I suspect the job change will make holidays difficult this year, with that said, it’s been a couple of years since I had a decent holiday given I changed jobs around the same time last year. Bit uncomfortable to be honest, changing jobs within a year but I think it works…I hope. Also odd that having worked for a vendor, I’ll be the librarian dealing with vendors…with that said, I know most folk on both sides of the fence.

qantas club

On to holidays…a friend has suggested Borneo this year which I’m rather keen on. I’d like to think it’s doable as it’s been at least 18 months since I had any sort of decent holiday, that being my trip tramping in NZ. On the other hand, I missed a decent holiday last year due to changing jobs and I’m about to change jobs again. Keeping Borneo in mind, and I have permanent work, I’m starting to consider holidays for 2013. For the last several years my holidays have revolved around work trips which has been handy as I’ve saved substantially on airfares yet still been able to make it parts of Europe, Mexico, US and Canada.

The last three nights I have been caught in Eurovision fever! I watched both semis and then the final last night. A friend actually made it to Eurovision last year and I’d love to make it myself. Eurovision is a massive pisstake on a global scale and has somehow managed to make it on to my bucket list. In 2013, it will be in Sweden and probably mid May. I don’t know yet how that will work with my new position.

I currently envisage, “look ma, no hands”, a trip of around 4-5 weeks, of which Eurovision is the centrepiece, or possibly the climax. I’ve never been to Sweden and any excuse is a good one. One idea that occurred this evening is perhaps to hike The Pennine Way, which takes around 18 days, then finish off with a week in Sweden. Any visit to Europe will have to include a few days in Bristol, UK as my sister lived there for a year or two, and some good friends live there now. Plus it’s rather lovely.

All that being equal there are places I’d like to revisit particularly Scotland: partly for the hiking and partly for the whisky. I haven’t been to Paris, or any part of France, for over a decade, and I feel this has been rather remiss of me. Most of my international travel has been city focused, and I’d really like to explore the countryside more. I have been fortunate that I have seen a lot of New Zealand, and thanks to a driving trip with my dad and sister, have explored the countryside of France.

I recall as a child watching an old black and white movie based on the book; or rather I watched it on a black and white TV – I know not if it were colour or black & white. The film frightened me in parts whether it were the application of tattoos to human flesh, or the stern mariner, or the white beast itself. There seemed to be  a thought or two running through the narrative that I’d like to revisit. I’d like to rewatch the movie I saw but moreso, I’d like to read the book itself.

Moby Dick

In 2009, The Folio Society released a limited edition (LE) of Moby Dick and it is this version that I desire most. I have quite a few Folio Society books, which I’ve either bought secondhand in the UK, or inherited from my father, not to mention the Don Quixote. The last being my first LE I think and a beautiful book it is. The obvious answer is to join The Folio Society and buy the book direct. Given the number of Folio books I want this should be the easiest path to follow.

Unfortunately, I discovered a year or two back, that Folio discriminate against the Australian market substantially with massive markups. Even worse, if I were to order direct from the UK, I would still be charged the Australian price. In the case of Moby Dick that means paying Oz$470 instead of Oz$270 plus postage and handling. As can be seen from the previous link (and conversation), Folio is happy to set higher rates (excluding delivery costs) for non UK customers.

With that said, it is hard to lay all the blame at the feet of Folio, as books in Oz have been substantially overpriced for many years. The glories of the internet have revealed, through comparisons of pricing from local retailers vs Book Depository, Amazon, etc., that locals are overcharged for books (and other items) and have been so, for a long, long time. The exception here is that for most books, I can order from Amazon or Book Depository and pay the cheaper price. However for The Folio Society, even if I order from the UK, I will still be charged the exorbitant Australian pricing. The only way round this is to fly to London and buy from their premises.

I love the tap thing. I put my glass under and turn the handle; shutting it off when the glass is sufficiently full.

It hasn’t really been in the barrel long enough to mature properly but it is tasting yum. I don’t know if it’s improved in the 4 months but it certainly hasn’t degenerated. I’ve topped it up regularly. Draytons originally sold me a 10.5 litre plastic flagon of tawny. It took more than 8 litres to fill the barrel as the wood soaks up quite a bit. I’ve probably drunk a litre or so from that.

Anyway, the other night, I forgot to put the lid back on the flagon when I was doing my top up. I noticed the following night and while it was still drinkable (from the flagon), the pleasantness had dropped substantially. There was probably around a half litre or so left. Thus yesterday, along with a few friends, I headed back up to the Hunter for a refill. If you wash out the flagon (don’t use soap! – I used warm water) they’ll fill it up and give you a discount. The standard price is $75 for the 10.5 litre and as a refill of the existing flagon that dropped to $63 or about 6 bucks a litre ie as cheap as cask wine though it’s a decent drop.

They also talked about adding a bit of rum to improve the flavour. I’ve not been keen on this as the rums I’ve sampled have been strong and overpowering. Turns out Draytons also sell a rum port and I had a taste of it. Much, much softer than I expected as the rum seemed to mellow out the port. So I bought a bottle. I’ve just decanted out some port from the barrel into a bottle and added about 700ml of the rum port. For the next few weeks at least, I’ll be back to pouring port from the bottle, which will give the barrel time to start blending in the rum.

It’s taken some rather unexpected turns since then, I rarely seem to end up in regular projects. Flexible deadlines became tight deadlines, and thankfully I had a boss who pushed me in the right sorts of ways. It’s been a good project to work out how things work at SLNSW, and provided ample opportunity to meet a lot of new people. Very much a learning experience for me. I learnt some new things about me and how I work, some good some bad, and acknowledge that there’s still more to learn. One curious side effect is that for the last 6 weeks or so, I’ve been living from week to week, expecting to go live any day. I would make last minute decisions, only to discover that they weren’t last minute anymore. Some decisions were good, some resulted in additional work.

There are things I’m naturally good at eg I can look at a random piece of code and make some sense of it. There are some things that don’t come naturally, like project management, so I have to focus harder on those. This project took my entire focus. Now that it’s over and the stress has lifted, my desire to read has returned; my morningpersonitis has returned – I’d hit a point in recent weeks where I couldn’t seem to wake up properly and caffeine had no effect. I haven’t been able to read in a couple of months.

At the start of the week, before the project had finished, I downloaded Dessaix’s new book of essays, and forced myself to read one. He has a certain style of writing, or rather of digressing, that I s’pose seeps into my subconscious. He plays with writing and puts me at ease. On the bus home this evening, I picked up my reader and got stuck into the second essay…not had the mood in a while, much easier now.

The project finished, stress lifted, and my centre has returned.

However, it’s not all good as I managed to put back on all the weight I lost in my first 3 months in the new job. I totally blame an addiction to a computer game called Skyrim that lasted about 3 months or so. Very addictive. Most days, I would return home after work and sit on the couch, playing through til well past bedtime. Needless to say, weekends disappeared all too quickly. Food was rushed and consumed while playing. Not a healthy lifestyle. Though I’ve racked up a few hundred hours of actual game play, it remains unfinished. I stopped playing 3 weeks ago and have been rediscovering my life since, even cooking and eating at, if not a decent time, not too late either.

I’ve also been conferencing. In changing jobs, I was anticipating a drop in the number of conferences I attended. So far the only difference seems to be that I’m now self funding my attendance :-) In my first 6 months in new job, I have been to 5 conferences: NLS5 (Perth), Library Camp (Perth), THATCamp (Canberra), VALA (Melbourne), and Library Camp (Melbourne). Admittedly both library camps were one day events following a major conference. I think I’m enjoying the camp approach the most: there’s room for learning new things, room for talking about new things, and room for generally socialising. All done with a group of people similarly minded; made many new friends.

There’s been an odd development in the last 6 months too: I’ve come to the conclusion that I no longer like staying in hostel dorms. There, I’ve said it. The Perth trip last September was the first time I stayed in a room alone: though it was my own room in a hostel with shared bathroom/dunny. $70/night instead of $25. The privacy was nice. I didn’t feel like I had to be totally paranoid about my belongings…or worry about my snoring, or other people’s snoring. On my recent trip to Melbourne, I found a room discounted from $320 to $90/night and that was fab. I’m getting rather used to this :-)

On the tech front, I now have a mac desktop tower at home, XP based desktop at work, an XP based netbook (ASUS Eee 901), and an android based phone (Samsung Galaxy S2). Whereas in my previous job I had the same XP based laptop for work and home, the same netbook, and an iphone. 6 months on and the mac continues to piss me off regularly. Though I’ve recently been reminded that it has a full unix underneath it and I’ve just set up a web server (XAMPP for Mac as I have XAMPP for XP on the netbook) so I can work through the code from the workshops I’ve been to; not to mention as a space for developing code to handle XML and manage data sets. Some aspects of the mac I like and some aspects I don’t. It doesn’t seem as flexible as the PC or as modifiable. Being a keyboard junkie, I consider some of the keyboard shortcuts on the mac to be utterly stupid. Plus there’s a design ethos for the OS (Lion) to work better with smaller screens rather than my 22″ widescreen desktop.

The Galaxy S2 has been a wonderful delight – I was very fond of the iphone 3GS I had which I had to give up when I changed jobs. This was a few months prior to the launch of the iphone 4S. 6 months of use later, I love the S2 and am very happy that I didn’t wait for the 4S. Speed is good, flexibility is good, and modifiability is excellent. I still haven’t replaced my netbook but I have decided on the replacement: ASUS Transformer Prime. It came out a few weeks ago: looks and feels fab. Unfortunately, only the champagne version has come out locally so I’m holding off until ASUS fixes a couple of design issues (related to GPS/wifi) and releases the amethyst grey version locally. I’m a little old fashioned when it comes to tech and would like to be able to walk into a store and buy it…not to mention return it should there be an issue.

As you can see from the above screenshot, at the time of release, it was available, via Amazon, for kindle for about $10, discounted from $23. Nothing unusual about that on Amazon and I’ve benefited from such discounts in the past. At the same time, it was released locally in hardcover for about $45 I think. Once Malazan was out of the way, I was going to see if I could pick up the hardcover cheaper somewhere to keep, and buy the e version to read.

A couple of weeks later, as I finished off Malazan, it was released locally on the recently launched Australian edition of Google ebooks…for $25. Looking at the reviews on the google page, there’s a few folk complaining about the price difference between it and Amazon…and lo, the publisher noticed and pulled the title from Amazon altogether. For a few weeks, the only e version available was for non kindle devices and folk with kindles had no avenue to get a copy.

I actually have both a kindle and a Sony ereader but I object to paying such a high price for an ebook to which I have so little rights. especially given how expensive books are in this country to begin with. Anyway, I noticed last week, that Army of Thieves had returned to the Amazon Kindle store. This time, it was listed for $26 with no discounting. Keeping in mind, this is with geographic restrictions ie this book is available for Australians only. There is a US version but it has a different name (Scarecrow Returns) and is due for release early 2012.

Needless to say, I am distinctly unimpressed. Moreso when, a couple of weeks back, I was able to buy the hardcover in my local Kmart for $23! I bought two: one for mum and one for me :-) I ended up paying less for the p than what the e currently sells for. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than $12 or so for an ebook and I don’t intend to change that any time soon. As a friend suggested, it would be nice if the hardcover included a free version of the e so I wouldn’t have to buy the same book in each format: one for the shelf and one to read. The other disappointing factor here, is that the publisher is fine with folk discounting the p, but totally against folk discounting the e.

text editing

Popped into an electrical store today and was able to play with a couple of tablets: the Sony Tablet S and the ASUS Transformer. There was a Motorola Xoom there as well but it wasn’t charged. I also had a feel of the ASUS slider which is a tablet with a keyboard that slides out from underneath…felt a bit too heavy for my liking though it seemed nifty enough. Alas, text editing on the Transformer was disappointing in tablet mode. It was totally fine via the external keyboard that it plugged into, there were even arrow keys for moving around with the text. I couldn’t work out how to enable the virtual keyboard on the tablet side though (was still connected to external keyboard at time). I’m generally fine with virtual keyboards themselves. The Sony tablet had a text editing experience that matched my experience with the Samsung Galaxy phone ie it was pretty good with a virtual tab (as per image) that you can drag through the word to get to the spot you want. Whereas the ASUS allowed you to highlight words or phrases but there seemed to be no easy way of getting to a particular spot other than pressing hopefully on the right letter. This is a bit odd as they’re all running Android. So at this stage, the Sony is the preferred option. Curiously, the version in the shop didn’t have Polaris Office installed but that’s ok, it should be available via the Android marketplace. I’m not in a hurry so I can wait a bit and see what the Galaxy tablet is like if it manages to get a local release.

Anyway, here we are a year or so later and I had to do some testing yesterday at work on an ipad2. In the last year or so, I’ve had a lot more experience of touch screen devices initially via the iphone 3GS and then with the Samsung Galaxy S2 I bought when I changed jobs. As far as phones are concerned, I particularly liked the Galaxy’s use of Swype for entering text and found its text abilities substantially better than the iphone approach (same as the ipad with thumb dragging) ie decent cursor control. My ipad2 experience was for the most part, much improved on my ipad1 experience; I was much more at home with the touch screen and found it fast and responsive. Fun even. Text editing however has not improved.

However my netbook is dying: randomly freezes on shutdown and takes a while to start up, even from hibernation…compared to the super quickness of tablets. I am reliant on some sort of portable notetaking device for meetings and so forth. The traditional pen & paper approach are no good as I’ve mostly lost the motor skill for handwriting:

I am keyboard dependent.

So I am investigating tablets once more. They’re fairly light, around 600g, startup is quick and typing seems fine. Unfortunately the ipad2 is out of contention so I’ve been looking out for alternative options. Given my happy experience with the Galaxy phone, I have been very, very keen to try out the new Galaxy tablets. Alas, due to a long running court case with Apple, there’s nowhere in Sydney I can legally try one out and buy. I’d also be interested in comparing the 10″ Galaxy with the 7″ though I suspect I’d want the bigger version. The other tablet that has attracted my fancy is the Sony Tablet S and it looks pretty slick. A friend at work has one and she showed it to me though I didn’t get a chance to try out the editing functions – have read somewhere that text editing is poorly handled. With that said, it’s a decent looking tablet and has a nice feel in the hand, similar in weight to the ipad2. I’ll pop into a Sony shop next week and try it out properly and keep my fingers crossed that the Samsung court case with Apple is resolved soon.

The last year or two or so, I’ve been mulling over the idea of starting up a port barrel as port is probably one of my favourite tipples to relax with. I’m fond of a good whisky, that is true, but port is always the one to which I chill out. Of late, I’ve been drinking cask ports too, the quality while somewhat basic, has been fine. The thing I like about the cardboard box is the tap and being able to put my glass under and fill up. Plus it tends to keep well. However, the biggest plus of having your own port barrel is that you can use it to mature, or blend, a port to your liking…even a basic port can improve with a bit of time in the barrel. I’ve read quite a bit here and there on what to look for and how to manage it.

barrel and port

Mid last week, I got an SMS from a mate, asking if I fancied a trip to the Hunter on the weekend with a few friends. I try not to say no to Hunter trips :-) We always try to visit a mix of old and new wineries on each such trip and I specifically asked if we could visit Draytons as I’ve long loved their port, dating back to when they used to do ceramic jugs. I figured if anyone in the Hunter sold barrels it would be them, though there’s no mention on their website. Sure enough there was and I ended up buying an 8 litre barrel + a 10.5 litre plastic drum of rich tawny port with which to season it.

Now that I have said gear, this weekend I will fill the barrel with warm water…possibly a few times. This will allow the wood to expand and become watertight ie barrels initially will leak so you need to do the water stuff before you do the port stuff. Once the water phase is out of the way, that can take up to 24 hours, I’ll then fill the barrel with the tawny. Due to the ability of the wood to absorb the port, it will probably take more than 8 litres to fill. The bloke at Draytons suggested I keep some of the port in a separate jug so that I can compare it with the what’s maturing in the barrel.

The downside is that I wasn’t quite ready to buy a barrel and I now need to find a table/cabinet on which to stand said barrel. The barrel comes with a stand of its own so that it doesn’t roll. Ideally I’d want something either waist or shoulder high, alas the cabinet I have in the main room isn’t quite deep enough for the length of the barrel otherwise that would be almost perfect. I suppose at least this gives me a reason to visit the new Ikea that opened up nearby. Not to mention, that any excuse to go shopping is a good one ;-)

Anyway…that didn’t happen. Another cool job popped up and I’m now at the State Library of NSW. With the potential to do some of the stuff I wanted to do in NZ. One of my strengths is running with other people’s ideas. Idea creation itself is hard and I can do it occasionally but I don’t think it’s my strength in the big picture. Within the big picture however all is good, I just need to work out the big picture first…or rather which big picture suits me.

One idea that is fermenting and was initially inspired by a tweet, and follows the line of why can’t I do what I wanted to do in NZ, but in NSW instead? How about I aim for developing fun stuff here…afterall I’ve lived here all my life…and spent most of my life trying to escape.

There was another tweet that challenged me: where is the Te Ara for Oz? Instead of viewing NZ as the place to go, how about we view NZ as the first step? What can we do to follow in their path and even better where else can we take it?