Stats indicate filth conduit

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
• 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.

Fixing email - or how email shoud be

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.

I hurt myself today

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.

Reservoir seagulls

... 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.

A respite from my holiday

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.

Story of a scary weird guy

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.

The problem with memories

In the process of organising the material components of my life for transportation, I happened across my box o' shit. This is the big box in which I keep the evidence that I have a past, in the form of letters, notes, postcards, newsletters, sketchings, etc.

Until recently I've not been keen on taking photographs. I have a single album full of snaps from the four years of my life I spent at University, but its a small album, and I recently lost it anyway. What I do have though, is letters. It is anathema to me to throw out anything that someone took time to create specifically for me. Looking through my box o' shit revealed not only letters from my then girlfriend (including my first and only ever hope-we-can-still-be-friends letter,) but a plethora of postcards, scrapbook papers, birthday cards and drunken scrawlings.

Reading these old letters does little more than make me sad and nostalgic. That I'll probably never see some of these people who used to mean so much to me is a bit of a personal tragedy that can't really be shared with other people. I feel so separated by time from the person who owned all this stuff that I find it hard to associate those sketchy memories with my own life. Why then should I keep this stuff lying around, if every time I look at them I get melancholy? Why indeed...

The next day: one of my flatmates finds my photo album. Looking through this is far more rewarding, though I can't really say why. I think it's probably the entertainment value - looking at photos doesn't provoke the kind of deep introspection that reading letters does.

One last nugget, to end this rant on a high note. Staff from my first workplace will recognise this licence as the one Noodleboy rips out a picture of every now and then to bring me down a notch.[1] It's mullet-tastic.

Footnotes
[1] My innocent youth led me down many stupid paths. This particular time resulted in Noodleboy having posession of my licence.

I don't want it - I just need it.

My name is Paul, and I am a technology addict.

I have come to this realisation over the last year or so, and I find it extremely perturbing. I used to pride myself on my utilitarian independence, but somewhere along the way I developed an insidious technological dependency.

This weekend I was dismayed to discover that I'd left my mobile phone recharger at work. The full repercussions of not having a functioning mobile may not be immediately apparent, but they quickly become obvious when such a situation arises.

I completely take for granted the fact that I can immediately contact, or be immediately contacted by the people in my social circle. I actually harangued Schmee until he got one for himself because the fact that he didn't have one was a discordant note in my personal sense of harmony.

This evil device has me at its mercy. It is some Machiavellian puppet master, and I the soulless marionette, dancing to the monophonic notes of its somber cadence. When I don't have a functioning mobile in my possession I get sweaty palms worrying about my car breaking down, or wondering if someone is right now trying to contact me for some important reason. Being dependent on a piece of machinery really emasculating.

It will be the death of me, I can see. It rings at exactly the wrong moments - usually when I'm about to negotiate a nasty bit of traffic, forcing me to scramble around in my jeans, groin in the air and right leg as straight as possible so I can squeeze it out of my pocket. I must do this because I cannot leave its siren song unanswered.

Living experiment #8

Scroop and I have found a place to put our stuff. Centrally located (Leederville), I expect this new house to quickly become the cultural Mecca for the city's alcoholics. I anticipate getting straight to work on my main goal - to have my likeness on the wall of every local pub and cafe. I'm looking forward to living but a short walk to the Re-Store, Luna cinemas, the Oxford and the Paddington Ale House.

Since I left my parent's house in 1996 I've lived in seven separate housing arrangements, with over fifty different people (Guild House and Erica Underwood housing providing a high turnover of flatmates.) Throughout my adventures I've lived with abusive spouses (not mine), sexual extroverts, substance abusers, people less tidy than myself, obsessive compulsives, thieves, Young Liberals, and any mixture of unpleasant, rude, selfish and two-faced people,[1] but until now I've never lived with a Scroop. Or a cat.

Paul's self-help guide to living with people
In spite of the above list of adjectives, on the whole I've immensely enjoyed each shared living experience. In the interest of refreshing my memory before entering what will probably be one of the most trying periods of my life, I now present a list of ways to stop the bad mojo drowning out the good mojo. I'm not going to talk here about cleaning rosters, shopping lists and cooking regimes - these have been different in every house in which I've lived. But I've found there are things you just gotta do when you live with people. I can't vouch that these techniques will make coping with me any easier, but it's up to each person to find their comfortable place - I can only do so much.

1. Girls shouldn't live together.[2] Sorry, but this is a truism. In fact, anybody - irrespective of gender - who puts themselves in a living arrangement with more than one girl deserves everything they get. I've also discovered that if girls have pillow fights in their knickers, they don't do it when guys are around.


2. Flatmate relationships are different. Because you have to spend a certain portion of your life with these people, you must treat them differently to your friends and workmates. Your house is like a social magnifying glass - small shit looks like big shit if you gotta put up with it daily. The rules for interacting with ordinary people are intuitive; special care must be taken to minimise friction when interacting with flatmates.


3. You can't live with serious problems. I don't mean dishes, dirty toilets or loud music. By serious problems I'm talking about mental disequilibrium, physically or emotionally abusive tendencies or serious drug problems. Some people carry an anti-social bubble around them and you don't want to get involved with that shit.


4. Don't argue about useless crap. I like to think I've developed a philosophy of tolerance, and learned to avoid ego clashes. Before having a stab at someone it's best to decide whether it's actually worth it, and what you hope to achieve. If you don't have an actual point, or you're repeating the same thing over and over, it's just your treacherous ego whispering spiteful propaganda to your mind and thus precipitating the downward spiral of knee-jerk reactions.


5. Develop a healthy memory problem. Nature, and probably alcohol, has helped me here. Not being able to recall facts encourages an environment where issues either get sorted out on the spot or fall by the wayside.


6. Don't be a total tight-ass. Accept that money issues won't always get sorted to your liking. People rarely go out of their way to cheat you, so unless you are absolutely certain that you are getting gypped it's sometimes prudent to give the other people the benefit of the doubt.


7. A big ego makes you look like an ass. It's easy to see dominance challenges where there are none - Is my flatmate using my stuff when I'm not there? Why should he get the top shelf on the fridge? Did he just piss against the wall I similarly claimed when we first moved in? A person can be measured by how they deal with these perceived problems (even if they are real.)


8. Learn to argue amicably. Don't be a baby and let unnecessarily heated polemic and accusations dictate the course of an argument. Did you manage to pay that bill? When's the power likely to get cut then? is far better than I told you to pay that bill a week ago... Prepare for a face full of knuckles, bitch. Similarly, maybe we should establish a beer-purchasing roster should be preferred over next time you drink my beer you'll be paying for it in kidneys. In the same vein, leaving little notes on the fridge as a means of avoiding direct confrontation will breed contempt and is dumb.


9. Don't ever live with Scroop. I really dropped the ball on this one, I'm afraid. I've just listed it here so others don't make the same mistake I have.

By far the easiest people to live with are those who know how to give you space. Of course everyone is different but I find this to be a more important factor than tidiness, financial acumen or beverage stealing. I am not particularly saint-like in any of these areas myself though (except the beverage stealing), so perhaps my priorities are skewed.

Rant aside, I have to say that on the whole I've usually been pretty lucky with my flatmates. I've only ever helped precipitate two people being kicked out of their home[3], but these were extreme cases. Additionally my lifestyle leads me to often treat my house as more of a stop-over than a home, so I generally find it easy to just get out of everyone's hair (read: get flatmates out of my hair) when I have a problem. Note to any ex-flatmates that may be reading this (and I can think of a possible five): I've never been one to spend much time at home in any case, so unless you suspect that I really didn't like you, don't go thinking I had a problem with you. Otherwise, suck it up Buttercup. Life's tough - get a helmet.[4]

Footnotes:
[1] You notice this list is chock full of pejorative adjectives; my defence here is that they are the people you most remember. I lived with a lot of great people but nice people aren't good sources of humorous anecdotes. For instance I could write paragraphs about the friendly Thai girls Ming and Ting, or the Indonesian girls Lek and Thong, and how their ghostlike invisibility and formal politeness didn't exacerbate the craziness that is Guild House life, but that's hardly braggable.
[2] The 'girls not living with each other' rule used to be near the bottom of the list but I decided it deserved a ranking reflecting its importance.
[3] I helped show Obsessive-Compulsive the door after a particular nasty in-house fist-fight (not with me), and Wife Beater got the boot following a long episode involving us smuggling Mrs Beater out of the country without him knowing. Both are long stories.
[4] I can see you wondering how on Earth anybody could possibly have a problem living with me. Well, unlikely as it seems I assume it can happen, and that there's possibly even some support group for Paul's ex-flatmates.

A McDonald's Affair

Skipping through channels last night (waiting for the season finale of The Panel) I came across an A Current Affair story on McDonald's. The premise of the article centered around a doctor who undertook his own version of Morgan Spurlock's McDonald's challenge to prove that one could still lead a healthy lifestyle while only eating McDonald's.

By the end of the report the tone of the story had taken on a decidedly suspicious bent, forming blatant associations between McDonald's food and good dietary advice, with the doctor's advising doctor suggesting at the end that even he might consider taking 'the McDonald's Diet.' What the fuck??? Pick a job already, and stick to it - don't abuse the post you've chosen!

The pièce de résistance came with an interview with the smug face of McDonald's Australia, Guy Russo. Of course McDonald's has always maintained that our food can be part of a balanced diet he said, an affected look of innocent bemusement on his smirking face.

I cannot conceive of a scenario where this doctor, or indeed the reporter, could be anything less than the worst kind of shill. What doctor in his right mind would take it upon himself to even suggest that people specifically go out of their way to eat junk food (let alone McDonald's) if they want to maintain a balanced diet? And by the end of the story that is what was being suggested. Granted, most intelligent people consider A Current Affairs articles and good reporting of hard facts to be completely orthogonal, but presumably some people use it as a credible news source, so they should maintain at least some façade of accountability. I know there's a whole class of people out there that get to use this story as an excuse for their eating habits, and can sagely shake their heads and tell their concerned friends no, thats all been disproven - McDonald's is no less healthy than any other food. It's a political stunt commonly referred to as The Big Lie where you only need to suggest an argument, no matter how outrageous, and people will cling to it (I gotta be careful with Godwyn here, so I'll say no more.)

Where did this story originate? It's obvious McDonald's is still in damage control mode after Supersize Me, so it would be natural to suspect that McDonald's played a large part in the formulation of this story. I thought I'd look up the name and credentials of the 'doctor' who decided to undertake this experiment, or perhaps find some disclaimer announcing the association the relation between the story and McDonald's Australia, but to my surprise neither the show's nor McDonald Australia's websites have any record that the episode ever aired.

Ray Martin's closing line after the story elicted a chuckle from me. He said something along the lines of '...and thanks to McDonald's for their... the uhh... the part they played in that story.' He cleared his throat, tapped his papers and moved on.