How do we remember things?

In the mid to late 1990's I had a job that required me to work most of the time on a help desk. Generally I provided second and third level support for technology resellers and integrators, with the occasional exception where I would actually have to speak to an end user. And from time to time I would stand down from the help desk, and go and work for my employer's training department. During these periods I would generally teach for two straight weeks, starting with the general introduction to Unix, and moving on through Unix system administration, TCP/IP, serial communications and shell programming. Two weeks was enough to do the full cycle, and I quite enjoyed teaching. According to my class feedback forms, I was pretty good at it. And there is nothing like teaching a subject to really clarify it in your own mind. I knew my subjects, knew them well. All those obscure Unix command line arguments, the vi editor, the tips and tricks that make all the difference between coping with an operating system and actually managing it were second nature to me.

Years passed (cue falling calendar pages or whatever), and I moved into consulting and then into presales. I dallied with other operating systems. I learned other technologies. And somewhere along the way, I began to forget my old skills.

I've now gone back to consulting (rather joyfully, I don't think I have any great talent for presales work), and a few months ago I began to learn Python. Python is rather a fun language, and I needed to learn it to satisfy the requirements of a customer. I got that job done, having learned enough Python to perform the task at hand but not much more. So I looked around for something else that needed coding: I can't learn a language unless I have something to do with it. Working through the exercises in books bores me to tears: I need a practical task to which the language can be applied.

I found a suitable task fairly easily. A while back there was a reminiscent post on Boing Boing about the old Omni magazine. Now I have a complete collection of Omni, from 1978 to 1995, about 180 or 200 issues. I hadn't looked at them in years - they were in journal boxes in my non-fiction room (shown on the house plans as Bed 4, actually full of book shelves). So I dug them out and had a look. I had forgotten what fun they were. A bit of online research showed that many people recall Omni fondly - there is even a Facebook page - and that it has never been properly indexed. There is a fiction index, but no comprehensive index of the whole thing. There have been some abortive attempts, which appear to have foundered because someone attempted to type every citation in manually, and got bored after the first half dozen issues.

Here's a job worth doing, and actually not that hard. I can scan the contents pages, put them through an OCR process and then write some scripts to reorganize and reformat the output, and to construct an index. Ideal for extending my Python knowledge, and good practice at getting back to the command line, a place that I haven’t spent much time recently.

Now anyone who has ever made much use of OCR knows that it is far from perfect. Particularly on old or degraded print, the recognition can be spotty, to say the least. So as each chunk of text is rendered, I open it up in vi and do some basic cleanup manually. The first few times that I did this, I struggled: I couldn't remember the vi commands to get things done quickly. I was actually trying to learn Python, so I didn't want to have to keep stopping and looking up the vi MAN pages. And then, quite suddenly, it all began to come back. But it wasn't as if I had remembered the keystrokes that I needed - it was if my fingers had remembered. Quite strange. Once I'd entered a command, my brain could analyse it and go "oh yes, I remember that syntax now, and it works like this". Since vi has a very regular command structure, once I got a few commands back into my brain, I could get most of the rest by extrapolation.

There is a scene in Robert Heinlein's novel "I will fear no evil" (if you've never read it, synopsis: extremely wealthy elderly man - Johann Smith - arranges to have his brain transplanted into a donor body. He recovers consciousness to discover that not only has the operation worked, but that previous occupant of the body has not entirely moved out, and furthermore was female -Eunice Branca), in which Johann Smith attempts to play the piano, a skill that he used to have. He can't do it, his new body won't cooperate. Then the "ghost" of Eunice takes over and operates a complicated piece of office machinery that Johann has never used. It works perfectly, because as Eunice says "the body remembers".

I've heard similar things from someone I know who had to learn to walk again after suffering brain damage. His brain knew how to walk, but his body had to relearn the skill (which his said was astonishingly difficult, for something that we take so much for granted).

Anyway, my fingers seems to have remembered all the vi short cuts that my brain forgot, and the Omni index is progressing nicely. I have it on line over here, if you want a look, and I'm hoping for some help with the proof reading.

My Latest Apple Gadget....

Is not an iPhone 4. I walked down George Street yesterday, and there were literally hundreds of people queuing outside the Apple store, and more large crowds outside each of the various telco outlets between my car park and my office. Some of those people must have spent most of the day queuing. Good lord, some of them had set up camp on Thursday, with sleeping bags and chairs! Don't they have jobs? How on earth does someone with nothing better to do with their time than wait in the street to buy a mobile phone afford a mobile phone in the first place?

Any way, I have already have mobile phone, an iPhone 3G, which is running iOS 4.0.1 perfectly well (perhaps the display of SMS messages is a shade slower since the upgrade, but I have had no other issues/crashes/complaints, and I completely fail to understand all the gum flapping in the press about "iOS 4 rendering iPhone 3G's unusable". Poppycock, etc.). I'm sticking with my existing iPhone until (a) the furor dies down, and I can just walk into a store a get an iPhone 4 without having to queue; and (b) I have enough time to deal with changing phones and telcos (note to Optus: you're dumped). Yes, I know that iTunes will sync all my data and apps from the old phone to the new phone, but I'll still have to negotiating getting off Optus and onto Telstra (my current employer's preferred supplier) without losing my existing mobile number, and then I have to get the new phone re-paired with my car and blue tooth headset, and established as a sync client for various apps. No, it is not going to be a five minute job, and I have a proof of concept kicking off next week, and several other streams of activity that need my attention for at least two weeks. So later for the iPhone upgrade.

The new gadget is one that I bought on Thursday (when it was still safe to go into the Apple store): the new Apple Magic Trackpad.

First, I hate the name. Someone in Apple's marketing department has "magic" on the brain at the moment. Perchance too much exposure to Disney children's classics has induced some sort of overload in the fairy dust department? Whatever, the device itself is really working for me. I've hardly touched a mouse since I got it (well, them actually, there's one in my office as well), which is good, because I still have this wretched tendonitis in my right arm, and using a mouse isn't good for tendonitis. The action of using the Trackpad is quite different, because you don't have to "hold" anything. Just holding a mouse causes the muscles in your arm to tense slightly, and moving the mouse works both muscles and tendons quite a lot. Using the Trackpad requires much less movement, and it's a different movement to mouse movement. Yesterday was a completely mouse-free day, and my arm was better for it.

The Trackpad (I refuse to using the 'M' word) does take a little getting used to, but I've adjusted quite quickly. The only thing that I've had trouble with it is using the Marquee tool in Photoshop for large selections; a Wacom tablet will still be better in Photoshop, no question. Everything else - scrolling, clicking, right clicking, dragging - works perfectly. I do have to be careful not to rest my fingers against the pad by accident, because it does interpret a very light touch as a direct order, and does it's level best to act on that order. The result is usually annoying.

Right now, and until I can get the tendonitis fixed, this Trackpad is the perfect pointing device for me. I think I may find it difficult to go back to a mouse in the long run.

Pictures for the DIY iPad Stylus

My apologies for the delay in getting these pictures up: actually taking the pictures turned out to be trickier than I had expected, and in the end I had to borrow the portable photo booth that my husband uses to take pictures of his model tanks (thank you, darling!).

However, here we are:

Get your piece of conductive foam:

And your Q-tip:

And your mechanical pencil:

Trim the Q-tip stem:

Glue the foam to the end of the plastic tube, and trim to shape:

Insert into jaws of mechanical pencil, and you're done:

I've managed to get hold of some Sugru, and I want to see if I can improve on this stylus by capping the end of the tube with a blob of Sugru before adding the foam. If that works, I'll post about it.

Living with the iPad

I've had my iPad for 3 weeks now, and I'm using it more every day.

For taking notes in meetings, including diagrams, it is perfect. I can use OmniGraffle, of if I just want to sketch freehand, Adobe Ideas (which is free) works beautifully. I have made myself a basic stylus (see note for instructions), simply because it feels more natural to draw with something pen shaped, and there is no practical difference that I can detect in drawing on the iPad and drawing on paper, at least in terms of output. And I don't need to haul a laptop around with me - the iPad slips neatly into my handbag, and when I need it, it's on instantaneously.

For the first time in my life, I see a reason to have a subscription to the Safari Online book service. I can read a book as easily on the iPad as I can on paper, and for technical books, Safari is great. I have a lot of hard copy books that I have had to buy in the past, and in many cases I have read less than half the content before I have learned what I needed, after which the book has gone onto my already overloaded shelves. Now I can "rent" a book from Safari, read the bit I need, and not have the trouble and waste of storing the volume afterwards. A Safari subscription costs less than 3 average technical manuals, while giving me access to thousands.

To make this work gracefully, you need the Atomic Web Browser for iPad, which can identify itself to a server as anything from Mobile Safari to Firefox 3 (even IE6, should you be so inclined, though if you are, you probably need help). If you try to use the Safari mobile service using the built-in Apple Safari web browser (now isn't that confusing, guess no one got the trademark on the word "safari"), you will get frequent and annoying interruptions from O'Reilly, protecting their content by making you complete Captchas every few minutes. I wouldn't mind one now and then, but every three screens is excessive. Atomic fakes them out neatly, and this pointless nonsense goes away. O'Reilly folks: get over it, and move on.

In fact, I've written this post on my iPad, while sitting in my favourite easy chair and not at my desk. This is a double blessing, because I have a serious case of tendonitis in my right elbow, and I'm not supposed to use a mouse at the moment. An iPad is tendonitis friendly, which is an enormous help right now. If you have never had "tennis elbow", be grateful: it hurts, a lot.

I have not, so far, lamented the absence of a USB port, or any other sort of port. I have Dropbox, Google Docs, email and as a last resort, cable-based sync. File transfer is not a problem.

The only thing with which I am not entirely happy is Apple's iPad case. I don't mind the design itself: it is light weight, robust and practical. But it shows scuffs. I've had to go over it vigorously with a stiff clothes brush, to return the surface to a tidy condition. However, I can find no other case that I prefer, so I will stick with it for now.

Note: how to make a stylus. First, find, an old-style mechanical drafting pencil, the kind that takes a 2mm lead. Make sure that it has a metal finger grip. I'm using a Staedtler Mars Technico, which you can get from any decent art shop (try Eckersleys, if you are in Sydney). Get a piece of conductive foam (Jaycar, about $AU10 for far more than you need) and a piece of fine plastic tubing. I am using the tubing out of a Swisspers cosmetic applicator, try the pharmacy, or if your significant other is female, ask her. What you are about to do will not damage the pencil in any way.

Take your piece of foam, and cut a slice about 2cm long and about 1cm wide. Make a pin hole in it, and then work your piece plastic tube in about 0.5 cm. Put a small drop of some convenient, thin, fast drying glue to the end of the plastic tube, and push it into the foam. Wait (do email or something) while it dries. Cut the plastic tubing so that there is about 0.7cm or less of exposed tubing sticking out of the foam, and insert that into the lead holder. The conductive foam must touch the metal finger grip for this to work. Trim the end of the foam with scissors, to achieve a shape that works for you, but which does not expose the tubing. You are done now. Hold the pencil barrel so that your fingers touch the metal grip. Your stylus will now conduct the tiny current needed, and it will work on the iPad.

What can I do with my iPad?

Sydney finally got the iPad on Friday May 28th. I will omit here any description of media beat ups, long queues of people standing in the rain, etc. Suffice it to say that I am surprised that neither Apple's website nor their chosen courier company's website melted down under the onslaught of frenzied geeks repeatedly refreshing their screens in an effort to work out when they would receive their iPads. I got mine just on 10AM, and after a check to see that it was OK, and a chance for my co-workers to have a look at it too, I stuck in my brief case and got on with my work.

I've spent most of my free time on the weekend installing apps, setting things up to suit my proposed work flow and syncing data. Apps that I have installed are:

• CSV Touch
• Do androids dream of electric sheep: Dust to Dust #1
• Dropbox
• Evernote
• Goodreader for iPad
• iBooks
• Instapaper Pro
• 1Password Pro
• Numbers
• OmniFocus
• OmniGraffle
• Pages
• Penultimate
• Sudoku HD for iPad
• The elements for iPad
• Weatherzone
• WIRED Magazine

And I have configured Contacts, Mail and Maps, loaded some music and photos and arranged things to suit myself.

From the iPad I can now access my email and contacts (built in apps) and my to do list (OmniFocus). I can use Pages for word processing, and OmniGraffle for diagrams, so:

Which is perfectly satisfactory for capturing something that a customer is describing to me, and will be even better when I take the time to read the OmniGraffle manual.

Penultimate looks OK, but I think I am going to need to investigate a stylus to get good results with it. And it will never compensate for the simple fact that I can't draw (sigh). I think I am likely to use Pages for taking meeting notes - I don't find the on-screen keyboard a problem, probably because (a) I'm a girl, my hands are a bit smaller; and (b) I've spent years typing on various portable Palm Pilot keyboards, until my last Palm (LifeDrive) refused to hold a charge any longer.

Dropbox, Evernote and 1Password Pro I use constantly, and I'm pleased to see that they work well on the iPad. Goodreader promises to be a real boon: I've already synced half a dozen large manuals in PDF format.

iBooks will probably be more useful when the local iBooks store launches properly. Instapaper Pro is even nicer on the iPad than it is on the iPhone (if you haven't tried this app, I do recommend it).

"The Elements" is just amazing, and I'm sure I shall read all of it, which may fill some gaps in my rather patchy education.

Sudoku HD works well, but could use an option to clear a game and start over.

"Do androids dream" and WIRED are exactly what I hoped to see: the future of publishing, slick, attractive and clever. Other publications, please take note.

CSV Touch is a little flaky, and the dev is looking into the problem.

So tomorrow the iPad goes to work with me, and I find out if if can replace a paper notebook. I rather think it can, and it is going to save me many hours (and the world many trees). The iPad is lighter than my Eee PC, and does more.

Verdict: A++

Between jobs

I left Alphawest on Tuesday, and I must say it was a wrench. It's the first time I have ever left a job that I really didn't want to leave. On almost all previous occasions I have left my old job because I could not stand it any more: either the work or the management was driving me to distraction, usually both. A couple of moves have simply been about money, but usually I've moved to avoid impossible workloads and delusional managers. Leaving a job where the work was fine and where I liked and respected my boss is a first. However, as stated previously, I'm not prepared to spend hours in commute time, and I know that many of my former colleagues feel the same. So it was not so much a case of leaving the team as of getting out before the rush for the exits starts.

I usually don't get much of a break between jobs - sometime no more than a weekend - but this time I got three whole days. I intended to use the time to square away some domestic matters, so that I have a fairly clear first month, with the minimum of external interruptions. However, the people making my bedroom furniture are running about 3 weeks behind schedule, due to some problem with getting wood of the correct type and quality. And the people making shutters for my kitchen hatchway have had some sort of accident with a glass panel during the glass toughening process, and they are having to remake the panel. I am guessing that both parties will declare themselves "ready" next week, when I am too busy to deal with them.

And I'm looking forward to starting work, because the eerie quiet of "not working" unsettles me. The first time that I really noticed this effect was when I left Sun Professional Services in 2005. I quit, and suddenly the torrent of email that I dealt with normally dried to a trickle. Instead of opening my inbox every morning to see 50 or 60 new messages, 75% of which were important enough to require a response, I'd open my inbox to see 5 or 6 messages, of which perhaps 1 would merit attention. It was the sense of connectedness that I missed, and I was surprised at just how much I missed it. No other job has ever produced quite that volume of email for me, probably because Sun is the only major multinational that I have worked for since email became really commonplace. If you work for a company which really has a global presence, someone, somewhere, is likely to be generating work for you 24 hours a day.

What I am missing this time is the constant ping and buzz of my iPhone. This is the first job where I have had a smart phone connected to the company email system, bringing the background noise of email and meeting invitation sound effects to my side all day long. When I deleted my Exchange account from my iPhone, things went quiet. It feels strange.

I've synced the iPhone to TestLogistics' Google Apps mail and calendar, but until I start on Monday, there is not going to be much traffic. Most of the email that I am getting at the moment is either routine vendor spam, or from recruiters who don't realise that it is too late to offer me yet another "unique position".

Endings and Beginnings

Tomorrow is the beginning of my last full week with Alphawest - I'm working up until the 18th, a Tuesday. Soon will come the "last" events, the last Monday, the last team meeting, the last lunch from my favourite local salad bar. I've already removed a lot of my personal effects from my cubical - some stuff transferred to my new office, some to my home. I already have my new business cards, and I'm aiming to hit the ground running. Happily TestLogistics (my new employer) is not in thrall to Microsoft, and they do not use Exchange: they use Google's commercial mail offering, which means that I can use any mail client I choose. In fact, no one is going to enforce a Standard Operating Environment, or expect me to comply with one. The great advantage of working with a team almost all of whom are "technical" is that there is an expectation that we can all take care of our own environments in a responsible manner.

This doesn't work in larger companies, because as soon as you have a significant contingent of clerical staff, you need to take steps to prevent them bringing malware inside the perimeter, unless you can prevent them using Microsoft products, and those seem to be the default choice for most companies. I can't think why - Microsoft makes ugly, expensive software, every bit of which can be replaced with something cheaper if you just bother to check the options. IT managers protest that using Microsoft is cheaper, while they pay exorbitant licensing costs, and waste hours of staff overtime patching, fixing things that patching broke, and dealing with outbreaks of malware. What they really mean is "the Microsoft certification exam was easy, and managing this stuff gives me a job for life".

I plan to enjoy the freedom to select my own tools to enable me to work more efficiently. I've set up OmniFocus for task management - I live by my to do list these days - and I hope to reduce Windows to something that I only need to run Visio. And only I plan to use that when a customer insists - Omnigraffle should meet my day to day diagramming needs. The thought of a working environment that is not bogged down with Managesoft, Active Directory, and never ending antivirus scanning routines is very appealing.

Roll on the 18th

Moving on

It is amazing what changes the passing of a few days can bring. When I went to work on April 12th I little thought that I would be looking for a new job by the end of the day, or that I would be resigning from my old job in less than two weeks.

On April 12th we were assembled for a "company update" and informed that our office was being moved from the current Sydney CBD location to an unspecified building in Macquarie Park. The news was greeted with something less than enthusiasm - in fact it went down like the proverbial lead balloon - and I went home, did a fast update on my resume, and sent it to a couple of recruiters.

If you have ever spent much time in Sydney, the problem with the proposed office relocation will be obvious, but if you haven't, it goes like this. The Sydney central business district is at the south end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Macquarie Park is well north of the bridge. The bridge is a major traffic bottle neck on good days. On bad days, it's a car park. I used to work in North Sydney (just north of the bridge) when I worked for Sun, and when I quit that job I vowed that in the future I would avoid any position that required me to commute across the Harbour Bridge. I am just not prepared to waste hours every week stuck in traffic. Forget public transport: the New South Wales state governments for the last few decades have completely failed to provide Sydney with anything even vaguely resembling efficient public transport. This has nothing to do with politics, just the fact that our state governments tend to talk a lot about infrastructure, but they deliver next to nothing. A sane person might well question why the hell we have state governments: they seem to be an expensive but quite impractical luxury. We also have local and federal governments, so why the useless layer of state-based parasites? However, I digress.

When I first heard rumours that we might be relocated I did the necessary analysis - which took about 5 seconds - and I had already made up my mind that I was not going to work at Macquarie Park. I have to go up there occasionally to work on the Optus campus, and I already know how horrible it is. So I sent out my resume, did a couple of interviews, and I got a letter of offer on Thursday. I resigned yesterday morning, and I have received a stream of emails, phone calls and LinkedIn comments from colleagues past and present, friends and vendor representatives, variously protesting my decision, congratulating me on the new job, or asking "can I come too?". I imagine that there will be more next week, when people get back to work after the Anzac Day long weekend.

My new employer will be TestLogistics, and several of my former colleagues from Sun already work there, so it should be fun. It's a small company, unburdened by excessive bureaucracy (no one has asked for my resume, and I've seen no sign of an HR department). They try only to hire people that someone already in the company knows and recommends; and they believe that, if they hire clever people, then they can solve anything. I'm honoured by their faith in me.

What the job actually is, at a detailed level, I'll find out on May 24th.

New desk

My new desk has been delivered, fresh from the workshop of John Gallagher from Piece Furniture. The new desk replaces an ancient table and a couple of small. cheap computer desks, which made the rather small room extremely cluttered. John took my original design (done in Google Sketchup):

And added a slide out shelf on the right for my scanner and other small devices. The result:

I've spent half the weekend rearranging things and getting the cabling right. Because the room is so small, I can't take a really good picture, but take my word for it: this is a great desk. John has done his usual sensational job - he has made several cupboards for me in the past - and just walking into my study is a pleasure now.

Who designs hotel rooms?

In the second week of March we went down to Canberra to see the Masterpieces from Paris art exhibition, which was stupendous, but thank goodness I managed to get early access tickets, or we would have had to wait for hours to get in (think queues of people stretching out into the street and down the road). We stayed in the Hotel Realm, which is possibly the quietest hotel I have ever stayed in in my life - I usually have trouble sleeping in hotels, because every little noise wakes me - but the Realm was virtually silent despite the fact that there was a wedding on in the hotel. The room was nice, the staff we dealt with were pleasant, and the Konoba restaurant served us a great dinner. I would definitely stay at the Realm again.

However, there was one failing, and it is a failing that is common to almost every hotel I have ever stayed in, in any country: no mirror suitable for applying makeup.

Not that there were no mirrors - there were several - but a make up mirror needs to be appropriately lit and you need to be able to get really close to it if you are trying to apply mascara with confidence. Or pluck your eyebrows (if you have never plucked your own eyebrows, take my word on this one: you need a very clear and close view if you don't want to wind up looking weird).

I have lost track of the number of hotels I have stayed in over the the years: they have ranged from ghastly little shoe boxes in London, through to an extremely nasty place outside Boston which reminded me of a rabbit hutch. I 've stayed in serviced apartments in Los Angeles and boutique hotels in Hobart. There was the place in Columbia , Maryland, where the hotel restaurant played the same Harry Connick CD every night that I was there, and the food was so horrible that my German colleagues relocated to another hotel; there they found that the food was just as bad, and they finally believed the rest of us (a group of Sun employees, there for a two week training course) when we said that what they were experiencing was normal American food. I dealt with it in my usual way, back having the hotel driver take me somewhere that I could buy fresh fruit and basic supplies.

There was the place that I stayed during a conference in New Orleans, where all delegates were given a map of the surrounding area and told not to stray from the marked zones unless we wanted to be mugged. There was the Hilton where Steve and I stayed in Perth (Western Australia, not Scotland) , where the interior decorator had perhaps been given too free a hand:


I've no idea what impression or message was supposed to conveyed by these objects. The room was clean and pleasant, but it would have been improved considerably by removing the tasteless tat on the walls.

Then there was the Sebel in Melbourne, which seemed to have become confused about whether it was a hotel or a bridal reception centre: the restaurant appeared to be permanently reserved for wedding receptions, and on the one occasion when I managed to get a drink at the bar, I was served a martini with a straw in it. My advice on that establishment is to avoid it like the plague: the bathroom looked grubby, the service was careless and there are many better hotels in Melbourne.

Of all these and dozens of others, exactly one had a proper make up mirror: the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua, on Maui, where we stayed in 2002. If you go to their photo tour page, and look at the Guest bathroom picture under the Accommodation tab, you will see what I mean. An illuminated make up/shaving mirror on an extendable arm.

Now I will concede that the Ritz-Carlton is a very expensive hotel - I didn't pay to stay there, the trip was an all expenses paid prize, for winning an award from my then-employer, Sun Microsystems. But surely it should be possible for any hotel room to have one mirror which is reasonably well lit, and which a person can get close to - a mirror behind the vanity unit is too far away. I now carry a small, magnifying mirror with its own build in LED and little suction cups on the back when I travel. I can usually stick this somewhere reasonably convenient - often the shower screen - so that I can see what I am doing. But I can’t be the only woman who has this problem, and surely there are women working in hotel room design who must wear mascara themselves - have they never looked at a hotel bathroom and thought "how would I manage my normal grooming routine in this facility?"

The litter is too deep

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions, because I work on the principal that if something needs doing, it should be started promptly. However, this year a resolution has sort of crept up on me, as follows.

One of my tasks over the holiday break was to tidy up my study, and I did make a start, but there is a long way to go. Now my study is not a big room - it's actually rather small, and resembles pretty much what Rands in Repose calls a Nerd Cave. My cave is green, not red, but otherwise, pretty similar. One wall is fitted bookshelves with cupboards underneath. One wall is mostly windows (heavily curtained against the afternoon sun). One wall is my desk and a small unit which holds my scanner and printer. One wall is almost entirely filled with a set of bi-fold doors, and the last wall has a large Ikea drawer unit on wheels, which is filled with a mix of craft materials and computer parts. Yes, five walls.

The trouble is that every surface is full, often full to over flowing. Books, journals, boxes of CDs, piles of paper, stray tools, odd cables and various knick knacks. Such as the foam Linux penguin, the Matchbox Mercedes car that my husband bought me while we were still courting, and stuff like that.

The books need to be weeded, and the stuff that I don't need frequently relocated to shelves upstairs. Tools and cables need to be sorted, and either stored in the attic or the garage. The CDs are mostly software, and mostly ancient, and mostly heading for the bin. The real problem is the paper. I have a bad habit of saving bits of paper: cuttings, recipes, cartoons, quotes, all things that I might want to refer to again. The trouble is, it would take me weeks to find the one I want, even if I remember that I have it. I have therefore decided that the entire collection has to be converted to digital format. I went through a great pile of yellowing newsprint over the new year break, and was delighted to find that many articles were still on line. What I couldn't find, I scanned. I'm dumping everything to EagleFiler databases, tagging as I go. I think our paper recycling bin will be overloaded next week, and there is still a very long way to go, but it is getting better.

I've also had a mammoth business card scanning session, and every last business card that has been lying around on a desk either at home or in the office is now in the address book on my Mac, nicely synced via MobileMe.

Cartoons have proved to be the greatest challenge. Do you remember the days before email? I do. Today, if someone comes across something funny, chances are that they email it to a few dozen friends. But in those long ago days, funny things circulated via fax machine. Person A would photocopy something amusing, and fax it to Person B, who would fax it to their friends, who would fax it to their friends, and so on and so on, the image losing quality each time it passed through a fax machine. Sometimes someone would get a pen and manually darken the images before sending it on to someone else, so you would get a combination of lossy transfer and amateur graphics.

Cartoons are hard to Google without some attribution information. I've found a few, where I could identify the cartoonist, but some are very old, and have zero citation data, so that I cannot find the originals. So I'm going to post a few here, and see if anyone can provide a reference, or an artist's name.


I've known cats like this.


The style is familiar, but I can't place this one.



OK, I have a low sense of humour.

Clues, anyone?

Cat Update

For those who have expressed an interest in the health and happiness of my felines. Percy was OK with his stitches until about the 15th: then he started pulling on them, and we had to fit him with one of those plastic cones that attaches to a collar, and stops the wearer reaching his/her flanks. He put up with this with a better grace than I had expected, but he kept hanging up on things - door frames, chairs and such, when the edge of the cone turned out to be a bit wider than he had expected. However, he was pretty manoeuvrable, and even managed to jump the back fence with the cone on his head, in order to fertilise our neighbour's garden - he got back safely, and our neighbours don't mind him, fortunately.

We finally got the stitches out, and the cone off, on December 23rd. Percy is now a much happier cat, and life has gone back to normal. Mungo has also made a good recovery from his vet experience, and my credit cards will recover eventually.

Four-footed Hostages to Fortune

In the 17th century Francis Bacon observed "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief." (Essays, 1625). Well to that add pets. Once you have them, you have assumed a responsibility and all the associated costs.

Last week my cats, Mungo and Percy had their annual trip to the vet for a check up and their vaccinations. Mungo is 12 and Percy is 11, so they count as senior felines, and they need a bit of extra attention. However, Percy has had a benign cyst on his side for a couple of years, and the vet has drained this cyst in the past. Last year the cyst came back really quickly, and got much bigger, so last weekend the vet announced that both cats needed their teeth cleaned (no surprise there, I had had a look at their gums myself, and I thought they needed attention), and that Percy's cyst should be removed, lest it rupture and ulcerate.

So on Wednesday afternoon I hauled Mungo (10.85 kilos of ginger cat plus a 2 kilo carry cage) to the vet. I picked him up on Thursday afternoon, and dropped Percy off at the same time. I got Percy back on Friday afternoon. Both cats recovered well from the anaesthetic (thank goodness that anaesthesia for cats has improved over the years, it used to be quite chancy), apart from Mungo needing time to get his paws back under control while the anaesthetic wore off. Both are eating and drinking, and seem unconcerned, but grateful to be home. I put my back out (probably moving Mungo), and had to see the chiropractor on Saturday to get it straightened out (thank goodness for Chirosports Coogee).

However, the bill was over $AU2,000, which included vaccinations, dental work, anaesthesia, intravenous fluids and shaving Mungo's rather daggy nethers. We have an excellent vet, and $2K is less than I charge for a day's work, but Mungo and Percy came from the pound: they are rescue cats, not pedigree. Still, I adopted them, so my responsibility.

And Percy now has this big shaved square on this side, and looks as though someone has fitted him with a zipper:


So the next drama will be getting the stitches out in a couple of weeks.

Renovations

My husband Steve and I designed and built our house, into which we moved in 1997. We hadn't intended to build it as owner-builders, but when the builder we had retained went bankrupt (owing us quite a lot of money) we had no choice. Fortunately Steve is in civil construction, and his knowledge and contacts got the house built, though it took longer than planned. On the day we moved in there were no skirting boards, few internal doors and an enormous pile of builder's rubble in the corner of the family room. The main bathroom was a shell, without even lining boards on the walls. The floors were bare concrete, which we sealed with paving paint as soon as we could, to control the dust. At that point in time our only goal was to get moved into the house, as soon as we could get a certificate of occupancy: we were paying rent on the place we were living in, the mortgage on the place we were building, and monthly storage charges because many of our personal effects (read: books) were in a rented storage facility. Our finances were strained, to say the very least.

The local council's criteria for occupancy were that we had a working bathroom and a working kitchen. A working kitchen was defined as having a working cooker and a working sink. Getting the ensuite bathroom fitted was not a problem, because I had bought a bath months before (floor stock from a local supplier), and I had got most of the other fittings at "mate's rates" through contacts at work. However, by the time we got to the kitchen, money was running out.

Now it so happened that I was doing some work for a government agency who would probably prefer not to be named, and while working on the premises of this agency it was forbidden to have a mobile phone switched on - and a junior agency person was detailed to follow me about, and ensure that I complied with this rule. Further more, I couldn't plug my laptop into their network. So I spent a lot of time hanging around their operations room, waiting for computers to load patches or whatever, with nothing to do. I looked around for something to read, and found a copy of "The Trading Post" a local rag dedicated to connecting buyers and sellers, which someone had left lying around. In this paper were adverts from a business selling factory second sinks, and a kitchen manufacturer who was going out of business.

So the next weekend I went out and bought a factory second sink (a returned order, I think, there was nothing wrong with it and it was a good brand), and 1.8 metres of floor stock kitchen cupboards, plus a pantry. The cupboards had no bench top attached, and they had been used to demonstrate different finishes: one cupboard door was blue, one was green, and the other was white. The drawer fronts were cream, with a wood trim. The pantry was white, and I acquired a section of grey laminated benchtop from somewhere else. The overall effect was awful, and the carpenter who installed it all did so on the proviso that we never tell anyone that he was responsible.

I never intended to keep the original kitchen for long, but in the end it stayed until late 2006, when I had it torn out and replaced with the kitchen of my dreams. And this year the original ensuite bathroom, which has seen about 12 years of service, finally had to be renovated.

The trigger was an event in March this year. The shower drain in the ensuite blocked, the shower stall overflowed, the drain in the middle of the bathroom floor failed to cope (an inadequately glue joint between two sections of pipe failed), and water began to pour through the ceiling of the room below. The room below is my study: I was just about to leave the house to go to work, when I heard an odd tap-tap-tap noise coming from the study: I thought that one of my machines was doing something strange, and turned the light on to see what was happening. What was happening was that water, following the path of least resistance, was trickling through the light fitting and onto the side desk where I normally keep my MacBook Pro.

I turned the light off, quickly, shoved the desk out of the way - it's on wheels - and fetched a bucket to put under the drip. Fortunately my laptop was safely in it's carry bag, protected from incontinent light fittings.

The end result of that little episode was a statement from the emergency plumbers that the grout around the shower stall was failing and no longer water tight. They fixed the leaking pipe (by making a large hole in the ceiling of my study to get at the problem joint). They also recommended replacing the light fitting.

Now it is October, and for the last couple of weeks there have been tradesmen around the house most days: since they are here, I'm getting a lot of other things fixed at the same time. The old ensuite has been gutted, re-rendered, re-water-proofed, re-tiled and new taps and other fittings installed (I kept the heated towel rail, the shower screen and the bath). We are now waiting for the vanity unit to be made - about 3 weeks - and installed. The painter should be here on Tuesday, to repaint the bathroom. I'm going to get the kitchen and the front hall repainted, too.

It will be great when it is done, but getting up early every morning is getting seriously tedious. Why do all tradesmen want to start at 7AM?

Darkness Falls

So I arrived at the office on a Tuesday morning, put my Mac Book Pro on my desk, opened the lid and hit the space bar and nothing happened. It took a few seconds for me to register the nothing, because it was so totally unexpected; I felt the first twinge of alarm as I forced the machine to reboot, and still got a blank, black screen. A few minutes of emergency troubleshooting procedures, including removing and replacing the battery, and I knew I was in trouble. I was pretty sure that the machine was powering up, but the screen was dead. Plugging in my external monitor didn't help: the external monitor announced that it was not getting a signal, and went back to sleep.

And of course it was a busy morning, I was due in meetings, and I really didn't have time for a technology meltdown. Fortunately I had cleared all email requiring an urgent response earlier that morning, while I having my first cup of coffee. I could access email from my iPhone, but many of the documents that I needed were stuck in the corporate document management system, which is built on Interwoven, and can only be accessed via Outlook or Internet Explorer. So I logged a call with our Internal Support people. and got on with the meetings.

A meeting or so later, Internal Support handed me a loan laptop, a revolting piece of junk (I won't name the brand) running Windows XP at the speed of an arthritic snail. I struggled through a few more hours, my stress levels rising every time some absurd piece of Microsoft nonsense got between me and getting things done. Finally I got a break, and called the Apple support line. A pleasant young woman walked me through the inevitable diagnostic procedures, and confirmed what I already suspected: the dreaded nVidia 8600 bug had finally struck down my machine. I had known it was possible, but the reports were so long ago that I hoped I had been spared.

I wrote down my case number, and walked down to the Apple Store. I had already checked, and the Genius Bar was booked out until Friday, but I was due to go to Melbourne for a few days break on Saturday, I had no intention of going without a Mac. The Genius Bar people wait listed me, and happily I ran into an old friend, so I had someone to chat to while I waited. The wait was only about 20 minutes, and the resident genius confirmed the diagnosis: dead nVidia processor. At least 5 days wait for a repair. Arrrggghhh!!

So I did what any DINK with an Amex card does: I left the Genius Bar, went down the retail level, and bought a new 15.4" Mac Book Pro. Fortunately my friend was there to provide input, since I was a bit stressed, and would have overlooked the Mini DP to VGA adapter that I needed.

I then went back to the office, wrapped up the working day, and headed home to start reconstructing my electronic life. I had been planning to buy a new Mac Book, but I had really hoped to wait until Oracle finalises the purchase of Sun, and pays out my shares. I had intended to take the money (whatever there is of it) and put it towards new Mac, which would have given me a nice sense of closure. What I hadn't planned was having to conduct an emergency rebuild. Fortunately I had done a Time Machine backup on the preceding Sunday night, but I didn't just want to restore from that. I really wanted a clean install of Snow Leopard. So I started by booting of the Snow Leopard DVD, and getting the install running while I did some planning.

The first thing I load, always, is Synium's Cleanapp. Then Camino, EagleFiler, 1Password, Vmware Fusion, Curio, Evernote. I recovered bookmarks, restored my essential data from Time Machine, and by the next day I could work. I still have a fair bit of clean up to do, and I need to take a cold, hard look at some of my old data and convince myself that it really needs to be on my laptop, rather than archived on an external disk where I can get it if I really need it. But that can happen over the next few days, while I am on leave, because I getting renovations done and need to be at home. But apart from the unexpected expense, to really wasn't that bad.

Objects of desire

Unless you live in cave, you are probably at least vaguely aware that speculation is rife that Apple is about to release, or at least announce, some sort of tablet device. Such a device has been rumoured for many years, but this time the rumours appear to have more substance. The wonderful folks at MacLife have gone so far as to do a detailed workup, with quite drool-worth graphics, of what such a device might look like, and what functions it might offer.

Now let me be quite open about this: I don't care if they call it an iTablet, an iPad (seems unlikely, too much like iPod) or an iBiscuit (iLibris, anyone?). I want it. But only if it will do the following:

Allow me to write, squiggle, doodle and otherwise draw upon the screen, and save my scratchings in some convenient format (JPG will do just fine). As someone who constantly jots things down, my life is absolutely littered with note pads of various descriptions: I can see 4 from where I sit, without turning around to check the shelves behind me. My chances of finding the one that contains the notes I need approach zero. Every conference or vendor event seems to give me another block of dead tree slices to write upon, and create notes that I can't find: there must be a better way.

Read newspapers, specifically the Sydney Morning Herald and the Weekend Australian. I do read newspapers online now, but I like to read a newspaper while eating my breakfast. I eat my breakfast in the family room (large room at the south end of the house, with no computers). Eating breakfast in my study is impractical because a). there isn't space on my desk to put down a bowl of muesli; and b). my white cat Percy expects to be able to sit on my lap while I'm in my study, but he knows that he can’t sit on me while I'm sitting at the table in the family room. It's about the only thing that the little idiot has ever managed to learn, and I'd hate to waste it.

Having access to newspapers on a tablet style device would have numerous advantages, for me and for the environment. Right now, when a newspaper arrives in my house, half of it immediately gets tossed into the recycling basket: I do not read the sports section or the real estate section, and I rarely read the enclosed advertising material (Dell, please note: sending me a flyer every day will not make me any more likely to purchase your products).

This is always assuming that my newsagent manages to deliver the paper: my local newsagent is a half wit, and I have the agency on speed dial, because they screw up so often. Any technology that would spare me having to deal with this particular business would be welcomed with open arms.

Then, when I've finished with the paper and my husband has done the suduko, the whole thing gets tossed into the recycling. Kilos of used newprint leave this house every week, much of it unread. We subscribe to the Sydney Morning Herald, so on Sundays the Sun Herald is delivered to us. The SMH is a OK as a newspaper, but the Sun Herald is the type of rag that you wouldn't used to line a hamster cage, for fear of upsetting the hamster. Shoddy journalism, verging on gutter press, it usually goes straight to recycling.

All this could be stopped, which would reduce the burden on the local council's recycling activities, and keep my house tidier.

If the new device would also allow me to read ebooks, and watch the occasional DVD, so much the better. But for me, note taking and newspapers are the big, must have features.

Of books and truffles

My husband Steve and I have a tendency to plan our holidays around food and what might be broadly defined as "cultural pursuits". We've just come back from a trip to Western Australia, which was planned around the Mundaring Truffle Festival (think underground fungus, not chocolate here). The Truffle Gala Dinner at the Loose Box Restaurant was sensational, and definitely something I would attend again, given a chance. The festival itself was a lot of fun, and I'm glad we went early, because a huge number of people turned out for it. And as usual, we ordered wine (which will probably get delivered to my office next week), and as usual we came back with half a suitcase full of books. Neither of us can resist a bookshop.

Next month we are going to Melbourne for a few days, to see the A Day in Pompeii exhibition at the Melbourne Museum and the Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. These two exhibitions are conveniently running in the same city at the same time, and we can combine seeing them with celebrating our twenty third wedding anniversary, which we shall do with dinner at a good restaurant. Steve wants to go to Grossi Florentino, so I've asked Amex to see if they can get us a table; if I didn't have American Express to do the organizing, I don't think we would get holidays.

We have more or less unpacked from the last trip, and the coffee table in the lounge is covered in new books, again. I've got more than 3200 titles loaded into Library Thing - all the new ones we just bought, and I've finished the doing the books in my study. I still have a very long way to go in other rooms, but I've made some interesting discoveries, and some observations. I have some wonderful books, many of which I intended to read long ago; and I've almost stopped reading for pleasure in the last few years: all I seem to read is technical manuals and journals.

So this is going to stop. I'm going to make time to read the books I want to read, and the technical manuals can wait. I joke about buying books to read when I retire, but given the sheer number of volumes in the house, I think I'd better make a start.

LibraryThing
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered LibraryThing. Now I'm sure most of you have already heard about LibraryThing - it seems to have been written up a quite a few places - but somehow I'd missed out. If you haven't heard of it, LibraryThing is an online service for organising your books. Because I have a lot of books, many rather indifferently organised, this was immediately appealing to me.

I chanced to be Googling about, looking for the name of a bookshop in Brisbane, and Google sent me to a page where a group of Australians were comparing notes on Australian bookshops. They mentioned the name of the one I was looking for (which has slipped my memory, because I haven't had to go to Brisbane since 2005,) so I made a note of it and then decided to check what site I had landed on. Behold, LibraryThing: the page I had been reading was a thread in their Talk area.

So I had a poke about, and registered a free account to try it out. LibraryThing will let you load 200 book records for free, so I extracted a chunk of my nonfiction list, re-organised it to suit LibraryThing's bulk upload system (which is pretty simple), and waited while the file got digested by the loader. It actually created 217 records before it quit, and the quality of the records retrieved was pretty good. LibraryThing searches library and online booksellers all over the world - you can configure which sources you want searched - and retrieves records which you can edit to suit your needs and add to you collection.

However, the stuff in my existing nonfiction records was mostly quite recent (within the last five years). I decided to test a bit more rigorously. So I registered another free account, for testing, and went upstairs to select some books. I settled on Nancy Mitford's "Wigs on the Green", which has been out of print for decades; a four-volume edition of Alexander Pope's "Poetical Works", dated 1853; and a privately printed edition of the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre, also 19th century. LibraryThing found them all (OK, we had to dig a bit for the correct edition of the Pope, but we got it).

Impressed, I registered a paid account (unlimited books), and ordered one of their "CueCat" barcode scanners. Then I went back upstairs to the room which is labelled "Bedroom 4" on my house plans, but which is, in fact, full of proper steel library shelving, most of it double stacked with books. I got an armful of old Penguins and Everyman editions from the middle aisle, and started loading books into LibraryThing: most of the old books I own don't have a barcode or an ISBN number, so searching for author, title and edition is going to be the only way to load them. Later I uploaded my entire author/title fiction list.

Some observations: LibraryThing works best if you tag your books, at least roughly, at the time of loading. At least tag for fiction or nonfiction. If you are doing bulk uploads, do not chuck a couple of thousand records on the load queue in one lump. First, you will probably cause the queue to hang. Second, you will have no way to easily check what loaded. Split your load into batches of about 50, and tag them by batch number. Then you can easily call up a batch by tag name, and compare it to the file of data you uploaded. This makes it much easier to identify records that don't get a hit, or records that retrieve bad data. I got a couple of very strange books added to my LibraryThing collection, caused by corrupted ISBN numbers in the load file, and it took me a while to track down which records had caused the error. If you can easily spot which entries in your load file have produced a suboptimal result, corrections become much quicker. LibraryThing has a Power Edit mode that enables you to quickly add, remove and replace tags, so it is easy to get rid of your dummy tags when you are done.

If you are tagging books, and working on a Mac (as I do), Typinator is a great help: you can establish abbreviations for frequently used tags, and save many keystrokes (if you are using Windows, this won't help you).

Of course, now that I am loading old books into the system, I'm finding a lot that need cleaning or repairing, so my dining room table is covered in piles of books that need help. And I'm finding so many forgotten gems on the shelves.

The CueCat scanner arrived on Friday, and it works as advertised. I've tried it on my MacBook Pro and my iMac, and it does what it says it does. You do get a dialog box as the Mac recognises what it thinks is a keyboard, but you can just close that and move on. Give the CueCat about 15 seconds to get its act together when you first plug it on. Actual scanning technique seems to be the only issue, and I imagine that that will improve as I scan more books. What is scanned is, as the instructions say, gibberish:

.C3nZC3nZC3n2CNDXDhD7DxnY.cGen.ENr7C3D7DxfZChb2DG.

that's the scanned barcode for Martin Gardner's "Mathematics, magic and mystery". Feed it into LibraryThing, and it returns the book's details, right down to the correct cover art.

You should be able to see a link to my LibraryThing collection on the left hand side of this page: I've loaded 2,798 books so far, and I have a long way to go....

The Joy of Books

Books (well, printed matter in all forms, but let's concentrate on books for a moment) flow into my house in a constant stream. Quite apart from the ones my husband buys (which are mostly about military modeling at the moment, and come from all over the planet), I buy books regularly. And irregularly. I buy books in shopping centres, in dedicated book shops, in air ports. If I land in a new city, the first thing I look for in the hotel room is a yellow pages, so I can see if there are any book shops nearby. And, of course, I watch out for book fairs. The University of New South Wales has a book fair most years, and I always come away with a box of books.

As you might expect, we have a lot of bookshelves (we designed our house to accommodate books, including reinforcing the first floor slab to carry additional vertical load), and they are all over flowing. And still the books come, from Amazon, from the English Good Book Guide, from second hand shops, from Kinokuniya, from Abbeys. Craft books, cookery books, programming, philosophy, almanacs, fiction, history, biography: I have no resistance. My husband claims that, when he married me, he didn't get a dowry, he got a library. I don't actually know how many books are in the house, because I know that some of the older volumes are not on my shelf lists, but I'd guess somewhere around the 4,000 mark. Perhaps more.

When a book enters the house, I try to avoid opening it at once. As far as is possible, all paperbacks and any hardcover with a loose dust jacket gets covered with self adhesive plastic ( I favour a brand called Alkor) before it gets much handling, to preserve its original condition. Once covered, the title is then entered into my shelf lists, which are large Excel spreadsheets for Fiction A-M, Fiction N-Z and Non-fiction; these are exported as CSV files, and uploaded to the CSV Touch application on my iPhone.

But this takes time, and sometimes a lot of books arrive all at once. So unprocessed books gather on the coffee table in the sitting room, to the consternation of my housekeeper, where they may stay for weeks until I can catch up.

I've just been entering a big batch into the shelf list - the catch from a trip to Melbourne, a foray into Borders, the aforementioned UNSW book fair, an order Steves placed on a specialist military bookshop in England and a couple of strays that somehow got into the general community without getting covered. I'm still behind on covering, but at least the shelf list is up to date (after a fashion, I know that most of the non-fiction I bought before about 1990 isn't listed).

I do an abbreviated form of physical cataloguing, sufficient to record author or editor names, title, publisher's name and location, year of publication and ISBN. Modern books are fairly straightforward, one can expect the publisher's details to be either on the verso of the title page, or in a colophon at the end of the book, and most volumes now have one if not two ISBN numbers. But with older books, it can be trickier. For example, one of the volumes I have just processed is a Viking Portable Library edition of Dorothy Parker's short stories and poems. It has no ISBN number - it does have statement that says "This edition is produced in full compliance with all War Production Board conservation orders", which says something about the constraints that World War Two puts on anyone trying to publish a book in 1944. But the publication details are rather scant. The cover is cloth, and there is a little foxing in a few places. The fly leaf has a signature, "Eileen Langdon", and in a different hand, at the bottom of the same page, the words 'from Leo Packer", but the binding is quite firm for a 65 year old book, and I doubt it has ever been read. I wonder who Eileen and Leo were?

Covering the books takes time, and before they can be covered, I need to remove all sticky labels (the adhesive will break down and discolour rapidl), and any grubby marks. Old books may need repairs, torn dust jackets will have to be reassembled and patched carefully. Stray book marks - which may be anything from an old bus ticket to a proper book mark - have to be found and extracted. In one case, long ago, I found myself in possession of a novel with a missing page, and wound up having to borrow the book from the library, type out the missing material, and add it to my book.

But I have the satisfaction of knowing that I can find a book on almost any subject somewhere in this house. If I look for long enough.

Significant Events

Quick as you can, think of some experience or event that changed your life. Some "fork in the road moment" that had a lasting effect on the direction your life took. It's possible (particularly if you are relatively young) that you haven't had such a moment yet, but if you have, did you recognize its significance at the time? And if you haven't had such an experience, how do you think you would recognize one if you did?

I've been thinking about this lately, because over the last few weeks I've been doing the Storage Networking Industry Association's Management and Administration course, and the ITIL version 2 course, and the related exams. I reckon that the two activities have consumed about 10 days in training courses, additional study and the exams themselves (I passed both). However, for all the effort, I don't really expect either one to change my life noticeably.

An event that did change my life happened in about five minutes early in 1981, and at the time I barely noticed it.

In 1981 I was working as a library assistant for the Community and Child Health Services branch of the Public Health Department of Western Australia. One of my duties was to take care of journal circulation, the extremely manual process by which periodical publications were circulated among staff who had asked to see them. This meant dealing with hundreds of people and thousands of individual issues of everything from the British Medical Journal to Nursing Times. There was no Internet, and the only way for the medical staff to stay up to date with current information in their field was to read the printed word. So every day scores of periodicals would cross my desk, and I would try to at least glance at the contents page of the new ones, and if anything looked interesting I might put it aside to read during lunch.

On this particular day, the November 1980 issue of Psychology Today hit my desk, having already made the rounds at head office, and during lunch I skimmed through it. There was an article by an American physician called John Eric Holmes, entitled "Confessions of a Dungeon Master". It was about the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, told from the perspective of Dungeon Master of a long running game. It probably took me less than five minutes to read it, and I thought it sounded like fun. I was looking for a new hobby, principally because I wanted to find a way to extend my social circle, most of whom at that time were either other librarians or nursing students (read: very few men). I knew that there was shop in Perth that sold the paraphernalia for D&D, because they also sold military simulation games, which I had tried previously. So, when opportunity permitted, I stopped by the shop and asked the owner if he knew of a group that I could join. He said he did, and gave me the name and phone number of someone who ran a gaming club the the Gooseberry Hill area.

I called the number, and spoke to the club organizer, Stephen Neal. And as Miss Bronte has it in "Jane Eyre", "reader, I married him". Not at once (not until 1986), but my husband and I met because I read an article in a magazine. A chain of events started that otherwise could not have happened. When I was offered work in Canberra, my prospective employer (the National Library) would not pay my relocation costs, but Steve was just graduating from his degree and starting to look for work, so we decided to drive across Australia together. I started work in Canberra, and Steve went on to Sydney and found a job there. I got a transfer to Sydney in 1985, and we married in 1986, just in time for me to get retrenched and accidently join the IT industry.

And I can think of at least two other people whose lives I significantly affected, by helping them get out of poorly paid public service jobs and into better paid (but much more stressful) private sector jobs. All sort of things could not have happened if I had stayed in Perth, and I couldn't get out of Perth without Steve. If we had not met, I would probably still be a librarian, and he would probably work in heavy construction on some mine site. Our directions changed because of a five minute event that I barely noticed at the time. I did work it out later, and while I was still at the National Library, I located that issue of Psychology Today and photocopied the article. I have it beside me now, faded but readable, with a proper citation scrawled on the first page in my hand, giving volume, issue and page number detail.

The important events are not always the obvious ones.

If anyone happens to know Doctor Holmes, say "Hi" for me.