Well, the cult in California committing mass suicide is all over the news. Sorry, but is there any real surprise here? This is what weird cults do. They recruit impressionable people, take all their money, cut them off from their families, go and live in a isolated compound somewhere, shave their heads or adopt some other uniform look, predict mysterious event X, and all commit suicide one otherwise cheerful day. It’s not really news anymore, is it?

This time of course, the twist was the Internet link - the Web site they left behind. Hmm… It’s just a thought - I wonder if they’ve paid their InterNIC domain name fees?

Given the lather the media usually work themselves into whenever there’s something to do with the Internet and bad news, they’ve shown remarkable restraint. All except the Herald Sun
(often commonly referred to as the Herald Scum), whose headlines were up to their usual well informed, non-sensationalist standard - "WEB OF DOOM".

It was probably a toss-up between that and "INTERNET DEATH CULT" and "NET SUICIDE PACT" and "ARE YOUR KIDS SURFING WITH THE INTERNET WEB DOOM DEATH SUICIDE PACT CULT?".

Wow! After almost a month, some movement at last on desks at work! Somehow, some way, they’ve found us some. And what’s more, they’re not stuck up in some obscure part of the building that’s fifteen minutes’ walk from the lifts. They’re down on the ground floor, near the main entrance. Amazing.

And of course, having made us wait all this time, suddenly the Powers That Be have decided they’re in a hurry - they’re paying extra to have the area all kitted out for us over the long weekend. So when we get back on Tuesday, the theory is that we’ll have desks.

Now, if we can just get some hardware to sit on the desks…

The neighbours’ car is still out there on the street. Obviously someone’s noticed its uncared-for status; people seem to have started dumping litter inside it. Maybe the reason nobody’s taken it is that, apart from being a crap car, maybe it doesn’t work?

POT SPOT WATCH:Yes, the Pot Spot is still gone. No sign of a last minute resurrection of their long running closing down sale. Makes me wonder if we shouldn’t support local business a bit more. Okay, in the two-ish years we’ve lived here, we haven’t actually wanted or needed any kind of terra-cotta garden accessory. But couldn’t we have bought some anyway? Just a few small ones? Maybe that could have somehow figuratively lifted the figurative straw that broke the figurative camel’s figurative back?

With the accommodation and hardware situation not resolved at work, I’ve been working at home most of this week. Haven’t done this since last year when I sprained my ankle. It’s got its bad and good points.

Bad:

• Less interaction with my fellow deskless sufferers and others. It’s probable that if I were locked in a room with a computer and no means of real time communication for the rest of my working life, I would go stark raving mad. But there’s always the email and phone.
• No hot chocolate from the bistro. Okay, it’s a good way to blow $1.20 in a hurry, but to miss out on regular chocolate drinks is wrong.
• Have to fit in with the surrounding family chaos. Even a door can only block out so much noise.
• It’s costing me extra in electricity and net connection fees! And a 14.4Kbps modem seems just a tad pathetic compared to your average corporate high-bandwidth something-bloody-impressive-Kbps "our staff can surf at any cost" connection.

Good:

• Can dress any way I want. Hey, if I want to sit at the computer in my underwear, I can. (Not that I do, but I could if I wanted to.)
• Can work any hours I want. As it happens, I’ve been working reasonably "normal" hours. I haven’t yet got into the habit of waking up late, working until past midnight. I can have long lunches, read the paper, watch some TV…
• No commuting. Saves me about an hour a day, and it’d save me money too, if I hadn’t just bought that monthly ticket.
• If you’re facing a deadline and being grilled by your boss over the phone, you can use all those excuses that off-site graphic designers always seem to use (not that I would, of course)…

• I can swear as much as I want when I make a mistake.
• I can safely go into one of my "thinking sessions" without members of senior management walking past and thinking I’m not doing any work.
• It’s not a ten minute walk to the Coke supply.

Might as well enjoy it while it lasts. Hopefully they’ll have got us all desks and PCs by… well, hopefully sometime this century.

It appears that one of our neighbours is trying to get their car stolen. A say this because it’s been sitting out there on the street (rather than in its car space) for the better part of a week now. With the passenger side window down.

Call me crazy, but if that’s really what they’re trying to do, I think the reason they haven’t been successful yet because it’s not exactly the Wheels Car Of The Year. It’s a 1973 Toyota in charming rusting blue (and I don’t mean that’s the type of blue; I mean it’s rusting).

We considered stealing it ourselves, but for the fact that (a) it’s a crap car, and (b) if we parked it anywhere close to home it would be noticed!

Well, the weekend is over and it’s back to work tomorrow, with the probably vain hope that we’ll actually get our hands on some hardware this week. Yes, we’re still without PCs and phones. As well as desks to put the PCs and phones on.

I honestly don’t think I’ve done this much handwriting since school. Okay, it could be a lot worse, given that it’s the early stages of the project and we’re doing a lot of preliminary design and analysis stuff. But there comes a time when you have to stop talking about building a computer system and actually start building it. And that time is fast approaching, along with the deadline for having the thing built, coming along not too far behind it.

But things haven’t reached desperation point yet. You’ll know I’m at desperation point when I actually start writing code on paper. When I start penciling HTML tags into my diary. And when a spare noticeboard becomes the project intranet, with documents pinned up and pieces of string tied between them as hyperlinks.

It’s all down to the wheels of big organisations moving very very slowly (if at all). Evidently it’s the desks that are the main problem - to be precise, where the desks will be. Once the desks have been allocated, the rest will apparently follow. The phones, the PCs, the network connections, all of that. They just don’t want to have to do it all again if we get moved.

But until someone signs the appropriate bit of paper in triplicate, no desks. We don’t have a place to live in the building. We’re homeless. We’re software development nomads, roaming the complex in search a home we can call our own.

If only we had a Moses. Someone to lead us. Someone to part the lift doors. Someone to get those desks, those PCs, someone to get that network connection. Someone to lead us to the promised LAN.

But in the mean time, it’s scrounging on borrowed PCs, our belongings in a waste paper basket, and meetings, endless meetings, in the bistro. Or maybe in the lift?

It was pretty sunny this evening so we took the opportunity to enjoy some fish’n'chips in the park. Well, it certainly saves effort on the washing up. Instead of wash/dry/put away, it’s scrunch up paper/put in bin.

After dinner Isaac had a run around in the playground. Isaac loves looking out for airborne vehicles - he hasn’t quite got the pronounciation right, but he always lets us know when he sees aeroplanes ("airplane!"), helicopters ("Ottawa!") and of course the Blimp ("blip!").

While we were in the park, a police helicopter came overhead very low, and proceeded to fly around the park several times - reminded me of the Grand Prix. ("Ottawa! Ottawa!!") It then flew to the other side of the park, and landed on one of the playing fields. The crew got out and were met by some other cops. After the propellors stopped spinning, the Observer signalled that people could come over and take a look. Kids of all ages appeared from nowhere to check it out.

The cops wouldn’t admit what they were actually doing, but whatever it was quickly turned into a Victoria Police PR event. One can only presume it wasn’t meant to be an undercover exercise - a helicopter landed in a park with scores of local residents checking it out might attract some attention.

The kids were scrambling over one another to take a look inside. Hopefully the cops didn’t leave the keys in the ignition. We took a look too… ("Ottawa. Ottawa.") Nice to see my tax dollars at work.

POT SPOT WATCH: I think it’s over. After almost a year of closing down sales, the Pot Spot really has closed. The For Lease sign is up, the stock is out, the window has been wiped clean. The place is empty. Even the sign proposing a specialised printing shop has gone. What will arrive next? Who knows.