Upgrading to 2.5 - wish me luck!

Taking the plunge into new waters with 2.5.

Normal service will (hopefully) be restored shortly.

UPDATE: Updated. No probs at all.
Now having a play with the new interface. One of the things I love already is the ability of automatically upgrading plug-ins on the plug-in page. Now that is a great feature. :)

Rainy day in paradise

I’m not one to complain - wait… yes I am - anyway today it’s the first real day post daylight savings and I must say… I miss it!

It’s SO dark SO early. I feel like I’ve stepped from summer to winter in one fell swoop.

Of course it wasn’t helped by the fact that it was a rainy rainy day thanks to Cyclone Pancho. (31.6 mm since 9am this morning)

Maximum temp in my suburb of 16C (what’s that about? - this is Perth people!).

I got home from work, cold, sniffly and waited no more than two seconds before slipping off my sandals for my trusty ugg boots. I love you my ugg boots… smooches.

We had pasta for dinner and now I feel back in the land of the living - should be mostly fine tomorrow and yes, alright… we need the rain.

One thing that really cheered me up was the fact that South Park is now online - although sadly, not yet in Australia.

The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin’s book The Hanging Gardenis one of his Inspector Rebus novels. You might have seen the Rebus TV series starring John Hannah?

In this book Rebus investigates two crimes. A war crime and some gangster in-fighting. Both complex, both in their way intriguing and somehow inter-related.

Rebus is a miserable bugger. Wedded to his job. Broken marriage. Recovering alcoholic. He’s a loner but of course a loner with the insight to resolve these puzzling crimes, even prevent them.

It’s set in the grimy underworld of Edinburgh and the grey setting perfectly matches Rebus’s mood.

I haven’t read an Ian Rankin novel before. He intersperses his prose with song titles which is a bit off-putting at first. Is it part of the text or a suggested accompanying playlist? Maybe they are what Ian was listening to as he wrote.

Overall, I enjoyed the read. He sets a mean pace and I was carried along with the plot.

Worth picking up if you like crime fiction.

Other reviews:
Complete review
Amazon (scroll down to find it)

Floating in the Indian Ocean

I’m floating in the Indian Ocean. The water is like a mill pond. My head is back, my limbs crucifixed. I can feel the water lap against my ears and in the distance, above the water, children playing, a car roaring past, the faint duuf duuf of the Cottesloe Hotel.

The water supports my body. A posturpedic mattress. The sun, gentle as it begins its downward journey one hour earlier.

I am at peace.

And yet there is the faint niggle of disquiet. How long will my family let me lie.

Suddenly my feet are grabbed. Sharp little claws catch at my calves, dragging them down into the water, no longer supporting my weight.

“Will you swim with us around the pylon? I don’t want swim on my own.”

“Oh alright then.”

How could I refuse? This is my perfect swimming environment. Still and quiet. No waves.

Bliss.

Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah

I picked up this book over Easter. One of our teenage guests had read it for school and was writing a paper on it. It’s not a long read - I read it over the course of a morning.

Chinese Cinderella is the autobiographical tale of Adeline Yen Mah - you may have seen her book Falling Leaves, a more adult memoir.

The story is of her childhood, growing up in China during the second World War. She is the fifth child of a fairly wealthy man and two weeks after her birth her mother dies - she is thought of as bad luck. Her father re-marries soon after and the new stepmother is - as you might expect from the title - not the most even-handed particularly when her own two children arrive on the scene.

She is not allowed to invite friends home, never celebrates birthdays, has no new clothes etc.

Her only champion is her aunt and to a lesser extent her grandfather, whose power wanes as the stepmother’s grows.

It is a sad tale but for some reason I lost sympathy with her. It just felt like a whinge. Now I’m sure her life was hard. Beyond imagining even, but somewhere along the line, she lost me. Perhaps it was because the story was told more simply for a younger audience.

I wonder if her adult autobiography would elicit the same response.

Have you read this book? What did you think?

Another review:
Reading Matters
It is an extraordinary catalogue of abuse and malice which will stay with you for quite a while after you finish the book. And I think you might find this book actually enjoyable, despite the content, because it is so well written.

Dear John by Nicholas Sparks

I picked this book up at the airport waiting for someone called John. On reading the first couple of pages I discovered it was set in Wilmington. We loved Wilmington on our recent trip to the US and so it seemed as if the universe was speaking and I should try out this new author. New to me anyway…

Dear John by Nicholas Sparks is the story of an Army infantry soldier who falls in love and then has to let his love go. No don’t worry I haven’t given away the ending - Sparks tells you that almost in the first sentence.

Yes, a love story. From a man’s point of view written by a bloke.

Interesting. I haven’t read too much male romantic fiction in my time.

There are a few macho bits. The action in Iraq for example, the odd fisticuffs on the beach, but mostly this is a story of a bloke and his feelings. A lot about his feelings - for his girlfriend, his dad, his girlfriend’s childhood friend…

I enjoyed it. It’s not challenging to read. A fairly gentle story with a hint of doom and you wonder all the way through why it all goes pear-shaped given the depths of his feelings.

Not a bad holiday read.

Other reviews:
Inthenews.co.uk
Book Reporter

The Cleft by Doris Lessing

I started reading The Cleft intrigued by this idea of women existing in a population without men. Spontaneously becoming pregnant and birthing only girl babies. Then comes the fateful day when a “monster” is born - a boy baby. How they react to this change in their circumstances and how it changes their society is the story of The Cleft.

I haven’t read any Doris Lessing books before and was expecting something along the lines of Jean M. Auel. Personalised storyline, detail, descriptions of their daily life.

I was disappointed.

Lessing tells the story through an aging Roman senator who is an historian. You get a taste of how she can write about characters through his tale but then she goes from his story to this buried history of early man. He’s sifting through scraps of old documents collating the story.

This way Lessing can describe the development of the Clefts and the Squirts (I imagine you can guess which are men and which are women) over generations.

But it didn’t work for me. I found it distanced me from the story. I was more interested in the Senator. I resented the dry, almost historical sections about the Clefts when that should have been the focus. I didn’t particularly care about the various characters (not that there was any character development) in the early world and while I maintained an interest - I wasn’t engaged.

I think Lessing missed an opportunity here to bring the story to life. By treating it as a history she took it out of the world of fiction and into the world of non-fiction. It read like a history not a novel and I felt well… pissed off actually.

It might be your bag, it wasn’t mine.

She won a Nobel Prize for Literature. Meh.

Other reviews:
The Guardian
The Australian

A smoky drive home

Tuesday night, and as I leave Bunbury on my way back to Perth I see a thick cloud of smoke…

In fact there are two fires and the helitacs - or whatever those fixed wing planes that drop water on fires are called - were flying between the two.

An hour later driving through Mandurah I see another thick plume of smoke. This time it’s in Port Kennedy so for the first time in my life I decide to turn into Secret Harbour… shhhhhh.

There, I join a bunch of locals on a low ridge and watch the flames as the bushfire burns through 500ha of Scientific Park.

It was a serious fire and some homes were evacuated, though in the end no houses or lives were lost. An interesting side story was that the park had been a bombing range in world war 2 and there is unexploded ordinance through the park. Firefighters had to stick to the existing tracks.

Meanwhile my photo journalism over, I was stuck in Secret Harbour. I’d got disorientated and spent twenty minutes driving into cul-de-sacs.

I can’t express adequately my delight at finally finding the highway home.

w00t.

Classy names may mislead you

If you saw this sign - what kind of establishment would you think you’d be entering?

A bottle shop… right?

Trust Margaret River to find a way to make the local bottle-oh sound classy… it was the fellows walking out with a bag of ice and a slab of beer that gave them away…

What next?

The Margaret River Regional Food Centre for their local supermarket?

Working from home can be distracting

Today I finally got access to the work VPN which means that now, I can access my work email and documents from home.

Now that could be a good thing - I’ve got a couple of reports to write and I wanted to do that in the relative peace of home - but instead I’ve been distracted by my email. In fact I’m just as busy doing the busy-work of the hour to hour crap running a network at home as I am at work.

Plus now that I can access my emails all the time… I am!

So now work impinges on home and home is impinging on work.

This is nuts. I can see that I’m going to have to work out some limits.

Do you work from home? How do you manage it.

Do you have to set up a separate home office? Set aside “work” time?

Coz now that I have it, I don’t want to give up my VPN access. :)

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