed the socks were the item referred to in this email.

On the Sunday I received an SMS from Australia Post about the delivery from Myer Southland. The package would come on the Monday (not the Wednesday, as I had earlier been informed by Australia Post). An SMS arrived from Australia Post on the morning of Monday 11 November about the delivery. Replying to it, I advised that someone would be at home to receive it. At 12.37pm the intercom buzzed and I asked the Australia Post deliveryman if I needed to come down. He said I did. I got my keys and phone and went down in the lift. Outside, I signed on his phone (“Just down the bottom,” he said) and went upstairs with a flat package that turned out to contain the shirt. It was darker than I had expected, and very nice, so I put it away in the closet.

I wore it on the Tuesday. At 7.02am that morning an SMS came from Australia Post informing me that there would be a delivery that day from Myer’s Parramatta store. I replied indicating I would be home. The intercom buzzed at 10.42am the same day and an Australia Post guy standing outside asked me to come down. I grabbed my keys and my phone and went to the lobby. He was waiting there next to the mirrored wall and on his electronic device I signed for the packet of socks, which had a sender’s address in Sunshine West, a part of Melbourne. Here are the socks.

Then at 11.31am the intercom buzzed again and an Australia post guy outside asked me to come down. Outside the building he said my name and I signed on his electronic device where he indicated I should sign (“Signature here,” he said). The order was now complete and I had a new pair of black Reserve trousers to use, as well as a pair of olive-green socks (which I would wear the next day) and a lovely blue-and-brown check shirt.

Now, there’s a coda to this activity runsheet … At the end of that week, on Saturday 16 November, I went to iron my clean shirts but steam wouldn’t come from the holes in the appliance’s soleplate, and the spare iron I had in the cupboard under the laundry sink wouldn’t work – in fact the water I put in it from the tap just poured out the bottom through a hole in the container – so I went back to the Myer website to order a new one. To get free shipping I added three pairs of socks (the same brand I had ordered earlier in the month) and paid using my credit card (Myer doesn’t save your payment details in a database, so you have to enter them each time you order on the website). 

I had wanted to order a new bathmat but what they had in the displayed selection (only one item) didn’t appeal. I had just ordered some sheets from a shop named Moss River Outlet in Sydney and so I SMS’d the woman working there, whom I had been in contact with, asking if they sold bathmats. She SMS’d me a photo with three likely options and I paid by calling the store. The lot would be packed in one bundle, she said, and posted. At 2.40pm the next day – the Sunday – an email arrived from transport company TNT telling me that on the following day a 4kg package would be picked up from 80 Queen Street, Woollahra.

An email also came from Myer at 3.17pm. It was about the socks, which the message said would be picked up on the Monday. On Monday afternoon an email about the socks arrived from the company. And at 10.11pm an email arrived from Australia Post about the same items which would, I was told, arrive on Thursday (they would in fact arrive on the Wednesday). 

At 6.56am the next day – the Tuesday – an SMS arrived from Australia Post about a parcel from Myer Bondi that would arrive that day. I replied saying I would be at home to receive the iron. Then at around 10.45am the intercom buzzed and a deliveryman asked me to come downstairs to pick up a package, so I grabbed my keys and phone and got in the lift. Outside the front door I signed on an electronic device using a stylus the man provided and took the box upstairs to unpack it. It contained the sheets and the bathmat, so I put them away in their cupboards. The iron arrived the same way at 11.34am.

On the morning of Wednesday 20 November morning I took out three of the shirts with frayed collars intending to take them to the tailors to get new collars put on them. I had had this idea the previous evening; it just came to me that the tailor could fix the shirts that were getting a bit worn. I thought they would still be serviceable with a bit of maintenance. 

The same morning at 7.32am an SMS arrived from Australia Post saying that a package from French Connection would be delivered this day. I replied saying I would be at home to receive it and at just after 9.05am the intercom buzzed at the instigation of the Australia Post deliveryman. He told me to come down to collect a parcel and in the lobby, when I got there, a woman from another unit was taking receipt of a box he held in his hands. I then signed to acknowledge receipt of my package and went upstairs with the socks (see photo below). One pair has cactus on it, one pair has seagulls, and one pair has reindeer (red; for the festive season).

I took the old shirts to the tailors’ shop a bit later and this time a woman was there as well. She wore a hijab in a fawn colour. The tailor charged me $85 for the three collars and he said I could pick them up the following Wednesday, a week away in time. He asked what colour I wanted and I replied, “Just any white.” He said the collars of cotton shirts are always the first part of the shirt to go.

When I got home I did the rest of the ironing. I had started doing it the day before but the steam had stopped midway through the task and I had called the manufacturer but they said that I would have to send the iron back to see if there was something wrong with it. This seemed like a lot of trouble so I just turned the device off and left it overnight. In the morning it worked fine – maybe I had filled the water reservoir past the limit (which is marked on the side) – and so I did the four shirts remaining and put them away.

What Queenslanders think about Adani’s Carmichael mine

The other day in response to something put on Twitter by a person I know, who is a journalist, I made a comment about this mine. The man I was talking to is English and works in Europe. His main preoccupation seems to be the environment and he is one of that new breed of practitioner who would embrace the epithet “activist” if it was applied to him. So he feels very passionately about what he does. It’s not important how I got to know him, suffice it to say that he is considerably younger than me.

When we had finished our conversation on Twitter I thought a bit about what had been said and, more importantly, what had not been said. It occurred to me that there are a lot of people in different countries around the world who are invested heavily, in an emotional sense, in the Carmichael mine, but that there is also a lot of ignorance about it and the political context surrounding it. The conversation I had had with the journalist in question demonstrated this to me. So I decided to write a short primer on the issue so that people in other countries, countries that are not Australia, can understand why the Carmichael mine will surely go ahead and be built. Most locals will already know what is included in this article, which is really designed for people resident overseas.

It’s not important what I think about the Carmichael mine. I have my own ideas about the environment and what should be done to preserve our future. But what is more important is what the people of North Queensland think. They are the ones, ultimately, who will decide what gets done in their territory.

To start with let’s step back and contemplate Australia briefly. This is a country with about the same land mass as Europe but with a population of 25 million. Queensland itself is the same size as Alaska and has a population of five million, of whom most live in the southeast corner in or around the state capital of Brisbane. North Queensland is parochial and independent; it is the furthest extremity of a frontier state. People up there are very independent-minded and they hardly tolerate being told what to do by politicians in Brisbane, let alone by activists in the southern capitals of Melbourne and Sydney. In Queensland the state government is very aware of this dynamic and some governments there even hold their parliaments up north in an effort to bring the people who live in that region closer into the fold.

Queensland has always bred mavericks. Julian Assange grew up in North Queensland and his mother lives in Southeast Queensland now. You also have the likes of Clive Palmer, a rich businessman who has run for office and who has won it and lost it. Then there is Pauline Hanson, the xenophobic populist who initially won office in 1996, trumping Trump by a generation. And you also have Bob Katter, who is the federal member for a North Queensland seat and who has set up his own political party, a party which includes his own son. I lived in Queensland for over five years and it was while living there that I first met the journalist mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

In outback Queensland you don’t see many cars. The ones you do see drive very fast on sometimes poorly-maintained sealed roads, or else on unsealed roads that are covered with gravel or dirt. Working on a mine means a lot of driving, often, to get from a major population centre to the work site. So it is dangerous work for the simple reason that you are going very fast for a good deal of the time on bad roads. Roads cost money to fix and Queensland is very big and very sparsely populated.

Jobs are especially important in this kind of country because workers spend their money in town buying food, staying in hotels, buying beers at the pub, and buying petrol to fill up their utilities. A town might have a population of a few hundred or a few thousand so every single job is considered to be a kind of gift to the whole community. In this context, the potential mine employment figures that are bandied about by a left-wing think-tank like the Australia institute or by the Adani company or even by the state government, are not the most important thing. What is most important is how locals think about the level of employment will be produced. You can publish any figure you like but you can’t argue with a $50 note put down on the counter to pay for a steak dinner. That $50 note is good for the whole community because it goes toward paying wages and paying for supplies. The money gets circulated through the community as retail employees and business owners pay their bills and do their shopping.

About five years ago, to do a story, I drove north on the Bruce Highway from the town near Brisbane I lived in to a place near Home Hill in North Queensland. I had a contact and he had promised to meet me at a certain time in a roadside café and he was there soon after I parked my car in the parking lot out the front, next to the highway. I shook his hand and the first thing he said to me after “Hello” was, “So you’re a Mexican.” I had to think for a moment because I have a surname that might sound Mexican if you don’t know your history (and a lot of people don’t, I have found). But I understood him in the end: I was from south of the border. I was an outsider because of where I lived in the southeast of the state. So he used this casual pejorative from the get-go just to test me. I agreed that I was a Mexican and we had a busy and productive day together.

The joke was hardly surprising to me once I had talked with this man, a retired marine engineer aged then in his fifties. People in North Queensland want to draw a new border at Rockhampton and govern themselves. Even though they rely on money provided by the state government in the southeast, they feel a good deal of resentment about the current political settlement. Queensland is the only state to have only one chamber in its parliament. They abolished the upper house in 1922. That’s how much they respect politicians up north.

In May there was a federal election in Australia and the result was unexpected. Everyone had thought Labor would win but the Liberal Party with its coalition partner, the National Party, won a slim majority in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, the Coalition increased its share of the available seats and although the Coalition does not have a majority there, the minor parties that control the balance of power in the upper house are mostly of a conservative bent. So the Coalition did something remarkable and are now in power until the next poll, in three years’ time. Before he was appointed party leader, the current prime minister, Scott Morrison, once scandalised the Speaker of the Reps by bringing a lump of coal into the chamber to make a point.

Before the election, the former leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown, travelled with a convoy of cars north into Queensland to protest against Adani. Some of the cars were Teslas. They were jeered in the streets by some and welcomed by others. But the stunt did more than make headlines: it galvanised voters in the state to reject parties that might – even potentially – be against Adani. Hence the Coalition’s windfall in the Senate. The people of Queensland spoke and they spoke decisively in favour of coal. A Labor government in Brisbane that ignored that voice would be committing political suicide (the next state election is in 2020). There’s no question but that the Carmichael mine will go ahead.

It should be added that many people in places like Sydney and Melbourne, and even in Brisbane, think that the Carmichael mine should be stopped. There are a lot of Australians who agree with the global consensus that we should avoid wherever possible using fossil fuels for energy. But the dynamic in play in this country is what you find in many places: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. North Queenslanders are pushing back and it is what they think that will decide the outcome in this case.

Twitter redesign mainly serves its purpose

This company has done some things that turned out to be less than impressive, such as the acquisition of Periscope (does anyone even remember it?). The decision to allow people to use 280 characters in tweets was, on the other hand, a good one to make.

Overall, the recent native site redesign seems to have been managed well. The actual design decisions that were implemented as part of the redesign are mostly good and have to a large degree improved the experience of using the site. This is just my view, and other people might have different ideas about this.

With the new interface, the navigation buttons have been put down the side of the feed. You can, for example, click on the “Profile” link if you want to see how many followers you currently have, or to see how many people you yourself are following. Nearer to the top of the page, the “Notifications” link allows you to click to see the interactions people have performed with respect to your account, such as likes and retweets and replies. As with the “Profile” link, clicking on this link does not cause the home page to refresh (unless you are at the top of the feed) so you won’t always lose your place when you go back “Home”.

The indicator on the home page that shows the number of notifications currently registered that you haven’t look at yet, is also welcome. This feature is also linked to your mobile phone app, so looking at a notification on your phone will mean that it will be flagged as having been seen on the website as well.

The following image shows the notifications page in a screenshot I made recently. You can see that the “Notifications” link has been selected using the mouse cursor. The notifications are shown in the centre of the display and some other, unimportant, items are (optimistically) shown on the right-hand side of the screen. The indicator that shows you how many unseen notifications there are is not visible here because it disappears once the “Notifications” link has been clicked.

From these implementations of interactivity, it seems to me that the designers have thought deeply about how people really want to use the site, and they have evidently tested out different iterations before settling on the final configuration. 

One thing that surprised me however is that the “Profile” page does not show all tweets that you put up. At least that’s true in my case, as it only shows me tweets that contain links from my blog. Other tweets, such as replies to tweets from other account holders, are omitted from my view. This is a bit strange but, in any case, I usually use TweetDeck to carry out my daily tasks on the platform.

The new webpage is a big improvement over what existed before the change. Back then, I used to use the app on my mobile phone to view notifications, whereas now I use the webpage. What is especially welcome is the ability to easily see different views of information associated with your account without constantly refreshing your feed. Even given the reservations I have described above, in my view the changes make for a big improvement in Twitter.

Many people have been asking for a means to allow people with a Twitter account to edit tweets once they have been sent, but I haven’t seen any indication from the company that this change will be brought in. Personally, this does not appear to be a major issue. When I write a tweet I usually reread it before sending it, often more than once. Perhaps people should just slow down their conversations a bit if they want to avoid errors. When I do make an error in a tweet it is usually a minor one that, often, I just allow to stand. Sometimes, depending on the recipient and depending on the nature of the error, I will delete a tweet and resend it, but this doesn’t happen very often at all.

[UPDATE 31 August, 4.15am:] Today I had a look for the first time at the "Analytics" page and was very impressed. The information on this page allows you to see how much impact each of the most influential tweets you have made in a month has had. It also shows you the most influential follower you have each month, which can form a guide to who to follow. For example, you can see how many impressions each of the most-seen tweets have had. I have to say that, since writing the review that appears above, I have been very impressed by the new Twitter interface. Now, I look at it more than I look at Facebook.

[UPDATE 2 October, 12.54pm:] TweetDeck went down at lunchtime and thousands of people were forced to use the native Twitter interface. The comments I saw using a search term were ferocious. Journalists, especially, seem to have been hard-hit. The term "tweetdeck" was not  shown trending on the Twitter page but it should have been, it was being very heavily used. TweetDeck came back online at 3.18pm AEST.

[UPDATE 3 October, 11.20am:] I had gotten into the habit, using the native Twitter interface, of shadowing tweets about different authors, authors whose books I had reviewed. The interface makes this easy to  do because the home page stores past searches and gives them in a list when you click in the search field with your mouse cursor. I am able, in this way, to share reviews with people who had an interest - or who might have an interest, going by what they had tweeted - in the reviews I had written and published on the blog. Sharing had become so much easier with the new interface made by Twitter.

Are institutions good for us or bad for us?

I thought for a long time about writing this and eventually decided to go ahead. I am going to omit names of organisations in what follows, and the names of people will also be left out. Some people who have worked with me in the past who read this will know what I’m talking about, but I am going to take a risk and talk about these things because few do.

The title of this post is somewhat inflammatory. This was done for rhetorical reasons. But this post will be deliberate and careful in its conclusions. This is more like a piece of memoir than a piece of journalism, so care should be taken to generalise for the whole of society on the basis of observations made and conclusions drawn here. This account is based on what happened to me and to people I have known. Other people might have different experiences, I wouldn’t know. The lack of information about this kind of thing is, itself, disturbing. I imagine personnel managers attending convocations where such issues are discussed in a collegial setting, but news of such conversations never seems to gain a place in the broader public sphere.

Since the majority of people work, or have worked, in an institution at some point in their lives, and many still do so, this absence of material on such a central part of our lives seems to me to be scandalous. People often talk about suicide and how it is hard to talk about it in public. But work? Surely we are able to have meaningful conversations about something that is so central to our lives. Something that occupies such a large proportion of our lives, in fact. Eight hours a day, five days a week for 40 years. Day after day after day of labour, of restlessness, of thwarted ambition, of disappointments and satisfactions. Month after month. Year after year. And not a peep about any of it in the media unless there is a scandal such as an employer underpaying staff or someone who breaks the law and embezzles funds. We only talk about work if it gets into the court system.

To get back to the title and start off: institutions have been around for as long as society has existed. Some of them, like the parts of national armed forces, are very old indeed. The role of institutions is to organise people so that they can achieve better results than might be achieved if they operated alone.

It is often said that in the West we have such good polities because of the maturity of our institutions. But if you work in one you often find that things are not quite so rosy. The place of the individual in an institution is usually difficult because it is fraught with danger, as well as with opportunity. Like a game of snakes and ladders, you can find yourself on a ladder one year and the next you are on a snake. Twists of fate, things over which you have little control, can affect your mental health and your domestic life. If you are sidelined or if you lose your job this can have a big impact on you in many ways. Marriages can fail, children can lose a parent, financial ruin can follow from events that can operate completely independently of the individual.

Conversations that I have followed about institutions often point to their failings, but these seem to be linked to precisely the same things that go to form their merits. In my experience, institutions can shelter the individual against such things as economic downturns but at the same time they ask for loyalty. Loyalty, for its part, can operate to stymie innovation because people are unwilling to speak out when they see that a policy pursued by a superior is having a deleterious effect on the health of the larger organisation of which his or her work unit forms a part. Often, feuds over territory that an organisation cannot properly modulate into meaningful action can result in people being unfairly criticised, and they may even, as a result of the outflow from a disagreement, lose their job for no reason other than to make sure that another manager, whose work unit had been threatened by the actions of the first one, keeps his or her budget and privileges intact.

In this kind of situation, line workers are often asked to say or do things that are not in the best interests of the larger organisation. Their managers might encourage them to continue to voice opposition to a change suggested to work processes that would result in a diminution of the importance of their work unit, but they will do what they are told even though they can see that making the change suggested would benefit a large number of people. Turf is protected and front-line workers are forced to deal with the majority of the friction it creates.

One problem with institutions is that there is often a knowledge imbalance that characterises the work unit. Line workers know more about the problems that exist but they are not empowered to make decisions that might solve them. Instead, often, a manager has a policy he or she is following in order to achieve a result that consones with her own ideas about how the organisation should operate, or to conform to industry best-practice, or to further their own ambition or the ambition of someone further up the hierarchy from them. Front-line staff may have to do things, in such cases, in order to benefit someone other than themselves. That person might be right and the policy they are following might in the end benefit the broader organisation. But, on the other hand, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So whatever policy it is that is being pursued, there will be conflict resulting from interactions with people in other work units.

What to do? If you are caught up in a feud you are probably best advised to keep your head down and get on with the job. But this can have costs to your and to your family. You might suffer stress or even, in a worse scenario, a mental breakdown. If the latter outcome eventuates, will your organisation let you keep your job or will they sideline you or even fire you? All of these things happen all the time everywhere in the world.

The paradox of organisations is that they both help people to earn enough money to live decent lives and operate to make people conform. Just to survive you have to do what you are told. Failure to do this will often result in your being sidelined into a useless role with low status and no prospects for advancement, or even to you losing your job. For my part, I not very good at working in organisations, although as an arts graduate, at a time when getting an arts degree was considered to be a waste of effort, I didn’t have the most auspicious start.

In my career have learned more than just the rudiments of writing an application report. I have learned more than just that I am good with words. I also learned that the knowledge gaps that exist in organisations lie at the core of the problems they evince. People up the tree know more about the direction your work unit is heading in, but people on the front line know how those decisions are influencing relations with other work units. Caught in the middle are these front-line staff, men and women who risk everything sometimes for no other reason than to feed the ambition or vanity of a person with more power than them.

Is this what we want? Is this the best we can do? Personally, I think not. We can’t live without organisations but if we want them to be better places we need to have intelligent conversations about them. This can be difficult for obvious reasons. People are usually unwilling to jeopardise their livelihood by talking in public about a current employer even if that employer is causing them to experience levels of stress that might, given the right circumstances, lead to a breakdown or worse. People are afraid of organisations and therefore organisations continue to treat people as commodities. A new person can easily be brought in to replace someone who breaks. The whole survives even if an individual is hurt.

But how are people chosen for the fast track to the top? Is it enough to have good ideas? I think not. Is it enough to be good at your job? Again, no.

I haven’t worked for an organisation for a decade but I think that the old rules are still in place. What I found in my time working in them is that in order to survive and thrive you have to obey the ethos they embody and you have to have what are usually referred to euphemistically as “superior communication skills”. To be able to parley your way to achieving personal goals can send a message to people higher up in the hierarchy that you might also be useful for them. So, to get ahead in an organisation you have to believe in its virtue and you have to be skilful at lying without being caught doing it. A strange amalgam of duplicity and conformity is what will help you to progress in your career. Sort of like being in a royal court: every step you take is watched and displays of obedience carry weight.

For every Steve Jobs there are tens of thousands of dead-weight executives who live fat in expensive suburbs in big houses and who send their children to private schools. For executives an innovative mind is relatively low on the list of desirable qualities, so an organisation usually continues to follow a well-trod path until the whole thing is taken over by a more profitable organisation, until it fails completely and its assets are sold off, or until things get so bad that there is a major shake-up and heads roll.

Conversations with taxi drivers: Three

This is the third in a series that started on 6 June last year with a “meditation” that I wrote. Meditations on this blog are longer pieces that have a single theme. I decided to continue with the subject of taxi drivers since I usually have quite interesting conversations with them when I go somewhere. The date shown is the date the conversation took place.

5 April

I caught a cab to the medical centre because I had an appointment with my cardiologist. The taxi driver was obviously not born here and I told him why I was on the road. He listened and then told me about a problem he had had with his heart when he had banged into the open door of his cab on one occasion. At one point he used the expression “mamma mia”, which is Italian, so I thought he was born there but it turns out he is Lebanese. He told me his grandfather used to take the silk off corn (on the cob) and roll it in paper and smoke it. His grandfather (or was it his father?) lived to a great age. He had asked me how old my parents had been when they had died, and I told him.

When we got to Missenden Road he told me that the traffic there now is very bad for cars because of the work that has been done to make the road safer for pedestrians. “It used to be ok but now it’s terrible,” he said. When we were talking about Italy – I mentioned that I had studied it when I was younger – he said that he had an Italian in his family because the Romans had colonised Lebanon. He was a funny guy, very talkative.

9 April

Coming home from the art gallery I caught a cab and the driver had a heavy cough. As we drove past the Queen Victoria Building he said to me, “When I see the statue of the queen I think she is telling people to pick up their rubbish.” I said that in actual fact Victoria had very little power, like today’s royal family, and that the majority of power in the UK lies with the Parliament. I said that the same applies in Australia. He said that this was good, that people were able to have a monarch but that real power resided with elected representatives. He approved of this system of government. I didn’t ask him where he had been born but he had dark skin and was heavyset. I said that the Chinese certainly miss their royal family, and that the Japanese were lucky when, after WWII, the Americans allowed them to keep their emperor. I told him a little about the history of the monarch in the UK. He dropped me at the corner near my building and I paid using EFTPOS.

19 April

It was Good Friday and I had gone to Newtown to have dinner with a friend. In the cab on the way home I talked with the driver, who at first seemed to be a quietly-spoken man. He could have been born in Serbia or Croatia but I didn’t ask. As we turned left from Pyrmont Bridge Road into Bank Street, I mentioned that the Fish Market was going to be moved further down toward Glebe and that the current site would be redeveloped for apartments. He was incredulous, and became animate suddenly, cursing the NSW government for overdeveloping the area. I said they should make the site into a park as so many people use the area. My takeaway from the conversation was that the driver didn’t like apartment buildings.

26 April

I had had dinner in Newtown and got a cab to come home. The driver told me that it was Good Friday for orthodox churches. I remembered that my friend and I had walked past a Greek church in Abercrombie Street on the way to Newtown. The doors of the church had been open and a young boy in a white robe with gold piping was wandering around near the entrance. The taxi driver told me that today was quiet in Newtown and he connected the two things. He said that there was another Greek church down near the train station and that there would be a procession later in the evening. I asked him if he was Greek and he said he was not. He said all of eastern Europe observed Good Friday on this day.

We went along Wattle Street and there was a random breath-testing station set up on the right-hand side of the road with patrol cars, their lights flashing, and witches' hats set up on the carriageway. The policeman in front of the traffic initially flagged the taxi driver to stop but the driver did not. The policeman waved him through with a torch. The driver told me that police don’t usually flag down taxis on Friday and Saturday nights when they are busy, but rather do it during the week when they are not busy, and when they do not have a fare. I told the driver that I had seen taxis being flagged down near the casino and he said that that was the Department of Transport checking IDs and other details. He said that they also do the same thing regularly at the airport.

On Harris Street near Pyrmont Bridge Road there was an ambulance and a police car stopped outside one of the pubs on the corner. I said that it was probably a young man who had got in a fight. The driver tonight was a gentle man with an accent and he drove very moderately, not breaking and accelerating rapidly as some drivers do, like the driver did who had taken me to Redfern, where I had met my friend.