News

So 2008 wasn't a great year for blog entries, but it was bursting with action in other regards. Here's a quick run-down

• HarvestRoad, for whom I have been working since 2002, sold its business and a dozen of its employees to an Italian publishing house.
• My job changed a lot.
• We moved office.
• We moved office again.
• Things got back to normal.

It was a mental work year, mostly as a result of all the things that happen when a company creates a new subsidiary. Happily we kept producing software throughout the changes and are just testing the first major release since 2006.

Somewhere along the way Ben grew another six inches, Jasper contracted (and is now in remission from) a type of cancer to which retrievers are susceptible, Eve kept everything running smoothly and I got my first (and second) iPod.

Helped along by a birthday present bike I started to exercise, first only on a weekly basis and now several times a week. Right now I am about a kilo heavier than I was this time last year...

I've discovered that even someone with talent as limited as mine can produce piano music that isn't entirely excruciating.

Armed with volume one of Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course I raced through the sections on how to find middle-C, through a two-finger version of Good King Wenceslas and a three-finger version of Jingle Bells, before slowing up at the pieces with a tune on the right hand and chords in the left.

My right hand can now produce melodies bursting with fluid expression. My left can be trusted to serve up chord progressions every time. Unfortunately they can't do both at the same time.

I routinely look at my fingers only to see them do the exact opposite of what I'm consciously thinking. Instead I'm finding that the best way to sort them out is to try not to think about it at all. Thinking about one hand or the other is usually better than thinking about both, and I suspect that true mastery comes when you don't think about either hand at all, and listen to the music instead.

More than thirty years ago I started to play a musical instrument. First an old recorder I inherited from an uncle. Then a jump to the other end of the woodwind scale where a bassoon kelp me busy for eight years burping and honking at the bass end of a selection of orchestras and bands before a tenor sax took me a few feet closer to the people who actually play the tunes. A number of dalliances with oboes, clarinets, a cortol (the instrument no-one has heard of) and a memorable year or two with a set of bagpipes gave me a good grounding in music, but it was all in the wind section, and all of them need other people to make music with.

Nipping out four or five nights a week for rehearsals isn't really an option these days so I needed to find a new instrument that I could play at home, and play on my own. So I bought a piano - actually a digital piano, which feels like a piano, sounds like a piano, and has a headphone socket so that the rest of the street doesn't have to hear me learning.

Hey - I can play more than one note at a time on this puppy!

Sometimes it blows me away to find out that someone I'm sure must have died years ago is not only very much alive, but is still hard at it doing the same thing they were doing donkey's years ago. Patrick Moore, presenter of the BBC's The Sky At Night television programme, seemed old (not to mention as eccentric as the orbit of Pluto) when I was in primary school.

Now in his eighties, he still presents the programme, and has done so every month (bar one) for fifty years. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is quite something.

A flick through his entry in Wikipedia reveals him to be a noted lunar expert, prodigious author, composer, accomplished xylophone player, monocle wearer and member of the Flat Earth Society.

And how many people can claim that they accompanied Albert Einstein on the piano?

We're saving it.

I don't know what's going on in Western Australia at the moment. Some sort of political rush of blood to the head - first we get daylight saving time, and now I hear that we'll be able to alcohol on Sundays without also ordering a three course meal. WA comes leaping into the 20th century.

Add that to Australia's new "craze" of environmental awareness, fresh blood at the helm of the Labour Party, and the Democrat's Bush-thumping in the US, and the world seems a marginally brighter place.

All that remains is for someone to shrink the 50 cent coin to something smaller than an Olympic discus and I'll be all set for a merry Christmas.

Of course WA has tried daylight saving time before, but it's always been abandoned on account of it distressing cows, fading carpets or some other tosh. The premier of another state even claimed that it would lead to a surge in skin cancer. This time around we have a three year trial, after which there will be a referendum on keeping it for good.

Let's hope the dairy farmers and carpet lovers aren't in the majority when the time comes.

Tonight on the ABC: The best albums of all time (as voted by ABC viewers - hardly a representative demographic of Australia). Looking at the Top 100 there were two albums by a group called Tool. They were the only group in the whole list I had never heard of.

I filed it away, and then moseyed on over to Paul's Blog to see what he has been up to. Quite a lot by the look of it, most of it in Italy, and next on his list of European adventures is ... Tool in concert.

How freaky is that?

Roundabout this time each year I write Christmas cards to people in far-flung corners of the world. Many of them I'm in regular contact with, which is to say that I send a card each year but, other than that, the opportunities for an exchange of life events are few.

A Christmas card is an ideal place to offer a tantalising glimpse of the year in the form of a quickly scribbled note - it's a small space, and since you have a couple of dozen cards to write everyone forgives you for only writing a sentence. My grandmother was a card-note expert. I'd often get something like "Going to Totnes for lunch Tuesday. Not as sunny as last week. Garden looking lovely. Uncle Eric dead."

Computers didn't help with card-writing. They're e printed on thick toilet paper so absorbent that any attempt to mass produce a card message leaves you with an illegible black blob where the words should be.

Instead there is the Christmas Letter. Some people are good at writing them, and craft a small work of literary genius with colour photos, amusing side bars and accounts of the family's adventures and achievements over the past year. "Back in July Derek completed his second masters, this time in Greek philosophy, and Teddy won the state archery championships. Florence continues to impress us all with her French Horn."

I can never think of anything to say. The house didn't blow up or fall down. I didn't change job/wife, no additional children popped out, the dog is the same goofy furrball as last year. And nothing that I have done really seems significant enough to commit to a once-a-year letter. We went on a holiday to Busselton, of which there would be photos, except that I broke my camera on the first day. I went on a business trip. There are now plants in the garden. Everyone is doing OK.

Very soon the postal deadline and my own procrastination will mean I don't have to think about it any more.

At least, for another year...

There's a shopping centre close to my house. For the last few years it's been the place to go when you didn't need anything too exciting. There's a couple of supermarkets that sell the basic stuff, a liquor store, a hairdresser and a store selling vaccuum cleaner bags (cos out here in the 'burbs we do a whole lot of vaccuuming). And apparently a couple of dozen other stores less exciting than even the vaccuum bag place.

But we're a growing suburb and, all winter, builders have been expanding the shopping centre into a whole new retail experience...

The thing is that I only ever go there after dark on Thursday evenings, and I wasn't about to go exploring the building site at that time. From inside you got no clue that anything was going on, but then a week or so ago a sign went up annoucning the opening of the new shopping centre in three days' time! Where?!

So this week I nipped in to get the weekly trolley load of sensible healthy options (and my secret stash of chocolate and chips) and was rewarded with a movie scene moment. I walked in through the old shopping centre, in through the (demolished) door of what used to be the liquor store and there in front of me, where there had previously been a wall stacked with cheap wine, was a bright and shiny new shopping centre. It was like wandering into Toon Town, but with more chrome and fewer dancing animals. Happy people were gazing around in awe, stunned that they no longer have to drive 15km to find a decent coffee shop. Excited children skidded around on the shiny new floors, knocking over the "Meet Bob the Builder this Saturday" signs. Shoppers rushed to the new greengrocer, half expecting that a brand new shop must mean never-before-seen fruits and vegetables.

It was high excitement.

Then I tried to do my shopping in the new supermarket. It took me three times as long because all the things were arranged differently. Who puts ice cream in aisle 17?! Everyone knows that ice cream goes in aisle 22...

I've hung off writing anything on this for a couple of weeks, thinking that the first post should contain something significant, an big intro, a fanfare.

Then it struck me that no-one reads the first post until after a bunch of other posts exist, and then they scroll down to the bottom of the page, and there it is. The first post gets read last.

Better to just get on with it...