“That’s working brilliantly. Exactly like every linguatronic system I’ve ever encountered. Total disobedience!” – Jeremy Clarkson

TONIGHT, on new Darkly Defending; I practice the most artful way to drown while my head makes a spirited attempt to kill me; another electronic bitch decides she doesn’t want to listen to a man; and my Irish ancestry is indulged with its favourite velvet liquor.

John Farnham may have most recently appeared on TV advertising Ford’s partnership with Microsoft to produce Sync for their car range, but I have decided that Sync Woman is a bitch and is just like every other voice recognition software out there; i.e. doesn’t work. Early last month, I retired the Commodore to happier pastures – a Ford dealership – and while it was screaming blue murder and making vivid and colourful threats about how it was going to call its GM brothers and beat the crap out of me with Detroit steel for the utter betrayal I’d just inflicted on it, I slipped a set of keys into a brand spanking new Ford Focus and toddled off into the sunset. Alright, it was mid afternoon, but let’s not bring logic into the argument this early in the day.

The Ford’s first big trip involved taking a mate and I to Cairns via Sydney Airport, where the Focus got to spend a holiday bopping around in valet parking, which was rather considerately on special at the time. At some point on the road down there, while my iPhone was happily sponging electricity from the car’s battery via the USB port, I decided to show off by using voice control to set the iPhone playing. I pulled the voice recognition lever like a boss, confidently said “USB Device, Play All”, to which the car promptly responded “I’m sorry, I can’t call anyone. There is no phone connected, but I can try to connect one for you – connecting your last paired phone.” While my friend was busy laughing at the car upstaging me, a message flashed up to tell me that my iPhone had successfully paired with the car, and was happily displaying battery and signal strength information. Happily for me, it did redeem itself when one of the hotels in Cairns called during the trip, and I had the distinctly weird experience of listening to the GPS bitch that it couldn’t find a satellite while I was talking quite clearly in the M5 Tunnel on the way to Sydney Airport.

The trip itself up to Cairns was fairly uneventful insofar as getting to the airport, complaining bitterly that my ticket was issued second by the machine when I made the booking, skulking around the airport terminal and stuffing my face with food before sidling onto the plane and sitting there for three hours feeling my arse going numb as the plane made its way up to the tropics, and feeling mildly spaced out on the Travacalm that was stopping me from showing my friend what digestion does to a pepper steak pie. Everything on that first day was basically administrative in nature; finding a hotel, finding somewhere to eat – and then finding out that “Churrasco experience” translates loosely from Brazilian into “Best Fucking Meal Ever Invented Ever”, before heading back to the hotel in preparation for the morning’s scuba stuff.

After having a mild freak out experience underwater as I learned scuba stuff, namely that I panic unnecessarily when I have no air, and that for a 90kg man made mostly from lard I am surprisingly buoyant, which is a bitch when you’re trying to do scuba skills like take off a BCD underwater. At any rate I managed to blunder through everything like a greased seal and bought myself some fantastic snorkelling gear for when I went out onto the Great Barrier Reef the next day, which I was rather looking forwards to. Everything was going fine as I packed for the Reef – which basically involved going “Fuck it, I’ll just take the big suitcase” and scrambling vaguely for Travacalm pills and booze – and we set off uneventfully in the morning with me dosed up on the anti-hurling medications, so all was fine.

As luck would have it, two days after passing my dive medical and telling the doctor “Yes, I have had sinusitis before, but I went through a full course of antibiotics for it and I’m fine now”, about two hours out from the Reef, guess which medical condition reared its ugly head? I didn’t show everyone my breakfast or what I’d had for lunch just five minutes ago, but instead I just got very tired very quickly and virtually hit the deck with a huge headache; I pretty much rested my forearms on the nearest table and put my head down while I whimpered like a bitch, not to put too fine a point on it. A few people came past and asked if I was feeling like I was going to hurl, in which case I should direct my vomit over the back of the boat into the ocean rather than into the boat’s carpet – and I had to explain that no, this wasn’t travel sickness, I had no idea what the hell it was but I felt half-dead. My mate suggested that since we had berths available downstairs on the boat I may as well use them, and muttering something along the lines of that he’d espoused a sensible idea, I went to lie down for a bit. It was frigging awful – I didn’t mind the fact the boat was rocking from side to side, that was fine – but I started sweating the instant I laid down, then cooled back to normal, and then went way too far in the opposite direction when I stared to freeze and was shivering. I vaguely remember my friend coming down to see if I was alright, by which time I was wrapped up in blankets and sweating, with a thundering headache. He asked if I would be right to go scuba diving, to which I quickly established the answer would probably be no – I couldn’t get my own temperature right and my face was swollen as the sinusitis attack I’d somehow managed to get lucky with blocked an entire side of my face and racked me with pain, including a horrible pulsing pain that ran from my nose all the way down my jawline as whatever had triggered the infection on the right hand side of my face got to my trigeminal nerve and fucked everything up. I said I’d let him know, and the next thing I remember one of the instructors was talking to me; I recall saying I felt worse and I couldn’t equalise at all.

Equalisation is of course important with scuba diving – I had somehow enough sense to realise that diving with a complete inability to adjust to changes in pressure inside my head would, at worst, result in ruptured eardrums on descent as the pressure differential forced my eardrums apart; if I was lucky enough to descend without injury, an air bubble inside my sinuses on the way back up would give me a fractured skull if I couldn’t equalise; I’d quite literally blow my face apart, which would be rather inconvenient. I explained that it may not be the best idea for me to dive, and I promptly fell asleep after that, waking up only in time for dinner when my friend came to tell me it was ready (to his credit, he did make a point of checking up on me). I surfaced with a bottle of beer, since I felt vaguely human, got told I looked better than I did earlier and that when the instructor had come down to talk to me earlier I basically looked like shit, although he’d phrased it as “you looked pretty ill”. Being sick and drinking a single bottle of beer raised some eyebrows, to which I dismissed suggestions that it wasn’t a good move by saying I felt vaguely human, but I paid for it the next day as it turns out the first day was just an amuse-bouché for Sinusitis A La Marine.

The next day, I was totally fucked over for sinus trouble and after staggering out of bed for breakfast with a splitting headache, sweating and having a rough night generally, I fell straight back asleep and slept until lunch – only waking up because the chef came down to see if I wanted anything to eat for lunch, which I refused – and then ten minutes later, when my friend came down and asked exactly the same question. I slept fitfully until dinner, ate, stayed up for a few hours and went straight to bed again. It was horrible that day, it really was – and the one thing I hate, being caught unawares, kept happening, especially when my friend came in to ask me a question and I didn’t even hear the first part, snapping into semi-alertness with an embarrassed “Shit! Sorry, mate, miles away” as I realised he was there – the clue being he was calling out “Hello?”. That was singularly the most unpleasant day of illness, especially when I was laying there in a moment of wakefulness on my back, and felt my pulse pounding through my temple and all sorts of other weird feelings, plus the out-of-all-proportion pain that I had whenever I brushed my hand against my face, or anything touched my face at all.

Happily enough, it started recovering on the third day, and although I was too unwell to dive, I was well enough to be very frustrated, and spent a lot more time moving around on the boat while I felt well enough to move around, and lying down when I didn’t feel well. By the time we’d got back to dry land, I was feeling passable, and went out to dinner with the people from the boat after a quick convalescence lie-down at the hotel. I decided I’d be damned if sinusitis ruined my night out and stunned the buggers into silence with alcohol, matching my mate beer for beer over dinner, which got rid of the headache I’d had, and I actually felt good for the first time in days and I didn’t half enjoy the night. Of course, I saw Guinness on tap and had to slake that thirst just to keep my Irish ancestry happy – but I was having a great night until about 12:30 in the morning, where I just couldn’t keep up (my mate had switched to vodka by this time and he was having a great old time of it), and I made my excuses and went home with seven pints coursing through my system, leaving on good terms. Because I was drunk I couldn’t be arsed walking back to the hotel and decided that some of the money in my pocket would be best placed into a taxi driver’s coffers and got myself driven back to the hotel. After that, it was all plain sailing for the rest of the holiday – which basically involved collapsing into a seat on the plane after watching my shoes set off metal detectors, right until we got to Sydney.

The weather was holding off while I got the car out of the airport and straight onto Sydney’s favourite traffic jam, the M5, where my plan was to whisk along the M5, join the M7 and finally spear off onto the M4, following that along the Blue Mountains and then out on the Great Western Highway to home. 2 hours after I’d set off, the traffic had barely crawled out of Mascot and I’d cursed myself for forgetting that the M4 runs past Olympic Park and I could have jumped off the cursed bloody M5 at that point. Fortunately, a faint shade of memory suggested that the M4 also ran past Parramatta; even though Parramatta Road is also a huge frigging traffic jam at times, the M4 at this time of night would at least be moving. Seeing signs to Bankstown and with a dim memory that Metroad 6 cut through that and Auburn on the way to Parramatta, I hit the Detour button on the GPS, kicked the Focus into manual shift mode, and floored it up the offramp into sweet freedom and moving traffic, flowing beautifully all the way to the M4. It had started raining by this time, but I didn’t care as I made my way onto the M4 and out into the west. I was so happy that I was in moving traffic I even filled the car up with petrol, but as I drove further west the weather got progressively worse. It got so bad that I called it off at Bathurst – a good two hours drive earlier than I was supposed to stop, and booked a hotel room overnight while the storm raged on.

Normally, I’d have just kept driving, but it was so bad that I couldn’t see more than about three metres ahead of me with the lights on full beam and the Focus’ wiper blades on full Dalek blitzkrieg mode, so making the decision to fork over an ungodly amount of money was probably the better decision in the long run to ensure that I got home safely the next morning, when it was still raining but at least I could see where the fuck I was going. The greatest irony of the whole trip is that while I had driven well over 800 kilometres without any insect life smashing into my windscreen, over my few trips to work in the next major town, so many things have died on my car it looks like the poor thing has been to Beirut and back. Even more disturbing for when I next bust out the Autoglym and clean the car is the fact that some of the bugs have left blood trails over the bonnet, so now it looks like it really belongs on an episode of Dexter. Oh well.

“This is really, really stupid… [T]here’s no handle on the inside. I call that inconsiderate.” – Death upon finding he has materialised in a stove, Hogfather (Terry Pratchett)

TONIGHT, on a new dose of literary AWESOME, Darkly Defending brings you an extended bitchfest about why people should fact check before they publish things on DVD covers, the rise of the XBOX to premier gaming console in the Darkly Defending household, and the bloody heatwave finally breaks in hugely impressive fashion.

As I whiled away the hours at work the other week attempting to lounge about and still get paid for doing so by clever application of my famous creative inertia principle, I spotted that work has suddenly started selling Hogfather as a $5 DVD. I already have a copy so I was rather unimpressed to see it at such a cheap pricepoint as I would have bought it but for that irritating factoid. All was fine until I read the tagline on the DVD, whereupon I promptly exploded with righteous literary rage. You see, this DVD is proudly marketed as “In the tradition of JK Rowling and Lemony Snicket”. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Anyone with half a brain, and ideally a chronological idea of time, would be able to tell you that a book CANNOT be in the tradition of a book that it predates!

For those who aren’t familiar with any of the books, allow me to introduce the timeline briefly. Hogfather is the twentieth Discworld novel and was published in 1996. It is clear that if it is already part of a series of 20 (now 39) it must be well established. The JK Rowling book that is closest to Hogfather chronologically is the first book in that series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. That was published in 1997. The first of the Series of Unfortunate Events was published in 1999. So quite how Terry Pratchett writes in the tradition of authors that he was writing twenty connected novels before they even started writing, I’m not sure. They are dissimilar if you want to go into further detail – Dumbledore is a powerful wizard who is wise and fatherly to Harry; Mustrum Ridcully fosters an air of stupidity but is in fact endowed with a fearsome intellect, is at least as functionally powerful as Dumbledore, becoming a high-level wizard at 27, and runs his University according to a memorable quote on his management style as “Me, who does the telling” and “everyone else” below his rank. Furthermore, Death is only an active character in any way in JK Rowling’s series in the 7th book, as the originator of the Deathly Hallows, endowing humanity with the three Deathly Hallows and allowing them to choose their own paths. Death in the Discworld is more than just a function to end life and has himself been forcibly retired, come back, saved the universe several times and even filled in for the missing Hogfather. At any rate, Terry Pratchett isn’t in anyone’s bloody tradition.

A rather erratic schedule at work – and by erratic I mean I seem to never leave the joint – has meant I’m rather lucky with funding at the moment in that it seems to be yearning to be spent. This has worked out with DMC Devil May Cry - like I mentioned last time, which I’ve already finished. Turns out that the fact I don’t need stealth at all and am actually encouraged to go beserk in shooting bullets everywhere in order to sock it to the demons means that I don’t have to worry about not being seen and how careful I am being when I’m about to murder something. I’ve also been scoring all of my recent titles on the XBOX 360 for a rather simple reason – my gaming headset is hooked up to the 360 and this means that I can plant a sword in people’s faces in utter quiet without waking anyone up. The old PS3 is sat there gathering dust and while I’ve still got a few games to finish on that I have to admit to laziness in that the XBOX is a bit quicker to reach and plus it means I can play in solitary splendour without having to listen to everything else in the background. The fact that the gaming headset is a Sennheiser, just like my computer headphones, probably helps a lot, since it means I can hear crap properly.

Thankfully, the stupid heatwave that we’ve had to put up with and has been setting fire to bits of the countryside has broken in spectacular fashion with the arrival of a cyclone to Queensland’s shores. Obviously this is causing flooding and a lot of problems, but it has pushed the heatwave into nonexistence with an absolutely brilliant display of an electrical storm and 100mm of rain where I live. The rain was rather welcome since our grass has regenerated to a good extent now; the electrical storm was just fantastic to watch. It also turns out that our house is a lot less susceptible to power interruptions than we thought. A blast of lighting that sent the streetlight on the corner of our property gently into that good night made the XBOX cut out, then the TV, then the whole house for a second or two while the transformer on the road hiccuped gently and restored power . After that the rest of the night proceeded without any electrical interruptions whatsoever but plenty of lightning, which is a stark contrast to the last electrical storm I saw. In that one, the transformer itself copped a belt from the lightning and some rather important bits exploded in a shower of blue and green sparks. There was a massive electrical hum as the damaged transformer tried and failed three times to trip and reset, and then stayed dead for the rest of the night until an electrical crew came and hit it with sticks in the morning. At any rate it’s brought a reprieve from the bloody hot weather and has managed to put out a massive bushfire that was raging about 160km from where I live, so at least it has done some good. Obviously it’s done lots of bad as well but the rain has certainly helped the bushfire fighting efforts.

Lastly, I’ve been eyeing things that I can’t afford again and this time my eye has alighted on a car. We’d been discussing service costs for my Commodore, which is now due for its 210,000km service, and for some reason the conversation turned and we ended up at the local Ford garage having a mooch about. I’d originally eyed off a Mondeo, which would set me back a whopping $17,990 (this is probably quite cheap for a car but if you’ve got my wages then it’s frigging whopping, believe me). A lot of wending and mooching about later, I’ve got my eye firmly on a Ford Focus Trend, which is a four door sedan. It’s a 2L engine so it is somewhat less powerful than the Commodore but it is more fuel economical, plus it’s a hard-arsed bastard of a car that’s not afraid to get its arse out. That’s according to the reviews, at any rate, I haven’t driven the lad. This costs a massive $23,800 but Ford is offering dealer finance at a rather competitive rate, which would work out as affordable for me over a given term, which is quite curious. It is cheaper to insure than my current car which is always a blessing. Since it’s the big brother of the Ford Fiesta, I know one thing for certain, and that’s its ability to handle the Royal Marines:

A somewhat unconventional army landing craft. But a grenade fits in the cup holder!

Honestly, I would love a new car but I don’t think my chances of getting one are very good. It would be nice to take that Focus for a spin, though, just to see what it drives like. Oh sure, it’d be a bit of a comedown going from a 3.8L Commodore to a 2L Focus, but I get more gears to play with and I would finally be able to shout at the car and have it actually understand me for once (since it has voice recognition) rather than it just smirking on its little car face and thinking I’m a bastard in its little electronic heart.

“Nanny gave this the same consideration as would a nuclear physicist who’s just been told that someone was banging two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm.” - Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

TONIGHT, on a new Darkly Defending for the new year, I wear a hat, I am out-sarcasmed for once in my life, and Darkly Defending prepares to bugger off on holidays for a while.

It’s been bloody hot in Australia recently; to wit, a mass of very hot air that has been collecting over the desert has finally decided it would like to say hello to the coastline, and it is pushing 40 degree days in front of it (for anyone in America, that’s in degrees Celsius, so up-convert to about 101 degrees Fahrenheit). This is rather rude, and it has meant that most of the state is on fire watch. Naturally, this is the last time you want anyone to be twatting around with matches, and I was pleased to hear that three teenagers were arrested for deliberately lighting fires in western Sydney. While the Premier of NSW says that people should be made to clean up any mess that they create by deliberately lighting fires – and I do agree with this – I stop short of throwing the book at them. That’s because I’d rather throw the entire fucking bookshelf at them for being so bloody stupid and acting with such a cavalier disregard for everyone else’s lives.

Thankfully, I am lucky in that the only lasting effect the heat has had on my house and mine is that we’ve had to wear hats when going to play out with the dog. I discovered a rattan trilby which I’ll have to bust out the next time I go on holiday (which should hopefully be quite soon), which made Dad laugh for an inappropriate length of time, but I don’t particularly care. It keeps my head from being burned – never mind the thick layer of black hair that sits on top of it, that’s an afterthought. The other effect it has had is that the fans are working overtime, but that’s normal for summer. At any rate I am very glad that I am not on fire and hope that this state of affairs continues; I also want everyone else to not be on fire either.

The only fires I would like around my place are the fires of sarcasm, which I will quite happily stoke. However, I have managed to meet another absolute master of the craft, who rather cheekily made a crack in the middle of a conversation about trying to organize holidays together. I’d signed off the previous night with something vaguely sensible for once, saying something like “Once we sort out the fine details, it’ll be a goer” or something like that, I dunno, I’ve slept since then. I was not impressed, but begrudgingly amused, when the reply came back the next day saying “..fine detail, do they have scuba gear big enough for you?”. If we weren’t as bad as each other with the comments – including the fact that the last time we worked together we spent four hours trading insults rather than doing what we’re employed to do – I probably would have shot him by now, but that’s fine. I may have come up with some absolutely frigging hilarious suggestions in the past, so I can hardly be to blame if we just happen to dick around rather than do anything.

At any rate, our holidays are all booked now, although I have still managed to make the odd cock up doing perfectly simple tasks. My latest minor disaster involved booking an airport transfer 24 hours before the flight I am actually supposed to be taking. I mean, I’ve heard of being prepared, but that’s just ridiculous. I’d emailed the hotel and rattled off an email asking them to organize transfers (since theirs are cheaper than the actual taxi service) and while I managed to get the arrival date correct, I somehow managed, while directly reading off the itinerary, to pick the wrong day, but that at least is easily sorted. I have managed, amazingly, to book flights, accommodation and parking from distances ranging between 400 to 3,000 kilometres from where I’m actually going to be staying, but I can’t read a bloody itinerary to save my life, apparently. Still, this pales in comparison to what I did with my passport. Never mind the fact that a passport is a crucial identity document and is proof positive of your citizenship in a country.

About eight months ago I had my passport out for something – I believe it was a British passport application – and I decided to put it back in the filing cabinet, where we have a specific spot for them. For reasons best known to myself, I decided to file it with the dog’s vet bills and paperwork instead of back in the same drawer it came from. Thus began an epic eight-month odyssey of trying to find my passport by tearing apart my room and several other wardrobes. It also didn’t help we’d moved houses in the interim, and I even went to the point of getting a replacement Australian passport form and filling in all of my details, and preparing to kiss goodbye to the passport application fee plus what’s effectively a $100 fine for losing my passport. It was only when Mum and Dad were considering a new German Shepherd to go with our mad one and pulled out the breeder’s paperwork that our dog is from to get her contact details that my passport finally made its reappearance. This prompted a conversation with Dad amidst much shoe-shuffling saying I had no bloody idea how it had ended up in there and I would learn to file things properly in future. And yes, my passport is where it really should be this time.

Lastly, I have become mildly addicted to my XBOX again and have been plying it with electronic games. I’ve decided that Samuel Beechworth is a bit of a bastard for alerting Admiral Havelock’s forces when I came to knock him off. All because I may have been a wee bit indiscreet and enjoyed just barraging into situations with a blade flashing. I shot him in the face as recompense for that, got myself killed repeatedly and got that frustrated that I restarted Dishonored with a pledge to be a wee bit less violent. So far Dunwall is only rating Low on the chaos rating so with any luck I won’t get in so much crap this time. In my true form of sticking to one game, I’ve now gone and laid out money on Devil May Cry and am piloting the new Dante around the joint. He does make a rather amusing dismissal of his prior incarnations when a white longhaired wig lands on his head for no apparent reason. After critically regarding his reflection for a bit, he says “Not in a million years” and continues on. I am rather enjoying chopping demons up with a big sword and not having a parochial old sod in a boat tell me off just because I’m a bit fast and loose with a sword. It’s not my fault that “Blunder recklessly into a situation and then come out with a sword flashing in all directions with heads going this way and that” is my middle name, rather than the much neater and shorter “Stealth”. Oh well.

“There are times in our lives when everything seems to go wrong. When despite our best efforts, and for no apparent rhyme or reason, tragedy strikes…. And there are other times when everything goes just perfectly. That’s how the last year has been for me.” - Dexter Morgan

TONIGHT, on Darkly Defending’s newest contribution to the electronic frontier, I make a very expensive mistake across international borders, something finally goes right under its warranty claim for once, and how to ensure someone frantically calls you at 10am in the morning.

Like practically everyone else I know, I can’t leave my tax return alone and have decided to put the poor thing to work buying things. This time, I’ve decided that I wanted to revive quite an old hobby, and decided to fork out on a train set as part of my spending program. I’d found a layout I was happy with, and ran up the list, and was then left with where to get it from, which was a bit of a poser. There aren’t a huge number of Hornby stockists in Australia, and I got a quote from the largest supplier which came in at $600. This was a bit steep, so I did a bit of poking around and was set to save $5 by purchasing direct from Hornby in the UK, thanks to a punishing exchange rate between Australia and the UK. A bit more looking around, and I found a stockist in Canada who was more than happy to supply me with a quote.

The quote itself was surprising in that it was $471 in Canadian dollars – significantly cheaper than the other quotes I’d run up from different websites. Happily for me, the exchange rate between Canada and Australia runs in Australia’s favour, so after the exchange rate was taken into account, the real cost to me was $450. This is naturally a huge amount of money to drop on track, but since it was a significantly smaller huge amount of money than I’d have to drop to secure it in Australia, I wasn’t too fussed. As I write, it’s making its way to Australia and is no longer in Canada. I was rather pleased at having secured the track so cheap, and decided to plan out the baseboard I’d need to put everything on there. This turned out to be another horrifyingly expensive move, as I realized at that precise point I’d forgotten to order any right hand points for my layout. Another $101 later, which was still cheaper than rectifying my mistake in Australia, and now I’ve got two parcels winging their way from Canada to enjoy.

As luck would have it, my car decided to celebrate my huge outlays of money by going wrong. The problem it had evidently mulled over for quite some time before deciding that was going to be the one it’d throw up purely to irritate me was a sticking throttle – meaning I had to boot the accelerator to make it unstick, which would make the Commodore’s backside step out on the driveway. This sounds fun, but since I have a driveway full of stones, it’s a bad idea. Annoyingly, this precise fault had been corrected by KMart Tyre and Auto back when I lived in the Illawarra when the car went in for its 195,000km service, so with 200,100km on the clock and my receipt to hand, I gave KMart Tyre and Auto in Orange a call and made the 100km trip down there to see if they could poke things with a stick.

This meant getting up early, rather than the previous happy scenario where I could just fall out of bed approximately three seconds before the car was due for its service and then drive the measly 7km to get there, so I was up at the crack of dawn to make my car get down there. I arrived a few minutes early, promptly had my address written down wrongly, and dropped my car in the tender care of another automotive garage. Amazingly, the problem was fixed rather quickly, and since a throttle body should not clog up after 5,000km when it’s been serviced recently, it was performed for free under warranty, which was a nice change for once. This called for some celebratory purchasing, so I dropped some cash on some new games for the PlayStation 3 – helped in no small way by the fact that EB had a games sale on at the time and I picked up three games for what I’d usually pay for one.

Finally, my hosting and domain names all decided that I hadn’t spent enough money, and they all fell due at once. As would be bloody typical, one set of renewals didn’t allow for me to make one single transaction, and instead I had to make three separate ones all in order to renew my hosting and two domain names that I own (darklydefending.net being one of them). This showed up as three separate transactions on my credit card within the space of a few minutes, all for different amounts, and all to the same company. This roused the attention of my credit card company – who didn’t so much as bat an eyelid when my card was used in Canada (incidentally, Skype is a good way to call overseas for cheap) – and the phone rang rather suddenly and delivered me to an inquisition by my credit card company, who had frozen the payments temporarily to make sure I’d actually authorized them. After assuring them that I had, and was just paying bills, it was all sunshine and happiness again and I was allowed to continue spending money at a prodigious rate. Although this must sound like I’m whinging, I really cannot complain about my credit card company. They have never denied a transaction on me, unlike my previous company, irrespective of what I buy and where (they seem to accept I like buying overseas due to being a tightarse) – and at least gave a reason why they’d taken me away from my early morning coffee.

I still remember the reason I left my previous bank – nothing to do with the fact I’m employed by the company that sponsors my current credit card and thus pay no annual fee at all – but because I’d gone to pay for my current glasses. I’d tried claiming through my health fund, who had suddenly decided that after three years of sending mail to the wrong address, they would deny payment on the grounds that they weren’t sure I was still at University – I was and still am – and despite receiving mail back marked “No Longer at This Address”, nobody had thought to actually ring and get our new address, much less verify I was still at University. Annoyed by this, I decided to stick the lot on my credit card, which was refused by the bank. Ho-hum, you say, obviously you had no money left. At this point I had fully paid off my credit card, so the full amount of credit was available, and still the bank said “No”.

This was not as frustrating as the last time, coincidentally at the same optometrist, where I’d paid for an older set of glasses, had my credit card refused, had my debit card refused, and finally resorted to getting cash from the ATM – only to find out that despite a refusal receipt – and a furious phone call to the bank asking them to explain why I was short $260 despite having a receipt saying the transaction had not succeeded – my credit card transaction had been successful – thus paying $520 for a $260 pair of glasses and necessitating a refund by the poor optometrist, who’d been led up the garden path by my bank. This time, I walked away to go sort out my health fund, and contacted the bank to find out why they’d refused payment this time, while going in the next day with my now-fixed health fund card, doing a proper claim and then finally paying with my debit card.

The reason I actually left was simple. I contacted the bank, and asked them what exactly they thought they were up to, and why did they deny a validly authorized credit transaction, especially one done via PIN. The official response from the bank came back – and said, quite simply, “I have no idea”. I replied that I had no idea why I was still using them for a credit card company, and promptly dropped them. My current credit card company? This is the first time in 2 years they have ever rung to check any transactions. This is the sort of thing that I like – I am left to blow the monies I receive in perfect peace, and they are still watching my back to make sure that I’m the one who’s doing the spending.  I could still theoretically complain to the original bank, but since I’ve enjoyed two years of being able to spend money without a bank randomly deciding no, you can’t use your credit card today, I’m happy with things the way they are.

As an addendum, I think it’s funny that banks are now required by law in Australia to put “minimum repayment warnings” on their credit card statements. It is obvious to anyone that if you only ever make the minimum repayments on a credit card, it will take you a long time to pay it off and you will pay much more than the original debt. For example, if you’ve got a credit card with $10,000 credit on it (I don’t, I’m not that rich, so don’t go getting any ideas), and you put $2,030 on it, you should ideally pay back that $2,030 within the 42 days or so that you have. Obviously this is not always possible, so the banks offer a minimum repayment option, usually $30. If you make this minimum repayment, you usually satisfy the requirements of not paying penalty charges, but interest is still applied to the closing balance on the card for anything not paid off within the interest free period.

Since interest is running at about 20% for credit cards in Australia, 20% of $2,000 is $400, so now a $2,000 debt is $2,400. You now have to pay even more back, and if you only make the minimum montly repayment the next month, the new bill for Month 3 will be $2,400 + $480 – $2,880, and for Month 4, your original $2,000 debt has now ballooned to $2,880 + $566 = $3,446. By Month 5, you’re looking at $4,135 – so within 5 months your debt has doubled. To anyone with half a brain it makes sense to pay off as much as possible so that even if you do get hit with interest, it’s as little as possible. Yet this dearth of common sense must be so common that the Government has actually had to legislate to point out stupid financial decisions to people. What can you do?

“Alas, your father is no more – he perished in an accident involving a vat of soup and a horse… if it is any consolation, it was quite funny to watch” - Malifax Skulkingworm, Bleak Old Shop Of Stuff

TONIGHT, by order of Court, on a severely delayed by those-pesky-things-called-examinations Darkly Defending, hear my merciful voice, the joys of not being a bat fastard, and this is just pages upon pages of incomprehensible gibberish – and no, it isn’t the law.

As is my custom at examination time, I usually sit there in a blind panic for most of the time, then inspiration hits and I dribble something sensate onto the paper. For my education exam about how learning (purportedly) occurs – the one where I was penalised hugely for the heinous crime of forgetting to put arrows on a diagram so it was classified as a “mind map” instead of an “attribute web”, thus taking 15% of the mark with it – I really did just dribble on to the paper in every sense except the literal. The other subjects, like inclusive education, quantum chemistry and Physics? I was on much stronger ground there, and my answers were even relevant on occasion. This meant when my marks came through from Uni, my suspicions were confirmed – I’d just managed to save my arse in the first Education subject and scrape home with a solid Pass; I was on much more solid ground in Quantum and Thermochemistry, where my frankly bloody excellent thermochem knowledge (which earned me a nice fat 92% on its own assessment) sailed me across the line and into the heights of a solid Credit; Inclusive Education stormed home like a boss on the back of two Distinctions in the assessment tasks and confirmed its boss-like status with a third and final Distinction to round things off; and finally, Physics stormed from the back quarter and smashed the lower marked subjects out of the way and proudly waved its own Distinction mark in the air – just two marks shy of qualifying for a High Distinction, which would have looked fantastic on my transcript. Still, when you are trying to train as a science teacher and you’re on a Government scholarship, it does look good when your major is the highest scoring subject on your transcript.

Heady with freedom from finally getting my exams out of the way, I buggered off to Parkes during the day, and my wallet leapt out of my pocket of its own accord after we’d poked around at The Dish out there (and never trust an old Navman GPS, which will send you along a dirt road which is only passable in good weather and dump you straight onto the Newell Highway as the “most direct route”), and it ecstatically wet itself, haemorrhaging cash everywhere when it saw a CB radio. Sadly this proved to be infectious, as Dad then purchased one as well, since we’d found ones which came in kits with the aerials and everything else in tow. When it came to fitting the CB radios, I of course didn’t want to wait, and stormed ahead doing mine. You would expect, knowing me and what I usually write on my blog, that I’d probably have electrocuted myself 5000 times before I even got the radio out of its box, but I have to admit I actually did the job properly.

This “doing the job properly” business – mostly because Dad was watching me like a hawk – also entailed fixing up the so-called professional job that was done by an auto parts shop and installer. Whoever had done it had originally done a neat job by cable tying my driving light’s power cables as they passed near the radiator on their way to the engine block. From there, the wiring appeared to have been done by someone who was 4. Not only was the wiring not properly earthed so that the metal spades could touch the car’s body and bypass the 20 amp fuse that was obviously put in to protect the wiring – which I fixed up with the ever-handy duct tape – the wires themselves were also allowed to trail over the exhaust manifold and dangerously close to the high tension leads going into the spark plugs. This means that not only were the leads in a spot where the 45,000V routinely generated in the HT leads could, by electromagnetic induction, also be generated to an extent in the wiring itself, but – and more importantly – if I went on a long drive, I’d melt the cables simply due to the heat from the exhaust manifold. I fixed such a stupid error by cable tying the wiring well out of the way, and also took the time to run my antenna cable for the CB radio while I was in there.

The next port of call involved running the antenna cable through the firewall and into the driver’s compartment. Surprisingly, the car cooperated very well here, and within about 2 minutes, I’d hooked the antenna up to the CB radio, mounted the CB radio and then set about cannibalising the 12V supply from my radio on account of it being the easiest 12V supply to get to. Happily, the CB radio works perfectly, and sits there looking all neat and stuff. It took 2 hours to do everything neatly, but it looks like it was a professional job. The truth is obviously the reverse, but there’s no point spoiling such happy moments.

Today, however, we tried fitting Dad’s CB radio to his car. I thought that my car would be the most difficult, because it was the older car, and that Dad’s car, since it was younger, would be relatively straight forward. However, it was my car which proved to be the lovelington and the softy-boots – to paraphrase from the same TV show I shamelessly took the opening quote from – as Dad’s car was an utter pig to fit the antenna to. The antenna did not want to cooperate for the first two hours with the bonnet at all, and then after much consumption of lunch on our part, it suddenly did. Not wasting an opportunity, we got the aerial mounted and then started feeding the cable through the firewall into the footwell. This went alright, just like it did in my car, and there the similarity ended. Trying to find a 12V supply for the CB was an absolute bastard, and trying to spot a cable was difficult indeed. I couldn’t just slide out the radio like I did in my car, that’d be too easy. Instead, I ended up bent at an unnatural angle, leaning backwards into the car, so that my head was next to the brake pedal and I had an unparalleled view of the steering column, and after exhaustive poking around with a light and thanking my lucky stars that my 85kg frame meant that the smaller mound of podge that still inhabits my midriff didn’t mean I got wedged between the floor and the driver’s seat (a feat that also came in handy at work, when I squeezed through a very tight spot between two pallets of stock while exclaiming “Thank God I’ve lost weight, otherwise this would be bloody awkward”), I gave the idea of a handy cable up as a bad loss.

I then thought, hang on, if my radio is easy to remove, surely the radio in Dad’s car should also be easy to remove. Er, no. While removing my radio simply involves pressure in the right place to remove a bit of fascia, then some deft work with pixelated hands in the car’s secret places to get the radio out, Dad’s car involves removing two major bits of fascia, unbolting half of the centre console, prising another important bit of fascia off, and then unbolting even more of the centre console, before you can even get to the screws that hold the radio in. Removing the radio, therefore, is not so much a two-minute job as an expeditionary force complete with lonely Huskies and Arctic explorers regarding the huskies with a hungry look in their eye since they haven’t eaten in ages. Eventually, we gave it up for the day, and decided to tackle it another day when fresher brains and less gymnastic contortion would come to our aid. Thus, Dad’s got a phantom CB, while I’ve got a real one.

The only kicker to the whole story? No bugger uses CBs out here, so it’s fairly quiet. However, I can hear the roadworks going on several kilometres away from my house via CB, a random telemetry channel, and the odd conversation via repeaters, so at least the CB works. It will come in handy when I’m next off to Uni, though, since I’ll be driving along some major highways and right into the heart of some very populated areas. Then, I’ll be able to letch like a trucker with the best of them.