tubagooba.com

There’s been a study that says (according to the summary in The Age:

[A]cademically gifted VCE students at schools that had introduced a technical stream, which included nearly all schools in less affluent areas — were less likely to win a university place than before.

VCAL is presented as being the enemy. It’s a technically-oriented alternative to the VCE, intended to make school relevant and interesting to students who are not academically inclined. Instead of learning calculus, they’ll learn to strip down an engine or manage a commercial kitchen or construct furniture, etc etc.

It seems obvious that schools where relatively few students have academic interests or ambitions would benefit from a programme like VCAL. Trying to bully students through an academic curriculum that has no relevance for them, and in which they have no interest, is worthless and counterproductive. It’s easy for those of us who were academically inclined to frame discussions about schooling in academic terms. According this reasoning, schools should aspire to give kids the sort of skills that I was given, and which have made me so successful (not to mention wise). But our memories of school (perhaps because they were formed during our narcissistic youth) tend to omit any reference to the experiences of those other students who, sitting alongside us in our classes, were made to feel stupid and small because they didn’t understand, and would never understand.

According to this article, the study finds that academically-gifted students in schools with a VCAL programme are doing less well than they were before VCAL came along. If that’s true, then it’s a bit surprising — I would have thought that VCE students would have benefited from classes which had a lower concentration of students who couldn’t give a shit. On the other hand, the drain of VCAL students would have meant fewer VCE classes, and thus fewer subject selections, so VCE students might have been stuck with a few generic choices that may or may not have suited them. Staffing might be an issue, too — schools may have needed to overlook a potential teacher with a VCE specialisation in favour of one who could teach VCAL as well.

It’s an issue if academically-minded kids are suffering in VCAL schools. It’s a problem that needs addressing. My concern with the way this article is presented, though, is that it seems to buy into the Cult of the VCE.

Mr Edwards said most public school principals had not been offered extra State Government funding to improve their academic programs to compete with the growth in richer independent schools. They were left with little choice but to specialise in vocational skills — an important pathway, but one that disadvantaged academically minded students.

The assumptions contained within this paragraph are:

1. That government schools should “compete” for students with private schools, on the same terms.
2. That schools who decide to focus on vocational skills are doing so because there is “little choice”. It couldn’t be a decision taken in the interests of their students.
3. That vocational education is “an important pathway”, but academic education is something altogether more.

Academic achievement, then, is the norm, from which vocational education is the departure. Those assumptions can even carry through to those schools which offer a VCAL programme. Perhaps there are schools where VCAL has an equal or higher status to the VCE, but in those couple of schools that I taught at during teaching rounds which offered a VCAL programme, it was quite clear (although perhaps not said explicitly) that VCAL was for the stupid kids. Articles like this carry the message loud and clear — it’s all well and good for you kids to be doing their panel beating or whatever, but let’s not pretend that it’s really important, and let’s for God’s sake make sure that they’re not taking away from those students who are doing real schooling, you know, with books and pencils and rulers and calculators.

It’s nice and obvious when VCE students start doing badly. We can look at these nice tables of figures and draw easy conclusions about what’s going on. If initiatives like VCAL begin to be compromised as a reaction against that decline, then the consequences will be less obvious. I’m quite sure that there are many students for whom VCAL brought school to life, made it relevant and interesting and provided them with the opportunity to excel on their own terms. But those students were invisible before VCAL came along (because they tended to leave well before they could drag their school down the VCE league tables), and they’ll be invisible again once they’ve been sacrificed on the altar of other students’ ENTER scores. In schools, the academic will always triumph over the non-academic as long as one remains more measurable than the other, and as long as those conducting studies and making policy regard their own (invariably academic) experiences as the model for others to follow.

Between September 25 and October 1 in Melbourne, the Melbourne International Festival of Brass is happening. If you haven’t heard about it, you’re not alone - the smallness of the marketing budget is such that no-one but brass players ever gets to hear about it (and lots of them don’t either), but I’m telling you about it now, and in particular, a concert that I’m playing in.

In 1949, Miles Davis formed what now seems like an unlikely alliance with Gerry Mulligan and put together a nine-piece band to play an assortment of arrangements and compositions by Mulligan, John Lewis and Gil Evans. The instrumentation was rather unusual — a french horn, trombone, baritone saxophone and tuba provide what might be called a robust bottom end, balanced only by Miles’s trumpet and Lee Konitz’s alto exploring the realms above middle C. The effect is that of a mushy centre with a brittle crust — the richness of the lower and middle registers allows licence for all manner of chromatic bizarreness to take place under a comfortable breadth of sonic cover, while the melody lines have the space to soar, plunge, wail or flurry at will. Now and then Mulligan’s baritone emerges from under the doona to play for a while, then goes back to making strange shapes with all the others.

All this is going to be reproduced live by a bunch of very distinguished Melbourne jazz musicians, and me, on Monday 25 September at 6.30pm in Melba Hall, the big white building facing onto Royal Parade from the Parkville campus of Melbourne Uni. Tickets can be bought online from the link above, and I’m pretty sure they’ll be available at the door on the day, too.

I read as to how British airlines are now letting people bring laptops on planes again:

[T]he UK authorities announced that passengers will now be allowed to bring a single piece of hand luggage measuring 45cm by 35cm by 16cm onto planes. Laptops and other electrical items can be stuffed into such bags, but will have to be removed for screening. Liquids, except babymilk and medicines, are still forbidden.

So staff at security gates are still confiscating tubes of KY jelly, but people with laptops can cruise on through? Does no-one imagine that a terrorist who can crash a plane with a bottle of Oil of Olay might also be capable of building similar destructive capacity into a laptop? Hell, devote two-thirds of the battery compartment to liquid-explosive-of-choice, and you could probably still power the thing up for inspection as you pass through security. (In fact, the disguise is probably not necessary — plenty of laptops have dud batteries already, so you could just plug the thing in).

I’m a bit conflicted about all this airline security. On the one hand, I think why don’t we just ban hand luggage altogether, for good, if that’s the source of the problem. Sure, it will be a hassle (particularly for those of us who like to fly without any check-in luggage), but it is really such a big deal considering what’s at stake? If the airlines were to put a bit of effort in, they could supply internet-connected computers to passengers who wanted to work on board, stock up on books and magazines and provide some in-flight movies that don’t star Kevin Costner. A small price to pay to keep the planes in the air.

On the other hand, there will always be a way to blow up a plane, even if it gets to the point where you have to line up naked in the departure lounge and submit to a rectal exam by the head flight steward before he scans your boarding pass. People are always scoffing condoms full of heroin to get them through customs — what’s to stop them doing the same with nitro-glycerine? Look for the guy who starts sweating when the pilot announces there’s going to be some turbulence. Also, if these liquid explosives are so effective and so dangerous, what’s to stop someone sticking them in their checked-on baggage? As I understand it, they’re not detectable by normal explosive screening, and the sniffer dogs aren’t trained to detect them. All you’d need is some way to detonate them — perhaps you could use that laptop that you weren’t allowed to take on as hand luggage. Windows Task Scheduler would probably do the trick as long as the laptop didn’t crash before the plane did.

I don’t have an answer, other than to point out that flying in a plane is a risk like it always has been, and no matter what security measures are put in place, terrorism will always form part of that risk. It goes without saying that we should do everything we can to minimise the danger, but it also goes without saying that we can’t eliminate it, and that we shouldn’t pretend we can. Each of the various hoops that passengers are made to jump through in airports could, with all the available information, be classified as either genuine prevention or security theatre. I don’t have a way of judging which is which, but I do think that when there are obvious inconsistencies like the one I’ve outlined above with the laptops, it encourages people like me to think that it’s all a bit of a charade. If the security measures are really going to keep us safe, then sure, bring ‘em on, but if they’re not, then why don’t we stop pretending and accept that we’re taking a risk when we board a plane, just as we are when we take to the road. (If you are about to object that the dangers on the road are different because no-one’s intentionally trying to kill you, I’d suggest that you straddle a pushbike one day and look into the eyes of the Commodore driver who is trying to nullify your existence by sheer weight of horsepower). If the authorities are putting any of their efforts into reassuring passengers, then I think they should redirect those efforts elsewhere. If a passenger is concerned about the risk of flying, then they shouldn’t fly — that’s a perfectly reasonable, rational decision to take, and none of us should have to submit to security hassles simply for the sake of encouraging that individual to believe that air travel is safe.

I don’t mind all that much being approached in shopping centres by people trying to sell things or solicit donations to charities. I don’t like being rung up on the phone, and I don’t like being approached on a public street (which has been happening more and more regularly on Sydney Road recently), but in a commercial shopping centre you’re in a private space, so it’s reasonable that when you wander in you should expect to be bombarded with advertising and crass attempts to make you spend money. There’s no reason why a certain amount of touting shouldn’t be a part of that.

What I really detest, though, is when the touts try to use my sense of decency and politeness to effectively manipulate me into a conversation (that is, to force me to spend time listening to their sales pitch whether I like it or not). Today, a gentleman soliciting donations to the Cancer Council saw me approaching, reached out his hand and said “Hi, what’s your name?” In this context, I think that question is bloody rude, because it leaves me with no way of politely moving on. If a marketer comes and asks for a moment of my time, then I’m free to smile and say no thankyou without having to breach any social etiquette. When someone asks my name, though, it’s impolite to just ignore them, and it’s a non-sequitur to say “No thankyou”. Of course, that’s why he’s asking – it’s not because he likes my face and thinks I might be good to have as a friend.

I hate this not just because it leaves me in an awkward social position when all I wanted to do was wander into Coles for a packet of Weet Bix. I also hate it because I’d like to live in a society where casual social interaction with strangers, like stretching out a hand and asking someone’s name, happened more often. When an individual takes a particular form of manners and cynically uses it to further a commercial objective, it makes all of us a degree more wary and less inclined to respond in a sincere way to anyone who really does want to make friends. Using this kind of language as a sales tactic intrudes upon the whole concept of good manners, and that’s what makes it rude.

It’s similar, actually, to the way in which John Howard manipulates the concept of mateship and “Australian values” to build a false and cynical connection with those whose decent sensibilities he is trying to exploit. It’s not just that it’s dishonest and that it creates election outcomes that I don’t like. It’s also that it erodes the very meaning of those concepts. Mateship and hard work and sporting prowess and honour in wartime were all fundamentally positive aspects of our common understanding of “Australianness” before Howard got his hands on them. Now, it’s hard to even mention them without subconsciously recoiling, knowing the evils that have been visited on this country under the cover of Honest John’s Decent Australian Values.

We got a shiny new bus stop this morning.

It’s a nice, colourful Metlink panel with lots of useful information and the proud logo of the Hope Street Bus Service across the top. It replaced an old stop that looked like this:

The HSBS is an oddity of Melbourne’s public transport system. The buses run, as you might imagine, along Hope Street, from just west of Melville Road in West Brunswick to Sydney Road in Brunswick, a distance of perhaps just over two kilometres. I stand to be corrected, but I’m betting that this is the shortest of all MetLink services. This tiny route is apparently all that sustains the HSBS as an autonomous transport operator.

Hope Street is narrow – if a car is parked on each side of the street there is only one lane left for traffic, which makes driving along it a constant game of chicken. It’s remarkable, then, to report that the driver of the Hope Street bus, who spends all day every day staring down four-wheel drivers asserting their God-given right to priority in all traffic situations, is unfailingly cheery and considerate. A gentleman of Italian heritage who wears a peaked cap and could be anywhere between 55 and 85, he greets most of his few passengers by name. He waves with unfailing genuineness each of the dozen-or-so times that he passes Angelo, the Italian pensioner across the street from me who spends all day leaning on his front gate (unless it’s raining, in which case he retreats to the verandah). The spiffy new bus stop is actually redundant for regular users - the driver is quite happy to stop anywhere that he is flagged down, and passengers can nominate their disembarkation point down to the nearest metre. The regulars get dropped in front of their respective houses without even having to ask.

Most of these regulars are elderly Italian women going up to Sydney Road to do their weekly shopping. If you think this doesn’t sound like much of a demographic to support an entire bus company, you’re right. Typically, the bus carries a handful of passengers. At most, the bus would be three-quarters full, but that probably only happens twice a day.

This city, like lots of cities, lacks “concentric” public transport routes across suburbs to complement the more abundant “radial” routes in and out of the CBD, and the HSBS is one such concentric route. It’s too short, though, to be very helpful in linking together those radial “spokes”. It crosses three radial routes - the 55 tram up Melville Road, the Upfield rail service and the Sydney Road tram. But those three routes are convergent anyway. The 55 tram crosses the Upfield line at Royal Park, so if you live in West Brunswick and you want to catch the Upfield train it’s quicker to hop on the tram. The Sydney Road tram almost crosses the 55 route at the Royal Parade roundabout. So the Hope Street bus doesn’t really offer a shortcut to anywhere except its own destination - Sydney Road - which would otherwise require a tram into Royal Park and a train back out again, or a tram to the roundabout and another tram back out again, both of which would be a pain. There’s not much in the way of destinations on the Western end of the route (my place notwithstanding), so it’s unlikely that residents on the Sydney Road end of the route use the service very often.

Also, there’s another bus service along Victoria Street, which is the next parallel street to the south of Hope Street. The Victoria Street bus, which is run by a larger company with multiple routes, runs from Moonee Ponds through to Westgarth, crossing maybe a dozen radial routes and opening up much more of the northern and western suburbs to public transport users. Unlike the Hope Street service, it seems to run to a well-publicised timetable.

So the continued existence of the Hope Street bus is a bit of a mystery. There’s no way that it can be self-supporting on the passenger numbers that it gets, so it must be subsidized by somebody. There might be a state government subsidy of some sort. I would think that if Moreland Council were paying for it, their branding would be all over it, and that’s not the case. I suspect that St John’s Catholic Church on Melville Road might be involved somehow - their parishioners certainly make up a fair portion of the service’s clientele. Whatever the case, the new bus stops seem to indicate that the route is not going away just yet, which pleases me. It might be tough to justify in terms of transport needs, but the bus serves as a de facto meeting place and community centre. Having an old bloke in a hat wave to you as you step out of your gate in the morning might seem like a small thing, but in a very subtle and non-intrusive way it links you with your surroundings, faintly blurring the sharp edges of suburban isolation. It might not be the most cost-efficient or environmentally-friendly source of social cohesion, but it seems to work, and for that reason I’ll be glad to see it hang around, regardless of who’s paying for it.

Gregory Melleuish has written a paper for the upcoming history summit, which apparently aims to counter the perception that “Australian history is crap … ’cause nothing happened”‘.

What’s his answer?

[Melluish believes that] there is a tendency for Australian history lessons to “exclude or marginalise” many significant elements.

“These include economic development issues, middle-Australia, people of religious belief and the churches,” Associate Professor Melleuish says in the paper, which outlines what he believes students should be taught by the end of year 10.

“It is necessary that a place be made for these elements.”

Yes, that sounds like a brilliant way to counter the perception that Australian history is boring - I can just see the kiddies’ eyes lighting up when the teacher announces that today we’re talking about economic development issues. They’ll be beside themselves during the lessons on Middle Australia, let alone the compelling narrative about people of religious belief and the churches.

If history teachers spend a disproportionate amount of time on things like the Vietnam War and the Whitlam sacking, might that not be because they’re, y’know, a damn sight more interesting than droning on about Middle Australia? “Yes, and you wouldn’t believe it, every back yard had a HILLS HOIST! What’s that? Everyone still has one? Oh, right.”

There’s an article in today’s EG by Michael Dwyer, titled “Bit-pop overload“, talking about the impact of internet marketing and distribution on the music industry. It’s an interesting article in that it avoids adherence to either of the two clichéd mainstream-media takes on the state of the music industry. Most articles that you read on this subject are either wholeheartedly positivist (i.e. the internet has enabled a new generation of artists to bypass the old bottleneck of profit-driven record companies and showcase their music directly to an audience of millions over the web, breaking the old monopolies and making a wider variety of authentically-produced independent music available on demand for a much cheaper price than we’re used to) or negativist (the internet is just a piracy free-for all, an arena for so-called music fans to exploit the system that has filled their CD collections with quality music, demanding product for nothing and in doing so destroying the economy by which it is created). Michael, by contrast, has grasped the fact that the internet can represent a new economy of music in its own right - he refers to the centrality of avenues like MySpace and iTunes for the marketing of online music, as distinct from the more anarchic mechanisms that the positivists might envisage. He also spots the fact that the internet is just as friendly (if not moreso) to cynical spin and dodgy promotion - the example of Sandi Thom shows that music which is marketed on its web-indie credentials (like the song which has unfortunately been welded to my neural jukebox for the last couple of days, I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker* by Sandi Thom, who notionally claimed her fame in a webcast from her basement, but whose “70,000-strong word-of-mouse cyber-audience” was in fact “stacked by a massive corporate spam campaign”) can prove, on closer inspection, to be driven by major-label marketing budgets. It would be nice to think that creative strength could combine with the massive social network of the internet to produce musical success sans cynical marketing techniques, but it seems even where hits are supposedly sourced from the internet, the old hit-makers are often still behind the scenes pulling the strings.

More interestingly, Michael then delves into the nature of the hit song itself, and how MySpace and iTunes might be starting to challenge that idea.

The trend is clear. More artists are selling less records. In the fastest-growing music store on earth, iTunes, it may appear that more artists are selling more downloads. But even there, the preferred music-biz model of a manageable handful of blockbuster artists shaping the sales graph is going rapidly pear-shaped.

In his book The Long Tail, American market analyst Chris Anderson comes to grips with a modern retail environment of unlimited stock, an online digital realm unhampered by physical shelf space.

Here everyone sells a few tracks - dead guys, live ones, old ones, new ones, the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, hell, even Soul Asylum - regardless of what the global entertainment factory is shoving at you.

We’ve been stuck, Anderson writes, “in a hit-driven mindset. We think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits derserve to exist.”

But companies such as iTunes don’t have production costs, Anderson points out, and they’ve “discovered that the ‘misses’ usually make money too. And, because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.”

This differs from the positivist view that I outlined earlier, because it is a model that still includes the middle man (in the form of iTunes, but you could also include MySpace and whatever other conduits are waiting in the wings, Google surely being one of them). Also, the very idea of producing a hit in your basement is an idea that doesn’t belong in a world where the “hit”, as such, is a thing of the past. The pie might be getting bigger and more diverse, on this view, but the slices are also getting smaller. On the one hand, the old monopolies are being broken down, letting more music get in on the action. On the other hand, new monopolies have taken their place, but the new monopolies have a fundamentally different character. The old record companies used to filter out all the wannabes, pick winners and back those winners with funding to produce and distribute hit records. The new players act more as aggregators rather than filters, welcoming everyone into the fold, taking only a small share of each sale, but offering very little in return.

It was always one of my hopes for the internet that media content would become more diverse as individuals gained a greater capacity to pick and choose instead of being forced to suckle on one of a limited number of big-media teats. A corollary of that, and one that I haven’t thought through very thoroughly, is that music is going to be repositioned in our culture. The few major content outlets did more than just get music into people’s houses and cars and workplaces - they also outlined a common cultural agenda around which our societies gathered. A world in which Hey Jude is just another selection on the iPod playlists of those who happen to like it is a world in which such a song cannot become a common unit of cultural currency. Mass media, for better or worse, is a significant part of the way that we relate to each other.

It might be naive to imagine that we’re in the last days of the hit song. Dwyer and Anderson might be right, though - we could be looking at a future where a hit song becomes something like another funny YouTube video, something that emerges from the tag clouds for a week or so to be replaced by the next amusement without having time to work its way into any common cultural memory. Artists might snag a few fans along the way who will download their wallpapers and ringtones and fill MySpace forums with OMGs, but the fans will be geographically diverse and their pencil cases will be unlikely to carry the same carefully-crafted band logos as the rest of their classmates at school (which begs the question: will anyone bother? When I inscribed the Kiss logo on my pencil case in primary school, it wasn’t because I actually liked the band - it just seemed like the thing to do.).

I instinctively like the idea of mass media being broken down into pockets of genuine enthusiasts, and I’m optimistic about the sort of cultural landscape that might result from that, but I have to admit that I have no idea what it will actually look like, and it’s possible that I might find myself nostalgic for the bad old days. As well as changes to music, of course, there will be changes to television and newspapers and movies and magazines and every other kind of media. I think music is providing a test case, because it is particularly download-friendly (as compared with movies and television), and it has a good range of technologies to make digitally-distributed content usable at the consumer end (unlike the print media at this point). Is there going to be an iTunes-like model for purchasing journalism? TV sitcoms are almost there, and I suppose that news and current affairs can’t be far behind. Each type of media will have its own economics that will dictate what kind of online model (if any) can supplant the mass media equivalent. I think it’s going to be an interesting twenty years.

*I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair is the first line. I can’t help wondering whether flowers in the hair were really standard dress for punk rockers. Admittedly, it might have been tough to squeeze “with a dynabolt through my uvula” into her iambic heptameter.

I’ve had my share of dodginess in internet transactions, so I thought it was worth making a note of an instance where shopping online proved to be wholly excellent. So here’s the story of how I bought a new battery for my PDA. If your eyes are glazing over at this point, please feel free to stop reading.

This PDA that I do much of my writing on is an old Compaq iPaq 3650. It was one of the earlier generations of devices with a full colour backlit LCD screen and various multimedia stuff, running the PocketPC operating system which provides pretty good integration with Microsoft Office. The screen is quite big for a handheld gadget, and while it could use some extra pixels (it has 240×320, which is still pretty common in current model PDAs and smartphones), I don’t think I’ve seen any other screen on a portable devices which is as bright, crisp and clear. It’s about five years old now.

Although the thing was supposedly capable of lots of different tricks - recording voice messages and playing mp3’s and games and this and that - I’ve found myself using it in fairly basic ways. I write text, using a Stowaway foldup keyboard, when I’m out and about. I use it as my diary, integrating with Outlook on the desktop PC. And I synchronise my email inbox to it, so that I always have my last month or so’s emails on hand in case of emergency (these emergencies usually take the form of “I did bring the address for this gig with me, didn’t I?”)

I seldom connect it to the internet, although it’s theoretically possible to do it through the mobile (at a blazing 9600bps). It has no bluetooth, no wi-fi, no built-in camera. Now and then I’ll write an email on it, if I need to get something down while I think of it, and it sends automatically when I plug it into the cradle at home. I never use it for mp3’s or voice recordings, not least because the sound system shat itself somewhere along the line and it doesn’t seem to work any more, but I didn’t really use those features even when I had the chance. I use the infra-red port to send SMS’es now and then, if I want to compose something long and make the most of the 160 characters (since fully-fledged txtspk is annoyingly fiddly to type into a mobile keypad when you’re used to predictive text).

The biggest trouble with it, a problem that it shares in common with most early-generation gadgets, was the battery. To begin with, the battery could get through a day’s work reasonably reliably. I used to be able to go to a couple of two-hour lectures in a day and type notes with the backlight on and never have to worry too much about it expiring. The data doesn’t get lost just because the main battery goes flat - it does have a backup - but there’s a rule of gadgetry that says that if you have to think about the battery running flat, then you’ll never really be able to integrate the gadget into your life. That was the case with this device - each time I pulled it out and turned it on, I had to have in mind the limited number of hours that I could afford to have it running for. If I opted to read an e-book (something else I occasionally use it for) during my lunch hour, then I might not get through the afternoon lecture. When that sort of stuff starts to happen, the gadget stops being an aid to living and becomes an impediment - something else to worry about.

As the years went by, the battery (an internal, rechargeable type, along the lines of the iPod batteries which are supposedly not user-replaceable, about which more later) started to struggle more and more. During the last eighteen months or so, the backlight became a non-option, meaning that I could only use it in well-lit areas (fortunately, the reflective LCD screen is great to use in bright light, but dimly-lit writing spots were a no-no). Eventually, even turning the device on with the backlight enabled would prompt an immediate shutdown - I had to plug the thing back into the charger so that I could have time to turn off the backlight. Then, inevitably, it stopped charging altogether.

I wasn’t very optimistic about my chances of replacing the battery. Styluses for this model had long since vanished from the shop shelves, and are difficult to track down even online. I’d read that it was possible to replace the battery, despite the official line that it wasn’t user-replaceable (what a great idea - make what was then a thousand-dollar gadget which becomes unusable after five years), but I fully expected to have to get one sent over from the US. I thought that it might be time to upgrade to something newer and better, but I was hesitant because I have no money, and also because there’s no guarantee that all those extra bells and whistles would actually be worth me having. I’ve found some really good uses for this device, and left lots of its capabilities unused, and I wasn’t convinced that the new features would fit into the “must have” basket instead of the “whatever” basket. I like the form factor of this thing, the screen is great, I know how to use it, and I own the foldup keyboard (which is a significant extra expense in itself - I would have had to have bought a new one if I’d changed to a different PDA or smartphone, because the connections are not interchangeable). So I got online and looked for a new battery.

To my surprise, there was a place in Sydney that was advertising them, Press Digital. I’d heard that the batteries often shipped with the Torx screwdriver that you need to get the back off the iPaq, and the catalogue entry didn’t mention whether one was included with this particular battery, so I pressed the contact link. Immediately, a window came up saying that a support person was being paged so that I could chat directly. The page timed out, as it happened, but I thought it was a nifty idea if there had been someone around to take the call. That sort of immediate communication is what is often lacking in online businesses - whenever I send an email asking for help, I’m half expecting it to go unanswered. In this case, I was redirected through to a form which I filled out with my question, and I got an email response within ten minutes. The screwdriver was included, and I was all set to go (total price about $60 including postage, less than I’d been expecting). I placed the order.

That evening, I got both an SMS message and an email to let me know that the package had been shipped. The next day, it was on my doorstep, boxed up in nice packaging which even included a complimentary chocolate (I kid you not).

Installation was simple - the battery itself is a flat plastic package filled with noxious smelling chemicals (I know this because I cut the old one up with a pair of scissors out of curiosity) with some charging circuitry printed on a plastic ribbon, the end of which plugs into the main circuit board of the PDA itself. The battery is glued to the back cover of the unit - the old one detached pretty easily - and there are also little plastic corners to hold it in place. I didn’t bother regluing it - the combination of the existing remnants of sticky stuff, the retaining corners and the tight fit with the rest of the electronics should keep it safely in place, I think.

The added bonus was that the new battery has a lot more capacity than the old one had, even in its heyday. The original battery was about 1000 mAh, whereas the new one was advertised as 1600mAh. When it arrived, the packaging said 2200mAh, so I don’t know which figure is correct, but I can tell you that in three or four weeks of quite intensive use, I haven’t yet seen the battery indicator dip below 100%. I suppose that the battery indicator was calibrated to the discharge curve of the original battery, so the 100% figure doesn’t mean anything in relation to the new battery, except to say that the voltage hasn’t fallen below the maximum it expected of the old one, and that’s good news. I can now use the thing as much as I like, in full backlit glory, and even if I forget to plug it in when I get home, I can still use it as much as I like the next day. This makes a serious usability difference - knowing that I can pull the thing out any time I like and turn it on without even thinking about how much battery power is left. It’s much like the difference between the early-generation mobile phones, where running low on batteries was just a constant annoyance, and the new ones which only need to be plugged in every week or so and otherwise just work without any complaint whatsoever. We’ve become used to not thinking about battery life, but I can still remember carrying around a spare battery for my first mobile that weighed best part of a kilogram (note: this is an exaggeration) and only just enabled me to get through a long day if I didn’t do too much actual talking.

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be a rave about how poor batteries ruined my life. It was supposed to be pointing out the excellence of the mob who sold me this new battery, and how there should be more of it. If more online businesses were as customer-focused, then I’m sure that a lot of the suspicion that still lingers around shopping online would just evaporate.

The right hand two-thirds of the Herald Sun’s front page today is dedicated to a story about the union rally that’s happening at the MCG on November 30 (full text under a different headline here). The headline is “MCG RALLY RIFT”. The rift, it turns out, is between the union organisers and - who, exactly? “The Melbourne Cricket Club can expect stiff opposition from among its 95,000 members”, apparently. Might well be true, but the paper’s research only extended to asking six old cricket and football stars what they thought about it, two of whom had an objection to the rally. Neil Harvey suggested that “They should find somewhere else to do it”, and Max Walker came up with the interesting statement “I love the MCG. It should be for the good of the people, not for the bad of the people.” Ron Barassi, Sam Newman, Dean Jones and Keith Stackpole, meanwhile, pointed out that the ground has been used for all sorts of things in the past including religious meetings, and as long as the surface is looked after there shouldn’t be any objections.

So as far as we can tell, the “rift” is between Max Walker and Neil Harvey on the one hand, and everyone else on the other. In fact, there’s probably not a rift at all, just some people who happen to object.

It’s notable, because the Herald Sun is usually too busy being trashy to bother being partisan. Political barrow-pushing generally has to make way for football, celebrity gossip and their various forays into Today Tonight style tabloidism. Apart from the Andrew Bolt freak show (read mostly by lefties getting their weekly adrenaline fix, I suspect), the paper is more or less the embodiment of a modern, profit-driven rag. Political grandstanding would only put a downer on things and scare away the advertisers, so much better to add a few more fawning reviews and lifestyle articles, a good murder here and there, some foot-in-door consumer protection stuff, plenty of entertainment news, and above all plenty of sport. When things get as blatantly partisan as today’s headline, the Hun must have a good reason.

It’s easy to see why the Right would be upset by the MCG rally. The union movement, by co-opting the “hallowed turf” into its struggle, is treading on the iconography that the right wing presumes to own. The ACTU could hardly link its cause more potently to the Australian Legend if they dug up Don Bradman and wrapped his unorthodox grip around a union placard. Sport is one of the most important vectors of political communication in this country. (If you think that says something about the quality of political communication, you’re right, but that’s another story).

As for the Hun, maybe they also regard this as an intrusion onto their turf - as their paper shows, the last thing they want is for sport, their most enduring connection with their readership, to be sullied by politics. The paper’s share in the Australian Legend, like that of the conservatives, is under threat, so they rang around some Legend insiders for support. They must have been disappointed to only score two out of six.

I recently read Journal of a Novel, the collection of letters which John Steinbeck wrote to his publisher over the ten months it took to write East of Eden. Steinbeck wrote his first draft in a large notebook, using the right hand pages to write the book and the left hand pages to write this series of letters. He would start each working day with a letter, which was his way to clear his mind, establish a good writing rhythm and get his handwriting to settle down. The letters do a certain amount of reflecting on the story itself, explaining what his day’s work is going to involve, what characters are going to be introduced today, what he’s trying to achieve stylistically and so forth. They’re much more concerned, though, with the miscellany of Steinbeck’s writing process. His pencils are a particular obsession. He would buy round pencils (the hexagonal ones aggravated his writer’s callous) in lots of four dozen, and would sharpen a whole jar full before each day’s work, so that he could change as they became blunt. His electric pencil sharpener, incidentally, is another recurring subject (he seemed to feel guilty about using it, as if it was an incredible indulgence). He would keep using the pencils until the metal surrounding the eraser started to rub on the webbing of his thumb, then he would pass them on to his sons to use for drawing and replace them (the pencils, not the sons) with new ones. He talks a great deal about his writing bench, a drafting table which he made himself, about the angle of its incline and the reflectivity of its surface (he repainted it a couple of times to reduce glare).

Throughout the letters, he is very insistent on keeping his writing speed down. It seems that writing slowly enough was a constant discipline for him - I’m not quite sure why. He talks about the need to let the story “breathe”, which perhaps is a way of saying that he needed time to reflect on the progress of the novel as it went along, which makes sense. He also talks about the burnout that he suffered towards the end of The Grapes of Wrath, and perhaps he was pacing himself so as to keep his head straight.

I liked the book for a couple of reasons. I actually liked reading about his petty obsessions - it’s reassuring to think of the novelist being diverted by the workings of his electric pencil sharpener, or meditating on his emergent callouses. Creation probably always takes place in a space surrounded by these kinds of trivial details, and it makes me feel better knowing that my modern-day obsession with various bits of technology associated with the creative process is really just an echo of Steinbeck and his pencil jar. (Of course, I’m not writing a novel, and I’m not comparing myself with Steinbeck in any other sense).

I also liked reading this unedited manuscript, which was reproduced in book form more-or-less verbatim from the original copy. Now and then he begins sentences without finishing them. His spelling errors (apparently he had a few persistent ones) are corrected, but a lot of the poor grammar and clumsy expression is left in. It’s nice to have this insight into a writer with his guard down, making the same sorts of mistakes as the rest of us make, knowing that he was as capable as anyone of writing cringe-worthy sentences. (Of course, Steinbeck’s detractors may say that he produced plenty of cringe-worthy sentences before and after he wrote these letters. Personally, it seems to me that while he is prone to the odd flight of pomposity which jars with his otherwise simple and unaffected style, and while his politics might not be to everyone’s taste, one would be a dickhead to claim that the guy couldn’t write.)

I also quite like the idea of the writer’s “warm up” in the morning. I’ve been trying it, these last few days, starting with an unedited, unjudged splurge into a journal which nobody (perhaps including me) will ever read. I find that after a while just rambling away incoherently, I begin to get the urge to express something that might become public. I don’t have handwriting to worry about, obviously, but even at the keyboard there is a flow state, a level of concentration where the formation of sentences in my head seems to keep pace with my fingers as I type, and whole passages will spill out more-or-less intact, without having to be coaxed and massaged and erased and re-written. I’ve sometimes sat down with an idea for a blog post but then found myself so frustrated with being unable to get the first sentence to sit properly that I’ve given up and done something else instead. The journal, while being a pitiable document in its own right, can be seen as a sort of clearing house for the constipated ideas which result from too much thinking and not enough writing. My inner monologue, it seems to me, is not the best place for ideas to be explored - they tend to double back on each other and lose track of where they’re heading. On paper (or its various digital equivalents), they can be laid out one by one in something like a map, allowing me to trace them from beginning to end and identify cul-de-sacs and collapsed bridges along the way. The journal can be thought of as a hand-off - taking a stream of consciousness and transferring it to the page, gradually letting the page take over until the writing begins to think for itself. You can tell when Steinbeck gets to that point - he always says something like “Right then, to work.” You can even see the flow state emerging as he progresses through each letter - the beginnings tend to sound a bit dreamy and unfocused, then he’ll usually wander off onto some tangent for a while and talk about his carpentry or his kids or (most often) his pencils, then his mind will come around to the book. He’ll start writing about pages he has planned for the day, and I think as his flow starts up you can feel him getting excited about putting the rambling letter aside and getting stuck into the real writing. I like it.