To me, the year has rushed by. Probably because I’ve been so busy for most of it. There’s no shortage of work, and during the rest of the time I’ve been juggling all the other aspects of my life - kids, girlfriend, friends, parents, voluntary work, and trying to keep my home from falling into too much of a squalid state.

And in between all these and more things, I’ve tried to keep this diary up to date. I haven’t generally succeeded really, there’s just been so little time. Oh well.

It’s been a great year for me. I don’t know if 2003 will be as good, better, or worse, but I’m hoping for better. Plans include a camping trip in January, my sister visiting in February, and if the planets all align the right way, an overseas trip in August. Other than that, work will be as busy as ever, and no doubt I’ll continue juggling things!

Happy new year.

After enduring many months of my spare computer playing up regularly - crashing, losing time, losing its CMOS settings - I finally decided to take a look under the hood yesterday. And found an obsolete video capture card in there, one I haven’t used in years. I don’t think I even have any drivers for it around the place. Anyway it was half in, and half out of its slot. Ah. D’oh. Sure enough, once it was removed, everything was hunky-dory again. Well, almost. Actually I think the CMOS battery does need replacing.

Are computers ready for prime time? I mean, they’re very common in homes now, but when it comes down to it, I’m still not sure I trust them to be left in the hands of your average punter, without that average punter having to regularly scream for help. And it’s not like a VCR, where the most complex function - programming the timer - can be safely ignored. When computers fail, there’s so many different ways they can fail, many of them severely limiting what you can do with them.

Take, for example, my dad. He rang me up last week and said he’d like to start writing again. Which is great. And he had gone looking for a word processor, like the one he used to own. One of those single function things. No games, no Solitaire, just word processing. And he couldn’t find one. He was told you can’t buy them anymore, and he’d have to buy a computer.

Alarm bells were ringing in my head. My dad just manages to work his TV and his alarm clock. Even if he had a computer which was not hooked up to the Net (and therefore was facing minimal risk of viruses, worms, spam, Gator software and other such nasties), I could just imagine something going wrong. Some driver would go funny, and what would he do? Is he going to replace a DLL or rebuild the kernel himself? Like hell. He’d be on the phone in seconds, and I’d have to traipse across town to fix it. And if I couldn’t do it that day, he’d be stuck in the mean time.

In this area, it seems to me that not much has changed since I wrote the "Techheads vs Users" article back in 1997. Computers are still a long way from being bulletproof. I think I might find my dad a typewriter.

Have a good Christmas, everyone. Or if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then have a good December 25th. If you use a different calendar system, you’re on your own.

The telemarketers and their predictive dialler seem to have given up on me. Wimps! Maybe it’s an early Christmas present.

Speaking of Christmas presents, I can proudly proclaim to have completed all my Christmas shopping. It was a Sunday afternoon trip into the city that did it. Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t too painful.

A predictive dialler is stalking me. It’s been ringing for a couple of weeks now. If the phone rings and the caller ID says "Private Number" and there’s silence on the other end, then hold music, I just hang up. Honestly, what a nerve - them ringing you up to put you on hold until they have someone free to talk to you. It seems to happen several times a week. They obviously need to tune their phone-answering-optimism factor or whatever it’s called.

Today it rang three times. When I answered it the second time, I again got the hold music. Fortunately I had answered in my spare room on my handy dandy phone which has the Hold facility. So I put them on hold. I don’t know if the predictive dialler handed the call to a human or not, but whoever (or whatever) was on the other end held on for a minute, before hanging up!

Time for a survey. What should I do?

On Friday at work we all shuffled up to our new offices, on the slightly dizzying 28th floor. The view is fabulous, of course. Anything would be fabulous after working on the 2nd floor, where the view consists of a wall on another building. No, from the 28th, you can see the other office towers around the city, the MCG, the river, theBolte and Westgate bridges, any approaching aeroplanes… uhhh… hmm.

Of course, the move didn’t go quite to plan. Upon arriving in the morning, naturally, the key didn’t work. I had to wait for someone else to let me in. And none of the stuff that had been so elaborately packed in the previous days (in accordance with the "moving 26 floors within the building" memo) had arrived. No, the moving guys were nowhere to be seen. At least the phones were all working.

Apparently, they had forgotten to book the lift. Yes, evidently in this building if you want to use the goods lift, you have to book it. And they hadn’t. Or if they had, it was for 9:30. So moving was to commence at 9:30. Not exactly the 8am sharp time they had indicated in the memo. And bugger, I had no newspaper to read - I’d left it behind at home.

Around 9:30 they showed up and started moving gear. They needed some help sorting out which desk was which. I travel light, so it was just one box of stuff and my computer that I was waiting for. The movers did trips up and down in the lift. The box arrived quickly, followed by everyone else’s boxes and computers, until the only thing still missing was my computer.

Then the movers disappeared. For about half an hour, no sign of them. Were they kicking my computer around the second floor? Had they taken it home to play with? Were they lost somewhere in the bowels of the building? Eventually I went looking. I found my computer, with someone else’s boxes, sitting on a trolley next to the lift. Great. Movers? Nowhere to be seen.

One of my colleagues suggested wheeling the trolley in and unloading my computer, and we were just about to do that when they showed up again, stinking of cigarette smoke to a man. That explains it. "Now, we’ve wheeled this stuff all the way up through the building, and to a point just around the corner from where it needs to be… hey, let’s have a smoko!"

But no matter. Within minutes everything was up and running and hunky-dory again.

Of course, there’s still the keys to deal with. And our new neighbours, one of whom has the habit of using his speaker phone while leaving his office door open. He must think he’s a hotshot corporate mover and shaker, just because he has a corner office.

And there’s the express lift, too. That feeling of my stomach jumping up my throat is one as the lift plummets to ground level is one that might take a bit of getting used to. No matter. The view is worth it.

On Saturday I met a man who was about to die. Well, a political death, that is. Here, for posterity, is a transcript of my hard-hitting in-depth dialogue with Liberal opposition leader Robert Doyle, merely hours beforehe spectacularly lost the election. I think you’ll find this free and frank exchange of views somewhat revealing, both of the man himself, and indeed of the political process.

(local primary school, 2:30pm Saturday)

Doyle: Would you like a how-to-vote card?

Bowen: No, thanks.*

Phew. Such an fiery exchange hasn’t been seen since the
Bracks/Doyle debate of the first week of the campaign.

*I don’t just reject Liberal Party how-to-vote cards - I reject them all.