These are the voyages...

A favourite thing to do on a Sunday morning is to make a coffee and then sit catching up on the part of my rss feed containing personal blogs. I love how you all take the time to share.

I love the personal touch not seen when a writer is aiming for the wider audience and has output to maintain. Some of you are prolific and I’m in awe of how you find the time while others write occasionally, your piece appearing in my feed like the glint of a hidden stone appearing in the bottom of the sieve when you’re fossicking for gold.

Personal blogs show the passion you have for your topic, how it gives them joy and wanting to share it with others. If it sparks joy in you it’s likely to spark joy in me simply because you shared it.

Some posts will be you working through a problem or wanting to tell everyone about your eureka moment. I can silently applaud you because you took the time to write about it and I’m grateful for it.

I’ll read some of the most thoughtful considered writing on your blog. When you give your own raw thinking on a topic I can almost see how you were processing your thoughts as you were writing. I deeply appreciate the way you share like this. 

Some of you share your views on software or technology you use, how it’s been useful to you, and why you chose it over something else. Often the examples given are much more useful and closer to my own use cases than anything a review from a mass market website can give. 

I like the way you’ll write about your recent holiday or the planning you’re doing for an upcoming one. I get to share your excitement and might even be adding the location to my very long bucket list of places to go.

You write about the highs and lows of life, you tell me about the important things happening with your family and friends. I can see how proud you are in their achievements. Sometimes there is sad news to share. If it helps to process your sadness or grief by writing about it the least I can do is read your words.

Don’t ever think writing about your pets is not interesting. I love hearing about the latest crazy stunt or how you’re working patiently with the rescue dog or cat you’re fostering to acclimatise them to a good life and ready to find a new home.

Your blogs also give me perspectives I need in my life. I’m a mid 50s white man. I call myself progressive, I lean left, somewhere between Labor and The Greens here in Australia. However, the very fact I’m a mid 50s white male means I don’t have the experiences many of you do, which you write about and share. For me, this is probably the most valuable thing from reading your blogs. 

It’s important to me, and everyone else reading your blog, to hear about things from different perspectives to our own and you should absolutely keep doing it. 

I really do love your personal blog.

I’ve been looking at alternatives to gmail as part of moving away from US companies aligning with or bending the knee to the orange grifter.

I have an original Google Apps account which means I now have a free Google  Workspace so there will be a cost associated with the change but it doesn’t bother me. I have multiple domains sitting in it so the greater concern is trying to retain the same functionality.

Despite being all things Apple, I’m reluctant to use iCloud email. The spam protection and search functionality have never been very good in my experience. If Apple invested a bit more in the product then maybe. Plus there’s the issue of the big donation to the grifter. 

Proton mail is an obvious choice a lot of privacy focussed people and websites recommend. My mail isn’t that secret though, I just don’t want it scraped for marketing purposes. I’ve ruled it out based on cost and not being a fan of the look of their products.

Was leaning towards Fastmail as it seems to tick all the boxes until I realised their servers are in the US despite being an Australian company. Is it a big enough sticking point to stop me changing? Something to think about as I take my daily walk around the neighbourhood.

As the cyclone hovered off the coast a week ago, I was careful with my device usage and kept the battery in each one fully charged.

I unplugged my computer because I’m of an age where as a child I was regularly told to unplug things when potential power surges might happen. It’s now deeply ingrained despite everything now being plugged into surge protected power boards and fuse boxes at home having much better safety switches ready to trip and protect everything.  

As a result of being cautious I spent very little time online. I checked the relevant warnings but didn’t doom scroll the news sites. I caught up on my rss feeds but didn’t scroll Mastodon or Bluesky endlessly. I didn’t open a browser to go down some rabbit hole of clicks. I did turn the Mac on and indulge in a longish game of Civilisation VI when things settled down.

I kept going all this week with the same approach, even though the cyclone had cleared and I returned to the office rather than WFH.

The news was still dominated by post cyclone clean up activity or reporting on the orange clown and his musky sidekick as the US slowly spirals down the drain. I don’t need a daily update on the level of madness.

It has been quite a good little break from online. I’m not going to call it a digital detox because it’s a ridiculously overused and overblown term.

I think it’s healthy to just step away from the constant barrage of news and information. I should do it more regularly and perhaps not wait for a tropical cyclone to be descending. 

I love a good cocktail and enjoy a good wine but lately I’ve been enjoying non-alcoholic beer more frequently. I like a cold beer and I particularly like popping a stubbie in the freezer for 15 minutes to put a nice little icy edge on it. 

I don’t usually drink during the week but with the non-alcoholic beer I can come home and wind down with one, sitting on the balcony just letting the work thoughts slide out of the brain. I usually have the Asahi but my current stock is Peroni. It’s quite tasty. 

I use one of the many many stubbie coolers I acquired from dad’s collection after he passed away and a little part of me feels like I’m still sharing a beer with him. It’s been 22 years but it still gives me some comfort to have a small tangible connection to him right in front of me.

With Tropical Cyclone Alfred slowly making its way towards the South East Queensland coast at a speed of 7km per hour the waiting game has started.

Earlier in the week it was expected to cross the coast on Thursday, which became early Friday morning, then afternoon and now early Saturday morning. Plans were put in place to close down Brisbane and the surrounding region as of Wednesday evening. All public transport stopped, most businesses closed, and the supermarkets and other essential locations were closing Thursday afternoon and everything was to be closed Friday. Everyone was advised to stay at home and wait. Which has now become wait through Friday as well.

There have been some adjustments to the closures but nothing substantial, more a case of things due to close staying open a bit longer. There haven’t been any announcements yet about whether supermarkets and the like will open for some time Friday. Once a large business has made the decision to be closed, cancelled deliveries and rearranged rosters it’s not any easy pivot to say you’re open again.

The basement carparks of my apartment building, and many around us, were flooded in the rain event in March 2022 so there is some anxiety across the neighbourhood as to what to do with cars. I didn’t want to move mine to the street but was concerned I’d have to in the middle of torrential rain. Fortunately, there’s a small shopping complex at the top of my street which has raised the boom gates and made the carparks available (and free) until at least Monday. They did the same in the 2022 floods so I was waiting to see what they would do. When word went round on the building WhatsApp group last night I decided to take my car up then and leave it there. It’s a full carpark now so I’m glad I did. It’s also one less thing to worry about. 

We switched to work from home as of Wednesday through until next Monday. It’s been good to keep busy but I’m beginning to get restless. I think I’d mentally prepared myself to finish up on Thursday and be off work post-cyclone on Friday but now the uncertainty has crept in. What will work advise and when will they advise is bouncing around in my head. I’ve checked in with my teams and the moods varies from still hoping it goes away through to could it just come now. 

I cleared my balcony the other day, I have plenty of water, plenty of non-perishable food to see through any power outage, I have some buckets ready to fill with water to help with the toilet if we lose mains pressure, I have a battery radio tuned to the local ABC station. I’ve made the important trip to Dan Murphy’s to acquire some additional gin supplies. One should never waste an opportunity to restock. I’m from north Queenslander, I’ve been through a cyclone and seen them come close. I know I’m as prepared as I can be.

All I can do is wait.

My favourite local cafe is Doc Brown. The owner is a big Back to the Future fan, hence the name of his cafe. He is also a huge movie buff and can talk to you about movies for ages. We’ve been swapping notes on things to watch for years now. His level of knowledge about directors, actors, film scores, would put some reviewers to shame.

Earlier in the week he hosted a movie night at a nearby venue, which just happens to have a 40 seat theatre in it. He gave some introductory comments and then we watched Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary about the “wild untold story of ozploitation”. Afterwards he started some conversation going by offering some thoughts and posing a few questions and then we were talking about the documentary itself and also the movies it covered.

What I really liked about the evening was the way it was clear movies were a passion of his and the absolute kick he was getting out of sharing his knowledge with a disparate group of people; the only thing we all had in common was being a regular at Doc Brown. I love watching people get animated about the thing they're passionate about, particularly if it is completely unrelated to their work. You can be passionate about your work but it’s healthy to have outside interests which are more or at least as important.

The other thing I liked was it reminded me to go hunt down Turkey Shoot, a completely bonkers movie from 1982.  

You know the person, the one who looks up an escalator and sees everyone standing on the one side but chooses to stand on the opposite side. The side to stand varies from country to country.

There’s a solution to this problem. A sensor in the step detects when you’ve been stationary for too long on the wrong side and a little cattle prod comes out and zaps you. Maybe a disembodied voice which says “move” if the budget stretches to it.

My response to a crank challenge by Deborah.

I’ve been accumulating various lists of blog prompts to help me get into a routine and was just looking at the one from Lou Plummer and my eyes landed on “What is your all-time favourite story to tell from all the jobs you've held?”

Without hesitation my brain went “the time all three emergency services were called to work”.

The area I worked in had an annual Christmas party on a Friday night and invited a lot of external stakeholders and ensured the alcohol and food kept coming. My then boss and I, being a bit experienced by then in how these things went, had a conversation around 8pm and agreed it was probably time to depart so we could say “I’d gone home by then” if needed. It was.

Emergency services (1) - the ambulance

Security discovered someone collapsed in a bush. Concerned as they were unable to properly wake them the ambulance was called. Nothing medically wrong, too many drinks. The person came to and proceeded to abuse everyone and insist they were fine.

Ambulance left, security filed an incident report.

Emergency services (2) - the fire brigade

A staff member had too many drinks to safely ride their motorbike home but didn’t want to leave it in the carpark overnight. Another staff member, with a similar number of drinks under their belt, suggested the bike be brought upstairs in the lift and locked in the boardroom. Sounds okay you think. It was until the owner of the bike started it up, spun the wheel, which burnt the carpet, which created smoke, which resulted in the fire alarm triggering and the brigade arriving in two big red trucks.

On arriving, the fire brigade were met by Security who had quickly responded to the alarm given they’d just been nearby dealing with the collapsed person and the ambulance. On entering the area where the alarm had gone off the brigade discovered a motorbike with a warm engine but no rider to be found. The owner and erstwhile assistant had bolted.

Fire brigade left, security filed an incident report.

Emergency services (3) - the police

Security have no idea how the bike made it into the building so they call the police to find the owner of the bike. The police sent a nearby car to investigate and looking up the registration revealed the owner was a staff member. The police tell Security it seems like a problem for them and depart the scene.

Police left, security filed an incident report.

The aftermath

Come Monday, the Security Manager arrives to see my boss in person. There’s a very detailed and lengthy security log from the Friday night. My boss calls me in and we both confirm “I’d gone home by then”. After all three of us had stopped alternating between shaking our heads and laughing, the Security Manager informed us he had to send it up the line. Our boss gets a call from the number two in the organisation, who you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of, and gets told to investigate, reprimand, and issue formal warnings.

It wasn’t hard to work out who was involved. They all filed one by one into the office to get a verbal reprimand. They were handed a formal written warning on the way out. The executive assistant had used the nice thick paper and the boss had hand signed it. One of the three framed it and hung it on the wall of their office.

I’ve been writing some blog posts for the last few months but not crossposting them anywhere. I really just wanted to get some thoughts out of my head but not into a journal.

I’ve been intending to crosspost for some time but as inevitably happens, I was distracted fiddling with the settings rather than actually writing. So enough is enough, time to stop tinkering and pondering is this colour better than the other one, time to write something and hit publish.

I’ve seen others using Pika so decided to look into it and turns out it’s just what I needed. A platform I can write without being distracted by a timeline. Minimal settings to distract me.

To take directly from the About page of this blog:

I had a domain I wasn’t using for its original purpose.

I wanted a place to write longer thoughts where I didn’t see the noise of a timeline to distract me.

I tend to see something happen or read something written by someone else which sparks my thinking.

So here I am on Pika with Nothing Original Here.

Today was to get me started, get one down, and then looking at a sole solitary post will hopefully prompt me to write more and increase the list.

I think I’ve set up crossposting the way I want it using the excellent Echofeed so maybe you’ll see this appear in your timeline somewhere. Fingers crossed it’s not a mangled mess of formatting!