Trainspotting...

I used to think I really loved trains.

It all started as a young boy when we would travel for summer vacation by train to visit relatives and I was hooked. So as a kid I would lovingly assemble my train set on the floor in the bedroom, happily making deliveries of goods to "towns" along the circular route. Never minding that it was the same set of plastic buildings for each town. As I grew older and my copies of Model Railroader kept growing, I began to actually have a collection of engines and rolling stock (ie, rail cars). And while real trains were interesting I never was a railroading enthusiast, always liking model ones the best.

After many (MANY) years of not being involved in the hobby, I recently decided to buy my first railroading enthusiast's magazine from a news agent here in Australia. This particular periodical hailed from the UK - the home of "trainspotters." These guys (and they are always male, it seems) get this particular nickname because they purportedly haunt train yards and lurk on rail right-of-ways wearing anoraks and clutching little note pads "spotting" trains by the number painted on the engines and writing them down in their notebooks. Sometimes traveling great distances to get that one number missing and bragging about it to their friends.

If it sounds like a sad existence, you'd be correct. And I never believed trainspotting was true. That is, until I got this magazine.

Page after page, letter after letter, article after article was written orgasmically describing train engines, the numbers on train engines, and that rite-of-passage moment into manhood when they scored "that missing number". Thank god there were no pictures.

All of a sudden, I don't think I'm so into trains after all.

- Farmer Ted

iTouch manifesto...

Have you ever seen the 1970 movie classic "Colossus: The Forbin Project"? Exploiting the unfamiliarity of computers and Cold War fears, it's the story of an intelligent supercomputer, Colossus, built to control all US nuclear defenses. However Colossus detects the presence in the USSR of its counterpart, called Guardian. The two supercomputers begin communicating and decide it is mankind itself that must be controlled.

Fast forward to 2009 where the Wi-Fi Alliance has just announced the finalization of Wi-Fi Direct. You all know what wi-fi is, allowing our electronics to connect wirelessly to a hotspot, wireless router or access point and communicate. Well what would you think about your same device being able to communicate with other wi-fi enabled devices directly; without the hotspot or router? That's what Wi-Fi Direct does. And your devices are already able to do it, it just needs a software upgrade to be made available next year.

As you might have guessed, Apple is one of the sponsor members ratifying this standard.

So I can just imagine now all my Apple devices, from the Mac Mini to AppleTV and iPods, able to communicate directly and wirelessly with each other and others nearby. Deciding what music between themselves must be controlled. Eventually with other Apple products forming a huge SkyNet-like sentience and taking over the world. All to the sounds of the latest hit by the Black Eyed Peas.

I'm just sayin..

- Farmer Ted

T-shirts talk...

Here in South Australia, the use of plastic lightweight shopping bags have been banned since midyear. While I applaud the effort if only for the trash reduction aspect, it does leave you in a lurch at times. Especially when it comes to unplanned buying of something so that you either didn't bring your own green bags or didn't bring enough of them.

Not to be caught napping, the two major supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, allow you to purchase durable heavy plastic shopping bags for 15-cents. These bags are interesting in that they are boldly printed with messages to make sure you know they are re-usable and exhortations not to just throw them away. These entreaties to use the bag again appear straightforward enough when you see them on the bag, however if you ask me they can take on a much more salacious note when the same message is printed on, say, a t-shirt.

So is it just me?

- Farmer Ted

Observing the Aussies: Hey Hey...

I would say something about this but I'm too utterly disappointed.

Not angry. Disappointed.

- Farmer Ted

Free trade...

I bought my first product from Cuba today at a store here in Australia.

Sure, that may not seem noteworthy to the rest of the world, but readers from the US know that is something never seen. As I decided I would make celebratory mojitos tonight for Butters and Illy, I went to the local bottle shop to purchase white rum. Looking at the dazzling array of offerings I found one that the type, price and size were right but the label was - unfamiliar. For a moment I just stared at it, seeing the label was written in spanish (nothing new, especially in the US) but puzzling over where it said it was from. I had to laugh at myself when I finally realized that "Cuba" in spanish was, in-truth, Cuba. Yes, that's how much we've been conditioned in the US - so that it doesn't even occur to us.

So I bought it. And while the the mojitos I serve will, I'm sure, be thirst quenching to the others; to me it will all be just a little bit cloak-and-dagger.

- Farmer Ted

Mindless marketing...

How do you know when the term "free range" has been overused?

Guess there's really nothing more I can add.

- Farmer Ted

Springing forward...

Nothing divides a country more than whether or not to observe the use of daylight savings time (DST). For the states in the US that don't use it, like Hawaii and Arizona, while state offices maintain one clock throughout the year federal offices, like the US Postal Service, do observe it to maintain schedules with other states. Thus if you were an Arizona - uh - an, opening and closing times would depend on when the rest of the US changed clocks. Here in Australia, the resistance to DST is a high art; with (historically) some states having their own dates to change the clocks or as now, some states not changing at all.

And while I've been neither a proponent nor detractor of the practice of DST, I definitely never bought the argument it saves energy.

But what gets me is the farmers are the most vocal complainers about having DST or not - something I don't understand. Does an eggplant really care about DST? Or when have cows worn a wristwatch?

"But then we'll have to get up just because the rest of the people do!" they exclaim.

Yeah, well, welcome to the real world.

- Farmer Ted

Who's the problem here...

Butters just went to the dentist yesterday and came home with very sore gums. While getting out the Peroxyl, my own visits to the dentist played out like an installment of the movie "Saw". What would always puzzle me is that after using the sharp instrument to jab into your pinky gums to "measure probing depths" the hygienist would invariably pronounce you at fault by saying,

"Oh, I see gum bleeding in there. You must have a lot of plaque buildup."

"No," I think to myself sarcastically, "it's because you're jabbing my gums with a sharp instrument they're bleeding." Now I say this to myself because, 1) my mouth is stuffed with dental cotton making talking impossible; 2) the hygienist still has the sharp sticker in her hand and my momma didn't raise no fools.

If you think this attitude that the patient being always in the wrong happens only at the dentist, you'd be mistaken.

On my last visit to the optometrist, I was put through the battery of so-called eye health tests before even seeing the doctor of optometry. Having the assistant have me do the chart reading test, the "round circle of bright lights glaring into your eyes" test, the "streaming bright vertical slits of light blindingly on your retinas" test and, worse, the glaucoma "puff of dessicating air into your wide open eyes" test. Finally being ushered, stumbling and half blind into the presence of the optometrist, the first thing the doctor observes to me is,

"I see your eyes are really red and irritated. You must have a problem with them."

This time, not being vaugely menaced by a sharp instrument, I could let this health professional know why my peepers were like that and just what I thought of the diagnosis. The faint response? "Oh, there is that."

(smugly) Let's just say the rest of the exam went by with no further fault finding.

- Farmer Ted

Would I lie to you...

Have you ever seen the US TV drama show "Lie to Me"? It's one of my favorites. In it a fictious team of consultants trained to detect deception in the tiniest discrepancies in the human face, body and voice solve crimes for everyone from the kid next door to the Department of Homeland Security. It's pretty ingenious really and one can't help testing yourself to see if you see what the actors are scripted to see. And of course, everyone who deos watch it thinks because of it they're an expert in detecting deception in others.

Including me.

I happened to see a news clip from Philadelphia news the other day. In it, the founder of the Community Academy Charter School, Mr Joseph Proietta, was commenting on the fact the feds had swooped down upon their offices and seized financial records. An honest-to-god Lie-to-me moment came in a bit of the interview on TV in the actions of Mr Proietta as he states, "...I'm confident [shaking his head] when everything is said and done that there is not going to be found anything [sic], any wrongdoing [nodding his head] ."

And from my extensive watching of "Lie to Me" season one? Ooooo! Somebody is in trouble...

- Farmer Ted

Observing the Aussies: What's in a name...

Did you know that in Australia they rarely use your middle initial on things?

It's not that people here don't have middle names or anything.

Hm. Maybe there's just not enough people in Australia that they figure they need 'em.

Yeah. That must be it.

- Farmer Ted

I care. Well, not really...

On a recent trip to the US, I happened to visit the local Kmart to try and get a few personal items to bring back with me to Australia.

Have you ever seen pictures in those news stories of the supermarkets in the then Soviet Union? You know where they show, like, two products on each shelf and long lines just to get them? Well that was what this Kmart was like. Dirty floors, poor lighting, shelves a mess with products tumbled about, missing or mislabeled items, and a checkout process that was took so long people actually gave up and left their carts where they stood in disgust.

How Kmart ever was in a position to buy Sears like it did is beyond me. But I digress.

When I got home, I was about to throw the Kmart receipt away when I noticed an entreaty at the bottom of it to go online and give them feedback of my experience. I don't know about you, but I tend to do these - both for good experiences and for bad ones - since it's the only way to make sure a store keeps doing something you like and stops doing something you don't.

So logging onto the site, I dutifully answered all the proffered questions, going into detail because especially if you rate something bad the stores wants you to explain why. After 15 minutes I got to the final exhortation to "Click to submit your survey and finish" that I dutifully, well, clicked. Only to be met with an otherwise blank page with these words written across it (in Times Roman bold, yet):

Survey Error
This survey has ended.
Results of this survey have probably been submitted.

"...have probably been submitted?" PROBABLY? WTF does that mean?
Yeah, you and I both know what it means: "I'm not listening anyway. Thanks for nothing, chump."

Well, "Once bitten," is all I have to say.

- Farmer Ted

Idiotic idioms...

Can you guess the well known (and overused) phrase depicted by the rebus below?

For some reason, it always struck me as a funny turn of phrase.

- Farmer Ted

The king is dead...

So the Rudd government here in Australia has finally ordered the breakup of Telstra: either split into a retail entity and an infrastructure entity, or face being barred from further access to possibly lucrative future wireless and adjacent markets.

For those of you on foreign shores, Telstra is the old AT&T/British Telecom of Australia; the telco that owns practically all the communications infrastructure in Australia due to that legacy position; from the phones in an Australian household, to the copper wires, to the switching equipment, to the transmission lines on down. And as a result, the broadband infrastructure as well as the largest wireless network. Once government owned, it was completely privatised as of 2006.

For my Australian readers, does any of this sound familiar:

• Controls all long-distance lines, thus limiting competitors’ growth simply by denying them connections to the national network
• Cuts rates in competitive markets keeping out other providers
• Charges high local rates or provides poor local service to other telephone service providers
• Implements a public-relations strategy to persuade both customers and the government that the telephone system was a “natural monopoly” – efficient, uniform, and reliable service in exchange for “rational” profits.

Do you think they're talking about Telstra? Nope, this is what they were saying about US telco giant AT&T before its historic breakup by the US Dept of Justice in 1982.And while how current Telstra shareholders do depend on how the shares are apportioned amongst the resultant companies, be ready for the old truism about "the parts being greater than the whole" to result if played correctly.

So stop whinging and relax: there's more choice and lower prices ahead, Australia.

- Farmer Ted

Two bits, four bits...

I've decided to give up trying to understand the system of coins here in Australia.

In this monetary system, there are 6 coins: 5-cent, 10-cent, 20-cent, 50-cent, $1 and $2. While the dollar coins are so novel I have no problems with them, I am forever getting the cents ones wrong. With the US having 5-cent, 10-cent and 25-cent in popular use, I'm having to change my entire way of thinking about, well, change.

Sure on first thought it seems simple, but its required all of my brain power to not look stupid paying for things. The most common scenario being confidently trying yet invariably using the wrong coins to pay for things; gaping stupidly as the the clerk keeps holding out their hand expectantly for the rest. Worse, being helpful they eventually just say how much more they need, often telling me the missing coins.

There are two ways I've found to not get into this embarrassing situation:

1) Hold out a handful of money and let the clerk take the correct change. Unfortunately that makes you appear as if you're either 4 years old or don't understand english; both patently not true since you don't have your mother with you and, in fact, had spoken to the clerk in english.

2) Pay only with dollar coins. While that seems the adult way to hide your monetary comprehension challenges, to your horror you receive back yet more of those dayum coins to get rid of. DOH!

Guess you really can't teach an old dog new tricks, eh?

- Farmer Ted

Little facts I can do without #4...

The London Daily Mail report on "10 Mystifying Human Habits" reports:

Scientist charged with tracking the motivation behind the habit of nose picking have concluded "there isn't any significant nutritional content in nasal mucous."

Oh.. my.. gawd.:-o

- Farmer Ted

Ashes to ashes...

The Australian cricket team is locked in battle with the England team in The Ashes 2009 tournament. Now everyone here knows that I have converted into a complete cricket nut (although Pigeon says not since I like Twenty20).

As with a participant in any professional sport, cricketers also find the need to stand out from the team in their own way. To express their individuality, as it were.

But there is a difference between being different and being just plain silly.

- Farmer Ted

Chatting with penguins...

I mentioned I was trying to create a Linux file server? Well I can yell, SUCCESS!

Yesterday after clicking the last check box all my home assets were able to log onto the Linux box and use it.

Butters was amazed that an old 80MB hard drive, AMD pre-core processor machine that was about to be trashed is now a Fedora 11-based 2TB file server for an increasingly storage-hungry home network.

Who can talk penguin?

- Farmer Ted (that's who!)

Most embarrassing moment (inebriated)...

While at work today, I overheard people describing what they did over the weekend, with Funke relating an embarrassing story about what happened when he had a little too much to drink once and then how it felt when he sobered up and remembered what happened.

Picture it: Manhattan, NYC, January 1998. It's a cold winter night and I meet up with two friends at a Lower East Side bar.

There I'm introduced to a drink I'd never heard of before: a vodka seven. Surprised at it's smoothness, I drink one. Then another. Then another. Soon I lose track. Much later, arm-in-arm, we three go forth into the deep frosty night to see what we could get into.

It is now near noon the next day and I have the worst hangover created by the heavens. As we stumble towards a subway entrance heading to brunch, I'm squinting even against the feeble winter sun when my glance happens to fall on a panhandler next to the turnstile. You've seen Alfred Hitchcock's Veritgo, right? When Jimmy Stewart's character is climbing the tower and there's that weird pull-back while falling sensation? That's what I experience horrific disjointed memories from the night before stabbed forth.

"Guys," I asked, still staring at the panhandler while annoyed New Yorkers pushed past me towards the entrance, "when we left the bar last night, was there a homeless person outside the bar?"

"Yes," one agreed.

"Was it a woman?" I pressed, "A homeless woman asking for money?"

"Sure was," said the other.

"And tell me," I continued, feeling truly sick. "Tell me I didn't stand there on the street giving her advice on how to panhandle. Tell me I didn't wish her good luck and then give her a big bear hug. Tell me I didn't.." I finished weakly, my head helplessly jerking from left to right under the onslaught of the surfacing vodka-laden memories.

"Sorry but that's exactly what you did," the first said with evil glee. "She was really REALLY annoyed."

And with that, my misery - and my most embarrasing inebriated moment - was cast.

What's yours? I won't tell. Promise.

- Farmer Ted

Fifteen candles...

Director John Hughes passed away yesterday. He was 59.

For me, Mr Hughes' films loomed large in my formative years, not the least of which is the movie Sixteen Candles from which my own blog moniker hails. Perhaps because his films entertained me (even when I knew better) and echoed my own life experiences (hey, we all carry a bit of teen angst even when an adult) that I'll always appreciate him.

So I pay homage to the man, his talent and his art.

- Farmer Ted

Not quite Ramsay Street...

National Night Out was this week in the US. For those not familiar, since 1984 NNO has been at its bare essence designed for folks to get to the know their neighbors and who lives in their neighborhoods; coordinating block parties, cookouts, flashlight walk arounds, and most importantly sitting on your porch or front steps ("stoops" as we call them in Philadelphia) and just talking to your neighbors. The rationale is simple: to build a sense of community. Your Farmer had participated in previous years and it's pretty cool.

NNO now has worldwide participation. Except in Australia where it appears to be unknown.

It puzzled me as to why until I thought about the different way the denizens of US & Australia live at home. In a fundamental architectural difference here, living spaces are in the back of the house and bedrooms in the front; while that reversal in the US meaning living areas are very visible to the street. And to ensure isolation, many houses in Australia are walled completely from the street meaning there is no front stoop or porch to be seen anyway; very different than in the US.
It's like if you're not located somewhere miles away from your neighbors, people here try to make sure it feels that way.

I guess NNO never comes to Ramsay Street.

- Farmer Ted

Flora and Fauna (4)...

Everyone agrees that the wildlife here in Australia is like no where else in the world. Especially joking about how many can kill ya.

Well, what do you think about spiders large enough to capture and eat birds?

~Shudder~

Anyone got a 55 gallon drum of Raid?

- Farmer Ted

Why bother...

Encountered on an automated teller machine screen I used this weekend:
So you tell me, why bother with the instruction at the bottom with the screen fairly shouting "Look at me! Look at what I'm doing!"

Sheesh.

- Farmer Ted

A rose by any other name..

This weekend I'm going to be performing a feat not done by the faint-hearted: I'm going to build my first file server for my home. And I'm going to do it using Linux.

I can hear some of you out there, saying "What a geek!" and "What kinda person would do that in his free time? I know..."

Interestingly, it's something I've really want to try to do. And besides, there are a lot of sweet things about being a geek. Just ask anyone.

- Farmer Ted

Observing the Aussies: Tabloid talk..

Newspaper headlines in Australia leave me puzzled, at a loss to imagine what the heck they're trying to tell me.

MACCA WANTED BROWN, blares The Adelaide Advertiser. I didn't guess it was about two sports figures.

CUCUMBER TRUCK HITS BUFF NEAR JUMPING CROCS, is splashed across The Northern Territory News front page. If you're like me, you know each of those words but put them together and it's like no phrase in english you've ever seen.

And maybe that's my trouble: perhaps it's not english but a sort of tabloid pidgin-australian, as it were. But papers in the US are not any better I guess:

VACS WACKS: CONCERNS OVER CC, screams The NY Post.

Uh,I say "The fat man has landed, the eagle walks alone."
So THERE!

- Farmer Ted

Little facts I can do without #3..

Seen on the side of a panel truck yesterday:

Delivering Excellence in Swine Reproduction

Does anyone else feel like washing their hands right about now?

- Farmer Ted

Shredded tweet..

The Colonel and I were talking today about Twitter.

As I've written before, social networking leaves me cold - as in with fear. I just don't like my business all out there for anyone to read. Like the poor guy who Twittered saying he was away from home and returned to find his house had been burgled. And call me apathetic, call me self-absorbed; but I honestly don't care about what other people are doing every minute of their day.

What is true is that most of our daily lives is singularly uninteresting to anyone except ourselves. I did surf onto someone blog that had their Twitter feed. After riveting posts like, "Just went to kitchen. Still nothing in frig." and, "I hate getting up for a wrong number on the phone." I was more perplexed than ever.

So why is Twitter such a hot thing right now?

I think because people are afraid they'll miss something. It's human nature. Take for an illustration the man who put a mini camera on his cat's collar certain that after he left the house each day the feline lived some sort of wild and crazy cat life. After getting home and checking the images he realized something profound:

All the cat did was sleep. It did nothing exciting at all.

So he had done that effort.. and waiting.. for nothing.

Twitterers take note.

- Farmer Ted

Life invisible no more...

Someone whom I consider a watershed writer has passed.

E. Lynn Harris died this past Thursday of undisclosed causes. He was 54.

I refer to Mr Harris the way I do not just because he was one of the first African-American authors I'd read intentionally for the experience. And notwithstanding the fact he was gay, but at the time I was reading his first book, Invisible Life, the nascent African-American mass market for books was getting started. Through a book club I belonged to, I discovered many other books by black authors: some excellent and some not so. And his first novel was like The Stonewall of the upsurge ushering it all in.

And so I say, simply, "Thanks, Mr Harris."

- Farmer Ted

Merry Xmas 2...

No, you're not reading wrong. It's just that tomorrow I'm celebrating my second annual Christmas in July celebration at the house with friends. As I mentioned last year at this time, now that it's cold with short days so that you want to snuggle up inside the house to a warm fire really seems like it should be the time for Christmas. And not when it's 90F and you're having a Xmas bbq like it is at calendar Christmas here in Australia.

Butters and I put together a menu to make any Christmas celebration proud: turkey with lemon stuffing, cranberry apple chutney, roast vegetables, candied yams and sourdough rolls; matched all up with cocktails and wines, including sparkling shiraz that Aussies insist you must have with turkey and you have a feast.

Yeah, I think this country does a disservice to itself by not having a bit of light and warmth during the coldest part of the year. Makes me appreciate home even more, I reckon.

- Farmer Ted