My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>Fiction</span>

Category: Fiction

Adrift in a sea of intoxication

My first alcoholic drink was sometime in Wagga Wagga, a large town in the Riverina district of NSW on the west coast of Australia. Rich farming country that bred healthy football players and at least one famous cricket player. Anyway, the first drink was from a long neck of Crown Lager or Fosters while our parents were out. My twin sister and I tasted the beer and then screwed up our faces in revulsion. How could our parents and their friends drink so much? The next day, my mother found evidence of the stolen beer and come down upon us …

Monday

Some fiction about the anxieties of Monday You know how it works. You wake, get in the shower, brush your teeth, chuck on some clothes, grab some toast and your bag, and rush out the door. It’s like any other Monday. At the train station there is a man you don’t recognise from the normal 7.13 commuter crew, smoking at the end of the platform. Despite the weather he is wearing a heavy coat and has curious slicked-back hair that is thinning. The slick-back is a statement of defiance. Fuck you baldness. I’m proud. The acrid smoke stings your nostrils …

It’s all good, until the lawyers get involved

After the initial joy at the birth of a new project, every little project needs to put on a pair of big person pants and grow up. As in life, this isn’t always easy, and sometimes you may need to talk to the lawyers. Take the behemoth Google as an example of the world’s most successful startup. They have a lot of lawyers and a lot of users, and there is a massive tension between the users wanting the aspirational spirit of a startup, and the hard-nosed capitalists running Google.  The unofficial Google motto, “don’t be evil”, created by Paul Buchheit in …

Why there are no stupid users online

When you’re one of the cool kids, it is pretty easy to forget that not everyone is in the cool club. In fact, some people are so far removed from the cool club that they haven’t heard of Twitter, social media, ecommerce, WordPress, Android, the Nexus 1, or the RunKeeper iPhone application. But generally, every human living in an advanced economy who can read has heard of Google and Facebook. We’re so connected these days that it is easy to forget that there are a bunch of people who are not connected; who are yet to realise the liberating potential …

Jumping the sofa, or how to be good at what you do

Once upon a time there was a Hollywood star called Tom Cruise who had the world at his feet. He was famous, rich and in love with a beautiful young woman called Katie. Being rich and successful, woman loved him and men envied him. Then one day late in 2005 whilst talking with talk-show host Oprah, Tom celebrated his success and the joy of life by dancing a jig on her sofa; by jumping the sofa. Tom’s fans were appalled and ashamed for him. This irrational exuberance was not the Tom they loved and respected, it was a freaky guy …

Beware the fexpert

An expert is an almighty and powerful entity. The expert arrives in town to the sound of cannon firing, jets displaying tricks above, an appreciative crowd and a gleeful clanging marching band. A fexpert is a fake or faux expert (aka guru) and they tend to slink into town with no one noticing. Some Fexperts even carry their own one man band just to make sure you know that they are there. Whilst some folks might specialise in an area and have a good knowledge of the tricks, the tips and the pitfalls, few are experts. An expert, as the …

The buzz of social media

Google just released Google Buzz which has demands that we “go beyond status messages”. To me this appears to echo the feeling many people had, including me, when confronted with micro-blogging sites like Twitter – so what. It represents a profound misunderstanding of what a status message actually is. Status messages are really: part of a conversation the start of a conversation a cry for help a complaint a grandiose aphorism about what’s wrong with the world a proclamation of love and of course a comedy. Whilst twitter and Facebook might appear to a Google engineer to be merely a …

All that is solid melts into the air

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” When Marx wrote the great line above he was describing the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgious for control of the means of production; he was describing capitalism and the paradoxical desire for continual change and improvement. For Marx capitalism is a disruptive historical event that shatters existing social structures and illusions. Life is chaotic and fleeting. To survive, one must face up to …

Le Monde

There was once a bar unique amongst others in Melbourne – Le Monde. For a start it was a bar. The drinking culture in the old days was pubs and nightclubs; barns for drinking beer and getting messy. I spent many a happy night drinking, dancing and indulging in bad pickup lines. I was an expert at the bad pickup lines. Le Monde was a tiny little place, dark and sleek it bought a European sensibility to the top end of the city. I was lucky enough to work at Le Monde for a 6 months, the 7am to 12pm …

When I was young everything was different

When I was 15 my chief concerns were sneaking cigarettes and my hair. I didn’t read the newspaper, rather I watched the TV news with my parents as bored as hell. The Berlin Wall was to stand for another 5 years and Ronald Reagan was talking about God a lot, even though he didn’t go to church. I was opinionated and selfish. Like most teenagers. The announcement last week that some research about how teenagers consume media released by Morgan Stanley and written by a 15 year old intern was received with breathless excitement. This kid had apparently clearly and …