Ellard

My Ferrari neighbour drives a Ferrari. I know this because he drives it out of his garage once every hour, taking some considerable time to rev it and navigate it around my small street. He then goes off down the road at a luxuriant and dignified pace, only to return roughly 15 minutes later, navigating his well appointed vehicle back into his garage. An hour later, he will set out again, and in 15 minutes be back.

Every hour.

Sometimes I avoid work by wondering what takes about 7 minutes there and back and has to be done every hour. By the time he’s locked his fine vehicle and made his way back up to his fine apartment, surely there’s only enough time for a quality cigarette and a snifter of brandy before it’s time to go get the car keys. Hell, can’t he use the phone?

Now you’ll be all eager to tell me something sensible like the man has to pick up the takings from a local bar every hour so that it’s safe from villains. So why not do what they do at most family restaurants and get a night safe? Maybe he has to put money back in the tills? It just seems too much trouble for something so banal.

More likely:

• He is the victim of a time loop and I am seeing the same journey every hour. That doesn’t explain Sundays, more on that in a moment.
• Every hour he has to type a code into an Apple 2 to stop an island from exploding. Hell, get the bouncer to do it.
• Has to turn over the C120 cassette that has the background music. Plausible.
• Extremely precisely timed domestic arguments.
• Something to do with MegaUpload.

I’m not opposed to this phenomena, because on Sundays something far worse happens. On that day Ferrari Neighbour (or somebody in his household – let blame not be ill assigned) takes out his favourite DVD: Bruce Springsteen Live Somewhere Or Other. And on the finest plasma display (I guess) and the highest quality surround speakers (I can hear) The Boss pumps his fist in the air for a multitude of proud Americans, bellowing all his hits and yelling DIDJA LIKE DAT? WUN TOO FREE FUH with 100 Percent Patriotic Fervor and a singalong.

Every. Fucking. Sunday. Loud. I mean PA loud.

WUN TOO FREE FUH!

I can’t be down on Ferrari Neighbour for playing the same piece of music over and over because most people seem to do that. On the other side of my house is The Bag Of Britons. You know the sort, come to Australia to get away from the dreary situation at home and then only ever talk to other Britons, usually about how Australia ‘just isn’t the same y’know?’

(Something which could easily be remedied y’know – two flights on BA every day back to mother country.)

The Bag have I think two CDs total in their collection, because there’s two possible programmes for each evening. God knows what they are called but I guess one is NOW THAT’S WOT I CALL MUSIC VOLUME 13 and the other is JIGGY BOOTY 18 INCHES. The former gets most of the play. I know it so well, having heard it some nights starting at 6pm and still rotating at about 3am. JIGGY BOOTY gets an airing when the wifey is off at the pub and has some bitchin’ gangsta action for the lads yo.

Some songs on WOT I CALL MUSIC are exceptionally deep and meaningful for the Bag and have to be played a few times until everyone tires of howling along including myself. These people are happy, they have good times, and they love music more than most people who chin scratch at sound art festivals so good on them. If it sounds like I am annoyed it’s only a little. I save that for Soggy The Sailor who seems to be having a ‘Enya at 3AM’ phase. Fuck him.

While I was writing this LinkedIn sent me FIVE MORE STUPID ARTICLES FOR THIS WEEK. Here’s the Chronic Of Higher ED with yet another whoa man the kids are using iPads article. Look, we’ve had quite a few of these thank you, and if anyone else claims that we have to move education onto FaceBook I’m going to double the bet and say NO let’s move onto SECOND LIFE. Remember when journalists treated Second Life like Twitter? I do. They pretend they don’t.

The cone of silence

Oh yeah and Apple released an AMAZING and MAGICAL APP that lets anyone make a textbook! It’s revolutionary! It is also a hack of the EPUB format, a simple case of embrace, expand and extinguish. Go and look at an ibook file on a PC. It’s just a zip, with modified EPUB components set up to add stuff that works on an iPad. Like all previous E.E.E. cases it does add quality; Microsoft’s changes to HTML added quality too …  similarly it locks you into the ecosystem of World #2 Multinational. And requires ‘upgrading’ to Lion which is otherwise a complete pain in the arse.

It sickens me that so many ‘technology writers’ haven’t stated the obvious: you could have already written a textbook that could be read on any device, could have done it for years running, nothing has changed. If you really really had to have movies and 3D spinning then there’s been Acrobat, which is really the whole point of this charade – to attack the success of Adobe Editi0ns in textbook distribution.

But I notice that these journalists seem to think words are sufficient in their own damn articles.

There goes the Ferrari again.