• Where it came from
• What’s in it
• Where it’s going to
• Why this name
• Comments
• Other stuff

Where it came from

When I originally started writing and posting stuff to the Net (via e-mail and Usenet) in 1990, it was pretty much all off-the-wall “I wish I was a Python” surreal bizarro kind of stuff. And arguably not particularly funny. But by the mid-90s a lot of it had morphed into more auto-biographical material: amusing anecdotes and so on. A colleague, Stewart, suggested I write it as a diary, and never one to let someone else’s good idea go to waste, I tried it.

As far as I recall, the diary first appeared on the web in early 1996, switching to its current address in December 1996. The pages were updated by hand until January 2004, when I switched all new entries into Wordpress 1.2. During the coming months I hope to migrate all the old entries across into Wordpress, though as I remarked once switching to something like that [is] a job in itself.

Another early experiment of mine in the style of what has become known as blogging was a page poking fun at the March 1996 Australian elections. The Political Circus was updated daily with japes and laffs of all types, and to my surprise, earned itself a feature in The West Australian newspaper.

Anyway, all these years later I continue to write a few paragraphs most days, doing my bit to contribute to the sum total of inconsequential trivia on the Internet. And it’s pleasing to see many friends and acquaintances also doing so — you can find some links to some great blogs along the right hand side navigation.

What’s in it

A tiny subset of my life makes it into my diary. It’s usually something I think might be moderately amusing, and often things will be exaggerated for comic effect — sometimes I will whinge here about something that is really trivial, and I would not complain about to anybody in real life. Many events go unreported. The lesson here is: Don’t think you know me based purely on what you read here.

From time to time in the past I’ve descended into coarse language. This is not something I apologise for, but since my kids have started reading (so far principally for the pictures) I’ll be mostly refraining from this in the future, looking elsewhere in my vocabulary to achieve comic effect and to express frustrations.

Where it’s going to

For the forseeable future, I’m going to be blogging, and maintaining the web site. ‘Cos it’s, like, fun. Some other parts of toxiccustard.com that get regular updates and would be suited to blogging tools (eg The News You Had To Have and the Guide To Australia) and are likely to be converted at some stage.

A comment from Rae the other week got me thinking about the long-term future of blogs, and mine in particular. Will this content be recorded for future generations to look at? Would anybody be interested? Perhaps just my descendants? Please?

In the case of my diary, some of it almost certainly will, since (for whatever reason) the State Library of Victoria decided to archive it in the National Library of Australia’s Pandora archive, though the updates seem a tad sporadic. Archive.org also has a massive library of archived web content, and a cursory glance seems to show it has a few local blogs archived in it.

The longevity of such archives depends on how long those programmes continue to get funding, and whether or not the devices of tomorrow continue to be able to read the media of today. I suspect that at some stage I will feel the need to make a copy of at least some of my writing onto that most flexible and futureproof of media — paper — for future Bowens to read, if they should wish to do so.

Why this name

Some reasons why this diary has this name:

• When I first put it online there were hardly any diaries on the web, and I thought it would attract hits from people curious about Australia
• Because the “average” word sounds a little self-deprecating, which I like, though lately I’ve thought it sounded almost grandiose
• To annoy any white supremacists who might be outraged that someone who is not entirely Caucasian would dare to call themselves an average Australian (okay so I thought of this reason after it happened — if I find the e-mail again, I’ll post it)
• It was originally “An average Australian’s diary” so it would be near the top of the alphabetically sorted Yahoo directory — though I note I’ve fallen out of that list completely now.
• It was a better name than Toxic Custard

Comments

I reserve the right to delete or edit anything. It’s my web site, I pay for the hosting. If you want to express your freedom of speech, get yourself your own web site. That said, I generally don’t act like a Nazi on the comments, and I don’t generally fiddle with comments which disagree with my opinions. Comments that will incur my wrath include:

• Spam. This gets deleted, out of hand.
• Comments which (like spam, really) are blatantly irrelevant to the topic at hand.
• Anything plainly designed to offend, be it aimed at myself, my friends, or whoever.
• Anything else deemed inappropriate.

Think of it as being a bit like going to the pub. Everybody’s welcome, but if you’re just causing trouble, insulting other people or annoying the proprietor, you’ll be ejected.

New comments are currently disabled 60 days after the post has gone out. Theoretically this may cut down on comment spam, though I’m by no means certain that it works, and I may change this in future.

E-mail addresses on comments get stored in the database, so I can reply personally, but never shown on the pages, to avoid spammers picking them up.

Other stuff

Sometimes I edit posts after I have published them. Yeah, apparently this is very bad form. It’s mostly fixing typagraph… typograf… typos. Occasionally I’ll read something back and think of a much better (wittier, usually) way of saying it, and change it. But I try my best not to fundamentally change the essence of what I’ve written. And certainly not after someone has commented on it.

This particular post may get added to as a kind of one stop FAQ.

Anything else I should say? Any questions to add? Put ‘em in the comments.

The other day an old bloke got on the train at Spencer Street. He looked vaguely familiar. A station or two later I worked out who I thought it was. Major Grigsby! Griggers. My old year 12 co-ordinator*, probably long-since retired. I wasn’t sure until a few stops later when some kids from my old school got on the train. His eyes narrowed to the teacher’s glare, observing intently. Yep, it was him. Still a teacher at heart.

(*Actually he might have been senior co-ordinator, in charge of years 11 and 12. Not sure. Something like that, anyway.)

I never had Griggers as a teacher myself, which is why I didn’t say hello (besides, the novel I was reading was at a critical juncture). But his presence brought back memories of my only memorable interaction with him, on the occasion of the last day of year 12. A small group of us had formed a SWAT team to perform a last day prank.

Our target was the school hall, during a school concert rehearsal for the juniors (years 9 and 10). The conspirators met up outside the main school building, armed with water pistols and two big packets of bean bag beans. We synchronised watches, and then team A moved off around to the back of the school to gain access to the hall stage. I was in team B, and we took a route along the top floor corridor towards the hall balcony.

We were waiting in a vacant classroom until the allotted time when we heard a roar of the juniors in the hall. Team A had attacked early. Damn their lack of precision, jeopardising the whole operation. We sprinted down the corridor and ran into the hall balcony to perform our mission: a few squirts of the pistol, and a bag of beans dumped over the teacher there, the unfortunate Mr Rush, as amiable a teacher as you’d ever encounter. He didn’t see us coming because he was watching with amazement the sight down on stage of the music teacher also getting covered in beans.

Then we ran, back along our pre-planned escape route. Along the top floor corridor, out the northern entrance of the school, and down the cliff-face steps out to Alexandra Avenue. Down the road and across the bridge spanning the nearby river, and there we waited at the agreed post-operation rendezvous. What next? Stay clear for a few hours? Maybe jump on a 77 tram to the city?

While we pondered, we saw the sight of the (rather more rotund in those days, as I recall) Griggers striding across the bridge. Damn. Rumbled.

He’d spotted us, and followed. We surrendered and went back to school to face the music. One of the other co-ordinators was ranting about the prank, but Griggers simply set us to work cleaning up the mess with a vaccuum-cleaner and a broom and some rubbish bags. It took ages. The beans kept moving about — they’re very difficult to sweep up.

We heard a rumour later that Griggers thought it was a pretty good prank. No real harm done, and amusing enough to those who witnessed it.

When everything was tidied up, he dismissed us. No other punishment, no letter home to parents. Didn’t even confiscate the water guns. We celebrated by drawing military-badge-style “HALLBUSTERS” logos in texta on the shoulders of our shirts, and at the end of the day we departed school for the last time, heading for the pub.

Onya Griggers.

Isaac asked me this the other week, and I had to think about it for a moment: How many cars have you driven?

I probably drove more cars while learning to drive than subsequently:

My driving instructor’s white Corolla - André from the RACV Driving School must have nerves of steel, and his car a clutch of Kryptonite. Few cars on the road would get stalled more than his. I remember the first day, I got the steering okay, but dealing with the three pedals was murder.

My sister’s red Lancer - she was driving a manual car at the time, so we drove to the Caulfield station carpark and drove up and down and up and down and stall –whoops– and up and down… Strictly speaking she shouldn’t have let me drive it, since it was a work vehicle, but she reckoned it would have been okay to just swap seats and blame her if we’d crashed into anything. Fortunately we didn’t, though she didn’t let me drive it to and from the carpark, only within it.

My sister’s boyfriend’s red Turbo Laser - We went on a long long drive down Dandenong Road to some godforsaken spot in Mulgrave, then back along the freeway. Got almost all the way back when we discovered the L plate had fallen off the back window. Oops.

A friend’s ancient boxy Magna - one of the rugly ones with those horrible louvre things on the back. Euch. It was an auto, and the bloke wot owned it (knew him for a short time back in 199x, but have forgotten his name now) let me drive it to Chadstone. In the rain. Almost had a prang on Dandenong Road when some twat two lanes over decided to move right without indicating, while I moved left with my indicator on.

My sister’s Camry - auto. I’d driven it once with her and the L plates (”it doesn’t seem to accelerate very fast” “That’s because the handbrake is still a bit on”), then she left it in my car space when she went on holiday. Well, I thought it was my car space, but it wasn’t, and I was subsequently asked to move it into a different space. The girl from flat 3 must have wondered why I looked so terrified, just me in the driver’s seat, worrying that I was an unqualified driver and might crash a car I didn’t even own, trying to manoevre in the not very expansive carpark.

A bit after that I got my drivers licence.

A Magna for sale - went car shopping with a work buddy and test drove a Magna. I’d decided on a post-93 Magna because at the time they had the highest safety rating of any Australian-made car. Wondered why it seemed a little sluggish taking off, realised later I’d started it in 3rd gear.

My very own Magna - bought from some guy in Ferntree Gully, we drove it around that area one evening in 1998. Decided it would do, bought it, have driven it ever since. Newly on my P-plates, it took a lot of practice to master it, including a couple of lunchtime sessions in hilly streets close to work, practicing hill starts. My car turned 10 last year, but it still runs all right (bloody should do, the engine got replaced not too long ago) so cars not really being my thing, I’m in no hurry to upgrade.

A girlfriend’s white Laser - it felt all wrong at first, the pedals seemed too loose, and I stalled it a time or two, but got used to it eventually. Though I never got used to the ugly louvres on the back windscreen, and the lack of aircon.

A hired Nissan X-Trail - on the camping trip to Cann River early last year. The 4WD mode was certainly very welcome on the off-road bit down to the camp site.

Hmm. I think that’s all. Nine, by my count. More than I thought, actually.

…and how pictures make a story real.

If there was a Daniel FAQ, these questions would feature in it: Why are you involved in the Public Transport Users Association? What’s in it for you? And can I tell you about how late my train was this morning?

Perhaps another long rambling retrospective is in order.

• Prehistory
• Why sustainable transport?
• And so…
• The New Year’s Eve story

Prehistory

When I was growing up, we didn’t have a car. The shopping was done with a shopping jeep at the local shops in Balaclava. Most of our friends lived in walking distance. My sister and I walked to school — something that is increasingly rare nowadays, as most parents are loathe to let primary school-aged kids walk the streets on their own. (Note, however, that we didn’t wear coal sacks, and didn’t trudge through the snow for three miles to get there.)

My dad was in the PTUA’s predecessor, the Train Travellers Association, and being a regular user of public transport, I showed an interest in my early teens, but then forgot about it for a while. I joined up again in my early twenties, during a period when I was a rabid anti-car-head. Oil was killing the planet, man. I didn’t have a driver’s licence, refused to get one or buy a car, and firmly believed in the ideal of sustainable transport.

(more…)

Call me an old fuddy duddy if you like, but for the most part I still like the video and computer games of olde a bit better. Though graphics and sound have leapt forward over the past couple of decades, the quality of gameplay is the subject of some debate.

How playable is a game if you have to read the manual for ten minutes before you can figure out what you have to do? In the glory days of the arcade, it was as simple as: shoot the aliens; climb to the top of the girders; get the frog across the road and river. They needed to get you hooked in the first game, to keep you pumping those 20 cent coins in.

Nowadays they’re all so complicated. Video game pioneer Nolan Bushnell lamented that the designers came up with games that were so complicated they required all your concentration to play — when the reality is, in a bar or arcade, while you’re playing, you’re probably sipping on a drink and chatting to friends too.

He also points out that because striving for technological complexity has driven development costs through the roof, a lot of the innovation has vanished from the games industry, with most new ones being first-person shooting games or driving games.

…if you really look at the games that have been developed for the arcade business in the last five years, you see driving games and you see shooting games, and very little else. With the driving games, sometimes you’re driving a car, sometimes a bike, sometimes a truck, or a snowmobile, but they’re still damn driving games.
- Nolan Bushnell, Edge magazine’s retro gaming special 2002

The controls are more complex these days. Back in the olden days it was a single joystick and a button. Maybe two if pressed (Robotron excepted). The standard controller on the XBox has no less than three joysticks, and a multitude of buttons on it. This seems overly complex to me. What game would require me to go in three different directions at once anyway?

That said, the XBox is a heap of fun to play. Midtown Madness 3 is a lot of fun. Some spectacular graphics, and the freedom to cruise around like a maniac, or drive in races like a maniac. Hell, you can even do an Henri Paul and go zooming through the tunnels of Paris weaving around at a stupid rate of knots before hitting a wall, with the only result being some wobbles from the force feedback on the controller.

I’m rationing my game purchases to one per month, which gives me plenty of time to read the reviews and work out what’s good value for money. Next in the queue is Harry Potter/Chamber of Secrets, which looks good. I’ve thought about buying Elder Scrolls 3 (for myself, not the kids, since it’s M rated), but I’m hesitant because it looks rather too addictive, promising to suck away time I don’t have.

So far the only other release I’ve bought is Midway Arcade Treasures, 20 classic games on a disc. Thankfully Midway are happy just to be game authors; alas Nintendo want to be in the console market too, which means barring getting MAME running on it, I will never play Donkey Kong on my Xbox.

Arcade Treasures is something of a mixed bag, and it probably comes down to the fact that some of the games are suited to different types of controls. Robotron, Paperboy and Gauntlet work well. Marble Madness would be better with its original trackball. Joust is hopeless - you need a button you can continually whack to flap your bird’s wings without getting RSI.

But in the comfort of my own lounge room, it’s as good as it’s going to get for now.

…

Since Tony mentioned Elite, here’s my top ten games of yesteryear, in alphabetical order:

Donkey Kong Junior (arcade). The platform game after the one that started it all, with Mario turned badguy. The Game And Watch versions of these games were also great. Hands up who managed to get past 999 points and “clock” them.

Elite (BBC micro). The legendary space trading/flying/piracy/dogfight/exploration game. You have a Cobra Mk3 spacecraft, and eight galaxies to explore. Go do your own thing. Breaking the rules about simple controls, but the concept and freedom within the game was breathtaking. I never did reach Elite status, but I did get to Deadly both on the C64 and the superior (faster) Beeb version.

Gauntlet (arcade). A kind of dungeons and dragons-themed multiplayer game, best experienced (at least for me) in the Fun Factory with three mates, feeding in the 20 cent coins and co-ordinating our efforts battling the ghosts, wizards, Deaths and what appeared to be little kids lobbing rocks over the walls.

Gyruss (arcade). The circular movement of your spacecraft was obviously different, but the frenetic pace, great graphics and sound made this a winner. “3 warps to Neptune”. I managed to get through to Earth on the C64 version.

Impossible Mission (Commdore 64). “Stay a while! Stay… forever!” Brilliance in platform games. Some C64s (including mine) would generate the same map and puzzle every time on initial load, making it easy to finish the game.

Joust (arcade). Flying your buzzard around, jumping on the others. Perhaps the first and only game ever that didn’t have up/down directional controls, but a flap button instead.

Lode Runner (Apple II). Platform game with a massive number of screens, and instead of jumping over your enemies, you dug holes to trap them which magically filled up after a few seconds. And included a revolutionary idea: design your own levels, something later done on such games as Magic Mushrooms on the Beeb.

Monty Mole (Commdore 64). A very cutesy scrolling platform game, with Arthur Scargill and other Brit coalmining strike references. Another one of Tony Crowther’s masterpieces, and one I managed to finish. Other platform games worth of mention include Jumpman, Jumpman Junior, Blagger, Popeye and Thing on a Spring. Undoubtedly 2D platform games were my favourites.

Sim City (PC). The original city designer game, and though less complex and realistic than its sequels, seemed more addictive. Also inspired other related games such as Traffic Giant.

Ultima 4 (Commdore 64). There were many Ultima games, roleplaying obviously inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, but this one had me hooked for many weeks. Wandering around the countryside fighting monsters, finding sailing ships to explore the oceans, through towns and villages and castles trading and talking to people. I wasn’t so keen on the dungeon fighting, personally.

There have been many other brilliant games, of course, including many I’ve probably forgotten and will wish later I’d included.

What are your favourites of all time?

Recently I’ve been reading some of Jeff “Yak” Minter’s nostalgic look back at how he got into writing computer games in the 1980s, and it’s got me thinking about those days, and how it’s shaped my life — or at least, my professional working life. It’s something I have written about briefly before, but I thought I might re-visit it in epic format. (Yes, I fully realise this might bore some people to tears.)

Early 80s

In the early 1980s, personal computers started to come onto the home market. Not the multibox PCs you see nowadays of course, and certainly not limited to the big 3 formats (Windows, Linux, Mac) that you see now. No, there were dozens of different types of computers, usually a single keyboard box, often using cassettes for storage and generally plugged into a TV. (Nowadays they’re trying to get computers off desks and into the livingroom, as a centrepiece of home entertainment, plugged into a TV again.)

I was vaguely interested in technology in primary school, but there were no computers there. I was intrigued by a passing reference to a homemade computer in one of the Mad Scientist Club books, and a diet of television scifi also sparked the imagination.

It was my friend Merlin who first got a computer. He and his dad had been into electronics for some time, and when Dick Smith started marketing a computer called the Wizzard (most appropriate, har har) they bought one. It was a video game console with a bunch of clones of well-known games on it (Donkey Kong became Police Jump), and also had a module you could plug-in to do some BASIC programming. (more…)

Years ago, I occasionally shopped at Rod Irving Electronics in A’Beckett Street. There was a shop assistant in there who looked like Darrin from Bewitched. The first, original Darrin, with the ears that stuck out. Apart from the ears, he had slicked back jet black hair, a dark suit and very shiny shoes. I don’t know if he was a bit strange or something, but I distinctly going in there one day and asking for something. He acknowledged my request, and appeared to ask a colleague to fetch it for him. I waited, and he carried on standing by the counter, waiting too. I looked around at something else as I waited.

After a minute or two, he came up to me again and asked me if I was being served. Weird. I said I thought he was already serving me, and when I got just a blank stare, I asked him again for whatever it was (something geeky and early 90s no doubt — maybe a copy of MS DOS 6 or something), and eventually procured it and fled. From that day, I avoided him when I went in there again, and the shop finally shut down in the late 90s, probably due to all the custom he lost for them.

This morning I got on the train to go to work. Only a very few seats left, and they were all in the awkward to get to spots in the corners, where you’d feel hemmed in by another person sitting next to you, so I decided to stand and read my newspaper. I aimed for a spot with relatively few people standing, and space to grab a handle and open the paper. Some guy in a longitudinal seat was resting back, his legs fully spread out across the train. As I went past I half stepped over his legs and half accidently-on-purpose bumped one with one foot. After all, if you’re one of the lucky half who have got a seat, at least you could do is make some space for the poor slobs like me who have to stand. Rude bastard.

I got to my spot and stood and read the paper, half-wishing someone would open a window, though the need was not desperate, so I didn’t ask anybody. After a couple of minutes I looked back at my laid back friend. Still laid back, feet almost across to the opposite seats.

The train rolled on. Read, travel, read, travel, read. A stop or two later I looked back again. Feet still there. In their shiny shoes. I glance across the carriage to the bloke attached to the feet. It was Darrin, looking not a day older, not in a suit but in trousers and a shirt. Shiny shoes, ears still sticking out, jet black hair still slicked back, and a bored expression.

As the train filled up, his shoes retreated. When we got to my stop, I got off the train and fled.

In the late 80s and early 90s, I watched a lot of TV. I also recorded a lot of TV. It’s left me with a rather large collection of VHS tapes, probably in the region of 250. As the 90s changed from “early” to “mid” it finally dawned on me (Eureka!) that I wasn’t getting around to watching very many of these tapes. And I stopped. Somehow, my life seems none the poorer for it.

But every so often I’ll dig through the collection and find something I’m glad I taped. I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” at the moment, and it’s got me rather interested in the whole futuristic cyberpunk genre of science-fiction.

Sci-fi seems to go off in two major directions. One explores the world of aliens and space exploration: Doctor Who, Star Trek, Ender’s Game, Star Wars. The other explores what happens to society (primarily western) as technology develops, private companies and government jostle for power, some people get richer, many seem to get poorer: Blade Runner, Robocop (which I hated, but that’s another story), even Futurama and Blakes 7, to a certain extent. (Yes of course there’s some overlap.)

Max Headroom was in the latter camp, and was something I taped in those late-80s recording frenzies. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the title character is a computer-generated VJ, based a human TV reporter. The show came in a number of varieties:

Variant 1 was a British telemovie, a dark tale of a future world where big corporations reign supreme, on the lawless streets food is scarce but TVs are everywhere, and body banks are doing big business (often without the donors’ permission). Every so often it pops up on TV again — most recently mid-last year on Channel 9, but alas I was out that night, and forgot to set a tape for it. It’s still hailed as a great piece of film-making, with one (perhaps a tad overenthusiastic) reviewer at IMDB saying: this movie is nothing short of being among the most impressive and visionary movies ever made, and by far one of the most interesting (and underrated) cyberpunk tales told.

Variant 2 was a music video show hosted by the electronically produced character from the telemovie — in fact I believe the video show was conceived first, and the telemovie spawned from it to explain the character. Whatever. It aired on the ABC for a while, but if you ask me was pretty forgettable otherwise. It also spawned some cola ads, as I recall. Don’t remember if they were for Coke or Pepsi, so maybe they didn’t work too well.

Variant 3 was an American adaption of the British telemovie. Not quite as dark, it suffered from comparisons to its parent, but the main points of the story and major cast players are the same, and it was this that I recorded a few episodes of all those years ago. As I said, reading “The Diamond Age” re-sparked my interest in the genre, so I dug out the tape on Sunday night to re-watch the first episode, which is based on half of the plot of the telemovie. A perfect accompaniment to the ironing.

Ratings leader Network 23 have invented Blipverts, a 30 second advert condensed into 3 seconds, to prevent people changing channels. Problem is in some cases it causes synapse overload, and some viewers are exploding. When a Network 23 reporter stumbles across this, his story is surpressed and network heavies go after him, at one stage leaving him for dead and selling him to a body bank.

I think it’s aged very well, and considering what it was — a sci-fi programme made by a mainstream American production company (Lorimar) — is a very dark, subversive piece of work. Looking forward to watching some more. Better do some more ironing.