Singular Scene

So Singular in Each Particular

Connective

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I spend ridiculous amounts of time online.  I know, you can scarcely believe it, can you?!  It, however, is completely true. I am online all day and half the night. In defense of this lifestyle, I am compelled to point out that I do also have IRL friends and relations, and that I do spend a healthy amount of quality time with them.  So it’s kind of interesting to me that I feel as though this year is all about  connecting some of those bits and bytes with flesh and bone and actually getting out from behind the laptop and meeting some of these strange and unusual creatures who also inhabit this thing called cyberspace.

I actually hadn’t quite realised this is what was going to happen this year, I seem to have stumbled into it… it started, as previously mentioned with the ABC or, at least the plans started. In actual fact ‘it’ will  start this weekend with my embarking on a short trip down south of the border to attend WordCamp Melbourne 2011.  I know, a whole 2 day conference devoted to all things WordPress (you thought it was  Bible Camp, didn’t you… hah, gotcha!).

A whole weekend of not only people who USE WordPress… but people who CODE for it.

I am giddy.

I am also working on being fully confident of NOT being completely intimidated by the nerds and code gurus who will be there but <positive affirmation>I will be unfazed. I am the Web Princess.  I am a coder. I use WordPress. I code for WordPress therefore I will be just fine. </ positive affirmation >.

Bonus is that I get to hang out with a couple of great (real flesh and bone type) friends who’ve moved there this year, one of whom is Bliss, who moved for a fella, no less, one she’s going to MARRY! And she met him on the INTERNET!!! Seriously, read the linked post to understand the magnitude that is Bliss meeting the MOHD on the internet thing.

Diagnosis: Geek

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As is not uncommon at this time of the year I’ve been mentally revisiting the previous year which actually was somewhat extended into revisiting 1981 – my first year at high school (and the years following up till the late 90’s).  I believe if I knew then what I know now my life would look very different.  Not necessarily better… but different.

  1. I preferred to spend my lunch hours in the library.
  2. While I was rubbish at maths and physics I was rather excellent at biology and other natural sciences.
  3. I wrote programs in BASIC and Pascall in Applied Computing and was actually quite good at it.
  4. I saw a mouse for the first time demonstrated on an Apple IIc – this made a monumental impression on me.
  5. I loved movies like Tron, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T, Ghostbusters, Goonies and Gremlins.
  6. I read MAD magazine at the public library (there was no budget for our own copies) rather than whatever the equivalent of Dolly was at the time.
  7. I had no idea about formal dresses and so had my mother make me something dreadful for my High School formal.  I cringe still, and no, there aren’t photos.  I didn’t go with a boy.
  8. I didn’t have to sit my University Entrance exams due to the  (now outmoded) process of accreditation… This was due to natural smarts and having sucked up to the teachers throughout the year sufficiently that my only marginally above average marks (due to lazy arse) scraped me in… had I had to sit the exam I would have been a quite badly off.

These are only some of the indicators that as a teenager I was a bit of a geek; I didn’t even know what a geek was and neither did my family. None of my quirks in the area of computing were encouraged, I mean, it was a country school and I was  GIRL and no one had any idea where things would go with computers… so I went to work for a bank.

I was never cool.

Geekery is cool these days… and Katie is a case in point – a little girl with a thing for StarWars became an internet sensation… and out of the woodwork came all these other people, girls and guys alike who like geeky things.  She’s by no means the spearhead, geekery has been becoming cool for a while (think the Big Bang Theory, Bones, ).

I would have liked being a geek to have been cool when I was at school and for people of the internet to be behind me in the things I loved back then (oh, wait… the world wide web really didn’t exist then) … but I’ll be happy instead that being a geek now is basically pretty darn ok, and that I can see what I was then and be happy that not loving girly frou frou and preferring the indoors and books and computer games is nothing of which she need feel ashamed.  I can look back and hug that geeky teen in me and tell her that one day all those things she loved would come full circle…

…and she’d be part of the cool crowd.

Squeaking In

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I really only have 8 minutes to post this before the midnight deadline so it will be brief… The blogging about dating websites is in the pipeline but my emotional bandwidth to cover it is a bit thin – and I’m tired so instead I shall leave you with a look at my latest venture… my website.

Not a website I’ve been working on for anyone else but MINE. The one for the business that keeps me in the lifestyle to which I’m becoming accustomed… you know, one where you’re I’m not in shedloads of debt and in which I get to work every day doing stuff I love. I know, I’m so ridiculously blessed… In any case, I won’t keep you in suspenders anylonger… go over, have a look! !

http://www.as-scene.com.au and if you like it… would you ‘LIKE’ it?? There’s a ‘f’ button in the welcome panel, if you would click that, I’d be grateful!…

I’d really appreciate the support, thanks!

Home Office

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office.jpg
It’s been quite some time since I arranged myself a corner of the flat into a office space, one that was suitable for both work and study.  I deemed it necessary because a) it makes a percentage of my home expenses tax deductible and b) because when I’m working on stuff it really is a lot easier to get into the right head-space if I’m actually ‘at work’ even if it is only 3 steps from the sofa.  It’s a bit of a weird psychological thing but I find myself a lot less easily distracted when I’m looking the to do list on the white board and am working with a keyboard and mouse than when I’m sitting on the sofa with a cat and the laptop on my lap and am also easily distracted onto sites like facebook… It also makes a difference when I actually get dressed for ‘work’ rather than hanging about in my pajamas… (oh, wait… I don’t… er… this is awkward.)

So, there it is above, my little office!!!  No, it doesn’t really have natural light, but in reality, neither does the flat as a whole, which is a bonus in this heatwave.  The flat’s always about 10degC cooler than the outdoors.  The table is actually my dining table around which there used to be 4 chairs… Now I have to dismantle the office when I want to have anyone over to dinner… bummer that, in fact, most of the time we end up eating off our plates on our knees…  (Ed. God, this is boring… haven’t you got anything else?) so now you know how to picture me when I’m blogging, as I’m now (Ed. except for the pajamas part, you don’t want them picturing that… Me. True enough… er, as you were everyone.)

I twittered during the week about having 2 Macs on the go and whether or not I was in heaven or the other place.  I think, after a whole lot of toing and froing to my serviceman (whom I <3 with all my Mac loving little heart) I can finally say I’m a happy Mac camper again… it was touch and go for a while there…  The new love pictured above is an older version of the old love which was given to me by ‘real job’ in lieu of certain other entitlements I had been pinning a bit of hope on.  I accepted it, probably slightly less than graciously because the offer was made after I’d spent half an hour talking over the merits of a brand spanking new MacBook Pro with my sales agent and getting all excited about the prospect of this fancy new machine.  So to take on the older one, while clearly saving me going into debt or onto a lease for a new machine was a bit of a downgrade…

In a rather ironic turn of events the new mac (which is an older mac) had been in possession of another staff member who’d just upgraded and actually, its hard-drive DIED the day before she went overseas… so I have been holding onto my old mac (which is a newer mac) until such a time as I could transistion to the other machine.  Well that was the heaven/hell episode last week, I got the new one and it gave me all manner of grief as I tried to get it into some kind of functional order… bah humbug.

Finally, I took it back to my lovely service man and bless his little cotton socks if he didn’t actually replace both sticks of RAM in the machine for no cost… zero. <3 <3 <3.  So finally I bought it home and was able to get it into a place where it is barely any different than the old machine (which is newer… you get the idea now, right?!).  So, I’m finally feeling the blessing of the machine.  It still looks good, it works fine with one lingering exception I’m waiting for an answer on from my fabulous service man as to why it’s such a noisy beastie and when that is resolved I shall be in fine shape to get my game on for the epic that shall be called ‘study09’. 

So, I am blessed. I was given a MacBook Pro and my leaving gift from the office will be some rather expensive software that I’ll be needing this year and when all of that is in order the ‘real job’ era will be completely over.  I cannot tell you, even after the shaky end to it all, how fabulous it feels to be in a whole new chapter of my story! 

So, here’s to a new year! Hopefully one that will include more blogging, even if it is tedious drivel like the above…