Resident Alien
We've gone and done it now: exchanged contracts on an apartment in Surry Hills. We're more than happy with what we've accomplished here. The apartment is huge (3 bedrooms), and we got it cheap. Well, relatively. This is the Sydney housing market after all, which seems second to none, or maybe second only to San Francisco, as the world's most expensive. Balcony, air con (reverse cycle, so there'll be heat over the winter; Sydney housing does not tend toward central heating/cooling), and did I mention 3 bedrooms? And parking - which is especially a point to relish, as Surry Hills doesn't tend toward much beyond metered parking on the street usually (and since we don't have a car as yet, it's potentially a source of income to offset the debt. The precinct of Surry Hills the block is located in is toward the edge, not far off the Central Business District, but it is becoming as much a trendy area as any along Crown Street, and offering considerable convenience for us in terms of shopping, transportation, dining, entertainment, etc. Reservoir Street isn't the greenest street in Surry Hills, but most office block conversions don't offer nearly as much in amenities or enviornmental niceties. But the best part of all is without question: the vendor is painting the unit for us, which at 1300+ sq. ft. would have cost us plenty. The developers have been terrific throughout this process, and deserve a lot of credit and thanks. So does Meera, upon whom the burden of locating, selecting, and negotiating has fallen throughout our search. She's thrilled with our purchase, and so am I. A happy real estate tale from Sydney.

The Weblog, or Why I Am Not a Journalist
It’s all well and good for webloggers to take themselves and their activity seriously. This is public discourse, a form and often a forum for the dissemination of ideas, and insofar as webloggers wish to distance themselves from the early days of the internet, during which it seemed everybody with a PC had a home page and on that page there were pictures of the baby or the dog/cat, it is important then that some effort is put into making the weblog’s content worth the time and effort to read it. This will often require the weblogger to be highly skilled in satire, familiar with conducting and documenting research, versed in the rules of grammar, syntax, and – please, please – spelling, and, because of the medium, sufficiently familiar with HTML to include a link now and then that works. Beyond that, there have been lately any number of efforts to regulate, or anyway advise on or recommend proscriptions for weblogging, some of which are very good, or at least thoughtful, including Rebecca Blood’s discourse on the ethics of weblogging, which I find myself largely in agreement with, excepting two points in particular of the six: Rule 2, Link to it if you reference it – sorry, but I’m busy. Well, I’m not really opposed to this rule, you’ll understand, because if I am ‘blogging about something off the web, I will link to it. But if web material exists on something I’m writing about, I may decide to slack off and let you find your own way to it. It’s not a business. Rule 4: Do Not . . . Delete. I agree completely. It’s dishonest to delete an entry. Archiving isn’t working very well for me, however, and neither does it work well if the ‘blog gets too long. So I’ll damn well zap out any post over 30 days old, and boo-hoo. One of the best points of ‘blogging is the dynamic content. That has to mean content goes away as much as it means content appears. If the archiving feature was working correctly, or I was running my own page, I’d ensure the historical depth. I am not by any means attempting to evade responsibility or to fudge at standing by my opinions. But this isn’t a business, again, and you’ll have to get over it.