Secret Mens Business

What every man needs is a Gurney. It gives us the three things any man needs for a spiritual experience. Instant Results. Men love instant results. With a gurney you got dirty concrete then its clean. None of this what are you thinking stuff. No emotions involved, no discussion. Secondly it involves repetitive, mindless motion. In the words of a famous standup comic, men's minds are made up of tiny little boxes. Each box can contain only one thing. Everything has a box, everything should be put in its right box. Except our nothing box. We have one box with nothing in it. Its our favourite box. The best way to get into our nothing box is to do something with mindless repetitive motion.
Thirdly and most importantly it has a motor. Any man will tell you that there is nothing better than the sound of a Briggs and Stratton in the morning.
So, instant results, mindless motion and the sound of a motor in the morning, means for me a wonderful mid semester break

The Mangoplah-Cookadinia United Reunion

I was so sad to miss the 100th year reunion of my football team. No not rugby, that’s not football. That’s 26 arseholes chasing a bag of wind, an import by thickheaded Englishmen.
No I mean our game, aussie rules. In my youth, it was one of our only community entertainments. In those days your heroes were locals. Every Saturday as you came in the gates of the footy ground, families parked their cars in the same place and put the same rug over the fence so you always knew who was there. If by some terrible tragedy you were not able to attend the game, all you had to do was drive past the Mangoplah pub in the evening. If there were no cars there we had lost.
Game day was a kind of semi religious experience. It was the only time my grandfather cooked, steak and eggs for my father and three uncles, accompanied by precise instructions on the only way we could beat those mongrels from Henty today.
I can remember to this day the smell of the liniment in the dressing rooms as we all listened intently to the captains pregame instructions, and watched little Lyle (our medic and masseuse) rubbing down and strapping the players. If you got scattered, shirt fronted by big Bill Box from Henty who hated us all equally, laying there fighting for a breathe, everything hurting except the roof of your mouth and you saw little Lyle running out to attend you with his Gladstone medical bag, you did everything humanly possible to get to your feet before he got there. The only bloody things in that medical bag were Bex powders which he stuffed down your throat dry and smelling salts (now highly illegal). My uncle remembers running past some poor barstard being attended to by our medic, his heels drumming on the ground as little Lyle jammed a vial of smelling salts up his nostrils.
As a fifteen year old it was a dream come true to be picked to play in this team. My uncle H who was my hero taught me to kick with both feet when I was just a five year old. The family was proud to say that our boys were good enough to play in Melbourne.
When I got older and came home every year to help with shearing and the harvest, the first evening home was down to the pub with Dad. The pub walls were a shrine to the football team, a vertical history of triumphs and team photos way back to the one where they all wore hats and work boots with the odd pipe to be seen. Many of the players from my Dads generation would still be there leaning on the bar, I would listen with fond memories to the reliving of games where every year the kicks got longer the marks got higher, and the fights got tougher.
They were admirable men, we don’t make them like that any more, they didn’t play for money, they played for their town. They believed in sportsmanship. They took young men like me under their wing and believed playing the game fair and square could build character. My wonderful aunt sent me the photos of the event and as I write this I look at two photos years apart, as young men and old men. I was there in spirit, and I remember the ones not in the reunion photo who have passed away. I pay tribute to them all.

My Hurting Country

Back from the Easter Break. I travelled back to my home country in the Riverina. We have been farmers in the area since the 1850's. It was a terrible shock. Trees that have been familiar friends since I was a child are dead and dying. Dust storms, the scourge of the 1930's are back, because the irrigation areas out around Finley and Deniliquin are gone. You can smell the dust in the air and the sunsets were blood red. My Grandfather would start sowing the years wheat crop on the 1st of March without fail, knowing the rains would come. I drove hundreds of kilometres around my district and did not see a single plowed paddock. The paddocks were bare and desolate, and rarely did I see any stock. If I did they were poor and skinny. Not in my families recorded memory have things been so bad. My cousin did ring last night to say they got some rain after I left and everyone is madly sowing wheat, hoping for follow up rain in the next few weeks to try and salvage something of the season. I got back to hear everyone complaining about the rain here on the North Coast. Please never complain about rain.

The Weird turn Pro

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

– Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S Thompson, god bless his cotton socks was a Gonzo Journalist. Accepted Journalistic practice is never to put yourself in the piece, third person only, no personal opinion. Journalists and writers like Hunter S ignored this. Gonzo's were blogger's before the Internet was invented.

His quote is very apt for the times we now live in.

A computer programmer called Michael Osinski is being blamed for causing the world financial meltdown. He is now picking oysters out of some ice bound hell hole in the far north. 

To get a handle on the toxic self destructive timebomb created by the Gordon Gekko's of Wall Street, read this great article.

To see how things have not changed since the Bush bailouts, read this and weep! 

Whimper and not a bang

This was the Week that was!

Well the conficker worm that was going to nail us all on April Fools day came and went with barely a bang, more like a murmur.

New research points the need for bosses to set aside some web bludging time for their workers if they expect extra productivity in these troubled times.

Bosses who sack workers for putting up their facebook status things like " I hate my job" may well be illegal. So it should be, it would be a mongrel act in the land of a fair go. Would it not?

Computer gamers develop sharper eye sight. We all knew that right!

Have a good weekend.

Welcome

The first day of my blog has been wild and windy.

The storms that trashed Coffs Harbour are heading our way.

The CGVE kids had a birthday party for one of their friends in the student lounge today. I was doing my lesson preparation to the sounds of fun and balloons popping. Took a break from Dreamweaver to steal the odd potato chip.

One of our favourite teachers, Norma who retired last year provided morning tea and proudly introduced her beautiful new granddaughter to us all. I tried to enrol the child in an IT course but apparently, 6 months old is too young. They haven't heard of "hot housing" obviously.

I'm starting this blog to:

• Reveal the hard working life of a dedicated TAFE IT Teacher who loves his job.
  
• Demonstrate to students the new emerging Web Technologies available.
  
• Push my own learning curve.
  
• Find students who I have taught in the AG12 computer room since 1987.
  
• See if anyone out there remembers me throwing the Apricot computer out the window in 1988.
  
• To have something else to do while I'm watching the ABC News.
  
• Inform my Students of current issues I want them to be aware of.
• Practice typing under water with my mouth full of marbles.

Pete