Free Wi-Fi Possibly Not So Free

I'm always suspicious of the word "free" in relation to services and deals, because usually such transactions involve data-mining and spamming and other modern headaches, and lo and behold my paranoia turns out to be quite reasonable, if not a tad staid, according to this investigation:

A top secret document retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and obtained by CBC News shows that Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal.

Plus there's this:

The document shows CSEC had so much data it could even track the travellers back in time through the days leading up to their arrival at the airport, these experts say.

Not even I suspected that level of nefariousness.

Hmm, makes you wonder about all those other "freebie" zones, usually sponsored by some product. Not that I've ever used them, but I shall stare askance at such areas from now on. Ah well, as the mutterings go these days, don't commit anything to the digital realm that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing up in lights in Time Square for grandmothers all over the world to read.

Shootin' The Breeze About Country Characters

Overheard in a shop today, as said by a pair of supposedly joshing women to an awkward-looking third woman: "Well, she's almost one of us now." "Yeah, almost."

As in a local.

And the two emphases were not entirely good-natured to my ears.

As a hyper-sensitive (possibly over-sensitive) people observer, it's the sort of remark that always makes me uneasy. Any us-versus-them situation or artificially constructed, supposedly superior in-group complete with self-appointed gatekeepers controlling the human traffic always gives me the creepy crawlies. The potential for power abuse is ever-present, and can lead to claustrophobic communities that hand over all their brains, manners and decency to TPTB -  the kind of behaviour which, if it takes over, can lead to the that scary place which is the wellspring for so many small town horror stories of the witch-hunting kind.

I'm 4 years and three months into my country living experiment, and I have to say it has been and still is a strange experience. Even though I grew up in Country Victoria, out Gippsland way, I then spent a few decades becoming completely citified in Copenhagen and Melbourne before moving out again. After 23 years of being thoroughly embedded in St Kilda's bustling ebb and flow, the blatant parochialism has been a bit of an eye opener for me. When anyone is  mentioned in the local papers, the journo always mentions where the person was born and lists the places that person has lived as a qualifier, sometimes even breaking it down to length of time spent in each locale in a way that suggests an underlying code for initiated readers. What exactly does 2 years in town X with an emphasis on their 5 years in town Y mean? When out and about locally, one of the first things many (but not all) people ask is how long you've lived in the area, and they're not shy about making an assessment of you to your face based on that fact. I noticed that certain people became friendlier once I hit the 2 year mark and become more so for every year that passes. Can't say I like it though. To me it's just as impolite as people who openly judge others according to their income, job, sartorial leanings, marital status, dog/cat ownership, number of children, the boy/girl ratio of those children, how many heads those respective children have or [fill in this blank with the prejudice/bugbear of your choice] though to be fair, I'm just as bad because I constantly judge people who judge others according to what I deem invalid criteria.

Anyway, just recently I caught myself out on a number of occasions putting off popping down to the supermarket and other shops on a Wednesday afternoon. I found I far preferred to go after 16.00 and on weekends. Why? Self cross-examination revealed that it was because there's usually (but not always) a certain type of citizen on cash register duty during normal work hours who is sooooo friendly and all over the folk they know personally, but who then, if they can't get away with ignoring you and absolutely HAVE TO serve you, swiftly shift in a matter of seconds  to surly and openly contemptuous if they don't recognise you and suspect you're a blow in. I prefer to avoid such rudeness. Besides, after 16.00 and on weekends, the part-time kids take over, and the mood changes, because they're as friendly and open a bunch as you could wish for. I've gradually gained a feel-it-in-my-bones understanding of why country kids are often so eager to head off to the big smoke ASAP. It's not just about the job and education opportunities, but also about the blessed anonymity the city offers, and the chance to be something besides the scion of this or that family with whatever baggage it entails.

I suppose all this is all just another lesson in the strange need some humans have to make themselves somehow special and to then use themselves as an irrefutable measure of what is good and acceptable in their particular part of the world. A self canonisation of sorts. Maybe it boils down to insecurity again. The older I get, the more I find insecurity is the root of most of our darker foibles.

But lest I've given the wrong impression about living in Country Victoria, let me finish off by reassuring you that I enjoy the fresh air, the beauty of much nature, the space, the stars, the nearby horses, the many clubs, interests and wonderful things folk get up to. I like that the move has shaken up my life and that I'm seeing new things in new ways. Fortunately, most people hereabouts are lovely and friendly and chatty. When I head for the train, I have to leave in good time because most days I have to stop for hallos or a quick pat of someone's dog or to explain that no, I don't require a lift to the station because I need the exercise, really, but thank you for asking.

Good News and Bad News

After waiting for only seven minutes, I finally got past my good friend the automated response system and spoke to an actual real live human being.

It seemed too good to be true. It was.

You see, the service provider's computers are down for the next two hours so the girl couldn't really do anything but tell people she couldn't do anything. That was why she could respond so quickly, I suppose.

She did wish me a good morning though. That was nice. The human touch.

So I guess I'll have to try again tomorrow. Or write that letter.

All Serviced Out

Hey, I'm an adult. I understand that service providers aren't really about providing services but about getting as much money as possible out of us general public schmucks for the least possible effort. They're about profit. They're about PR spin but no substance. They're about sneaky accountancy disguised as customer benefits. They're about cutting service staff from the bottom so there's more money for those at the top. They're about contracting out the nuts and bolts of the operation so they don't have to deal with the messy business of actually providing the services they're supposed to provide. They're about companies doing whatever they like and us desperately trying to get them to abide by their original agreements. I get it. I do, really. Still, you'd think that a smidgen of embarrassment would kick in after a certain amount of stuffing around. 

Oh, what am I saying? That would imply that such companies recognised us as human beings with other things to do besides waiting in phone queues for the opportunity to politely beg them to fix their mistakes. If they never get to hear about their mistakes, well, it's less work and more $$$ for them. It's a cunning tactic. As you can probably guess, I've been trying all day (well, yesterday), on and off, in between multiple naps and getting out of the way a whole lot of grown up, officey stuff that has accumulated over the past few months, to get through to a certain telecommunications company. I've given my intimate details to the automated system so many times that I feel we know each other well enough to go out for coffee sometime, but the very best the machine could offer me was, at one point, to wait for 20 minutes until someone (maybe) got around to me. I'll probably end up calling them a few more times tonight. I'm hoping that that other folk are heading for bed around now, thus shortening the queue. Of course, then there might be the other arvo and night shift people of the world to contend with. And the company might roster less staff to deal with the fewer calls. *groan*  

If I can't get through to them tonight, I have a cunning backup plan -  I'll write them an old fashioned letter. I know for a fact that modern service providers hate letters. Once upon a time not long ago, I sent off just such a quaint thing. In return, I received a rather pompous note telling me how they'd taken care of my problem, although in future they recommended that I use their amazing automated customer service system (which I'd complained about). But. They. Fixed. The. Problem. As far as I'm concerned - major triumph!

Yes, a formal letter of complaint might be the way to go. Maybe I'll even dig out a fountain pen to write it. And some violet ink. That'll really mess with their minds.

The Mighty Amazon Gets a Smidge Mightier

Yep, there they were in my inbox this morning, sent on by kindly, well-meaning souls  - multiple links to the new Amazon Author Rank. I can, even now, almost hear the frantic mouse clicks of insecure writers all over the world as they try desperately to gauge how much the reading public loves them. Or not. I'm trying to resist the temptation to join their ranks. I have no status to speak of in the world of writing, but oh, the curiosity, the urge to take a just one peek...

Luckily, a few minutes later, I read this post by John Scalzi. Level-headed sanity from a professional is always welcome when these sort of media thingies threaten to sweep up and exploit less confident writers. He ends with:

Authors who start to worry about their Amazon ranking should likewise be aware that by doing so they’re allowing Amazon to define their success to a greater or lesser extent… and they should really ask who ultimately benefits the most from that: Amazon or them. Amazon isn’t (necessarily) evil, but Amazon is interested in its own goals, many of which may ultimately be at cross purposes to an authors’ own. Amazon will be happy to frame your career to suit its own purposes. All you have to do is let them.

Keep it in mind as you’re refreshing your Amazon author page to see where your ranking is right now.

 Good on you, John. All you have to do is let them. So true.

Now, gotta go. It's pouring down outside, but the Arvo Job beckons.

Time is my Friend

The quantity versus quality debate has probably been going since one cave person spent half  a lifetime (after the Day Job of hunting mastodons or gathering tubers) scrunched up in backbreaking positions whilst painstakingly painting a complicated paleolithic scene replete with herds of local wildlife portrayed in loving detail while another prehistoric visual artist, overcome by inspiration, seized the moment and wildly smacked a pigment-dipped hand countless times against a rock face and then demanded equal respect for that quickie. Time is the distinguishing factor here, and the ongoing debate reflects how we evaluate its importance in the creative process. Can fast be good? Is slow necessarily better? Might the slapdash artist have benefited from taking a few moments to consider composition and colour? Might the meticulous one have heightened the dynamics of the animal subjects by loosening up a bit?

Over at the SFWA blog, there's a post by Marcis Yudkin on the perennial time as an added value topic :

http://www.sfwa.org/2012/07/guest-blog-post-in-praise-of-ripening-4/#more-25449.

She's not taking a swipe at the self-publishing industry, or damning ebooks to a special circle of Hell, but questions the way these modern developments often spin an attitude that promotes churning inferior word-stuff through the system as an admirable thing, and actually encourages would-be writers to not worry about ripping off readers with hastily written, bad quality prose because the product is so cheap. Often the message is that you don't need to waste your time agonising over your work to make money from writing. Quality craftsmanship is for chumps. Content can be copied. As per usual in these shallow days, it's all about the packaging. 

 Me, I'm an old-fashioned girl with a mostly non-linear approach to the physics of writing time. I too can, in a fit of inspiration, slap my hand against a cave wall to produce the occasional fast piece, and I still consider those to be well-worked stories in their own right, but mostly I write, put aside, write, put aside, write, and finally finish my tales, sometimes years later. I actually enjoy letting the bigger stories mature. Years can add layers to a first draft that only a few geniuses can achieve straight off the bat. I wouldn't mind being a faster writer, not at all, and I'd love more than anything to be be paid properly for my work and to make enough money from writing to be able to do it full time. I do believe in having a realistic and professional approach to the business of fiction writing, but fast or slow, mainstream or genre, literary or pulp, I also believe one's work has to be motivated by a real love of words, stories, characters and ideas, include a willingness to let tales unfold at their own pace, and incorporate a genuine enjoyment of the process. If there's no love of bringing unruly elements together and racking your brain for a way to make them gel, just a preference for following easy tick-the-character-and-plot-boxes developed by marketers, then it isn't writing as I know it. If there's no artistic component to it, a story is just another mass-produced product. If there's no understanding that no matter how disciplined you might be, you can't always force creativity to abide by imposed time strictures, then you should invest your energy in a more regulated, punch-in-and-out-according-to-a-roster office job to avoid frustration.

Possibly this is an unrealistic attitude that dooms me to a life of writerly poverty. So be it. Now, it's time to get on with that story about...

Trial Run

I spent most of yesterday in Melbourne, taking my usual Arvo Job train to the city and, for the first time in two months, also returned home on my usual evening train. From my experiment, I suspect that for the next few weeks at least, train time will not so much be writing time as napping time.

In between, I did many un-Arvo Joberly things. First, fresh off the train, I caught up with a friend in Degraves St. Arriving early, I popped around the corner to Flinders Books only to discover that another mainstay Melbourne bookshop is closing down. So sad! Ah, the times I've ducked into that repository of second-hand treasures for a nice peaceful perusing. Long ago, I purchased one of my most favourite and always envy-inspiring books there - Writers' Houses  by Francesca Premoli-Droulers, with a forward by Margaret Duras, which features beautiful photos of the amazing abodes of Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Lawrence Durrell, Karen Blixen, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Castles and fantastic retreats abound, and browsing through it never fails to inspire sighs of longing and thoughts of how I too could be a great writer if only I had a mountaintop chateau in which to collect my thoughts. Anyway, since there was a 50% off sale, and for old time's sake, I bought two hardbacks - Brian Stableford's The Empire of Fear and Robert Silverberg's At Winter's End. Then it was back to Degraves St for tea and a chat.

After that, I trammed it to St Kilda (and gleefully eavesdropped on a bunch of young Danes), visited my doctor, walked back to the city via Chapel Street popping into many shops along the way, and finished off the day with fried noodles and a movie, namely A Royal Affair, simply because Mads Mikklesen is in it :) It's all about an infamous liaison between King Christian VII of Denmark, his wife Queen Caroline Mathilda, and the freethinking court physician Johann Friedrich Struensee. Not very historically accurate, it was nonetheless entertaining, and had some pertinent comments to make on the power of  ideas, information and misinformation control, political spin, influencing the masses, and the sheer nastiness of folk with much when it comes to sharing their toys with the less fortunate. It was also a long movie - if not for the arrival of a just-in-the-nick-of-time tram to speedily carry me across town, I would have missed my homeward train.

So I did the time (a day crammed with fun like that certainly illustrates just how many perfectly good hours our day and arvo jobs take up) and even though I had to sleep in this morning, I'm not overly pooped now. I should be right for a gentle return to the Real World next week.

Now for some walking and writing.

The Dragon Has Landed

Commercial space travel here we come?

SpaceX will officially begin deliveries to the ISS later this year, transitioning to Cargo Resupply Services (CRS) with legally binding contracts and penalties.

I'm firmly of the opinion that once there's money to be made in them there stars (asteroid mining anyone?) we'll start our outward expansion. What humankind as a whole won't do for the pure acquisition of knowledge and simply for the thrill of exploring unknown territories, they'll certainly do for a buck. And so it has ever been with new frontiers.

So, maybe it's time for me to get my CV up to scratch for that job on the Moon that I grew up thinking was a dead certainty.  Mind you, I envisioned myself wearing a purple wig and a fishnet spacesuit, and there were hostile aliens involved, but I was working on the Moon, dammit, and that's what counts!

Summer in the City

Today’s trip to the Melbourne Showgrounds for Supanova was a recon mission. This pop culture expo has been on each year for the past decade, but I’ve never checked it out. Silly me. The atmosphere was fantastic. Despite the crowds, people were calm and well behaved – I’ve never experienced such orderly and good-natured queues, and because people weren’t jumping around trying to cheat the system and outmanoeuver each other, the lines moved quickly. There was lots of laughing, hugging, people complimenting each other on their costumes, like-minded friends greeting each other, and light-hearted discussions about the finer plot points of books/TV shows/movies/games.

Besides, there was always lots to look at and smile about – scary aliens, adorable aliens, sexy aliens, cloaked LOTR folk, cloaked Hogwarts students, the most amazingly detailed fantasy and Goth gowns with bead work that had me swooning with envy, big-horned demons, booted SF military aficionados wielding weaponry (Stargate, the Umbrella Corporation, a Zombie Protection Officer) scores of young girls in maid or sailor outfits wearing cute, fluffy cat ears, clutching cute, fluffy cat bags and/or hugging cute, fluffy toys (usually cats), priestesses, warrior and mainstream princesses, angels, Jedi knights, samurai of varying levels of cross-genre, people with cardboard boxes over their heads, The Hitcher from The Mighty Boosh, and a couple of guys in bright blue NASA overalls.

Even going to the loo was an adventure. Instead of the usual delicate powdering of noses and applying of eyeliner, there were ladies-who-lunch-on-brains smacking on another layer of grey foundation and freshening up their blood and gore. Instead of insecure teens endlessly fussing with their latest haircut, there were steampunk ladies adjusting their behatted wigs and space cadets confidently tossing their impossibly lustrous, fake locks. Instead of checking reflections to see if their bums looked big, woman were straightening their epaulets and realigning their wings. Girls valiantly negotiated hoop skirts around tight corners, or squeezed extremely wide and stiff, multiple layers of petticoats into narrow cubicles, thus demonstrating that the modern world does not design these spaces with the sartorially imaginative in mind, which I suppose illustrates another cookie cutter aspect of our society. Baroque will never make a comeback simply because it's too expansive, so we’re doomed to recycle the same 50 years worth of streamlined fashion.

Anyway, it was good to see the many stalls spruiking Australian ventures of all stripes- small press books, comics and artwork. I came across a few familiar faces at the author tables and bought raffle tickets to support Continuum 8 – cross fingers.

Summer Glau was also there somewhere with all the famous folk behind the barriers that admitted only folk with the big $$$ tickets. She was due for an appearance at 14.30, but we headed off just before then, our mission accomplished. T-shirts had been purchased, along with startup Aussie comics and hard to find DVDs. Next year will involve more planning – prepaid tix, an itinerary to cut down on aimless wandering, and perhaps I’ll sign up for a writing workshop. Foodwise, I’ll go into con mode, and stock up on cheese sandwiches, fresh fruit and gingerbread, and drag barrel of water on wheels along behind me. I’m still rehydrating

There might even be a costume, or at the very least a pair of fluffy cat ears...

Bad news

The fallout from the RedGroup's collapse hits the spec fic community:

Eneit Press is folding.

This is just awful. You do you job enthusiastically, and you do it bravely and well, and then, because of a bunch of overpaid A**holes not doing their jobs properly, you're left high and dry.

Cross fingers for a miracle.

Killing kangas

In the local paper this week: the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia is lobbying to replace the present system of government controlled kangaroo culling with a commercial harvesting plan. They say their program will ensure better animal welfare, and that they will closely monitor the population to ensure that no more kangaroos will be shot than is sustainable.

Put me firmly in the camp of the cynics who point out that when the destruction of wildlife becomes profit-driven, well, perhaps a few decisions might be made that are not 100% in wildlife’s best interests. Then there’s that old bugbear of commercial entities always wanting to expand and grow richer and more powerful. I don’t quite see mushy feelings about the fate of orphaned joeys influencing the board directors of a commercial harvesting organisation that counts the dead bodies of the mothers of those joeys as their source of revenue.

Yeah, I’m thinking seal cubs*, collapsed fishing industries...

Later: I mean 'pups' of course, though you can add bear cubs to the list if you like.

Signs of Sunday: Commerce (2)

Signs of Sunday: Commerce (1)