A Gigantic Whinge Fest

We have it pretty good in this country. I know I do. Most of us have a roof over our heads and access to reasonably useful food. And for those who don’t, there’s access to services, welfare and community aid programs. No-one in a privileged place like Australia really has much to complain about.

And yet…

I’m having a hard time finding a job. I mean… I have a job, but my contract expires in June and there’s no funding available to keep me on after that, so I’m looking for a new one. I’ve had a couple of close calls for jobs which would have been fantastic, but even after making it to the interview stages, I’ve been denied. So that’s disappointing.

Another thing that’s annoying me more than it should lately is the NT Literary Awards. More specifically, my failure to get shortlisted for them. I don’t want to seem like a bad sport or like I have a higher opinion of my own writing than I should, but I was quite disappointed not to make the last round with a play I submitted. That’s fine. I decided to submit a request for feedback to find out what went wrong. I got this reply from the organisers:

Unfortunately, of your four pieces, only one has received written comments. It’s one of the hardships of dealing with a panel of volunteer judges, that you can’t tick them off for failing to follow orders! Please find one piece of feedback attached for Traditional English Hospitality.

I don’t want to bag the Lit. Awards too hard, because they do a great job promoting NT writing, but I do wonder how they made the decision not to shortlist me when there was no feedback on anything I’d written. Well… whatever. I’m not bitter. I’m never at home to Mr Bitterbottom.

And it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve always been of the opinion that as long as I’ve got my keyboard and my car, there’s nothing I can’t do. It seems a strange thing to base my independence and self-confidence on, but there you have it. If I can go anywhere and I’ve got Samantha with me, we’re all good.

On Saturday night my car broke down. This is a calamity in anyone’s life, but in Darwin it’s particularly disastrous, as buses tend to come about once every fifteen years. And for me it was a double blow as I watched the otherwise faithful GSS Unity being hoisted onto the tow truck: Genius that I am I left my keyboard sitting on the back seat.

Fortunately I’m in a position where I can walk to both work and church from my house, so the loss of my car doesn’t cripple me completely like it did when I was without a car in Palmerston. But here I am in the middle of the year when everything was supposed to be falling into place for me and I can’t get a job, apparently I can’t write, and now I have no car and no keyboard. At times like this a man falls back on the only recourse left to him: Whinging about it on his blog. I mean… praying.

Fresh from last week's spectacular demonstration of things going right for me, I'm just a little frustrated at my seeming inability to catch a single break. Ah well. One Body and Happy Yess comedy are both coming up. Hopefully that will turn things around.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

A Perfect Weekend

It’s been a little over five weeks since my last trip to Sydney for Easter, so I was very excited to have Kim coming up for the May Day long weekend. I spent a bit of time planning out the weekend and making all the bookings: we were off to Kakadu for three days and I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. There was fuel in the car, food in the bags (!) and plenty of time to take things easy.

We made pretty good time and arrived in Jabiru with enough time in hand to check in and relax before heading out for a Yellow Waters cruise. I was quite excited for this, because although I’ve spent plenty of time floating on wetlands and looking at birds in the past, this time in addition to the sunset cruise we were booked on a night cruise, which was aimed at star gazing and sharing some of the Dreaming stories of the local people about the stars and how they came to be where they were.

Unfortunately the arrangements for cruises had changed a bit since the last time I was out there. The car park for the boat dock was still slightly underwater from the wet season which we are rumoured to have had (I saw very little evidence of this), so the idea was to arrive at the resort just around the corner and get ferried over by someone with a large bus. So you need to get there twenty minutes before the departure time.

I did not realise this.

We arrived about fifteen minutes before and were summarily dismissed and told to come back the next day. It was a bit of a nuisance, but after rearranging our bookings, we jumped back in the car and headed for Ubirr. I’d planned to do Yellow Waters on Saturday and Ubirr on Sunday, but there was no reason why we couldn’t do it backwards, right?

Well, the traffic on the road out to Ubirr is a little bit steadier than you might normally encounter on a road out to the middle of nowhere, and not every car out there is as awesome as my Focus, the GSS Unity. Some prefer to take the road at something a little closer to what I might be able to manage on a golf cart. By the time we made it to the Ubirr car park, the sun was very low in the sky and we were in serious danger of missing the sunset altogether. Fortunately Kim was wearing the sneakers she had assured me she wouldn’t need, so we were able to manage a quick sprint up to the lookout.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to run straight up a rock face. In my experience it’s not really conducive to the kind of contemplative/romantic serenity I’d had in mind when I planned the trip. Nonetheless, we made it up in time for me to watch the sunset and for Kim to take about sixty identical photos of it.

The next day we were all set to take another run at the Yellow Waters. We took no chances and I made sure I had us down at the resort a full hour before we were due to depart. Unfortunately this meant we had to sit around in the heat for forty minutes waiting for the guides to show up. My father would have been proud of me.

The sunset cruise itself actually went pretty well. The air over the water wasn’t as hot and the guide was out to practice his upcoming comedy routine on us. We didn’t see any jabirus or brolgas, but we got some great views of some White Breasted Sea Eagles, which are my favourite bird and Kim’s favourite rugby team (Don’t ask me why).

We had some dinner and waited until the night cruise was ready to start. It was cloudy, with a slight chance of rain, so the guides did what they could to talk us out of making them take the boat out. We were really keen to go, so we stuck our heels in and asked for the tour to go ahead. After a few delays, a massive and yet still ineffective dosage of insect repellent and an apology that we weren’t going spotlighting, we got moving and went down to the boat dock again.

The boat had a flat battery. We turned around and came back.

I don’t know what dreaming story they tell about that, but I do know that we drove back through the rain, and that by the time we got back to our hotel the sky was clear as a bell. At least we got our money back.

Monday afternoon we got moving again and headed back to Darwin. I wouldn’t exactly say the Kakadu excursion was a complete disaster, but I certainly hadn’t been everything I had imagined. We had a dinner reservation at Nirvana that night, which was handy because I had a voucher I had won at an open mic night a few weeks previously and had stored carefully in the glove box in my car for just such an occasion.

Naturally, it was nowhere to be found when I needed it. That's not unusual; things go missing in my car all the time. But they usually do show up when i need them. My car is a bit like the Room of Requirement. But not this weekend. And I think that's the second one that's gone missing. I can only assume that at some point in the future I'm going to find myself in dire need of Nirvana vouchers (I have no idea why) and there'll be a stack of six of them waiting on my passenger seat.

We had a lovely dinner anyway, and were contemplating desert when Kim got a text message from Jetstar. With just four hour's notice, her flight home had been cancelled. Not postponed, or rescheduled, just cancelled completely. There was a phone number for her to call so that she could organise her own way home, and a promise to pay for accommodation for the night. So we quickly paid (Full price. Oh well.) for dinner and then wandered off into the night to find Kim somewhere nicer than our living room floor to stay.

I took her to the airport the next day only to find that the entire airport had been dismantled by an army of demonic nuclear powered scarab beetles.

Not really.

There are a number of lessons that can be learned from last weekend.

1) Don't use Jetstar ever. I have yet to meet anyone who has had a positive experience with them.
2) Boat rides in Kakadu at night sound really romantic, but probably aren't
3) It doesn't matter how comprehensively wrong a weekend goes, if you have the right company it still turns out pretty good.

Shut up.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Surprisingly Awesome

So our monthly comedy gigs at Happy Yess are ticking along nicely. Last night we had a virgins night- A night for all first timers doing stand-up comedy. It had potential to go either way, but we were all blown away by how much fun the night was.

It started out with the usual panic attacks when we realised that we had an hour and a half to fill, and only two comedians on the list. None of the regulars had prepared anything, so we were all wandering around figuring out what we could pull off at short notice, when Amy wandered in with four other comedians in tow and we went from there.

You wouldn’t expect to get seven good ones in a row at a first-time amateur comedy night, but that’s exactly what we got. Everything from dark yet somehow self-deprecating socio-political commentary (from someone else this time) to an entire string of mother jokes made about the comic’s own mother (who was in the audience). And one particularly inventive man who attempted to pick up the previous comic by impersonating an amputee construction worker.

Basically the point is that Darwin is awesome, hilarious and packed full of more talent than most would expect. I suspect it’s something to do with laughing to distract ourselves from the weather. So next month we’re having Ladies’ Night at Happy Yess Comedy. A night when we all get to make fun of… no wait, that can’t be right…

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Too Many Biscuits Before Bed Time

My housemate makes a mean ANZAC biscuit: Crusty on the outside and gooey on the inside. Kind of like me. Of course, she negates all the awesomeness points her baking skills accrue by insisting on calling them ANZAC cookies. We’ve reached an uneasy sort of peace over this: she agrees not to use the C word in front of me and I agree not to shoot her. Occasionally I get careless and shoot her anyway, but only with a nerf gun. And she’s always awake, facing me and armed. Well… usually.

I was munching thoughtfully on one of her latest efforts the other day, considering the deep mysteries of what elements go into creating the perfect ANZAC bikkie. I should have known better than to tempt fate like that, and sure enough there was a puff of green smoke (sure, why not?) and an eerily familiar voice echoed through my bedroom.

“Do you have any fish for me?”

What the hell? I was totally expecting Biscuit Lady. She explained that Biscuit Lady couldn’t make it, on account of my having killed her off last year. But that still did not account for what Fish Girl was doing here. And how did she make my bedroom echo? That was fantastic.

It turns out Fish Girl’s television wasn’t working and she really wanted to watch Celebrity Splash. I rolled my eyes in frustration with my own generation’s insane taste in popular culture. But I had to admit the bodybuilder belly flopping off the high board was awesome.

Where was I?

Oh who cares. Cum Tacent Clament! Internally consistent plot lines since... never.

Make me what ANZAC biscuits you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Some Thoughts on Temporal Mechanics. Sort Of.

I spend a lot of my time pondering the great mysteries of the universe. Sometimes I sit and ponder the relationship between causality, free will, divine predestination and chaos. Other times I ponder my persistent inability to get my chicken burgers right.

This week I’ve been considering time travel. I mean, not considering it in terms of whether I should do it or not, but more in terms of which literary expressions of it make the most sense to me. This is largely Kim’s fault. She made me read the Time Traveller’s Wife. I enjoyed bits of it, but as far as plot lines go it was one of the girliest science fiction stories I’ve ever read. I shouldn’t complain too much. It was a lot better than Jane Eyre.

It’s important that you understand that I really do take my devotion to this subject very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that I recently finished editing my second novella on the subject. I wrote it in November for Nanowrimo and I’m planning on doing a third at some stage, just as soon as I can find a spare plot and an extra November lying around.

And I’d hate you to think that this is just some rubbish I made up while I was bored at work because I wanted to get an extra post in for April. No no no. This post is the culmination of weeks of meticulous research. You can find my sources here, here, here, here, and here.

See. I totally know what I’m talking about. I’m planning on having awarded myself an honorary doctorate in the dual fields of temporal mechanics and goofing about on the internet at some point last week. Wish me luck.




Garry with 2 Rs

Rethinking My Whole Life

When I was a kid I watched way too much Lois and Clarke. I don’t know what it was about the show that appealed to me at the time, but it really sucked me in. I used to make sure I could be at home to watch it on TV, and if I couldn’t be there I would make sure Mum taped it for me. On VHS. Yes, I’m that old. Shut up.

It was at about that time in my life that the idea of becoming a journalist started to appeal to me. It would be easy to assume that it was all about wanting to be Superman, but my passion for writing and for public information has only strengthened over the years, while my obsession with the Man of Steel has thankfully declined. A bit.

By the time I left Darwin to travel to university, I knew there was only one field of study for me. I had good enough marks from high school to study just about anything that wasn’t medical, but to my extended family’s despair I enrolled in a bachelor of arts program and signed up for a journalism major. As an extra side project for interest’s sake, I also enrolled in introductory linguistics. Nothing was ever going to come of that, it was just for fun really.

Five years later I held a Bachelor of Journalism and an Honours Degree in linguistics. Many of my colleagues from the school of journalism went on to cadetships and positions in regional dailies. Some have gone on to do some great things. One of my colleagues is now a political reporter for ABC TV in Canberra, and another has just become an editor at ABC radio in Queensland.

Me? I decided to put my job offer from the Border Watch (the local daily paper in Mt. Gambier) aside and entertain the strange idea of working as a professional linguist for a speech technology company in Sydney. I figured I could always become a journalist later, but the opportunity to work as a linguist was only going to come up once in a blue moon.

With the benefit of hindsight, moving to Sydney was an excellent decision, as it was in Sydney that I first met Kim. But that’s another story that everyone’s sick of by now.

When I returned to Darwin a few years later, the plan was that I’d be able to walk straight in the front door of the NT News and say “job please”. The weeks I had spent as an intern during my studies coupled with being a local boy were supposed to be a watertight guarantee. Unfortunately in the intervening years the entire management and editorial staff of the paper had changed (it does that about every six months) and no-one knew who I was anymore. My applications landed in the pile of applications from every journalism graduate in the country, and I slunk off to become a trainer at a locally run credit union.

Two and a half years, one promotion, and five applications later, I managed to wrangle myself another two week voluntary stint with my local newspaper. Perhaps this was finally my chance to put aside this project management nonsense and fulfil my destiny as a newsroom cadet.

Well, I was offered a “research position” with the Northern Territory Government instead, and for the last twelve months I've been once more managing recording projects in other languages, despite no such activity being found anywhere in my current job description, which is admittedly fairly vague. It seems my true destiny is to sit in front of computers in quiet rooms, listening to other people record languages I don’t understand. This realisation would be extremely depressing, if I hadn’t had an equally powerful revelation this week about journalism.

I don’t want to do it.

It came this week as our televisions, newspapers and computer screens were flooded with images of the Boston Marathon bombings. Twitter exploded with expressions of support, the news had images of the aftermath on repeat for at least a whole day and online news was full of opinion pieces about how this was further demonstration that no-one should ever feel safe and terrorists are lurking behind every corner. Let’s bomb them. Three people were killed, which is a tragedy. One of the victims was a child. Look at this nice picture of him.

Meanwhile in the same week, 39 Afghan civilians were killed by US armed forces, who blew up a wedding celebration for some classified reason. And as we prepare to pull forces out of Iraq, a series of up to fifty explosions killed 46 people in Baghdad and injured over three hundred. That one happened at almost exactly the same time as the Boston attacks.

But look at this picture of a dead American boy. It’s a tragedy.

Well, okay, yes it is a tragedy and my prayers are with his family. My prayers are also with the families of the Iraqis and Afghans hurt and killed at the same time, even if the media don’t give flying fig about them.

And it’s not just a symptom of our society’s general ignorance. As soon as people become aware of these facts, they are as shocked and disgusted as I am that we could spend so much air time lamenting the loss of three people, when almost thirty times that are being blown to bits overseas, some of them at our hands. It’s not that people don’t care about it; it’s that the mainstream media are telling us not to care about it. The commercial news values of every major media outlet have dictated that the loss of three white people in America is worth a full day’s uninterrupted coverage, but the death of close to a hundred people in the Middle East isn’t worth reporting.

That’s inhuman, inconceivable and repugnant. I want no part of it. I’d rather record notices in Kriol telling people to take their kids to school than walk within twenty metres of a newsroom this week. And so would Superman. So bollocks to my journalism degree. I’m going to go and do something worthwhile with my life.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Press Release

(Written for Happy Yess Comedy 4 April 2013, and posted here in lieu of anything else to write about)

Good evening ladies and gentleman and thank you very much for your attendance this evening. As you would no doubt be aware from the press briefing notes we spoon fed you this morning, our party is taking this opportunity to announce some bold, audacious and courageous new policy directions. These new policies are designed to give more Australians a fair go, and to more responsibly, sensibly, reasonably and responsibly spend the budget allocations for this sector.

Just like many Australians, our party has been disturbed, concerned, troubled and indeed disturbed by recent revelations regarding the transport of live creatures around Australian and to destinations in South East Asia among others.

It is the firm belief of this party that such wanton disregard for the value and dignity of life is unacceptable. To cram so many in to such a confined space, for interminable amounts of time on route to Asia is beyond reprehensible and cannot be allowed to continue.

Therefore under a brand new initiative, our party will be forcibly disbanding Jetstar, replacing it with a transit system that doesn’t leave at one o’clock in the freaking morning and placing a blanket ban on those stupid orange uniforms to go with it.

Our party is very cognizant that Australians are concerned about the state of our environment, about climate change and about Anthropogenic Global Warming. As a political movement, we want to reassure all voters that not only do we have a firm grasp on what these words mean, we take very seriously the science behind the debates and the entirely rational discussions that go with it.

As an extension of this, our party will be revamping the Carbon Tax. It will no longer be a flat rate tax on polluting industries, which damages our economy, but a more fairly, evenly, equitably and fairly distributed tax on all carbon-based life forms and their footprints. This is to ensure a strong and sustainable future for our country, free from carbon and the manifold problems associated with it. The science is clear on this issue; remove all the carbon-based life forms from our economy and we’ll remove the human causes of global warming altogether, for a cleaner future for all Australians.

Turning to the very complex challenges facing us in the area of immigration, asylum seekers, people smuggling and political refugees; It’s important to understand that issues such as these can only be addressed with very simple, straightforward, sloganistic campaign messages, and in accordance with this principle, Australia has a very clear approach to the development of appropriately populist immigration policies. As far as this party is concerned, if the immigration policy of this country can’t be summarised, satirised or debunked in a three line internet meme, then it needs to go back where it came from.

With this in mind, our party is committed to eradicating people smuggling by the year 2175. In order to take the first steps towards this realistic, measurable and accountable goal, we will not only abolish the Pacific Solution, but we are in active negotiations to abolish the Pacific Ocean altogether. We have put out a number tenders for sub contracts, and the consensus from the private sector is that complete elimination of the Pacific’s 622 million cubic kilometres of water could be achieved over a period of three years at a cost of three hundred kajillion dollars. We have therefore set aside the necessary 1.7 billion dollars and we are confident that the project will be delivered by Christmas.

Naturally some budget cutbacks will be necessary to fund this venture. It would irresponsible, reckless, careless and, frankly, irresponsible to make a huge sweeping promise like this without having any idea how to fund it, and Australians expect more. That is why we have elected to generate funds for the Pacific Dissolution by closing twenty seven hospitals across the country and completely disbanding the Department of Education. This is an important sacrifice that we are prepared to undergo on behalf of the Australian people, as we are firm in our belief that draining the entire ocean will stop the boats. Probably.

Our party is firmly committed to these policies, as a central part of our nation building platform; a platform which is engaging, sustainable, equitable, and – above all – engaging for all Australians. Full details will be available on our party website, just as soon as we get the NBN working.

Ladies and gentleman, I’m Garry Condoseres. I thank you for your time.

Make of that what you will

Garry with 2 Rs

Way Off Target

Modern technology is amazing. The power of social media is changing everything we know about communication and information dissemination, but even more than that, it’s actually convinced me to get a Twitter account.

I’ve had the thing for a couple of weeks now, and while I can’t say it’s changed my life at all, I’m sure it’s made a huge difference to the ten or so people who now eagerly follow the occasional deranged overflow of my overcrowded mind. Mind you, the ten people who follow me on Twitter appear, broadly, to be the same ten people who follow this blog. So I guess you already knew what you were in for.

Meanwhile, as we’re all well aware, the real point of social media is to make money out of people’s lives. The whole point of having a massive audience is, ultimately, to sell that audience as a commodity to advertisers. And if you have access to the personal data of millions of people in order to target that market to the desired demographic, well now you’re cooking with someone else’s gas.

I like to keep an eye on the targeted ads that Facebook sticks on the side of my news feed. I never click them on principle, but it’s interesting to keep an eye on what the algorithms in Facebook’s advertising database can determine about me based on the content of my profile. When it advertises local music or theatre events, I’m impressed, but not surprised. When it advertises protest events for left-wing political causes, I laugh and congratulate myself for having such a diverse and socially active group of friends.

This week it gave me a targeted ad informing me that ASIO (Australia’s intelligence agency) had job vacancies for linguists. I broke my rule and clicked the link, not so much out of a desire to be a secret agent, but more out of professional interest in career opportunities for academically qualif…

Yeah, okay. I totally want to be a secret agent.

It doesn’t take Q to realise that Facebook knows I’m a linguist because of my listed education and the groups I’m a member of. It’s possible it even knows I’m in the market for a new job because I work for the NT Government. Nonetheless, I was touched that Facebook thought of me when the opportunity came up.

It turns out that ASIO wasn’t after linguists so much as interpreters, which I’m not. So I closed the ASIO website and went back to Facebook. The ASIO ad had been replaced with a new ad.

Engagement rings.

A few weeks ago I informed the world (and Facebook) that my relationship status had gone from “It’s complicated” to “It’s even more complicated with Kirribilli Kim”. And to demonstrate how proud we were of the fact that we’d kept it a secret (not very well) for nearly six months, I even listed the not-uncontroversial start date of the relationship. And apparently the Facebook advertising algorithm has decided that eight months is quite long enough, thank you very much.

It’s possible the Algorithm came to this conclusion by first checking my religion, which is also listed. And I suppose that’s fair enough. Eight months is getting up there for a Christian couple these days. Fair play. I may have to add a note in the personal description field saying something like “frequently gets in trouble for not doing what the other Christians are doing”. That’ll sort it all out, I’m sure.

In related news, the humans in my life who seem to be arriving at the same conclusion, and asking similarly inappropriate questions can go jump in a very deep lake. But that’s a different post, which I’m probably not going to write.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll leave the sociological commentary on targeted ads to one side for now. Otherwise I’ll have to come to some uncomfortable conclusions about what the ads for Fitness First are trying to tell me.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

As Raw As It Gets

About nine months ago I started doing stand-up comedy with my friends at Happy Yess. We started out small and token, but this year we’ve launched a re-vamped and rejuvenated version with themes and headliners and organisation and everything. I’m really excited to be a part of it, and putting some time and energy into developing my own stand-up stuff. Having tried a few different ways to stand up on a stage and make an exhibition of myself, I can confidently assert that comedy is both the most challenging and the most instantly gratifying of all the theatrical arts.

On Friday night I took it to the next level. I decided to enter the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s Raw Comedy, which is a national amateur comedy competition. It was a significant step up for me, having only tried out comedy in the comfortable shelter of Happy Yess, and it was certainly a much larger audience than I’ve ever tried to be funny for before. Apparently there were about 400 people in the audience. Not that I could see any of them for the bright stage lights.

A few of my fellow contestants were trying out comedy for the very first time. And equally surprised at how many of the others had never been backstage at the Darwin Entertainment Centre before. These days I’m as at home backstage as I am in a bar or a church, but I suppose not everyone has had the same theatrical background as me, or lived in Darwin for as long.

There were about a dozen contestants, all of whom did a pretty good job, and the crowd were, for the most part, really good and generous with the laughs. There were only a couple of instances of heckling, and they were reserved for those who could obviously handle it. And at one point a little girl jumped on stage and asked if we had any fish for her.

Phil had assured me that the best strategy with Raw Comedy was to do a musical number, so that was what I did. I’ve been writing little musical numbers for Happy Yes for a few months now, so it wasn’t a big stretch to write full song for the competitions. And it went over pretty well.

I really hadn’t been too fazed by the whole process, but when the winner was announced and it wasn’t me, I discovered I had wanted it a little bit more than I realised. I was a little disappointed, but no so much as to harbour any ill feelings.

In the wash-up, Phil asked me why I had done a song. “I’ve spoken to the organisers,” he said (apparently this is still the sort of thing that just happens to him), “and they told me they’re really not looking for musical numbers these days.” I don’t know… one of these days.

I think I’ll probably give it another go next year. We’ll see what happens.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Anti-Social Media

Following on from last month’s theme of 'ridiculous things people expect Garry to be good at,’ on Friday my boss sent me to a Social Media Marketing conference, with a view to improving the office’s presence on online social media. I’m not sure why they sent me specifically. I’ve no qualifications in marketing and I’m not especially sociable. It’s got absolutely nothing in common with anything else I do at work.

It might just be because I’m male and under 30 (just) and am therefore naturally assumed to be good with computers. This is foolishness, but I didn’t mind a day away from the office where I’m assumed to be good at project management, which is also foolishness.

It was more a training event than a conference, run by a crew from America called SkillPath. It was a two person team who were in town as part of a whirlwind tour of Australia, shining the light of social media into the deepest depths of cultural cynicism, represented ably by me in the back row.

It didn’t start well. I had to give the Americans points for trying to contextualise their data for the locals, but pointing out that some people were likely to be following Julia Gillard on Twitter, while others were following Tom Abbott (sic) didn’t quite have the desired effect. And the presenter’s revelation that she thought she was in Queensland, and didn’t actually have any idea where Darwin was, was just downright hilarious.

However, the obligatory mocking of visitors from America having been indulged, the content they presented was quite interesting at times. And some of the examples of how not to use social media were fascinating.

Possibly the most cataclysmic outcome of the conference for me was that I’ve finally been convinced of – if not the virtues – then certainly the utility of Twitter. I’m only ten years late. You can follow me @GarryCondoseres, but I can’t promise I’ll lead you anywhere useful. Next thing you know I’ll be posting pictures of other peoples’ cakes to my Pinterest board.

I don’t have a Pinterest board. One step at a time.

#MakeOfThatWhatYouWill.




@GarryWith2Rs