Getting Netflix in the middle of January (I wrote about it that month and also in April) was part of a trend that led me away from the ABC News channel to other entertainments. Starting last year I was watching commercial free-to-air TV for the first time since about 2003 – though even then I only really watched the news broadcasts – the fact being that the last time I’d regularly watched commercial TV had been in Japan where I lived almost 20 years ago. Now, as though to compensate for neglect, I started writing reviews of TV commercials (for example, for a dermatological cream and a painkiller).
Just as I’d begun to read old books that are in my collection – many of which I’d owned for decades but had never opened to read – now I became enamoured of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and began to appreciate its distinct charm, a kind of demotic aesthetic of power and desire achieved through language and kinetic images. It screens at 4.30pm weekdays, just before the news on Ten Network. I would then watch the news then, from 6.30pm, ‘Nine News’, then ‘ABC News’ and then the ABC’s current affairs magazine program ‘7.30’, taking me up to 8pm, at which point I’d catch an episode of ‘NCIS’ on 10 Bold (channel 12), or else one of ‘Seinfeld’ or ‘Friends’ on 10 Peach (channel 11) before going to bed.
Later, when it started to screen, ‘The Big Bang Theory’ engaged me with its riffs, from 15 years ago, on the phenomenon of geeks but on Wednesday nights in November I was watching the ABC’s ‘Hard Quiz’ (8pm) followed by ‘Gruen’ and ‘Reputation Rehab’: an attractive night from the national broadcaster and, I think, the best night of the week (‘Mad As Hell’ had finished by this time of the year) across the whole year. On Fridays I started watching old episodes of the police procedural ‘Vera’ (I reviewed some eps here and here).
Ten’s secondary channels offer context that’s just as interesting as the primary one. When I was a child such programs only aired early in the morning or late at night. Nine’s and Seven’s secondary channels are also accessible, but to see them you have to go to the 90s and thereabouts in your channel selection, but I took to watching ‘Death In Paradise’ on 9Gem on Sunday evenings and didn’t resent the long journey from the teens on the remote control’s punch dial.
On one of the secondary channels I also watched some episodes of the original ‘Mission: Impossible’ (a US TV drama that ran from 1966 to 1975). Old shows like these – and there are many that you can watch if you flick through the channels during the afternoon while sitting (as I am prone to do) on the couch – are a window into the past and serve to highlight the corny and the lame as much as entertain in and of themselves. What we like today will, likewise, age and become second-rate.
It’s just a matter of time but old shows can still be compelling despite some awkwardness due to stale ideas or hackneyed dramatic ploys. It’s way too easy to slam old shows (‘Seinfeld’ stands the test of time better than most and ‘Friends’ is also good); I find it more encouraging to try to find redeeming features. Watching such old shows teaches you how fashion is prevalent in content delivered via TV. Just as ‘Mission: Impossible’ now looks ridiculously clunky and, in some parts, downright silly, what we extol today on Netflix and Amazon Prime will, one day, date. Even the best shows of the past have passed their use-by dates except as oddities to be enjoyed in the new era of Divergism (which I’ve written about several times, including in April), where there is no longer a canonical centre and where the almost inexpressibly large volume of material available to view makes a magpie out of everyone.
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Online, the year contained other novelties. On the second day of autumn I removed the links to the WikiTribune and Civiq Social websites from the bookmarks section on the Settings page in my browser. Neither of these social media sites had any traffic, links sometimes wouldn’t post, and other people weren’t interacting.
I added Better TweetDeck on the last weekend of March so that I could put emojis into tweets. The extension is made by Chrome and it’s easy to install: just click on a link on a web page and restart your TweetDeck tab. On 24 April I changed the layout of TweetDeck in the browser tab I reserve for this website, and added a column for Amazon Prime tweets, using the hashtag to tune in. I also started to add movies and TV shows to my “to watch” list on Prime’s home page, deciding to see more movies there, not just on Netflix. Prime seems to have more old movies.
On the second last day of June I updated the postal address for my domain – a bit of housekeeping that had become necessary since my accountant moved to different premises – and on 28 May I started using the new Blogger back-end. This part of the site is more detailed than the old interface, and includes comprehensive analytics that show, down to the second, who is looking at what, though naturally it doesn’t identify who is reading each post. I worked out some tricks – for example, excluding your own visits from the pageview count – by exploring and by searching on Google. As early as the previous year Google had suggested to users to use their new interface but I hadn’t, at that time, bothered to check it out. Now, the old interface would be retired with all users shifted, in June, to the new one.
On 5 July I picked up my new car (I wrote about it here, here, here, and here) and two weeks later I finally disconnected my Optus email address from my email client. The thing had started to demand a sign-in several times a day and I’d anyway pretty much stopped using it, so the company’s annoying reminders were eliminated in one swoop.
At around the same time I also started using the new Facebook interface. With an eye to their deployment on social media, I began to rename files for slides and negatives I’d had digitised at an outfit located in the nearby suburb of Five Dock. Renaming started on the last day of April, when I also took another box of negatives – as well as some prints – to be done at the same shop. Digital images are much easier to peruse and share and the cost per unit is low; if you get them done professionally you also get a high resolution, it’s faster than doing it yourself, and you get the advantage of someone else’s expertise. To help with the renaming, I brought out an Ikea desk I’d assembled the previous year, now placing it next to my office desk where an L-shaped workspace with more surfaces would help while I used my PC.
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Over a week from 8 August I got my phone organised with apps for the major commercial TV stations, one by one linking them, as well as those for Netflix and Amazon Prime, to my TV. I also downloaded the app for Microsoft Excel so that I could access spreadsheets – located on my computer – on my phone. I downloaded Microsoft’s Word app as well as Adobe’s PDF app. To use the latter I copied files to Google Drive so that I could view them on my phone but this measure was quickly superseded when on my phone I downloaded and installed the OneDrive app, which allows me to see all PC-based files in my hand, or else open in a graphics program on the PC photos taken with the phone.
The ability was revelatory: to almost immediately see on the PC photos that had been taken on the mobile. Previously, I’d been connecting my mobile to the PC with a USB cable and manually copying photos to the PC.
Now, all the fuss was dispensed with. I also got files from my doctor chronicling my health over time, so that I would be able to show them to a new GP if I switched once I’d moved to the house (I was still, in summer, of two minds about this). Much of this housekeeping was prompted by spending nights away from home at a friend’s house while home inspections were done at my apartment, which I’d put on the market to sell. I’d needed, while away and in the absence of my PC, to find sources of entertainment, so the mobile served a new purpose.
In October I downloaded a couple of dieting apps, one of which I thenceforth used daily – in fact for each meal and snack – ‘FatSecret’ providing feedback that became immediately evident on my waist. From the time I started I lost over 5kg in a period of two weeks, and by the end of the first month on the restrictive diet had lost nine kilos. Tracking reduction using a set of Withings scales I’d bought from Amazon (I talk about all of this activity in the “shopping list” series), I’d found low-carb alternatives to many foods, including sweets and bread.
On 16 November I also bought a Salter kitchen scale from David Jones in Bondi Junction so that I could more accurately track inputs.
It took a bit of effort to work out how it functioned. I eventually got the idea that the button on the right-hand side of the device has to be pressed to get a reading. If you press the button when something is already on the scales it takes the weight sitting there to be that of a container, and zeroes itself so that you can put blueberries into a bowl or milk into a glass. If you press the button when nothing is on the scale, and you wait for a “0” to display, you can place there an item to find out how much it weighs. All of this coordination was a bit technical for me and initially I had an unsteady relationship with the device.
Banking apps were easier to set up and use. In August I also downloaded an expense tracking app called ‘Money Tracker’ (made in Japan and purchasable for A$11).
This is useful for budgeting. I’d tried a couple of apps that link to your bank accounts, but found them unsuitable for my purposes, and the one I eventually decided to permanently use stood out due to its flexibility. You can create categories for each class of expense and each income stream, letting you see for each month or year how money has been spent, and where it has come from, how much in each case being easily tracked from your phone if you’re diligent about recording transactions.
In early November I bought another beard trimmer as mine had been packed up for the house move. I purchased it at Shaver Shop Broadway in Shopping Centre on the recommendation of a store clerk with very, very dark skin and a mass of curly hair. She was so striking I could hardly look at her though she asked me questions about how I wanted to use the device.
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I wasn’t happy about my website, which I’d paid Melbourne IT to make. Part of the new site contains dad’s memoir, and pages were missing by the time I got around to checking its contents. The company had also done a bad job loading journalism I’d written, so I can’t recommend the company for this sort of work. Their effort was slapdash and unprofessional and it now leaves me looking for someone who can fix up the problems they made, going forward.
Then my daughter asked me to help with her emails and I set up a new domain with the company. I ordered a hosting package so that I could configure an email address to use for her overseas clients. The domain (http://adadasilva.com) won’t contain a website, and will just be used to make and manage emails.
On the third last day of the year I noticed that, due to weight loss, my watch strap was very loose – the thing threatened to twist around my wrist so the face of the device’d be pointed away from me – and started the process for getting the National Broadband Network (NBN) connected at the new place I was moving to. I chose my old provider out of a sense of loyalty – and also because I’d gone with a different company first but then had had problems with the modem delivery (they can only put a physical address into the system; I’d gotten a PO box but then remembered that anything sent to me at my old address is automatically sent to it) – and they put in 21 January for the day the NBN technician would come out to the house to make the connection. I’d initially organised to move in on the 18th but had had second thoughts due to the cost – the owner wanted me to pay rent and I thought that rent should be deferred – so would have to shift the day of the visit when the company called me on the 20th.
Optus asked me if I wanted to bring my mobile phone across to their network as well but I declined. You save a bit of money by bundling plans but I prefer to diversify where possible as a matter of policy.
There’ll be more about house-moving in a post to go up in the new year, and next year maybe the “equipment and devices” post will include details of a hallway display. In the third week of December I paid about A$50 on a digital artwork published by Sedition Art. The work by Mark Titchner is titled ‘Please Believe These Days Will Pass’ and it runs through a sequence of frames featuring these words, suggesting that history repeats. You can log onto the site from an iPhone app that includes a “vault” where purchased work is kept, and you can also subscribe if you want to (but I didn’t).