All of the swimming in Beijing has reminded me of the day that I came to the conclusion that swimming just wasn’t for me.
I was in primary school and was reluctantly taking part in the weekly school swimming trip to the AIS pool in Bruce. For one reason or another I was relegated to the half-length pool and the supervising teacher encouraged me to swim from one end to the other and back again. I’m not entirely sure why, but I decided to try to swim that distance as quickly as possible…perhaps I thought that the quicker I did that, the sooner the torment would be over.
Anyway, swimming as fast as I could, I managed to swim the entire 50 metres in just over five minutes, which means that I had reached the incredible speed of just under 10 metres per minute. It may have only been five and a bit minutes, but it felt like half an hour.
Not surprisingly, the teacher also agreed that swimming wasn’t my forte. I still had to go on the weekly swimming trips, but I didn’t have to enter a pool again.
Incidentally, whilst reading that, did you read “forte” as “for-tay” or “fort”? You may be interested to learn that technically, the correct pronunciation is “fort”. Answers.com explains with help from the American Heritage Dictionary:
USAGE NOTE: The word forte, coming from French fort, should properly be pronounced with one syllable, like the English word fort. Common usage, however, prefers the two-syllable pronunciation, (fôr’tā’), which has been influenced possibly by the music term forte borrowed from Italian. In a recent survey a strong majority of the Usage Panel, 74 percent, preferred the two-syllable pronunciation. The result is a delicate situation; speakers who are aware of the origin of the word may wish to continue to pronounce it as one syllable but at an increasing risk of puzzling their listeners.
Today is not a good day for me to have a headache which is gradually getting worse, and what feels like the start of a cold. If anybody wants to buy them from me, let me know…you can have them.
“Buy” might be the wrong word as I don’t intend on charging the recipient.
A few moments ago I walked downstairs muttering to myself, only to find Nattie peering out of her bed at me and giving me the “I’m trying to sleep here” look.
I then said to her “Don’t mind me, I’m just telling myself off for going completely cuckoo.”
Could this be a sign that I have finally lost it? (On the assumption that I had “it” to begin with).
And you’re trying to record your first episode of Editorial Echoes for quite some time, you can be guaranteed that all of the neighbourhood animals will start making a racket.
Unfortunately I now have to attend to other matters…hopefully the animals will have settled down in a couple hours.
One day it would be nice to have a “guest writer” who could fill-in for me from time to time, but until then I suppose the textual equivalent of silence will have to do. For those of you who are wondering (including the few who emailed to enquire about my location and well-being) I have been attempting to ignore the Internet for about a week. The break was good and will have to count as my planned “few days of holiday time” during my few weeks without work (pity, Melbourne would have been nice but the budget isn’t going to stretch that far at the moment).
Apart from a couple emails which required my almost immediate attention (including the fun of my eBay account being temporarily stolen in the wee hours of one morning…more on that later) and a few minor things for which Internet access was required, my break from the Internet was a success…and it proved something I already knew, I struggle to live without it.
The decision to take a break from the Internet was a snap decision taken at a time when I had confused myself quite thoroughly about what I actually want to do in the coming months…I decided that the best thing I could do would be to take a break from my normal activities to work things out. In addition to this, I may have unexpectedly come a step closer to understanding my depression and how to manage it. The break was very worthwhile and beneficial, and I have no intention of ruining it by jumping back in to the thick of things here with ten posts a day, or even half that…unless I get carried away, of course. With all things going to plan, it will take at least until the weekend for me to get back in to my normal, regular blogging routine. (Why did I set that alarm for 7:30am?, 1am was a much nicer time to be annoyed by it. 7:30am has a habit of coming when I’m trying to do other things such as concentrate on writing.)
Where was I? Ah, that’s right, at some stage over the coming days I will try to briefly summarise what I want to do over the coming months. I can’t promise to keep it brief, but I’ll try.
The only downside to my break is that I now have far too many emails to deal with. I’ll try to get through them over the next couple of days…I could easily get through them in a couple hours if I tried, but I hate rushing through emails…I’ve done it when enticed with payment to do so, but it really is just quite awful to have to do that.
Anyway, much to do, probably too much time on my hands in which to do the “much”, but we’ll see what happens.
Willie Nelson may sing about how he “just can’t wait to get on the road again”, but thankfully for me, the wait is over and has been since Saturday.
I picked up my new (used) car from Barrack Heights near Shellharbour on Saturday afternoon, a day which I can only describe as long. It’s probably a good thing that calendar days change without regard for whether a person has slept, as a calendar based on my sleep cycle would be quite difficult to use. I woke up on Friday around 11:30am and was awake for the remainder of that day. Between midnight and 5am on Saturday I did a number of things including preparing something to listen to during my journey to Barrack Heights…my original plan was to put a few podcasts and a handful of songs on an MP3 CD, but that plan had to be scrapped when I noticed that my portable CD player doesn’t work. I then switched to plan B, prepare four playlists of approximately forty-five minutes duration each and record them to tape. This plan also failed as I discovered after recording Side A.
In general, TDK audio cassettes marked as being of ninety minutes duration, usually have about 95 minutes of usable tape…in this case it was quite clear that something was wrong when my 48 minute playlist (the last few minutes of which were a piece of instrumental music) finished, and yet the stereo was still recording. I let it run for a couple more minutes before pulling the tape out of the cassette deck only to find that there was at least a sixth of the tape waiting to be consumed. I then played some of the recorded content back to find that it was a bit higher pitched and faster than usual…I would estimate that it was between 15% and 20% faster than usual. I’m not sure whether the tape was being run at a slower than usual speed during recording due to the tape being dubbed from a virtual cassette tape which may have confused the stereo due to the weight discrepancy between the virtual cassette and the real cassette, or if it is just a recently-developed fault with the recorder. I will have to investigate that and report back to you.
Anyway, with that failed experiment abandoned, and with my other tasks completed, I decided to go to bed for half an hour…as it happened I slept for an extra half an hour and had to bolt to the Jolimont Centre on Northbourne Avenue to catch my 7am bus to Sydney.
The run to Sydney was, as expected for a run I’ve done too many times to count, quite uninteresting, especially without the expected stimuli. Sydney itself was busy (also as expected, but this time due to World Youth Day…I doubt that Sydney would be expectedly busy simply because I didn’t have a CD or tape to listen to) and the bus was unable to set passengers down at Central Station, stopping about three blocks away instead.
I had lunch at Central Station and used the hour or so that I had to spare watching some of the trains, involuntarily learning the stations that the train on platform two was planning to visit (thankfully I only remember Dungog now), having a stroll around the streets surrounding Central Station, and spending about ten minutes on an awfully slow Internet terminal.
Around 11:40am I caught the South Coast train and enjoyed watching the world go by for a while, and I arrived at Oak Flats station a bit before 2pm. By 2:30pm I was leaving the area and heading down the Princes Highway in order to ensure that I stayed within radio range of the AFL coverage. I wasn’t able to pick up 2EC and the Geelong Cats V Western Bulldogs match until about 3:45pm but I did manage to stay in touch with it via the “around the grounds” reports during the ABC’s coverage of the Richmond V Essendon.
I was able to pick up 2GB by about 5:20pm and stayed with them to hear the NRL (the ABC’s signal was stronger in that area, but why would I want to listen to their coverage when I can listen to Andrew Moore and Steven Roach instead?) and, due to a deliberate detour within Canberra, I arrived home around 7:30pm.
I then, for whatever reason, despite being tired was unable to get to sleep later that night, so I stayed up until about 6:30am, which totalled 43 hours awake minus an hour in the middle. I’ve been awake for longer on previous occasions, but I’m not used to it at the moment and felt quite drained by the end of it…something which was cured by 14 hours of sleep, unfortunately requiring me to miss an engagement without notice.
Anyway, it’s good, and a relief, to be on the road again. Needless to say, I will be doing my best to make it much less eventful than last time.
All ten of them are marked police cars that were in the same place as me at various times between 2:30pm and 5pm today. I think that seeing four marked police cars per hour over a two and a half hour period, when I would normally be lucky to spot one marked police car per day, is as good a reason as any to be paranoid.
Where did I see the Police cars? I’m glad you asked:
Three of them passed me in rapid succession as I was walking down Ainslie Avenue shortly after 2:30pm.
Another one passed me on Northbourne Avenue (and turned on to the cross road that I was using the footpath of) as I was walking towards West Civic.
A fifth police car did much the same thing as the fourth one as I was heading back to the Civic bus interchange.
A sixth police car drove through the Civic bus interchange while I was having coffee at a coffee shop a few metres from the interchange.
A seventh police car passed the bus that I was travelling on as it headed down Athllon Drive towards Tuggeranong.
An eighth police car passed the same bus just as it was about to turn in to the Tuggeranong bus interchange.
The ninth and tenth police cars passed the bus I caught back to Civic as it was travelling along Athllon Drive, a few minutes before 5pm.
Yesterday I wrote a rather long blog post titled “So, a week is gone, and another one is here“. Since then I have received a handful of emails from people who were concerned by my references to suicide in that post.
Firstly, I should point out that I have no intention of committing suicide. Admittedly, people who have tried to commit suicide at least once are statistically more likely to try again than those who haven’t tried at all, but I don’t actually want to try again. I have a number of reasons for that, but I think the memory of how ill I made myself and how lousy I felt afterwards will be enough to dissuade me for quite a while.
Secondly, yesterday’s blog post should have contained at least three more paragraphs to spell this out. I decided not to include them because I got stuck whilst writing the second of those paragraphs, couldn’t decide exactly what I wanted to write, and came to the conclusion that they weren’t really on-topic anyway.
The basic gist of the paragraphs was that a few weeks ago a friend of mine wrote a rather long blog post which reminded me slightly of what I had written. It was basically a summary of where they believed they were in life, why they weren’t happy with their position, and what they thought they needed to do in order to move on. When I read it, I became concerned that they were close to suicide. It turns out that they weren’t, but I was concerned anyway.
Because my blog post reminded me of their blog post (although they didn’t actually mention suicide in their blog post), I came to the conclusion that people reading my blog post may become concerned for my welfare, even though I didn’t intend on making any rash decisions, or intend on alarming anyone.
It looks like I was right. I alarmed a few people, and all because I couldn’t make a few extra paragraphs make sense.
I’m sorry if I concerned you; that wasn’t my intention and I want to make it clear that you have no need to be concerned.
I should also thank the people who were concerned enough to write to me. It is very moving to know that there are people out there who, even though in reality they barely know me, are concerned enough about my well-being to write to me and offer their support. Thank you.
In a way, I’m glad that I couldn’t work out what to do with those paragraphs yesterday. If I had worked it out, I wouldn’t have seen one of the better sides of human nature, which is something I think I really needed to see.
And finally it sinks in, it’s a Monday morning, and for the first time that I can remember in a very very long time, I’m not at the beck and call of somebody else. Yes that is correct, I am unemployed.
The duration of this unemployment is yet to be decided, but will probably be in the order of weeks, although a handful of people have the power to make it less and if they decide to do so then I will be happy with that, but otherwise I will enjoy my few weeks of relative freedom.
The last time I took any proper leave from work was in October last year when I took two weeks off, one of which I spent in Sydney. It looks like I’ve built up a reasonable leave balance since then and I’ll be quite happily living off the payout from that for a few weeks.
For those of you who aren’t aware, I resigned from AussieHQ about a month and a half ago. Originally I was going to finish up on Friday June 13, but this date was pushed back by mutual agreement and I finished up on Friday July 11 instead, the last couple weeks of which I have spent working from home, which is rather fortunate considering my current lack of personal motorised transport.
Last week was somewhat quieter than usual on this blog due to my week being somewhat more hectic than usual. On top of working, I had half a dozen personal administrative matters to sort out, and I spent most of Monday and Tuesday in bed with food poisoning…well, that’s technically accurate, but not the full story.
“Food Poisoning” is definitely technically accurate, after all I ingested something which didn’t agree with my body and I became quite ill as a result, the full story isn’t quite as innocent though. If we go back to the early hours of Monday last week, everything “just got to me” and I hit what I would describe as being my most depressed state yet. I have previously reached the point of writing a suicide note and scheduling it to appear here a few hours later, only to eventually come to my senses and delete the note. On Monday I didn’t write a note, I just decided that taking 2600% of my daily dose of anti-depressants would do the job…I was wrong. Within half an hour I was very sick and I spent the better part of the next two days in a “zonked” state, clearly a large dose of the drug made its way in to my bloodstream before my body could deal with it, and it had quite an effect.
Thankfully the work I needed to do on Monday and Tuesday didn’t require an awful lot of concentration and I was able to take care of it by sitting in bed with my laptop.
To answer the obvious questions, yes I feel better (both physically and mentally) now, and no, I don’t want to do that again. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that failed suicide attempt turns me off trying for a very very long time. Apart from being zonked for a while, I had an utterly awful taste stuck in my mouth for about four days. To understand the taste, imagine chewing any random medication you happen to have, multiply the awfulness of the taste by about three hundred, add the taste of vomiting, and there you have it, an absolutely awful taste for four days, and a really really bad memory for life.
Of course, I’m happy that I’m over that, and I feel much better now knowing that I’m not actually compelled to do anything at this very moment by virtue of employment. I could have breakfast now, or this afternoon, or just skip breakfast completely, sleep until midday, have lunch and the rest of the day’s meals in their normal sequence, and have breakfast before I next go to sleep. Regardless of what I do, nobody is actually waiting for me to do something for them or turn up somewhere, and I’m not going to get an earful and be disciplined for not doing such.
It’s not that I don’t like work…it’s just that I pretty much lost interest in the job I as doing, and I’m happy to put it behind me. Whilst it was nice to know that it was almost over, it’s much nicer to know that it actually is over.
With things looking up from a work (or lack thereof) perspective, and with me looking forward to taking a break for a few weeks, I’m pleased to say that things are also looking good from a personal transport perspective. I’ll be back on the road on Saturday afternoon, after which I’ll be in a much better position to spend a bit of time out of Canberra, and take care of a few projects and trips I’ve been putting off for some time.
That reminds me. I was planning on starting a new podcast this month. The plan was for a weekly online talkback program recorded live and released as a podcast. I haven’t had any time to deal with my plans for that lately, so I don’t know if it will actually happen this month, but it’s coming and is back near the top of my priority list.
I’ve got a lot to do, and a good amount of time in which to do it. This should be a good few weeks.
Apparently it just takes four beers in the space of 60-90 minutes (I don’t recall how long it was) when I’m on anti-depressants and painkillers to get me drunk enough for people to want to record embarrassing videos of me talking nonsensically.
I promised to post the video online, so for better or for worse, here it is.
I’ve previously had about the same amount to drink in about the same amount of time when not on medication, and it didn’t have anywhere near as much effect. That said, no excuses from me, I just don’t handle alcohol well. I’m pleased that there was no hangover, but it’s possible that I slept for too long (approximately sixteen hours) for that to happen.
This was last night (Friday the 4th) if you’re wondering.
Following on from my car crash last night, all of the “what ifs” surrounding it have been running through my mind. I’m surprised that I managed to get any sleep last night with various parts of my body trying to punish me with pain.
Ultimately it was my own stupidity that caused that crash and I’m not going to try to diminish my responsibility for it. I am going to try to work through the “what ifs” though, so that I can try to understand what was going through my head at the time, and to help me learn from the experience.
After the crash it occurred to me that if I hadn’t managed to miss an appointment with a neurologist yesterday morning (which has since been rescheduled now that I have realised my mistake), I probably wouldn’t have had the money to pay for the tow truck. But what if I had gone to see the neurologist? Would I have then made my trip in to Weston once I was finished with the doctor? If so, would I still have crashed on the way home from Weston?
I believe that I would have gone to Weston and that I probably would have avoided the crash because:
1. The roads were dry at that time of the day.
2. With more traffic, I wouldn’t have been speeding.
Then there are the immediately more relevant questions:
What if I’d gone home a couple hours earlier rather than sticking around and going to the Weston Club for a while? (And before you ask, no, I wasn’t drinking…although I’m surprised that the Police didn’t bother to breath test me)
More traffic, and it was still raining at that time. I probably would have been driving slower…in fact the stupid thing is that I left Weston, drove around for a bit and went back, if I had just gone home, I doubt that this would have happened.
What if I had stayed in Weston for longer?
I doubt that it would have made a difference. I would have been driving just as fast, and the roads would have been slippery, not to mention the impossible winds on Parkes Way at the time. It probably would have been just as bad, if not worse.
What if I had a passenger at the time?
That might have saved me. I’ve noticed that I’m more cautious when I have a passenger than when I’m on my own. I knew that I was going too fast last night, and there is no way that I would have done that if I had a passenger in the car. With a passenger, I highly doubt that there would have been an accident to talk about.
OK, but what if I’d had the accident anyway?
The passenger would have come off worse than I did as pretty much everything that was loose in the car (eg the CD cases in the console, my mobile phone, my glasses which flew off my head, and even the dirt from the side of the road after the windscreen was pushed back a bit) flew in that direction. The structure of the body of the car survived, so the passenger wouldn’t have been too bad, but the debris flying in their direction could have done some serious damage. In fact it could easily have flown in the other direction and injured me.
There are more “what ifs” where they came from, but I’m going to wait until I’ve spoken with the Police today before I write any of them.
I should have known that yesterday was going to be weird from the moment that some drug-crazed nut interrupted me to babble about “gear” and “five dollars” before wandering off as quickly as they had appeared. I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but I feel like telling the story anyway.
I’m lucky to be alive, but considering that I often struggle to feel safe in vehicles being driven by others, and that I don’t trust myself now (I’m still debating whether I ever want to drive again), I think I’ve just put myself in my very own psychological hell.
One day a time for now I suppose…and this one is not going to be one of my best.
This evening at about 8:05pm I rolled my car on Parkes Way. I was stupidly going too fast in wet conditions and lost control on a bend, the details are a bit hazy but I believe I hit the gutter and rolled once, landing in the left hand lane. It was impossible to move the car on to the shoulder so I tried to get it across to the median strip, however the car stopped with the rear wheels on the road.
Surprisingly I managed to escape with only a small bump to the head, and a slightly grazed shoulder and knee. The main body of the car survived almost intact whilst the boot and most of the front of the car were demolished. The police officers who attended the scene were surprised that I was still standing.
Thank you to the people who stopped to check if I needed any assistance, especially the couple in the ute who parked on the median strip to flash their lights at oncoming traffic to warn them about my car protruding on to the road on a blind corner…not that they all paid attention. Also a big thanks to a friend who took my call and sent me the phone number for a tow truck.
I’ll be heading down to the Civic police station tomorrow to hand in the accident report, it will be interesting to see what happens after that.
I don’t know if any of you remember PodZinger as it came and went from the public spotlight very very quickly a few years ago, but basically it was a semi-promising new search engine which aimed to automatically index and transcribe podcasts. If it worked, it would have been a good way to find information in what is otherwise an awful medium to search.
But of course, it was doomed from the beginning as anybody who has ever used voice recognition software would have known. To get a computer to recognise a voice with any amount of accuracy, you have to train it. Usually this involves two steps, the initial preset “read these sentences” training exercises where the computer gets to hear you say things that is asks you to say, and then the ongoing “no, I said “cat” not “hat”, the hat is not in the hat, the cat is in the hat…no, the cat is not in the cat either” intermittent corrections which also help the computer to learn how to understand your voice.
The reason we need to teach the computer how to do recognise an individual’s voice is that everyone has a slightly different voice and a slightly different speech pattern…and if humans who are predisposed to understanding the speech of other humans have difficulty understanding people with accents, what hope does an untrained computer have?
As far as I can tell, PodZinger had no form of quality control…the robot listened to the audio, produced a mangled transcript of it, and nobody bothered to check the accuracy of it. A system where corrections could be submitted by listeners could have worked better, but I don’t think PodZinger were ever interested in having masses of voice samples floating around in their system, nor do I think that having masses of voice samples from different people would have helped with individual transcriptions.
So, why am I babbling about an ultimately failed search engine of little-to-know consequence? Because they’re still around under a different name (EveryZing) doing much the same thing, albeit with expansions in to the more profitable and sane market of search engine optimisation, and expecting people to pay them for it. Maybe the transcription software is better today than it was in 2007, but I wouldn’t be willing to pay them in order to test the theory.
I noticed that they are still around on the weekend when I was wondering if they are still around and was shocked to find that they are. They also have all of their old archives…and if you search for my name, you can be informed about my Chinese communist leanings by their transcription robot.
It has transcribed the Feedback segment from Samuel’s Persiflage #13, specifically the section from 47 minutes and 58 seconds. According to their robot, in that segment I said:
can go to get sort of course if you concentrate back podcasted Samuel Gordon Stewart — Communists the email address or you can leave comments in the China nights or irritants Samuels who supplies were sought to
Maybe the robot’s ears are blocked, because when I listen to that segment, I hear:
feedback to get through and of course if you’ve got some feedback, podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com is the email address or you could uh leave the comments in the show notes or go to the samuel’s persiflage website and
That said, I have been (jokingly) accused of encoding secret messages in Samuel’s Persiflage…maybe they were on to something…I would have to be among the last people on Earth that anybody would consider as a possible communist, so I would have to be the perfect vessel for hiding and broadcasting such messages.
It leaves me pondering the question: “Why am I giving the conspiracy nuts something to work with?”
