Category: Diary

Even though I have my pile of Problem Books I still buy new ones. Indeed I forgot to mention that I have read Ian Rankin’s post Rebus novel while Exit Music sat there staring at me. Today the delivery man knocked on the door and deposited six bottles of wine and two new books from my latest love, The Book Depository.

I love books, love reading, love having shelves full books but the one bad thing is the expense. I should probably join a library but, and this may sound weird, I’ve always had problems reading books I don’t own. I know, don’t ask, it’s just another oddity to add to my very long list. Given reading isn’t such a cheap hobby you can imagine my delight when I found www.bookdepository.co.uk – dirt cheap books, sent from the UK with free postage. That’s right. absolutely no postage costs at all. I must admit I first thought this must be a con, or a temporary promotion to get me hooked but it’s not – the books are sent to you for nix.

But how cheap are they? Well today I received Iain Banks’ new book Transition. It cost me $10.40 (as a pre-order) delivered to the door. Angus and Robertson have its list price as $29.95. I also bought Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day (thanks to an interview with him in the Good Weekend a couple of weeks ago). That one cost me $21.00 delivered while Borders have it listed as $41.95. We’re going to order the kids a book every now and then too so they get the surprise of having one turn up in the mail.

The sad thing is these prices make it almost impossible for me to go and purchase books from the local book store any more. I know I should be supporting my local businesses, god knows I need locals to support mine, but I can’t justify to myself, or the CFO, spending twice as much on non-essentials like books.

I’m determined that neither of these shall end up as Problem Books but now I’m faced with the decision of which to tackle first. I think Mr Banks may come out on top, guess we’ll see tonight about 9:30.

(Oh and if you want to see something really cool – watch people shop at The Book Depository)

Saturday night, 12 days in to Spring and it’s a balmy (yet windy) 29 degrees outside at 8:15pm. Great finish to a couple of great days. Yesteday we went to see the Star Wars exhibition at Science Works. If you ignore all the boring educational aspects then it’s a fantastic experience seeing the original models. The Falcon, X-Wings, Boba Fett’s blaster, Chewie – it really brought back the magic of the first trilogy, which they sensibly concentrated on. A nap in the afternoon with Rae followed by a movie at night.

This morning it was haircut time, sprayed the weeds in the front yard to get it ready for seeding, Ren came over and a relaxing afternoon around the house topped off with a lamb roast. Nothing special but it’s just been a relaxing two days spent with Rae and the young ones, a mini holiday at home. Now the dough is resting for tomorrow morning’s breakfast, the kids are in bed and it’s time for an early night.

I’m very grumpy with someone I don’t know, he’s thrown my whole day out. When you spend time at home you get to know the rhythm of life on your street. Kids off to school, postie arriving, kids home, friends that visit across the road every Wednesday, neighbour home at 4 and put the garage up door up for the next arrival; that sort of thing.

Now the one thing I have factored in to my week is that the catalogues arrive Tuesday morning so it’s eggs, coffee and catalogues while the kids watch Play School. You can imagine my disappointment this morning when I went out the front and there were no catalogues to be found and I’m not sure the day has got back on track since.

It’s now afternoon and they’ve finally appeared, and just in time. I was falling asleep (thanks for the killer cold kids) so I’ve made my coffee and now it’s time for my version of window shopping, It’s the little things that keep you sane.

Andrew was talking about watching the telly and it made me think about how much has changed so quickly. When I first met Rae we were still using VHS tapes, torrenting wasn’t around and DVDs of television shows were just taking off. When we were married we put some of our gift money towards buying a Sony HD recorder, which was pretty shmick at the time. We bypassed DVD only recorders but this model had a DVD recorder as well the hard drive. It has a single analogue tuner in it so we plugged in a set top box to record digital broadcasts.

Now 40 or so months later that seems almost prehistoric.

We’ve added an LCD telly with built in HD tuner. To that we’ve connected a silent PC with a television card. We can record HD telly on that using Windows Media Centre, one of the many stellar reasons to update to Windows 7. As we’ve got Windows 7 on my main PC and the laptops things get really interesting – you can watch your recorded shows on any PC connected to the network so if we want to watch something in the evening we can just flick on a laptop in bed and stream it over the wireless network. Off on a trip? No problem, make a copy of the show on your laptop by clicking ‘Copy’ and there you go. As I’ve got a card in my main PC we can record there as well.

Now all we need is a media server and a blu-ray drive for the PC and perhaps a better video card….and I had better stop now as I can see Rae shaking her head and pointing to the bank balance when she eventually reads this.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come, makes your head spin when you wonder where we’ll be in a few more years.

We’ve been going to the South Melbourne Market for years now, although I’ve been a regular since ‘89, and one thing we do every week is to grab a coffee from James at the pizza place. It has to be one of the best coffees in Melbourne and you can tell it’s because James really cares about what he’s doing, he has both passion and skill.

Over the years we’ve got to chat and find out a bit about him, including the fact that he lives just around the corner from us, has the same number of kids and moved in a week shy of when we did. However it was only this weekend that I found out we are not only similar in those regards but that he and I had mirror image job paths. Back in ‘97 when I was making coffees for a living he was studying web design (he asked me if I used Java or Pearl) then slowly over the years our jobs changed and now I’m developing web sites (classic asp, php & .net) while he gets to stand behind the machine producing cup after perfect cup.

Am I the only person who has problem books? These are books that I want to read, that I have started many times but never ever finish. Every time I pick up one of my Problem Books I power on but deep down know I’ll probably run in to problems again. I have two in particular that I should make a super human effort on. The surprising thing is these are both books I really, really want to read.

The first is the final Harry Potter. Yes, the very same book I went and sat in line for the morning it was released. I’ve never made it past the fourth chapter in four tries. The other is the final Rebus novel, five attempts at that one and no further than the third chapter. And just to prove it’s not only ‘final’ books there’s one Iain Banks novel, Dead Air, that I just can’t get in to and I’ve tried his, as Iain M Banks, Player Of Games umpteen millions of times.

I’m currently waiting on a few books from the UK (oddly enough, one is by iain Banks and another by Ian Rankin) and have a week or so window until the first should arrive. So, tell me, what should I read?

Deathly Hallows, Exit Music or Dead Air? Leave your votes in the comments, I’ll start it on the weekend.

It’s council hard rubbish collection morning this morning. All weekend piles of refuse have been appearing on nature strips, huge numbers of unwanted fridges, lawn mower and even the odd elliptical trainer have parked themselves waiting for the truck.

Lying in bed last night we heard a truck pull up and begin idling. Okay, a little odd at 10:00pm. Then there was the banging and thumping so I hopped up to investigate. It was a bloke, complete with fluro safety top, lugging Joseph’s old fridge on to the back of an already bulging truck. He finally finished this and added Ange’s lawn mower before pulling around to load up our neighbours lawn mower as well.

This is when she came running out and yelled “what the hell are you doing?”.

Now here’s the question that kept Rae and I chatting away. Did he have the right to go and help himself to other peoples junk, presumably to make a profit on further down the track.

Is he a civic minded, recycler of unwanted goods or a thieving parasite making money and not sharing the proceeds with the owners of what he took?

What do you think? And bonus points if you can guess which one of us was on which side of the argument.

The Tigers played their final home game for 2009 last night and all I can say is thank god that season is over. I got no joy at all from the footy this year and if it hadn’t have been for my reserved seat I probably wouldn’t have gone to many games. As it is I didn’t see one win this year and the toll of turning up knowing we didn’t have a chance was just too much. I sat and shivered through the embarrassment that was our loss to Hawthorn but left at three quarter time. I used the excuse I wanted to beat the freeway closure but in all honesty I spent more time checking my phone than watching my team last night.

Given we can’t replace the entire team in one go there’s more years of this ahead. It’s going to be hard but I’ll keep my seat, renew my membership and hope that before too long going to a game will be something to look forward to, not something to endure.

No, I’m not fiddling with the blog again. It’s OS update time. Two Vista, one Ubuntu and two Windows 7 RC installs are about to be upgraded to Windows 7.

This could go either way. I could be a very happy boy this evening, at least until I head off to the footy, or you’ll hear the cries of anguish from wherever you are in the world.

First up is Rae’s laptop, here we go….