The Great Debate: No Choice is the New Choice

(This article was republished in On Line Opinion on Wednesday, 28 July 2010. Thanks to Susan Prior for her consideration.)

If you smear peanut butter on the roof of its mouth, a chimpanzee will rhythmically smack its lips together trying to get it off. It's apparently how they make those ads you see on TV with the talking monkeys.

It seems that Sunday night's Great Debate 2010 was made the same way - although it was slightly more difficult to take seriously.

From Plains To Plate: a declaration from the food convergence

[Held in Adelaide in February 2010, From Plains To Plate was a convergence dealing with issues of the sustainability and security of the food industry in South Australia. The following declaration has arisen from the convergence. Feel free to spread it far and wide to politicians or other interested parties. The original publication is here. - A.N.]

published article: "Peak Oil: Under The Radar"

This article was published in the 2010 issue of Projections magazine, conceived and compiled by Ewan Scott and Nick Petch. Many thanks to Ewan for his consideration, and to Cecilie Corless for recommending me.

Peak Oil: Under The Radar

While climate change has been in our consciousness for over a decade, another pressing issue remains largely untouched by the mainstream: peak oil.

In 1956, a Shell geophysicist called Marion King Hubbert presented a shocking revelation about the state of oil production in the United States. According to Hubbert's figures, oil production in the lower 48 states would peak within 15 years. His colleagues spent 14 of those 15 years dismissing his theory, until U.S. oil production did indeed peak right on cue, in 1970. Production levels have been in decline ever since.

Adelaide Greenies calendar - an update

In the few weeks since I launched the Adelaide Greenies calendar, I've received a large amount of feedback. Thankfully, most of this feedback has been positive. I thought I'd write about it again, just to clear up a few questions that people may have.

How can people read it?

While putting "Adelaide greenies" into Google presents the calendar as the #1 hit, and my original blog entry about it at #3, it doesn't really have a home. I have added links to my blog to the different ways of viewing the calendar (HTML, XML, ICS), as well as a little embedded widget with some of the upcoming events. I think that's good enough for now. Of course, you should feel free to share these links with others and add these links to your own page if you find them handy.

Incidentally, I don't have a problem with people adding the calendar to their own sites. The HTML version of the calendar is the easiest one to link to, and the XML version is the easiest one to embed in WordPress sites (the PEZ site already includes it). Google Calendar does have an application that can help you create widgets for your own web page, like the HTML version or the list version on my blog. However, the application is only available to people who have full access to the calendar, so for now, you have to ask me for help with that. This brings me to my next question.

How can people add or change events?

At the moment, I'm the only person with full access to the calendar, so nobody can change it but me. This hasn't been a problem so far, since people haven't minded just sending me the occasional bit of news, so it hasn't been a huge task to keep the calendar up to date.

(As an aside, I would appreciate it if people gave an approximate finishing time for their events. Sometimes, I will already know, or at least be able to take an educated guess based on the type of event. The starting time is usually the more important, though. If I've taken a guess at an end time and got it hopelessly wrong, let me know!)

In the future, this will likely be a bigger job, and I will ultimately have to let other people in. There are two ways to do this: either give certain people full access to the calendar, or give certain people their own calendars. I think this caused a bit of confusion when I first launched the Adelaide Greenies calendar, so I'll explain in a bit more detail.

When I refer to a "calendar", I simply mean a sequence of events. At the moment, there's only one of these. What I had originally envisioned was that the individual groups around Adelaide might prefer to run their own calendars and manage their own events. For example, The Food Forest could just run a calendar of events hosted there, SCNPSP could list their community group meetings, and PEZ could list their workshops.

In case you were wondering, the HTML widget to display Google Calendar can handle several different sets of events on a single timeline. I've attached a picture to show the HTML widget with two calendars: the Adelaide Greenies calendar in green, and Australian public holidays in red. (I don't manage the latter; Google Calendar suggested it to me.) If you've got a dedicated calendar application on your computer - such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Lightning/Sunbird, or Apple iCal - it can already display multiple calendars simultaneously, as it typically would if you have separate personal and work calendars.


This would make things easier to manage, but it would also make things harder to find. Part of the goal of this exercise - and, indeed, a common theme among Transition Towns people in South Australia - is the coupling of the existing organisations, and splitting things up this way might not be as useful, since we haven't got a central directory of all things eco-friendly (yet) that would bring them all together and let people find them all in one easy trip.

There is another reason why the single calendar might not go away any time soon. As was very insightfully pointed out to me, even if there were separate calendars for separate groups, there might be events that don't fit them. Perhaps an event is organised by a group that doesn't have its own calendar yet, or perhaps the event is organised by several groups and no one of them really owns it. In such an occurrence, a single central calendar would still be useful, even if others exist.

For now, I'm happy to keep the one big calendar in place. That said, if anyone wants to know more of the details, would like to help edit the calendar, or would like to start their own, let me know. I'm still the gatekeeper, but I don't have to be the only one.

Which events should be there? Which shouldn't?

I got a question about whether there are boundaries or criteria to determine if there are certain types of events that shouldn't be included. I haven't thought too much about this, because for every event that I've seen so far, I've always known someone (or known of someone) who'd be interested.

That said, there might be closed events or minor things that people don't want publicised too broadly. Other events might be seen as off-topic; for example, I'm on a mailing list where some participants equate the response to 9/11 to a response to peak oil, but others take no interest. There might also be events or groups that not everyone wants to endorse - just as I've seen reputable journalism sites carry articles by climate change sceptics in the interests of balance but without vouching for their arguments.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might exclude something from the calendar? What boundaries should be set? Are there certain things we should all be interested in and certain things about which we are neutral? Are certain issues off-topic? Remember, though, that we don't all have to believe in the same things for them to be relevant.

What personal information should be published?

Another issue that I'll bring up at the same time is privacy. People often host events at their own homes, and I've been hesitant to list private addresses in a public forum without permission. This isn't as much of an issue with our existing mailing lists, since they're usually closed-circle.

My policy so far is that you can list an address or you can say it's at someone's home, but not both. Phone numbers are OK, but I've been disguising email addresses in an attempt to stop spammers from harvesting them. What do people think of that policy? Similarly, please contact me if you would like any personal information added or removed.

Finally...

Couldn't you have come up with a better name?

I've never wanted to spend too long on the name, and this blog entry is no exception. Not everyone appreciates the label "greenies", but in truth, there isn't really a convenient term for everything that's going on that conveys that level of meaning.

There isn't a prize for coming up with a better name, but don't let that stop you having ideas about it. If all else fails, we can just call it Transition like everything else. :)

I hope that's cleared things up. Tell me your thoughts.

Monbiot loses the plot?

A few days ago, George Monbiot of The Guardian newspaper published an article entitled "The Population Myth". The article was circulated to me with the rather blunt title, "Monbiot loses the plot". Fearing that some on the mailing list had hypocritically missed the point, I wrote my own response.

I suspect that a lot of the controversy surrounding this article (at least here) could be averted simply be removing this tagline:

"People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor"

Among those of us who preach the significance of population growth, not all of us are taking out our frustrations on the very poor. Most of us can already see the hypocrisy of the most polluting countries, such as Australia and the USA, who blindly point the finger at poorer nations rising by housing our dirtiest industries. Some of us even understand the dependence - again, however forced via globalisation - of developing countries upon affluent foreign markets, and their consequent dependence on foreign money.

To this end, Monbiot has an excellent point, but he stops short of making it. (His suggestion of changing the I=PAT equation doesn't help either; in modern times, we already tend to measure the affluence of a population by its consumerism.) Whether by resource depletion or by rising sea levels, we are at risk of an apocalyptic population crash. The strategy of The Powers That Be is to centralise those dwindling resources so that they can outlast everyone else. It's like the old joke about trying to escape a river full of crocodiles with a pair of flippers: I still can't swim faster than a crocodile, but I can swim faster than you.

Think of the situation in Iraq. If the USA could reduce its dependence on oil, and could afford to buy it at wildly fluctuating prices, they wouldn't have to send the military around the world to steal it. This doesn't solve peak oil, but it does mean that the "non-negotiable American way of life" might last just long enough for them to see other countries depopulated first.

I have no delusion that such a strategy would benefit anyone more than those already at the top of the pile. On mailing lists like this one, a more common strategy for resilient communities would be to concentrate on the resources you really need and to invest them wisely. A strategy to strut around the world taking these resources by force is no less cogent - provided, of course, that you first give up your last shred of human decency.

Cheers,

AN

peak oil in transition

Update: This article was republished in On Line Opinion on 23 September 2009. Many thanks to Susan Prior for her consideration.

A couple of Wednesdays ago, I went to see a film entitled The Age Of Stupid (IMDB link), about the current state of the climate change debate. The movie only played in three cinema complexes in Adelaide, and two of them were in Westfield shopping centres - probably the wrong crowd for a movie about climate change. There's no word yet on whether our local Palace Nova cinemas will pick it up.

After paying 17 bucks to watch what appeared to be a copied Blu-ray disc, and to have an entire theatre all to myself, I came away from the movie with a mixed message. Most of the main characters in the film seemed to have conflicting ethics for their reliance on energy, but few actually showed any remorse. The oil rig worker who stayed in New Orleans throughout Hurricane Katrina sees the obvious connection between his work and his environment, but he has no remorse about it whatsoever. The lady in the Niger delta, having seen the massive pollution and the ravages of war that are brought to their nation by our greed for natural resources, sells petrol in bottles to make a bit of extra cash.

I don't know what the point of the movie was any more, but I still think I know what it was supposed to be. Climate change isn't just an environmental problem: it's a broad social, economic and political problem that will affect all of us to an extent that we cannot fully comprehend, even after seeing a film about it. This one got so close: people do understand that the drive for resource wealth does as much harm as good, but it never actually asked the question of whether it's worth devoting your lifestyle to it. (This point is raised directly by Michael Moore in The Corporation.)

After a decade-long hiatus, climate change is back on the agenda, and regardless of their position on the subject, everyone is back on message. The greenies want to save the planet. Big business doesn't want saving the planet to interfere with employment or economic growth. The politicians want to implement a trading scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, but want to set aside $11,700,000,000 in welfare for the mining industry.

Most importantly of all, everybody has an opinion that they can't wait to tell you about but that they can't live up to. I saw a bumper sticker the other day about doing something about climate change - on the back of a 20-year-old Ford Laser. To be fair, you could see through the brown exhaust fumes that it was at least carrying a full complement of passengers. Everyone gets climate change, and gets it well enough to talk about it, but nobody's doing anything to fix it. An Inconvenient Truth (IMDB link) was a bold step, and we had the impression of having come a long way since Kyoto; one wonders how far we have travelled since.

The previous weekend, I was back at The Food Forest for a weekend workshop on something called the Transition Towns initiative. The goal of transition is to make communities more self-sufficient, and therefore more robust to problems such as economic downturn, political dysfunction, or the disruption of utilities. Think of it as permaculture scaled up to a society level: the idea is to take similar tenets of environmental management and use them to plan entire communities. It stands to reason that climate change is a given in this philosophy, as is peak oil.

There are already hundreds of Transition groups all over the world, and each community is tackling the problems a little differently. It might start as modestly as a car pool or a sewing circle, or it could be as ambitious as a local currency or an activist group to fight against imposing businesses that, one way or another, do not act in the community's interest. Neighbourhoods become more productive and more closely knit, favouring local businesses and activities seeing their own well-being as prosperity in itself.

As much as I find a lot of the environmental debate quite tiring, I found the Transition Towns weekend very uplifting. The difference was that the people who attended this workshop seemed more like the sorts of people who might actually do something to make their lives better. Naturally, such a weekend involves a lot of talk, but it's positive and enthusiastic talk, and those of us who were already doing something were more interested in networking and marketing what was there than the minutiae of establishing something new. Suddenly, the confidence was there among us, the right courses of action were obvious, and everything else seemed irrelevant, distant, archaic.

I wondered, then, whether the environmental debate could truly be taking this direction, and, if it were not, whether this might be an opportune time to turn it this way. It was nearly five years ago that I discovered the peak oil debate, and at the time, it was all doom and gloom. In fact, Matt Savinar's primer, The Oil Age Is Over (sadly now out of print), ends with a discussion about the depression one typically suffers after the penny drops about peak oil. Arguably, though, the debate is still one of doom and gloom today, and the purists among us are only too ready to howl down anything touted as a solution.

We can do better.

I can vouch for the concept of post-peak depression. I remember when I ran out of both questions and answers, and I remember how helpless I felt at the time, as if the only way not to lose was not to play. The best way out of this funk is to do something positive. For me, getting around my oil dependency meant less car travel, working out public transport again, and getting a bicycle. I'm still going with that.

When you consider most problems so fundamentally, the solutions are simple too. If you're worried about food miles, buy local produce from suburban markets. The dominance of large supermarkets and department stores can be mitigated by shopping elsewhere, even if you can't buy everything in the one place. Learn to turn things off when you're not using them, and not to buy things you don't need. Even questions about money - from the siphoning off of local investment by major banks, to the very nature of fiat currency itself - seem tractable when considered the same way.

The point of these individual tasks is twofold. Firstly, you participate less and less in a system that will break off in massive chunks in the coming decades and crumble into the sea. (With that mental image, you and Antarctica are in this together. Secondly, the more you think about this, the more you learn and understand the way things really are in the world. New challenges will come along in our current convention, and current conventional thinking won't solve them; you will need a new paradigm. Either way, you're doing something positive about the world's plethora of problems, and coming shocks won't be quite so shocking.

It's a lot more easily said than done, of course. For example, buying food is easier and quicker than growing it, and there will be no shortage of people telling you so. That said, it's all about believing in what you're doing. If you believe that growing food is important - and with good enough reasons - you should do it anyway. Every person who attended the Transition weekend, I conjectured, probably knows someone who isn't interested in climate change, peak oil, permaculture and the like, but that hasn't stopped us getting together anyway, and it won't stop us trying to do the right thing.

This is perhaps the real key. Just give it a go. Buy a rainwater tank. Walk somewhere that you normally would have driven. Repair something you would otherwise have thrown away. Whatever form a collapse of civilisation may take, you are far worse off afraid or ignorant than you would be armed with options.

Above all, the Transition concept has given me a sense of hope that I haven't had for years. It hasn't assured me at all that we won't see major societal upheaval in the next decade or so, but it has motivated me, with neither fear nor rage, to do something more constructive to prepare for it. Furthermore, it's also given me a better way to talk about to those ordinary people I know who imagine me in sandwich boards telling them how nigh the end of the world is.

I mentioned The Age Of Stupid as merely the most recent Chicken Little, and despite its good intentions, I wonder how much films like this are really helping. Then again, even if people are tiring of hearing about the problems, they need more in the way of solutions than superficial gesture of buying a CFL and a green shopping bag (that is, in all probability, made of plastic anyway). I sense a valid opportunity here, to engage interested people not to panic but to empower themselves, and to make peace (or at least neutrality) with the non-believers who may never notice your conviction. You don't even need to talk about a crash; at least, what you want is to make the world a better place.

Think about a low-energy future. Food without chemicals. Transport without pollution. Austerity without exploitation.

Think about a human-energy future. Motivation without badgering. Urgency without panic. Darkness without fear.

We can do better.

plus ça change

Half-way around the world, another country embraces change. Upstairs at my place, things are more the same than ever.

The upstairs rooms are still in a state. I've been meaning to tidy up the bathrooms, but I got gastro a couple of weeks ago and I didn't feel like doing much for a few days. That set everything else back, so I'm only just getting back to it now. Admittedly, I've only got a few odd jobs left to do before I set upon my own bedroom, but getting back to them has been a bit of a struggle.

My parents and my brother are coming down for Christmas and New Year and not much else. They're only getting here the day before Christmas itself (so I'll miss Dad's birthday), and they're only here for a few days after New Year. Now that I've got plenty of places to put them up, that's not going to be an issue. Plus, I won't have many days to fill up with things to do. Still, I only get to see them in person once a year, an experience sadly not available on Skype.

I invited a few friends and relatives out to celebrate my birthday - not on my birthday, because nobody could go, but still, the celebration's the thing. I wanted to bring together people from different circles but that I knew would get along, so I invited them all out for dinner at one of the local restaurants. It all went off pretty well. Not everyone could turn up, including my lady friend who isn't my girlfriend; she did drunk-dial me to invite me out afterwards, though.

Since someone has already asked, I should mention that this time was much easier and much less awkward than two weeks prior. Sure, she got nearly as drunk and I was even more sober, but the pressure came off: the expectations were much more subdued, and having learnt what she gets like, I understand a bit better how I should treat her. Even the weird things drunk people say - which might be insightful unspoken truths, or which might be random crap - don't affect me as much any more. (Actually, they affect me a lot more than I care to admit, but I'm getting more graceful about it.)

Actually, on that note, I did meet someone a week ago. I was at a presentation about the limits to economic growth, organised by Economic Reform Australia. It was an excellent discussion - the presenter just about wore himself out with his own enthusiasm, and everyone seemed to hang on his every word. I hung around afterwards to join in the afterglow, and in the process, I met a young lady who had come from China to do her PhD in environmental accounting. We got to talking about climate change and peak oil - normally a good way to end conversations with the uninitiated, but not in this case. It was actually something of a novelty for me to talk to someone both intellectual and open-minded about the subject: most of the people I know either worry themselves sick about peak oil or refuse to acknowledge the problems in any way. I've sent her a couple of emails on the subject, so she's got plenty of homework to do, but I can't help but wonder if she'll get back to me. I mean, I'm happy enough to network for now, but I wonder if she'd like to continue the conversation over a coffee. Oh well, we'll see.

* * * * * *

The thing that's really bothering me at the moment is work. Things are going from the sublime to the ridiculous, and I'm still bored out of my mind. However, it has taken a turn for the worse in the past week or two.

We are working on a task that has turned sour before it has even started. I suspect my boss doesn't know what we're doing either and is just making it up as he goes along. This wouldn't worry me, normally, but not only is he holding me up by our not knowing, but he's working hard to pretend both that we do and that I can't see through it. Every time we talk about what's happening, I learn something fundamental about the project that I should have been told weeks ago, certainly before we started submitting documents about it.

I spent some time writing my boss an email, in which I collated the whole array of things I hadn't been told in a timely fashion, or hadn't been told at all, that have gotten this project on the wrong foot so early. The email turned pretty nasty pretty quickly, though, and I wasn't sure it wouldn't do more harm than good to send it. Normally, I prefer to write something a bit more positive and a lot more constructive, even if the nasty version says things that really need to be said. I don't know whether I can hold back this time. Maybe my patient really is at an end.

For all the time I've had wasted by having nothing to do at work, you'd think I'd be welcoming this with open arms. However, that's not the point. I'm sick and tired of being treated like a mushroom in this job. I've been so patient with him, and I've been consistently let down. This has to change now. The question remains: even if this will make things better for me, do I have the guts to do it?

Gerendo

I'm going to talk more about the economy this week, but I'm going to start small.

My own economy has taken an upturn, with a new projection of healthy revenue for the coming months. In other words, my new job pays better than my old one (and much better than being unemployed).

I took some time to crunch the numbers on my first pay, which was coincidentally almost identical to the amount I was being paid when I left my previous job. The difference that briefly caused my eyes to leave their sockets is that this pay slip only covered eight days of the fortnight instead of ten. Ever since then, I've been impatiently awaiting my second pay slip, which will cover a full fortnight and will therefore have far more attractive figures.

The question I have struggled to answer since I started working full-time has always been that of knowing what to do with the money. My family and friends only ever have one suggestion - "give it to me and I'll spend it for you" - and I don't much like it. I can do that frivolously enough myself, as I proved on the weekend. No, I'm thinking moreover of something to do with my money over a longer term.

It needs a project. I need to find it a problem that it can solve.

Put that way, it almost sounds as difficult as it really is.

Money has never brought me happiness. Agreed, it takes the stress out of doing things that I want to do, but ultimately, I've always found spending money to be a crutch, and I've never been satisfied with relying on it. It's not that I'm unhappy, it's just that retail therapy can only take you so far.

For example, I like video games, and I can buy whatever new game comes out that I'd be interested in playing. The problem is that I have plenty of money to buy them but less time now to play them than I have had in the past - and aren't they more fun to play than to buy? A few years ago, as I noticed a steadily increasing backlog of games that I had bought but hadn't played, I realised that this was a waste of time and money. I've been more selective since, and by and large, I've kept the queue to a minimum.

The lesson was that money is merely a means to an end, and when you lose sight of the end, you wonder what it is that you're doing. If you're going to buy something to make you happy, you'd better use it for that purpose, lest it be wasted entirely.

So, what can I do with my money that won't waste it?

It's really a question of passion. I can't justify everything that I do, but I'm never going to be hard on myself for pursuing something about which I am truly passionate, something that opens doors for me. (As a crude example, I spend a lot of time writing these blog entries, but I really enjoy writing and I'm trying to create something that I'm going to enjoy, even if nobody else does.)

One might suggest that I buy a house, or have one built. This is perhaps the next frontier for me. Granted, I'm well short of knowing exactly what I want and not even remotely prepared for such an undertaking, but I'm sure I can learn what is required. (One of the downsides to my fragile combination of idealism and deep thought is that I take forever to make decisions. When it works, I do take immense pride in getting there; when it doesn't, I conveniently blame it on being Libran.) No, it's that I have two much bigger problems with the idea.

Firstly, it's not something I really need at the moment. I've just started a new job, and I'm hardly going to buy a house and land with my first month's salary. The compulsion for me to have my own place stems mainly from the ideas that I have had for the place I'm living now, particularly when it comes to living somewhere energy-efficient. I'm renting now, and I can't really put these ideas, some of which I will admit are a bit experimental, into practice on someone else's property. That said, it would be a hobby, and an expensive and time-consuming one at that. I don't think I'm ready for that right now. I'm already tired most of the time now, while I'm still getting used to the arduous timetable of full-time work again.

Secondly, I have deep concerns about the state of the world economy, and I don't think this is the right time to assume a debt that large. The Dow Jones is down some 15% in the past two months and has shown no signs of recovery. Here in Australia, the stock market has dropped nearly 20% in the past three months and has been on the slide now for 11 consecutive trading days. The pressure is manifesting itself as inflationary, which is likely to mean higher interest rates, bad credit and continued flatlining of real estate prices.

The current plateau in global oil production surely has a lot to do with the credit crisis: the economy is geared for growth, and without growth in our largest energy source, economic growth is getting harder to come by. This is an aspect that worries me. An ideal preparation for peak oil would probably involve me having my haven of permaculture built and harvested before the problems really take hold. As such, a move into real estate at this point could end up as a race between preparing for peak oil and preparing for three decades of debt. Then again, with its low rainfall and summer temperature extremes, perhaps Adelaide isn't really the ideal place for such a suburban utopia.

I'm basically day-to-day on these things. While I am gearing up for a large economic move, and while I think I will make it sooner rather than later, it won't be that large and it won't be into my own place. This is certainly on the cards, but I fear it would be the right move made at the wrong time.

First week on the job

I've just started a new job with a defence contractor. Pending any more joyous paperwork or induction activities to dismiss, I'll be back in my good old software engineering boots in a matter of a few hours. I didn't sleep well before my first day on Monday, so I was tired for most of the week, but I'm feeling better now.

Actually, I had an interesting experience on Friday, being back at my old genuine-article Defence workplace. Aside a client meeting, I spent most of the time looking around for people I knew from when I worked there. It's not as though I could realistically have stopped to chat much, of course, and lots of people are still on leave, so it's still a bit of a ghost town.

Given that things weren't going so well for me when I left in June, I had wondered how I'd feel about being back there. The first person that I saw that I recognised was a former supervisor of mine, with whom I don't really get along any more. I wasn't sure if he was expecting to see me, or if he would know what so say to me if he did. I didn't really know what I would do either. Perhaps I was listening more intently than usual to my new boss, who was with me at the time, in the hope of avoiding whatever awkward moment might have been.

Fortunately, I had already had a weird premonition of what would happen. When I returned from my Christmas holidays in Townsville, another former supervisor was on the same plane back to Adelaide. I was waiting at the departure gate, and I had the distinct impression that he saw me and that I had seen him. Yet, he kept walking as if he wasn't supposed to be there. I caught another glimpse of him getting his luggage in Adelaide, but by then I was looking for a bus ride home.

It was all a bit strange. I hardly wanted to stop to chat, particularly because I don't really have a lot to say to him. I will, no doubt, see him again one day on the base. That said, I can take some heart from the sheepishness with which he seemed to avoid eye contact with me at Sydney airport. I've long had a theory that he was afraid of me when I worked for him, although this near-conversation hardly put that theory to a conclusive test. In some ways, I can't wait to find out more - I can accept bad news, so long as I understand it - but in other ways, I'm not exactly seeking it out.

It was all just a coincidence... or was it?

Well, yes, it was.

My near miss on Friday with another former boss conjured up similar thoughts. What would I do? What would he do? Nothing, as it turned out: as sure as I am that we both recognised each other from afar, we both got on with our respective business without outwardly acknowledging each other in any way. Another anticlimax, then.

All in all, Friday had the makings of a very bad day. We were waiting on some software that we are having written for us, for which we have been waiting day-to-day for months but which has been delayed again. Things didn't go so well at our client meeting, either, but we have since managed to make some progress. As for me, I'm still in the mode of not knowing what I'm doing from one day to the next, but that won't last much longer.

* * * * * *

I still can't believe that the Adelaide 36ers beat the Sydney Kings last night. After a near-melee between Brad Davidson and BJ Carter, the Sixers came out and flat-out shut the Kings down in the second and third quarters. The Kings don't lose often nowadays - in fact, last night saw them lose for only the third time all season - but I can't even remember the last time they got smashed like that.

Although I don't get anything for click-through, you can read my match report on Ozhoops. I'll have another one to write on Wednesday night, since we have the Perth Wildcats in town for the Fox Sports game.

* * * * * *

The US economy continues to crumble, and the US dollar continues its slide against the other major currencies. The Dow Jones dropped another 246 points on Friday, and has now dropped some 1500 points in the last three months and 1000 points since Christmas. Gold is knocking on the door of US$900/ounce but is starting to be outpaced by silver now.

The "good" news is that oil has dropped below US$93/barrel, so we might not have to deal with A$1.49/L petrol here for much longer. We'll see what happens on Wednesday, when every petrol station in South Australia simultaneously jacks up its prices.

While I could go another week without filling up the car, I would personally rather try getting the bus to work this week. One tiny problem with that is that it would mean waking up at 6:00 and working 8:00 until 16:30. Considering how tired I've been all week, I'm not sure I'm up to the task, at least without more training. We shall see.