Living in this tiny, tiny city, subject to the restrictive timetables of our draconian shopping hours, one can quickly tire of shuffling between one day and the next of our weekly work-bbq-sleep agenda. Betwixt the summer evenings pushing electrons around the Internet, the Saturdays stumbling down the wobbly slope from sobriety to drunken forgetfulness, and the Sundays of squinting, yawning recovery, the weeks can all too easily blur into hazy months, even years.

What is a young, middle classed suburbanite to do? How can one escape this war of attrition with yuppie indulgence - this taking-for-granted of lifestyle?

My answer came in the acquisition of one Director Bob. Bob, Bob, wonderful Bob! Arriving on the doorstep one day with a toothbrush, two packing boxes full of DVDs, and a skull-full of movie trivia, his smiling bearded visage was the blessed promise of relief from this tedious routine. Don't worry, it seems to say, chuckling slightly, I'll help you transform your life, help you out of this gutter you've fallen into! Just let me in, and give me Coke.

We knew time was limited, and that nothing we could do would stave off the feeling of a wasted opportunity when he'd gone. As if some wealthy proprietor said 'take what you want from my electronics/gormet cuisine/computer game shop! As much as you can fit into this here little basket!' and left you with your gross indecision... where do you begin? How do you begin?

The Sopranos. That is, in fact, about where it started and ended. One of the finest television series ever made, we spent those halcyon days exploring the complex relationships between that crazy family, helping Tony work through his problems, and mourning the diminished social significance the Mafia now commands. Psychology and cunnilingus brought us to this! we'd quip; And proctologists? I don't even let anyone wave their finger in my FACE! Oh Anthony Soprano, you whacky funster...

We spent weeks cramming in Sopranos episodes, between pizzas, potato salad and exotic soirées. And movie scripts were drafted, computer games played, jokes shared, anecdotes told, and Simpsons were quoted. For three full weeks Director Rob was the pale moon that shifted the tidal flows of our lives, gently changed our patterns for the better.

And just like that... he was gone. From one day comfortably ensuring our lounge room did not lay in a wasteful state of unuse to a sudden vacuum where his quiet form once wandered, he left no trace but a small thank-you cartoon on the kitchen desk, and three series of Sopranos. The gift of his presence will always be remembered, but I wonder how long until it was as if he'd never come?

It's whispered that if you listen really hard, you can still hear the explosive vomiting from the back toilet; a Director Bob filling the house with mighty ghostly retchings... possibly rupturing internal ghostly blood vessels.

Yes, the page is reverting from the horrid monster it briefly became to the old format I know and love. See the little frowny face up there? Oh, he looks so angry...

Some stuff still needs a-doin', like the sidebar and the padding and stuff like that, but most of the work has been done.

I've added a development section but I'm not sure if I'll get around to updating it... for now I'll leave it there. I've also put in a food section; not because I have any food news to put up, but because I just really love food.

Update 2005-02-15: I migrated all my old posts from Blogger... the comments, sadly, were innocent casualties of this monstrous war. When will it end? When will the senseless violence finally stop? How many more comments must be lost before we learn?

There are a few rules I have learned to follow in the interest of being an active participant of a functioning society. Firstly; don't make fun of someone's name or occupation. If you think about it, there is no way what you are about to say will not have been said to them a hundred times before, and in far wittier ways than you are about to. If you ever feel inclined to joke about the aforementioned subjects, jam your vengeful fist into your treacherous mouth before you make an arse of yourself.

Similarly, the topics of politics and religion are minefields that, unless you have something meaningful to add to the sphere of information in which the person you are talking with resides, you are likely accomplishing nothing apart from planting a festering seed of resentment in someone's stomach. You aren't going to change someone's political or religious point of view - let it go.

When I started writing regularly on topics that interested me I was careful not to let politics drown out my general ranting. I have opinions, dammit, but nobody is interested in some guy calling down holy fire on politicians - it's a safe topic usually reserved as the domain of disingenuous observational comedians.

Nevertheless, yesterday I tried to summarise the last six months in U.S. politics from my perspective[1], as a kind of zeitgeist for posterity. It was at this moment I realised that I have almost completely withdrawn my interest in commentating U.S. politics since their elections last November. I've lost much of my interest in commentating because it is impossible not to be cynical and sarcastic about the whole affair, and I'd rather be cynical on my own terms.

So I'll let the Internet breath a collective sigh of relief. So to farewell (temporary, no doubt) my U.S. political interest, part of a eulogy I didn't write[2]:

No way
To recall
What it was that you had said to me
Like I care at all

But it was so loud
You sure could yell
Took a stand on every little thing
And so loud.

[1] I thought I should comment on Alberto Gonzales and Condolezza Rice's new appointments, the departure of Colin Powell and John Ashcroft from the administration, and Bush's inauguration speech, spliced liberally with various witticisms and metaphors. Needless to say, I was correct in my stance in each case, my arguments watertight.
[2] Yes, Tool's Eulogy. One of the finer songs ever written.

Fed up with Blogger, I decided to try a new system. This will allow me to have categories, allowing me to separate rants from events/happenings/short ramblings, from news (like this, although ironically I am posting this news entry in the rants section. way to go paul.)

Not liking it so far, but I'll see what it looks like when I've changed it around.

The old rants page is still there, with all the old rants and images: http://paul.cechner.com/blogger.html

I have access to technology that enables me to monitor certain profiling information about visitors to my site[1]. Just basic information, mind you: I can't tell who the visitors are or what other windows they've got open on their computers or anything... yet.

For example, I can tell you that about 89% of my visitors this month use Windows (5% Linux), while 58% use Firefox (33% use Internet Explorer.) We must take into account, however, that I probably generate a fair amount of traffic myself (I find my own conversation inestimably amusing and delightful.) I can tell you that this month 105 unique visitors to my site have visited 284 times, viewing 1674 pages (many in the gallery, and most on a Monday), and that this was about half as many as December.

The craziness starts to come in when you look at your referrers... one can derive a whole lot of information from these. A referrer is the last page a person visited before coming to your site. Usually this is because that site linked to your own. This month, 33 visitors came through Scroop's site. More interestingly though, someone was referred to my site by the defective yeti logs, which requires a password to view. One could deduce that perhaps Matthew Baldwin, the author of the site, was perusing his own referrers and visiting them (I visit that site a lot). More likely he's got some stat-collecting bot or something.

The amusing tidbit that precipitated this entry, however, comes in the hits referred by search engines. The information gleaned in these referrers includes the terms for which the person was searching. I can tell you that people have been directed to my site by the following words and terms[2]:

• wife beater jeans
• leederville hotel stabbing
• indonesian single girls
• list of adjectives
• hunting games to play onion
• shaun cechner
• ray martin mcdonalds diet
• thai fuck girls
• swimming in honey
• linkdomain www.masaieditor.com</li>
• flatmate relationship mistake
• supersize me guy russo
• dr. paul cechner

I am not smart enough to understand the full implications of these terms and what my site is being used for. I have a friend who set up a page dedicated to sickos... perhaps you cannot escape them.

[1] Pretty much everyone who runs a domain has these tools. I'm not that much of an egomaniac...
[2] Note that I don't necessarily have content on my site reflecting these phrases... I perhaps have a few words mentioned (not necessarily together) somewhere. Please stop emailing me for the location of my 'thai fuck girls' page.

Some people look at an email like an sms message. It's useful but transient. Read, reply, delete, do a little dance. I keep pretty much every email that gets sent to me... I have these hoarding instincts that make me protect my communications like little tasty chocolate treats with bits of honeycomb in them. I still have my emails archived from when I first started work. Perhaps even when I first started using email.

I see these communications as a kind of alternate diary. No matter how impassionate or automated a message may be (other than SPAM of course) they capture a meme of what was going on in that particular moment of your life. While this hasn't proven useful to me yet, I'm holding out against the day...

I just deleted this whole rant about how none of my email clients were providing what I was looking for and how gmail offers this new... well, I found myself about to say something like paradigm and that really stopped me short. That would make me some kind of marketing person and that just will not do. So I'll cut a long story short here and just say that I'm trying to get all my emails redirected through gmail, for various (usability) reasons [1].

Skeptic that I am though, I must point out that there have been privacy concerns with the service. Although Google try to asuage everyone's fears, they are getting their profits by having bots scan your emails for key words to create a profile for individually targeted adverts. You gotta keep a constant eye out for sneaky bastards...

I just want to spread the love. So to that end I have 6 accounts to give out, so if anyone wants one, email me at cechner /at/ gmail /dot/ com. You want one. You need it. Until recently these things were traded for impressive sums of money (and other things) in what became a kind of black market. Google added clauses to the licence restricting the sale of accounts for money or for-profit ventures, and eventually just decided to flood the market with accounts, dropping the bottom out of the gmail trading business altogether.

[1] For posterity, the coolest features of gmail (that come to mind) are:
- No stupid 'folders' that you have to come up with neat filters to push your mail into. Folders are a pain in the ass to manage and search.
- Emphasis on email archiving. You don't just read-delete-read-delete.
- Conversations. The way gmail handles threads of conversations (email backing and forthing with the same subject line) is really intuitive and tidy.
- Sweet key bindings that allow you to navigate without using the mouse.
- Of course, the 1 Gig disk space is also sweet. And by sweet I mean totally sweet.

Even as I write this I am listening to the late Johnny Cash's last album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, and I'm finding it very hard to write for the barrage rising through my stomach to my frontal lobe.

I've always been interested in Cash, his music pressed into me on many long drives with my parents from Onslow, Tom Price or Karratha to Perth. Even more recently when, on my trip to Esperance last week I discovered I had the Man In Black 'best of' album in the car I subjected Lee to my hapless sing-along renditions of 'Boy called Sue' and 'Dont take your guns to town' while he sat helplessly trapped in the passenger's seat, scratching at the window. Still, it's the kind of music that until recently I would pick as a back-drop to parts of my childhood, but not any more.

This guy became a bit of an idle for me again a few years ago with his cover of Soundgarden's Rusty Cage - this old Country guy with his musical taste that runs at least partly parallel to my own. Then last year I heard his cover of Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat and was astounded. This guy knows how to take a song and own it.

This quality of his in particular applies to his rendition of Trent Reznor's Hurt. Not only does this extend his list of cool, relatively contemporary covers, but it is barely recognisable from the original; hell - I loved the song before, but I don't think I've ever actually listened to the words. It turns out Reznor had the incredible foresight to write a song about Johnny Cash's life for him. Additionally, if you get the chance, watch the film clip (apparently you can get a special edition of The Man Comes Around that includes a DVD with the clips on it.) Obviously on death's door, Cash plays a piano and sings in a wobbly voice of his lost friends and meaningless empire while June Carter Cash, his wife, stands behind him like a ghost, staring at him helplessly with tears in her eyes.

The whole album seems to be some externalised internal narrative - very personal and moving. It opens strongly with his own When The Man Comes Around: a powerful song full of doomsday visions taken from Revelations. The rest of the album treads up and down through sadness and reflection.

Unfortunately J.B.'s didn't have American III: Solitary Man, the album containing his personalised version of U2's One and the aforementioned Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat (although Cave does sing with him on this album in I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry), but the album I did get surprised me with its tight production and playlist: Fiona Apple provides backing vocals in Paul Simon's Bridge Over Troubled Water, there's awesome covers Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus and the Eagles' Desperado. Also, I'd never realised I Hung My Head was a Sting song, but it hardly seems relevant when Cash wrings it out and slings it over his shoulder.

... in which I dedicate a week to alleviating the world's preponderant fish over-population problem.

So Schmee rounded up a posse to head down to Esperance for a week. The eight hour drive southwards seemed a simple affair after the 16 hour drive northwards to Karratha only a few weeks prior.

Fishing is a curious stimulant. The individual components that contribute to the experience are by-and-large activities one would normally consider laborious, frustrating or even boring. Were a person to invite me to a holiday where I predominantly burn in the sun (and let me tell you, I do burn,) catch my fingers on hooked barbs, get stung by march flies and dehydrate while fooling myself into thinking that there is a fish I can't see interested in the bit of meat I've put on a hook (placed so precariously it disintegrates and must be replaced every other cast) on the end of a line I've thrown ten meters or so away into the ocean, I'd laugh in their face and scrub them from my Christmas card list. When mixed in the appropriate proportions with beer and Cougar to formulate a fishing trip, however, they acquire a whole musty aura of hearty rugged goodness. Additionally, I don't send Christmas cards anyway.

The transformation is probably influenced by the same magical force that prevents fish-gut covered hook barb cuts from getting infected, or makes stinky bait eye-juice and black gore covered fingers sterile enough to eat sandwiches with without requiring cleaning (even though the ocean water would probably suffice for the job, who can be bothered?)

An additional benefit of the plan was that it also saved us money by providing us with sustenance that we wouldn't have to purchase with money. It worked perfectly. We must have reaped a full half-kilo of herring fillets at a monetary cost of no more than four bags of mulie and three full days of fishing. I haven't bothered to put a price on my own time before, but I trust that the cost of three days fishing was outweighed by the almost full plate of fish that was the end product.

I have just been afforded a moment's respite. While I can't say that this is the first opportunity I've had to rant since I left, it's the first time such a moment has coincided with me being sober and un-hungover enough to write.

I am currently sitting on Schmee's parents' dial-up connection in Esperance. Having driven all day and had a few acclimatising home brews and a hot shower, I thought I'd steal a moment before heading off to the pub or the beach or something to peg a pinion into the rocky slopes of the Internet to mark my location.

The number of people remarking sorrowfully on my recent lack of rants has been amazing. Including my girlfriend the current tally is at one, but I expect my mum to have a go any time soon.

A few notes on long distant traveling: tunes, tunes, tunes. You can't make yourself play games to keep awake - unless these are spontaneous, you'll end up putting yourself asleep. One must stay amused through a carefully nonchalant regime. Mine involves either good tunes or good conversation. A good traveling buddy is a must.

My holiday started off very well. Nothing like a beach-side sunset concert hosted by and starring your little brother to get a family get-together moving.

Karratha is an enigma. There is a complete juxtaposition between the remote desert wilderness and the completely decadent lifestyle I live up there. Between the exquisite cooked breakfasts, the with-beer lunches, the roasted, basted, soaked-in-gravy dinners and BBQs and the cocktails, I've just discovered I have outgrown my favourite pair of jeans.

The desert heat (above 45 degrees C in the shade) only makes the evenings sweeter (with a cold beer, of course) and makes the ocean almost luke-warm. Kayaking has become one of my favourite sports.

Anyway, other people wish to take the opportunity my having dialed up has created to send their own emails and such, so I must sign off. I realise just now that this is almost a diary in it's reportage style, so I will add this mini-rant to even things out: Australia's education system is screwed.

What I'm about to tell you cannot leave the Internet. This is just between you, me and the select group of people online or who may ever read archive.org in the future.

Note: the majority of the rest of this rant is diffracted through the lens of an achewood-ometer

So I'm chillin' with my homie Scroop in our pad, checkin' out a Family Guy DVD. I think it's yesterday afternoon. Scroop's just made sandwiches (vego, but more than palatable). I'm on the lounge chair with a glass of nice whiskey in my hand, sandwich in the other, switching a bit of quick banter, when this guy knocks on the door. Scroop is all like "WTF?" and peeks around the door frame at the front door, and sees this shifty looking derro guy with his hands in his pockets.

I'll take a quick moment to describe what I could see of this guy - he had a bit of a pre-mullet going on; close undercut but short and curly on top (I wasn't witness to the back). He's young, but kinda friendly looking, though he's obviously got something on his mind. I assumed this guy was one of our neighbours come to complain about something.

Scroop struts up to the front door, plated sandwich in hand: "Hey man, what's up?". The dude kicks in with nary an intro: "Hey. I have a huge favour to ask man; could you give me a lift down to the Fresh-Stop?" Without hesitation Mr Pass-The-Buck turns to Mr Eating-Sandwich-Watching-Family-Guy and says "I got no time. You feel like giving this guy a lift to the deli, Paul?"

I'm sure this is betraying some level of trust between friends, or at least undermining some foundation of flatmate-hood. I have to say I hesitated, friendly guy that I am. As unlikely as it seems, for a moment my mind ran through best and worst case scenarios where I give this guy a lift to the deli.

Derro jumps in to fill the temporary silence, perhaps sensing my hesitation: "I really gotta pay my rent today, and I've got no money," he explains. To say this sentence seemed a non-sequitur would not be doing it justice. It becomes immediately obvious that he's got money on his mind, so I made up mine. "No man, I got stuff I have to do. No time," I say, guiltily shifting my sandwich off my lap.

The dude, thankfully, makes no more of it and leaves after a quick "thanks anyway." Scroop and I sat in silence for a minute exchanging incredulous glances before going back to our sandwiches and Family Guy. We kept an eye out the front for a while after that though. I don't know how this guy was expecting to be able to pay his rent after a trip to the Fresh-Stop (he didn't have any goods in his immediate possession) but I sure as hell didn't want anything to do with it.

Note: I'll put an image into this post at some stage. The move has temporarily deprived me of an Internet connection. Hence my recent lack of rant updates.