Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Back in 2002 at the STC Conference in Nashville I met two of *THE* gurus in the Help authoring world – my great friend Char, and MJ.

MJ lived in Nashville, and I spent some extra time at her house, getting some RoboHelp training from her, meeting her family, and generally hanging out and having a nice time (and some good food – she’s a great cook!). During the conference, we continued to meet up (as you do), and MJ and I kept in good email contact for a time. After the certified RoboHelp trainers got shafted by Blue Sky/eHelp as it was then, MJ dropped off the radar. She didn’t respond to emails, phone calls from concerned colleagues and friends, etc.

About 3 months later, just like a ground hog, she popped up again with an  explanation, then as quickly disappeared again. We knew she continued to live in Nashville with her family, but after no response, I guess her old colleagues just gave up. But at every conference, someone would ask if anyone had heard from MJ. No-one had.

So, what makes me write about this connection now? Well, I had a few spare minutes the other day and decide to clear out some old emails in my Inbox. I scrolled down to 2003 and started there – and one of the first I came across was MJ’s explanation for her disappearance off our respective radars.

That was the trigger to go a’hunting on Google! And within a few minutes I had found her – what she was doing now (still writing a lot, but not technical writing any more), her current website, etc., and I decided to email her to see if she wanted to renew the contact from a few years ago. Some hours later (morning for me), in my Inbox was a lovely email from MJ, and over the past week we’ve exchanged quite a few more. She has headed in quite a different direction – and it’s all good for her.

Without Google (or similar) it would’ve been much harder to track her down, so thank you Google for providing the mechanism that allowed two people to reconnect.

BTW, I never did get back to clearing out those old emails!

Some years ago I had the pleasure of working with Whitney – one of the best writers and editors I know. I had never met her, but we communicated well via email between our respective locations in the USA and Australia. Together we worked on a professional interest group’s newsletter and some articles, and I finally got to meet her at the annual STC Conference in Chicago in 2001. She was even nicer in person than she was in her friendly emails, so it was good to know that my gut feeling about her was right.

Anyhow, Whitney’s gone from being a lone tech writer to being part of a larger team on some important stuff for a military equipment supplier and I’ve followed her career with interest and a little envy! (though I’m not sure I’d want to be writing to MIL standards…) When I was in the US for the 2004 STC Conference, I stayed overnight with her, then we drove to Baltimore and spent a day meandering about that fair city’s harbourfront area prior to the conference. One of her passions is guinea pigs, and at the time she had 3 or 4 of them living with her. Very cute they were too – and surprisingly (for me), not at all smelly.

Despite working in a high-end tech industry, Whitney’s passion for her ‘pigs hasn’t abated, and she’s now involved in a rescue group, as well as writing about them on “Pig Notes” a blog/website she set up.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this post… Whitney’s articles on guinea pigs have hit the top 100 articles (#78 as at today) on Squidoo, a website that caters for people and their passions.

Great job Whitney – and well-deserved.

… that’s what little boys are made of!

Our youngest nephew, William, turned 3 on Monday and all the family gathered down at his parents’ 50 acre farm near Yallingup on the weekend. We drove down to Busselton to my folks’ place on Friday night after work, went into town Saturday morning to buy him his present (a frog umbrella!), then over to Dunsborough to see a family friend’s fabulous new house that she designed herself, before arriving at the farm for lunch.

Everyone except Paul was there (he had some urgent business to do in Melbourne on Sunday… defeating Carlton). When we arrived, the older nieces and nephews and their respective boyfriends were out gathering large pieces of fallen timber for a huge bonfire on Saturday night.

As only a 3 year-old can be, William was momentarily enthused about the bike from his grandparents and the dragon’s tail from his sister, along with all his other presents. But he was most taken with the main present – a golden retriever puppy from his Mum and Dad.

“Jasmine” is 6 weeks old and JUST ADORABLE!!! She was only taken from her mother and siblings the day before, had to endure a 3 hour car trip down to the farm, and had 12 adults and one small child loving her to bits all day on Saturday. She is the cutest, sweetest little puppy, and was just so placid. She happily hung around our feet most of the day, sleeping and dozing, and generally being a very young puppy. Later, when we walked down to the orchard and then across to the dam, she scampered along through the grass following William – it looks like the beginning of a beautiful bond and a long friendship!

Of course, there was the obligatory sugar-laden kid’s birthday party fare – honey and chocolate crackles, caramel slice (like Nanaimo bars) and a snake cake covered in sickly sweet icing and sugar lollies! That’s why we needed the walk down to the orchard and the dam…

My sister and brother-in-law are doing a major extension to the farm house – a 12m x 6m ‘great room’ with a massive cathedral ceiling, super-wide verandah, and a deck you could hold a wedding reception on. It looks absolutely fabulous and fits well with the rest of the house. The view of it from the dam showed how well the design fit the landscape too.

My nephew took me for a quick zip around the farm roads in his new convertible Mini Cooper! That thing sure moves. My first-ever car – way back when – was a Mini… but it sure wasn’t made like these new ones. It didn’t cost the same either! In fact, the Minis in those days could hardly be called a luxury car, whereas today’s Mini Coopers fit that price category. (BTW, my Mini was a bit of a lemon – it used to die whenever it saw a puddle of water, even if the puddle was on the other side of the road!)

After a lovely day in the winter sunshine, we headed back to my parents’ place for a very light meal (ya think?) and to play “Jokers and Marbles”, a game we learned from the other branch of the family tree when we were in Michigan in April. Dad had taken my photos of the board we played on there, and made us a great board based on those photos.

On Sunday we headed back to Perth via Bridgetown. Popped in to the fortnightly Bridgetown Sunday Markets, but there wasn’t a lot left by 11:00am. Drove up to the property development – two new houses are coming along well, and the property we want to build on now has a back fence. Settlement is still not expected on this one for another month or so…

We had a light lunch at the Bridgetown Hotel and made a room reservation for October 21st, the day of the Blackwood Valley Wine Show and tasting. We’ll probably be down again in a few weeks as the AGM of the strata company is likely to be around August 20.

After picking up a couple of cases of cleanskins from the Wattle Ridge vineyard, and some fruit and vegies from the Fruit Barn in Donnybrook, we drove back to Perth listening to the Dockers beat Carlton on the radio. Yay – that’s four wins in a row!

A lovely relaxing weekend.

Australia has a Census every 5 years. Usual stuff. An army of census people deliver tonnes of census booklets to every household in Australia over the next couple of weeks, we fill in the forms on the night of Tuesday August 8, then the army of collectors comes back and picks up all the booklets and off they go for scanning and analysis.

I remember back in 1996 and again in 2001 questioning why they didn’t offer an online option for the census. 1996 would’ve been too early as the internet uptake was pretty low at that time and speeds were achingly slow compared to today, but it would’ve made a lot of sense in 2001.

Well, here we are – it’s 2006, and this year Australians will be able to take part in the census electronically! Cool!

On reading the FAQs on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, it looks like they’ve got the “I’ve already filled it in” situation covered (http://tinyurl.com/ehswq). So I hope it works well. It would be good to save a few trees and to get this data written straight to the database. Over time, this should not only save a lot of taxpayer money but provide more responsive feedback to city planners and the like as I’d expect that the demographic trends etc. will be available much quicker.

Last night I was watching the 6:00pm evening news on one of the local free-to-air TV channels. The lead story was about an alleged paedophile living in a small community who’d been ‘outed’ by local residents, at least one of whom’s daughters had been a victim of this person. The reporter, in his ‘holier-than-thou’ way that some reporters have, was wandering the street where this person lived, showing his house, and describing in some detail how this man “…took out his penis…” etc. His tone was very sombre and righteous.

Move on a few minutes… Now the TV News reports an incident in the “Big Brother” house where two male housemates were evicted because of an activity (described as “turkey-slapping” – and yes, it involves a penis… I know this because the News told me so!) they had participated in with one of the female housemates. According to the report, this incident was NOT broadcast on the Big Brother show or its “adults only” late night version – it was only seen on the live internet stream. But this TV channel (not the one that broadcasts Big Brother) saw fit to show a clip of the internet stream – in all its glory – on the 6:00pm news! You couldn’t actually see the penis but there was an implication in the report that it was there.

Move on a few more minutes to the Sport… The reporter talks about the Wimbledon tennis match between Sharapova and someone else, and shows footage. Then they cut to the streaker who invaded the court. His private bits are pixellated out, but there’s no “fuzziness” about the voice-over commentary about “… his penis …”. Cut to the Sports host and the News hosts, all of whom are laughing at this ‘joke’.

So here we have three mentions of male anatomy in the one 20 minute News report. The first is associated with assault on young females, the second is associated with assault by two males on a young-ish female (22), and third is associated with comedy! Weren’t there any young females or children in the audience at Wimbledon for whom this could be construed as assault? Why isn’t it deemed assault (at least an assault on the visual senses) on the two young women who were trying to play tennis? Why is it OK for them to sensationalise the assault in the Big Brother house in a ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ way, yet adopt a very high moral ground when it came to the first report? Why laugh at the streaker who exposed himself (and thus legitimise his act), but get all pompous about the man who exposed himself in another time and place? What gave them the right to broadcast the internet stream when Big Brother themselves chose not to show it? And on the 6:00pm News too. What makes this news?

I’m sorry, but I can’t reconcile how the media can be so fickle and variable in how it treats what could very well amount to the same illegal act just because it occurs in different situations and with different audiences. It smacks of double standards and hypocrisy to me.

We had some long-awaited good news the other day – one of the two blocks of land we put a deposit on last year is due to settle before the end of the month. The other will be some weeks yet as it's in a later stage of the development. The second one is the one we want to build on; the first to settle is an investment block. 

And what an investment it seems to have been! So far, we've only paid $500 deposit on each block, but both have increased in value tremendously since we paid those deposits in late September and mid-October last year. The investment block (0.75 acres) has a contracted purchase price of $85K; other blocks in that same stage of a similar size are now on the market for $140K+. The block we want to build on (1.1 acres) has had similar growth.

Settlement has been a long time coming – we were told the investment one would settle in January and the other in March. It's now mid-June and only now is the investment one close to settlement (i.e. we'll then own it!). I suspect it will be July or August before the other one settles, unless they've made more inroads into getting the infrastructure finished than I heard a few weeks ago. We really should go down there soon and check out the progress of the road building etc. and take a look at some of the new homes going up in the development…

Of course, settlement is all well and good – but now have to meet the increased loan payments… 

OK, I know that the greatest incidence of car accidents and loss of life is with those aged 17-25, and I know that SOME of them are hoons (a small percentage), but why target ALL P-platers (probationary drivers) with the same draconian laws? Western Australia's "nanny" legislators are bringing in some very tough measures designed to reduce the likelihood of injury to our young people. But I have some serious doubts.

Where is the evidence to show that such measures actually DO reduce the death and accident rate? What other countries have implemented such measures successfully?

Where is the evidence to show that the incidence now is any different to what it was 10 years ago, or 15, 20, 30, or even 50 years ago?

So what are these laws?

Well, the ones that I questioned on hearing about them the other day are those concerned with curfews and number of people in the car of a P-plater. With these new laws, P-platers cannot drive between midnight and 5:00am, and they can't have more than one passenger in the car with them at any one time. Oh, and they have to have their driving supervised by a 'responsible adult' for longer after actually gaining their license and will have to have much longer supervised log book time when they are on L-plates (Learner plates).

I'm not so fussed about the length of time for supervised driving, but I am concerned about the curfew and the number of passengers aspects. Why? Because for MANY young people – who ARE responsible kids – these measures will stop them from getting employment and getting an education, further alienating a group who already feels alienated from society.

With the current cost of fuel, how can a struggling uni student who does the right thing by the environment and their pocket, now deal with the fact that they can no longer car pool and share rides to/from uni? Please don't say "Use public transport" – in Perth, this is NOT practical for many kids because it would entail at least a 2-hour trip each way, with changeovers at bus/train stations etc. So what will be the result? I can see a few scenarios – kids will risk not being caught and continue to share rides; perhaps kids will drop out of uni because catching public transport is too hard or the cost of fuel (when not shared) is too high; maybe they'll become more dependent on their parents for rides at a time when their independence is so paramount.

And the curfew… how does that help kids who have part-time jobs working in the hospitality industry, for example? If they have to be home before midnight, they could easily lose their job. Those who pack the supermarket shelves in the middle of the night will be similarly affected. All because someone decided that midnight was somehow different to any other time of the day and that these kids had to be tucked up in bed by then. Unfortunately, these 'kids' aren't 'kids' any more – they are at least 17, and seeing as though you only have to be 18 to vote and to drink, I can't see them complying with these draconian laws for very long.

Somewhere on the flights from the US to Australia I picked up a cold. It didn’t manifest itself into anything until last Sunday night – a week after we got home. First symptoms were a horrible sore throat with an inability to swallow, followed by a very rough voice that went in and out over the next couple of days, then the sinus congestion, and now the cough. Some 9 days after it started (and with 2 days off work last week) it seems to be waning… but now my husband has it. So here’s hoping it doesn’t come back to revisit me. It’s a nasty, filthy thing that lays you low.