I’m in England.

There seems to be even more reality TV out here than there is in Australia. I, like many people am sick to death of it. It’s stale, it’s boring, and I think it’s time we had something new.

Here’s my suggestion. Surreality TV.

It’s a bold new concept for entertainment, and to explain just how it works I’m going to update Big Brother to take advantage of the exciting new Surreality TV format.

First step is you get rid of Gretel Killeen, (or Davina or whoever it is in your part of the world) and replace her with the reanimated head of Gala Dali. Gala communicates telepathically, thinking only in rhyming couplets as she bobs about in a overturned sideboard full of Branxton pickle.

The housemates are 12 Identical bicycle seats all named Garry, and they’re locked in abandoned 7/11 where all the neon lights have been replaced with electric oven-grills.

Every full moon, you can evict a housemate by calling your nearest Vietnamese dry cleaners. At which point you must perform your impersonation of the shoe size that best matches the selected housemates personality. Once the votes have been tallied, the chosen housemate mutates into a martini glass full of cream of broccoli soup that slowly evaporates under the oven grills.

Once all the other housemates have evaporated, the winning contestant receives a ticker-tape parade and becomes the new minster for foreign affairs.

…. Eddie McGuire, I’m waiting for your call.

A few years ago I went out with some mates one night to watch a few ska bands. Late in the night, while I was skanking around with one of my friends, I managed to trip over someones leg, stumble, and fall over backward.

I don’t know how I did it , but as I was falling backward I managed to spin around 360 degrees and land with my hands tucked neatly behind my head, and my legs crossed. I lay there on a few seconds, trying to look as though I had just decided to take a quick nap, and that the move was completely deliberate. Maybe it was the good mood that ska music generates, or the amount of beer everyone had consumed, but as my friend helped me to my feet, a couple of guys applauded and clapped me on the back.

Yes, I had made a dick of myself, but I did it with style.

Last weekend I went to visit my parents (Now they’ve arrived back from their ’round the world trip) My trip back to Sydney takes anywhere between 3.5 and 5 hours by train. Depending on trackwork and delays. So I take my Macbook with me so I can watch a DVD and get some coding done. After finding a seat on the train (a comfortable distance away from the guys that were smoking cones in the toilet and rapping the entire 50 cent back-catalogue) I opened up my Macbook, and hit the power button..

I waited for a few seconds… No apple logo. No breathy “bong” noise (apart from the one coming from the toilet). I waited another 20 seconds and rebooted. Same thing.. I sat there for a while, Panicing about how I might have dropped my laptop bag a little too heavily on the bed, or about how cold my baby could have gotten during the 40 seconds I spent in the cooler room of Dan Murphies.

As I sat there I realised that the screen wasn’t perfectly white anymore.. It looked like there were faint pixel thin lines of colour running down the screen.. As I watched I could see more lines starting to appear. Until I was left with something like this:

Kind of nice, isn’t it?

I spent the rest of the train ride berating myself for being a wanky graphic artist and buying a Macbook.. Why didn’t I stick with a nice reliable PC?

When I got home and did some research and found out the problem is caused by an Airport 2006-001 update.. I zapped by PRAM and reset the PMU and my Macbook is booting properly again.. No more Bleeding Rainbow of Death (BRoD)

See, even when my Mac makes a dick of itself.. It still looks good.

When I first moved into my old place in Parramatta I noticed that there was a small corner store about a block away from my house. “Cool” I thought, “Now I don’t have to lug a bunch of shopping bags 2km home just to eat” After a couple of days of settling into my new place I ran out of cigarettes. I grabbed my wallet and set off down the road only to find that my handy little corner store was closed. So I turned around and went home.

After a couple of months of walking past it, I figured out that the shop seemed to open for a couple of hours at a time in random bursts. It was just a weird coincidence that every time I would run out of smokes, or need to buy milk, I would walk down the road just to find it shut.
I called it my local inconvenience store.

In my new place I have a local 7/11. The prices border on extortion for things like bread and milk. But it’s good if you need to buy disposable razors and a hot-dog at two in the morning. I’ve been dropping in there occasionally for the last couple of months and I’ve noticed something a bit odd about it. Like most stores it has those impulse buying stands right next to the checkout. This is where store owners place things like gum, breath mints, and less popular kit-kat varieties which are now two for a dollar. (Note that the kinder surprises are usually at toddler eye-height). But my 7/11 sometimes dumps magazines in there… adult magazines.

Now if it was something like Playboy or even Penthouse I probably wouldn’t have even noticed..(Alright, thats a lie, a glossy magazine cover showing an attractive woman with an arm casually draped over her nipple region would get my attention) But this stuff is a bit more hardcore.

Now I can understand your average guy standing in line deciding to grab some breath-mints and a copy of FHM for the train ride home.. But what kind of person decides to purchase the latest edition of “Pregnant Sluts” on a whim?

Hmm, yeah I am kind of hungry.. I might as well pick up a Violet Crumble and Cheerleader Cocksuckers issue 137.

Nobody does that.. Buying porn requires a high degree of planning… Don’t believe me? Here’s a excerpt from my upcoming paper “Sexual Deviancy in a post Internet society: A survival guide.”

Firstly, you can’t buy porn at your local store, Not only will the guy behind the counter give you uncomfortable looks every time you drop in to buy orange juice, but you also run the risk of bumping into a neighbour or family-friend during the mission. I suggest a minimum 4km distance between your home and the targeted premesis.

Secondly you need to check out the kind of bags the store uses. A lot of newsagents use pathetic tissue paper thin paper bags. Any words in a bright fucia 48 Point font are going to show straight through that sucker. So ensure that their bags are sturdy and discreet, or plan on bringing your own primary transport mechanism.
OK, you’re ready to enter the store.. Ideally the store should be empty aside from the guy behind the counter. Your next step is to buy a newspaper to work as in-store concealment. Remember, just as broadsheets tend to offer a higher standard of news coverage, they also offer a higher standard in smut-mag coverage.
Now you need to learn the layout of the magazine racks, so you can pretend to flip through “What Hi-fi” before casually sliding over to the plastic wrapped section and collecting your selected erotica. Wrap your choice in the newspaper in such a way that the barcode is close to an open corner. If the front counter is still clear head for the dust off point immediately.. If not, go back to browsing through “Australian Business Review” and wait.

Casually present the newspaper to the guy behind the counter, as doing so peel back a corner to show the barcode of the magazine hidden inside. Never look him in the eye.. that’s creepy. just pay for your reading material and evacuate… mission accomplished.

—

See, It’s a complicated process. You can’t just dump smut at the front counter and expect guys to buy it. It’s meant to be surreptitiously stashed between comics and surfing magazines. In fact removing porn from it’s natural habitat and placing it at the front counter like it’s completely normal is going to freak perverts out.. It’s going to make them suspicious… Sure, They will be sorely tempted to reach out with their sweaty palms and grab that hyper-conveniently placed issue of “Busty Naturals” but in the back of their minds there’s going to be a voice screaming “Stop! It’s booby-trapped!”.

Ok, I admit.. I wrote this entire post just for that bad booby trapped gag.

In the last two weeks my sister has adopted a three legged dog, scored a job interview, and has learned how to ride a motorbike.. My parents have visited three different countries, have been suspended in a cable-car 4100 feet above the ground, and have filmed a bear in the wild.

Me, I’ve read some AJAX tutorials, went to the cinema and ordered some t-shirts online..

Alright, by now I’m pretty used to my friends and co-workers living bigger, more interesting lives than mine.. but it’s worrying when you start being totally outclassed by your own parents.

So, I’ve decided it’s time to do something positive to affect my lifestyle. I’ve decided I’d like to lose 10 kilos before the year is finished, and I’ve decided the first step in my new weight loss program is to spend some more time sitting on my arse in front of the computer.

About two weeks ago I bought a cheap rowing machine from ALDI.. I’d looked at buying a machine before, but the prices seemed to start at about $700, and for me that’s a lot of money to spend on anything which doesn’t have 802.11g support. ALDI were flogging them off for $180 (right next to the washing liquid) so I decided to pick one up.

On the third day of rowing I remembered why my get fit plans keep failing.. I suck at team sports, and I don’t get that “buzz” that most people get from exertion. I find the whole thing kind of tedious. After about five minutes of panting and staring at a wall on my machine I’m bored shitless, and I start thinking about how much I’d rather be playing with my new Xbox 360 instead.

Then I remembered a friend of mine, who lost 30 kilos in three months by getting addicted to Dance Dance Revolution on the Playstation 2.. I’m a geek, and I like computer games, so logically all I have to do is turn rowing into one.

My first idea was to take apart the small sensor which hooks up to the LED display on the rowing machine, and connect it to a COM port on my PC. The problem is that electronics isn’t really my strong point.. and while I feel comfortable with wiring up the pin assignments, I’d probably get the voltages wrong, and end up frying my mainboard.

Then I came up with another idea. My new MacBook has a small iSight Camera on it, and Flash has input support for webcams.. Combine this with Flash 8’s new bitmapData class, and suddenly I have a way of comparing changes in pixel values over multiple frames for some pretty decent motion detection. It should be possible to write a function that could detect rowing speed, and stroke length. After that all I have to do is make some opponents to battle against and I’ve made a pretty basic rowing simulator.

I’m also thinking about including SRR Technology (Sally Robbins Randomisation) in version 2. This means an oponent may just crap out half-way through a race.

Hmm I think this will be the first time I’ll have ever built up a sweat from a few hours of bug-testing.

Writing a blog isn’t as easy as I first thought (as the lack of updates will attest to). I think the crux of the problem is that I spend most of my time at work or sleeping. So there’s not much I can talk about.. Obviously I can’t discuss my clients or co-workers. Partly out of respect for their personal privacy, but mainly out for fear of being dooced

Similarly I feel equally worried about writing about my dreams.. Some of the most boring conversations I’ve ever endured began with “I had this really weird dream last night.” Unless you have a subconscious that deserves writing credits on “The City of Lost Children”.. You should probably keep that surrealist crap to yourself..

Aside from the fear of boring you, I have a flatmate who works as a psychiatrist. He’s knows a bit about dream analysis, and I’m not to keen on raising any unnecessary red-flags… After all, it is my hope he will be totally bewildered the day he arrives home to find me wedged naked in the fridge, trying to gargle along to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries with a mouthful of cold porridge.

Then I remembered, I have a something that could help me fill these text boxes. A gift so amazing that it could provide me with a thick syrupy vein of bloggable material… Never again would I have to write about household appliances or scour my brain for another cult movie title.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a face.

I’m not saying that my face in itself is interesting.. Never have I been accosted by an artist demanding a chance to capture the full spectrum of human emotion that exist between the furrows of my brow.. It’s quite the opposite really, my face is pretty dull. In fact only a few weeks ago, one of my friends realised for the first time that I had eyes.

None the less, there’s something about my face that people find absolutely irresistible.. Not most people. certainly not pleasantly shaped lady people, but some people.

Alright, crazy people..

Yep I’ve got one of those faces than just gives every nutbag and freakball the urge to run over and eject their special brand of lunacy right into it. And the problem is, I’m too polite to stop them.

Unlike my housemate, I’m not bound by things like patient confidentiality So, sit back and enjoy the story of the my newest friend, John the carpenter. (Warning. Course language and sexual themes)

After finishing work last Friday one of the guys from work and I headed out to a bar to meet up with some of his friends. They seemed like OK people, but I ended up on the edge of conversation, and I couldn’t hear much of what was going on. Soon I started to feel like an idiot nodding dumbly in the corner. I decided it was time to use my social escape hatch, and headed outside for a cigarette..

I was standing outside, puffing away while quietly berating myself about failing at the human-interaction thing again, when a middle aged guy came over and mumbled a greeting..

In Kings Cross there’s a limited set of reasons a 45 year old guy would mosy over and start a conversation with another bloke 20 years his junior. So while chatting to him my brain was quietly working on the nicest way to phrase these replies:
A: Sorry, I’m not gay, but I’m flattered.
B: No Thanks, I’m not looking to buy any drugs tonight.
C: Sorry, I don’t know where you could buy any drugs tonight.
D: Thanks for the information about your group, but racism really isn’t my thing. (I’m a big guy with a shaved head.. So I get hit on by the Nazis too.)

The conversation started fairly normally. I asked what he did for a living. He told me he was a carpenter. He asked what I did for a living. I told him I was a web developer. He said he’d never used a computer before, and I tried to think of another topic I knew something about.

I’d been listening to the finer points of billy cart construction for 10 minutes when I decided to light a second cigarette . After doing so another guy walked over and in an effeminate voice asked if he could bum a light. This is where my chat with John started running a bit off the rails. John made a pretty obvious joke about “bumming” other things, then he started complaining about all the “fucking fags” in the city. (maybe he shouldn’t be in a pub so close to Kings Cross.) He started to get a little worked up about it, soon he was raising his voice so that effeminate-lighter-guy could hear what he was saying.. I told him to calm down, and that he shouldn’t get so wound up about gay guys.. Hey, it just means more women for the rest of us, ehh? ehh?

To brighten his mood I told him I was going to get a round of beers. On my way inside I gave the gay-lighter-guy an apologetic shrug. (I can articulate 17 distinct emotions by subtle shoulder movements) While waiting for service at the bar I started thinking of ways to gradually wind down the conversation so I could leave.

John had been thinking about the “more women for the rest of us” comment I had made.. and when I returned from the bar he decided to broach the topic of love.
John: “So mate, who you fucking at the moment?”.
Me: “Uhh nobody..” I replied ” I’m going through a bit of a rough patch”

Obviously I have nothing to contribute to the conversation, so John decided to rattle off his list of recent sexual partners, including his current “Hot Little Asian Slut” (Woo, I’m banned by NetNanny now.)

OK.. I’m in the middle of a crowded bar, and I’ve got a drunk homophobic carpenter telling me about how he likes his balls sucked…

and how much he enjoys eating ass..

I suddenly realised I have no hope of shutting down this conversation.. So I started looking around for the group of people I was with earlier. Praying that one of them would rescue me. John noticed me looking around, and mistakenly thought I was having a casual perv.. He scoured the area, then pointed to the to the white-skirted girl directly in front of us.. “I’d eat her ass too, if she gave me a chance”

The White-skirted-girl overheard this and turned around just in time to see John making grabbing and spreading motions with his hands.. She glared at me with complete disgust. I try to shrug “Hey, he’s not my friend, he’s just some drunk nutcase I can’t get away from” but I don’t think she understood.
Then John returned his attention to me.
John:”I’d have her do me too.. There’s nothing better than a woman with her tongue up my ass!”….
Me: “Uhh, What?”
John: “Oh, so you’ve never had you arse licked.. mate, you should try it. I had a girl do it a few years a back, and it blew my mind, now I make all my girlfriends do it. Hey, you know what you need to do, you need to start jogging”.
Me: “Jogging?”
John: ” You know, running.. You’re OK, but you’re a bit of a lardarse.. You need to get up early in the morning and run around for an hour.. If you lost some flab you’d have the girls lining up to eat your arse.”
Me: “Thanks for the advice, but I’m not into that shit- I”

John goes nuts, he stands up.. and started waving his beer at me.
John: “Hey, just because I like getting my arse licked doesn’t make me a fag or anything.. I fuck more girls than you do.. If anyone here is a fag, it’s you lardarse!”

That’s the point where he dropped his half-full schooner.. spilling it over my jeans, and smashing the glass. Within seconds he had a large Polynesian gentleman on either side of him, and he was being ushered outside so they could have there own little chat with him..

I decided to go back inside and order a scotch.. I hate my face.

It’s almost 3am, and I’m still at work.. I’ve had a client push a deadline for a DVD presentation forward 24 hours, so currently I’m burning the midnight oil at both ends (Hey, it’s 3am, I deserve both metaphors) I’m writing this because I’m waiting for Adobe Premiere to render video footage.. until it’s done, there’s not much I can do. (damn you blur effect, damn your poorly defined hide.)

Once it’s done, I have to transcode the video, and burn it to 5 DVD’s.. which means I might get home about 4am, then I can grab a refreshing 3 hours sleep, and get back up to return here.

What good is 3 hours sleep anyway? I’d be much better off If I spent that time cramming my system full of caffeine and adrenaline to last me another 16 hours.. Ahh Yes, that’s much better, instead of sleeping, I’ll make a few triple expressos, listen to the Dead Kennedys, and play Project Gotham Racing 3..

Yeah, that’s right, Project Gotham 3.. and you know what that means..

I’VE GOT AN XBOX 360 BITCHES!!
(please note, the term “Bitches” only reffers to male viewers. Calling a man a bitch is humourous, calling a woman a bitch is only acceptable on Talk shows.)

God, I miss my wireless controller.. Baby, if your reading this, then I want you to know I can’t wait to hold you again in my warm hands, feeling you shudder gently with excitement.. (Or whenever I hit a wall).

Ok, that was a bit creepy. I must be very tired.

Anyway, render finished… back to work.

The best feeling in the world is waking up with your arm wrapped around a warm sexy body. This morning I lay in bed for 10 minutes smiling and watching my new companion sleep next to me, breathing softly..

I think I’ve been a pretty good boy recently. I’ve been doing a lot of overtime at the office, I dropped a couple more kilos, and I haven’t entertained any homicidal fantasies about my clients for weeks. (Well one, but it wasn’t very grissly). As I seem to spend my life hidden under a smudge on the karmic radar screen, I decided It was time to give myself a little pat on the back.

Now In retrospect, I could have done something a little more interesting to reward myself.

I could have booked myself a weekend away at a nice relaxing day spa, somewhere in the country. Gotten myself a manicure, shiatsu massage, cucumber facial, mud bath. You know, really pampered myself.

I could have tried sky-diving.

I might have even rented a ludicrously expensive hotel suite with views of Sydney Harbour, and spent a night inhaling a gram of Colombia’s finest from the waxed butt-crack of a high class Russian prostitute.

But no, Instead I decided to buy another immediately obsolete, shiny toy.

It arrived yesterday, so right now I’m laying in bed writing this entry on my new 2Ghz Core Duo MacBook. I skipped a couple of pages in the Apple manual, consequently, I missed the part where I have to give it a rediculous, wimpy sounding name. (I think I’m supposed to name it after one of my favourite poets, composers or nuclear physists.)

Some of you might be demanding an explanation at this point. (If James is reading this he’s probably allready started composing a flame-mail for me). It’s a decision I thought about for a long time.. In the past I’ve been very anti-mac, I considered them overpriced and under-powered.. and that mac-users dumped a lot of extra money on their computers just to prove what a unique and special individual they are, that they won’t fall into that whole PC pigeon-hole thing. Pffft wankers.

So why did I buy a mac?.. Look I’ll admit it, I like OSX, I like the whizzbang stuff like Expose, and Dashboard Widgets, I like the cool 3D stuff, the genie effects, The rippley bits.. I like my rotating 3D RSS screensaver. I like that unlike windows XP it doesn’t look like it was designed by toddler with ADD. (Sure my screen has over 16 million colours, but you don’t have to use all of them in the UI). I like that i can choose the way I interact with it.. I can either just drag and drop to install programs. Or I can open up the terminal to prove my L337 status..

And I really like the fact that the MacBook has all the grunt of its PC counterparts. But is cheaper than most of them, and better designed than all of them.

Crap, I’ve had this thing for less than 24 hours and already I’m becoming a mac-zealot, now all I need is black skivvy and a double skim latte, and I officially become a graphic design dickhead.

BTW It’s Intel based, so If I ever “come to my senses” I’ll just paint it grey and load Windows on it.

In my second post I told you I didn’t believe that demons had the power to posses washing machines. And while I like to consider my belief structure as “highly adaptable” (some people prefer the word “fickle”) it’s a theory I’m going to stand by for the time being. The idea that beelzebub could somehow shimmy through the power lines and posses my laundry appliances is absolutely ridiculous.

On the other hand, If my laundry was equipped with a USB port, the concept becomes a little more plausible.

This morning I had to present a site redesign to client. As I was getting my files ready, I noticed that my footer read “Copyright 2005″ instead of 2006.. So I decided to change it.

“Copyright 2006666666666666666666666666″

Dang, my 6 key is stuck.. CLACK “666666″. CLACKETY CLACK 66666666.. *opens notepad* Crap, now notepad won’t close and my screen is filling with sixes.

Thats when I remembered todays date.. June Sixth, or 6/6/2006… 666.

I must have a virus.. Somehow, some pathetic, maladjusted, Norwegian-Death-metal listening, Satan-worshiping, 15-year-old script-kiddie has breached the two firewalls and gotten past my anti-virus program.. He’s hidden a crude little chunk of code to impress his friends, and I’ve triggered it by pressing the 6 key on the 6/6/6.. right now it’s deleting my flash files. The LITTLE PRICK.

So I tugged out the network cables and rebooted into a virus scanner. As It scanned I fired up another PC to browse the latest threat warnings on the anti-virus sites.

Everything checked out OK.. No viruses found, heuristics clean, no alerts. So I plugged my 2 month old keyboard into another PC, and it’s turned out to be totally fried… dead.

*sigh* It wasn’t a virus. It wasn’t a message from the devil or whatever.. It just so happened that a piece of hardware malfunctioned, and started repeatedly producing the number of the beast on the day that some wackjob fundamentalist christians claim the child of satan will be born.

Heck, given the number of computer users worldwide, the rate of hardware failure, and the number of keys on keyboard it probably happened to like 3 or 4 other people today, right?

See, that’s a totally reasonable, sane rationalisation … It’s just a coincidence.. it doesn’t have to mean anything… Everything is fine.

That said, you can compress the bible down to 713Kb, so if you think storing it on your PSP might stop the dark forces of the universe from erasing your saved games, you might as well give it a shot.

*click*… *click*… *click*.
Dang,I guess this means I have to shave off the mustache.

A couple of weeks ago our washing machine packed in. Halfway through the washing cycle the machine would just panic. A red light would begin flashing intermittently and the controls would rotate and click of their own accord. This was annoying, but the real problem was that it would utterly refuse to relinquish my underpants.

Now, I’m a rational man, a scientific man. Unlike many people I don’t subscribe to the theory that demonic forces have the ability to possess whitegoods. This is because I believe washing machines are devoid of a soul. (I’ve resigned myself to the fact I’ll be washing by hand in the afterlife)

The machine was still under warranty, so we sent it back to a manufacturer. Who informed us it would take weeks for the required parts to arrive. So for the last month I’ve been scrubbing my clothes in the kitchen sink.

A couple of days ago we got our machine back, and I looked forward to not having to spend half my weekend up to my armpits in soap suds and black t-shirts.. (It’s sad when you look forward to laundry day)

I was working on some javascript when I heard the noise again.. *click* — *click* — *click*… shit.

Dad, if your reading this, you finally have a reason to be proud of your son. Instead of writing an impolite email to the manufacturer I cracked the bastard-thing open and took a look myself. After 15 minutes of poking around, and minor laundry flooding, I managed to retrieve a $2 coin from the bowels of the discharge mechanism. A bit of cursing and a hard-reset later it started working perfectly.

I can’t believe it. I’m a bloody handyman. I succeeded where lesser men failed.. Most importantly I fixed something mechanical without it involving registry editing and updated drivers.

Shit, I can feel the testosterone:

Microwave making funny noises? - I can sort it.
Cat stuck in a tree? - No worries.
Boss making inappropriate sexual advances in the workplace? - Let me have a word with him.. wait, how big is he?

I’m almost tempted to let my pants drop a couple of inches and consider growing a mustache. I’m feeling that good.