All winter long we scan the weather charts, watching concentric circles and coloured blobs dance across our monitors. The Southern ocean is active at this time of year… so when we see something significant, we shuffle our lives around to be ready for action. So we watch… and we wait… and….

absolutely nothing happens.

The wind howls from the North, and the sea turns a mix of grey and brushed on white. Or the wind disappears… and the ocean falls still, oily smooth and dead flat. All winter we wait for swell… and  every time something goes wrong.

3 days of winter left, and our prayers are finally answered. The swell begins to wrap into the reef at 3pm and by 4 it looks like a surf magazine cover. It’s not perfect… there have been better days this year… but not many. It’s been a long time. 3 hours in the water, 3 hours yelling as someone else takes a late drop, 3 hours scrambling to be in the perfect spot when the next set explodes onto the reef , 3 hours laughing almost non-stop at just how good it is.

Two beers, huge bowl of pasta with pesto & shaved pecorino. It’ll take a week to wipe the smile off my face. I feel sleepy.

That was time wastin’ Tuesday. How was yours?

Tags: Time wastin' Tuesday, general by admin
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“I’m outside now”

It was the first time I’d talked to Sarge in over a year, and he still sounded like the same old Sarge… very much in the way I like all my oldest friends to. He was down from Big City for two days on a whirlwind visit.

“See ya in a sec”.

Within 2 minutes the lift had taken me to the ground floor, and as I walked out through the foyer I caught sight of him standing by the door. I thought the lovely Elle might have been with him, but as far as I could tell he was alone. The automatic doors opened and Sarge turned ’round expectantly as I stuck out my right hand to shake his. Always the joker, he had positioned himself next to someone’s pram - hoping to catch me by surprise. 20 years of his self certified batchelorhood, and a stream of attractive, bubbly girlfreinds loomed large in my memory. I smiled and looked down at the little boy staring wide eyed at me, then looked up at Sarge shaking my head.

“Ha! You had me for a moment” I chuckled, looking around for the pram’s real owner.

“He’s ours” Sarge announced.

I looked back at the pram again, then back at Sarge. I probably looked a bit stunned at that point.

“This is Oliver” he offered.

So off we trundled across the street to the busy lunchtime food court, since it would be kid freindly. I assumed a counter meal and a quick pint at The Historian was probably out of the question…

We found a spot, and cleared the plates and greasy paper left by the previuos diners from the table, and sat down. Clearly we had a lot to catch up on. Sarge volunteered to grab the food if I stayed and minded Oliver, “no probs” I offered.

So there I sat with Sarge and Elle’s 6 month old kid, who’s existence had been utterly unknown to me just minutes earlier. My mind flashed back to their wedding, the photo session in Hyde Park between gulps of Champagne, the speech I had agonised over for weeks that went off better than I had hoped, and Elle looking like a whipped cream coated miniature model of her famous namesake. I looked at the little stranger sitting quietly next to me, and could see both of them in his face. I wondered how the three of them would be the next time I saw them…

Subman was first cab off the rank, announcing Annie’s pregnancy within a few months of their wedding and beating everyone in our circle of friends to the punch. It was sort of sureal, partly because he was only a year older than me and I couldn’t imagine taking on such a resonsibility, but also because he had spoken about it so many times before.

He never had any doubt that he wanted kids. In conversation, as a single guy in the years preceeding, he always spoke of it as a forgone conclusion. He’d one day have kids, yes, two or three, and settle down quietly and live happily ever after. 5 Years on, he’d done precisely that - alternating boy / girl / boy with Angus already at school. I kept in touch with Subman and Annie, and we celebrated our own birthdays and those of their kids on the milestone occasions.

But all the while, it felt like Subman had lost his spark - like there was now a sense of resignation to his lot in life. An upbeat, partying, humourous single guy, in married parenthood he had become…well… boring. It wasn’t that we didn’t have things to talk about - we were still great mates with lots in common - it was just we didn’t seem able to relate in the same way anymore. I found it hard to have a decent conversation with him, and when the kids were around it was impossible. They seemed to be forever running headfirst into sharp pointy objects and bleeding all over the place - or threatening to.

A few years on I would appoint him to the bridal party at my wedding, as gratitude for his friendship. On the night of the reception, I caught a spark in Subman’s eyes - one I hadn’t noticed for years. He partied hard, he danced like a maniac, he went completely ballistic - much to the amusement of our old group of freinds, and much to the embarassment of his dear wife. Later that night when they all hit the town, Subman’s highjinks in a shopping trolley resulted in a bloody gash to his chin. His wife, a registered nurse, disowned him, but undeterred, he soldiered on until the wee small hours. Tales of his drunken shenanigans abounded at subsequent gatherings. It made me so very happy to see him back to his old self.

I’d really missed him.

Tags: general by admin
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• On JJJ this morning they were talking about Tinytown drivers and their reputation as being the rudest and stupidest in the country. Then they also got a call from someone describing our fantastic one-way expressway, and how it annoys people because it always runs in the opposite direction to the one they want to travel in. It was funny, because at that precise moment I was driving along said expressway, watching several acts of motoring bastardary - all perpetrated by rude, stupid tinytown drivers!
  
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• I had an MP3 raid last weekend and have begun to compile the sountrack to my spring. There’s just sooo much stuff I like at the moment it’s ridiculous. Might link a few of my faves for those that are that way inclined.
  
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• The weather is just beeeewwwwwwwwwdiful at the moment, and it seemed like the entire tinytown population stepped out to bask in the sun over the busy lunch hour today. For those inclined to do a bit of perving, let me just say it was a feast for the eyes!!
  
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• My beach looks more like a lake this week - it’s so flat and glassy you could waterski. Tonight I caught sight of what I thought was a pod of dolphins heading toward the point - so I bolted down there with my camera hoping to time it perfectly. When I got down there, it was just the same fat old seal that has been hanging around for weeks, lolling about off the rocks with his flipper up.
  
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• Are you the sort of person that always steps to one side in the street to avoid oncoming pedestrians, who have inflated senses of self importance? Do you ever feel the urge to just march down the sidewalk swinging your arms, yelling ( in a robot voice, for effect ) “CRUSH!… KILL!… DESTROY!”? No? So it’s just me then? OK fine… moving right along…
  
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• There’s a girl who drives a red Hyundai that arrives on the same floor as, and parks just before me most mornings in low-rise carpark. She really, really reminds me of a certain blogger… so much so I have named her after said blogger. But if you think I am gonna tell which blogger… think again!
  
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Tags: general by admin
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Aggggghh!!! TWT has been highjacked, despite my best and repeated efforts to do nothing of significance today.

Thanks to absolutely no surf I have skulked around the house all day, but worse, now I must do a whirlwind tidy up of my office. You see, I foolishly agreed to a meeting tonight with a new client desperate to throw some money at me for some work he has now left far too late to get done by anyone else. That’s fine, but here’s the thing - he works in the same industry as another customer I am in the midst of wrapping up a fairly large job for. Prior to getting that job, I signed off on a commercial confidentiality aggreement declaring I had no existing arrangements with anyone in this sector. And at the time, that was true. And right now, it still is… well… technically… at least until I actually start the other job.

But what’s worse is I haven’t invoiced them yet… and this other gig is quick money… but by rights I should declare it to my existing customer before I take on the work.

So it may well be that if I do ( depending on what exactly he wants me to do for him ) declare it, they might get narky. In fact, they could turn around and say “we want to withdraw, and we will not be paying for work to date” if they don’t like it.

In which case, tonight’s meeting, and the frenzied tidying of my H-bomb-site office, will have been a complete waste of time.

So umm… yeah… that’s time wastin’ Tuesday.

How was yours?

Tags: Time wastin' Tuesday, general by admin
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Once upon a time, the first humans banded together and formed small groups of hunters and gatherers.

In that primeval time, there were really only two things you could aspire to - and even then, this was often governed by gender. But as the species became more clever, and more spread out across the globe, other needs arose. One day, an ape-man fashioned a cutting edge out of a piece of volcanic rock - and he quickly showed how it would save time and effort in removing meat from the bones of a dead animal. Others tried to copy him and make their own - some succeeded, but many failed. They found it easier to rely on someone else - a manufacturer - to create this essential piece of Cavewear™ for them. In doing so, they became the first consumers.

Soon though, clever people thought of other things to make - and set about creating them. In the millennia that followed, they learnt how to make clubs, then axes, and much later still, bows and arrows. The carpenter made plates and from timber, the stonemason made altars from granite, the tailor made coats from animal skins - and soon learnt how to trade with the hunter, the stonemason and the carpenter. The raw materials used were well known and understood, and the usefulness of the products created from them were universal. Almost everyone had a job, and that job was defined by what that person made - be that as a primary producer, or humble labourer. There was never any question about the complexity, or necessity of what an individual did for a job: everyone needed coal, and miners to dig it out of the ground; everyone needed clothes to keep warm, and cotton mills to spin the thread.

* * *

I was standing on a building site, my friend’s friend at the controls of a Bobcat™ - busily leveling the ground for the foundations the concretor would lay the following week. My friend had spotted them as we drove past, and asked me to stop so he could say hello. He climbed onto the bucket of the bobcat, and engaged the operator in conversation as he throttled back the engine, while my new acquaintance stood next to me in a red safety vest, clutching a rolled up plan in his left hand. Through his tinted safety glasses he peered, and from under the peak of a dusty trucker cap, he turned and asked,

“So what do you do, Geeb?”

I paused for a moment, thinking of what depth of explanation I should go to… before abandoning the idea and simply answering,

“web developer”

He grunted a sort of indifferent grunt, and looked off across the vacant block, in the general direction of the truck he drove - the truck that the bobcat would go on the back of once they had finished moving dirt. I knew that line of conversation had reached its logical conclusion.

Later in the car I told Nev about it, and he chuckled. “Mate” he said, “those guys wouldn’t have e-mail addresses… probably only ever looked up porno on the ‘web… none of ‘em own a computer”. He went on “I mean, what do they need it for anyway? Pete gets up in the morning, gets in the truck, drives to a site, moves dirt all day, then gets back in the truck, goes home and has his tea. That’s it.”

And I stopped and pondered for a moment explaining the likes of secure socket layers, or DNS resolution, or Open Source Content Management Systems, to someone who only knew AJAX as a household cleaning product and saw no reason for it to be otherwise. Where would I start? What foundations, what assumptions could I build my explanation upon? And how, then, could I even hope to explain exactly what it is an Oracle DBA does for $220 an hour, or what on earth you’d need a Business Analyst… a Project Manager… an e-Business Strategist for?

My head started to spin as I tried to pair back the layers of complexity, to strip it back to something simple… something familiar… something understood. Yes, I tried, but I could not. And I didn’t feel in the least bit clever about that fact. In the brief moment of clarity that followed, I pictured myself standing on the African Savannah, matted beard and hair, my work hardened body wrapped in the skin of a buffalo, a large stone axe in my right hand. An axe I had made. The same one that killed the buffalo who’s meat my clan gorged upon, who’s coat I wore. And I pictured a stranger appearing out of the dust, and asking me where I came from, and what I did. I would answer in just two words, and so would he.

There would be no need to say any more…

Tags: general by admin
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Two things have been bothering me all day, actually, the last few days. Number one, when did Nestle’s Quick become Nestlé Nesquick, and why does it taste like some watery, pale imitation of its former self, and, number two, what’s with all these men with goatie beards driving around in family sedans wearing flourescent vests, like they are ready to jump out and fix a pot hole in the middle of the road? Is this just a tinytown thing or have you seen them too?

Hmmm… I’ve spent far too much time pondering these questions… still… that’s what TWT is all about.

How was yours? ( just in case you’ve got bugger all else to do )

Tags: general by admin
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Back in the dark, cro-magnon days of the World Wide Web, circa 1996, a primative online community emerged. Geekwise, Firefly.net had some cool, cutting edge technology behind it - including a nifty way of categorising and browsing music recommendations. You could either hunt down like minded souls, or find music that had a similar “feel” - e.g. “other bands that you might like”. Among other things, it also had a sort of streaming chat that you logged into via a thing called a passport. If you thought that sounded just a little like Windows Instant Messenger, then you wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that Microsoft actually bought Firefly - lock, stock and barrel in 1997. But I digress…

I came across one such like minded soul, and you might say she became my first ever online buddy. I began chatting with Kittylady sometime around Christmas 1996, after she initiated a conversation centered around bands Tonic and The Tragically Hip, which we were both into at the time. If Kittylady was to be believed, she was a vivacious, young, moderately hot and available second year uni ( college undergrad ) student living in Columbus, Ohio.

Before long we were scheduling chats on certain days at certain times - essential not just due to the time difference, but also because I was paying about $5.00 a second for my 33kb/s dialup internet connection. We never got below the waistline, but we did rabbit on about all manner of stuff - from what sort of a day we had, to who sucked and who didn’t and why, to TV, movies, and of course music. You might say that over that period of time, I established a close bond - a connection - a sense of feeling her about me - despite the thousands of miles and 14 hours seperating us. Yes, you might say this… and it would be a filthy lie.

Truth be told, Kittylady was flighty and unreliable. We’d arrange a time to chat online and she wouldn’t show up, then when quizzed later would say she just forgot. She’d tell me something, then next week have a diametrically opposite view and defend it strenuously. She’d act like you were her bestest buddy one day, then be monosyllabic and off hand the next. Kittylady gave me the shits.

I’m not sure at what point I got fed up with Kittylady and her fair weather friendship, but after a while I stopped trying. Over the next few months I came across several others like her - people who you seemed to click with, only to find you’d been dropped like a shit filled nappy the next week. By the end of 1997 I concluded that this was how things worked in cyberspace - that people simply didn’t have time or commitment to forge meaningful relationships: that such  things were in a state of permanent transience. I withdrew all participation, and enthusiasm, forthwith.

It would be almost a decade before I’d take my first trepidatious steps back into what you might call an online community. Even then, I was wary, guarded - expecting more of the same. I discovered blogs and lurked on them, and started to imagine what the people who wrote them were really like - and if they just made it all up. Along the way I found a few who definately couldn’t seem to get their story straight, and I quickly wrote them off for the phonies they were.

But along the way, something unexpected happened.

I came across a few people who actually seemed genuine, real, but moreso, seemingly prepared to invest something of themselves in forging relationships with people like them. It seemed too good to be true, and for quite a while I expected all of them to just disappear without a word. I stood back, and continued to dismiss them as needy, or attention seeking, or therapy seeking. It was easier than accepting they might be just like me.

Over the last two years my whole view of this thing… whatever it is… has been repeatedly and relentlessly challenged. There’s still a little voice in my head saying “there’s something fundamentally wrong with them… there must be for them to take such an interest in you”. Then I look at myself, and again I say, why do I take such an interest? Why do these people’s lives and how they describe them matter to me at all? How can I possibly feel some sort of connection with someone I have never, and in all likelyhood will probably never, ever, meet in real life?

I still can’t answer that, but I do know it’s changed the way I think. You people have done this, the wonderful people who have let me peer into those quiet little corners of your mind - that maybe others will never know.

Yes, Kittylady is lost and gone forever - but I like to think that with her went my fear, my uncertainty, my distrust of the very real people out there that inhabit this netherworld. You all proved her… and me… wrong.

I was lost… but you found me. I’m so glad you did.

Tags: TOS, general by admin
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There’s a place, some 90 minutes away… a mythical place… a place that 364 days a year nobody would even consider trying to surf. But one day a year, when the wind swings to the NNW, and the swell swings into a narrow window, the tides are perfect, and the planets align, you can find great waves there.

Today was not that day… in fact, we ended up right back where we started - over the road, 2 minutes walk from my front door, surfing until dark. Sometimes days seem to end up where they first began.

That was time wastin’ Tuesday.

How was yours?

Tags: general by admin
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At the end of winter last year, I planted this Alogyne heugelii - West Coast Gem.

It is known for its resilience and resistance to harsh climate, but it does not enjoy the dark winter months.

This is the first flower I have ever seen from this plant.

I studied it today in the winter sun, and found it absolutely covered in buds.

It has survived a dark, cold winter, and is set to absolutely thrive in spring.

Thrive like it never has before.  

Tags: general by admin
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