2 Texans Down Under

Moving to Australia gave us a new perspective on our home country, the United States. Now Kristi and I are traveling for a bit in the Netherlands and Belgium following a work conference she had in Amsterdam and we’re getting a new perspective on Australia.

 * Most noticeable of all is the fact that Australia is, relatively speaking, less pricey than we thought. We asked our friend from Amsterdam if anything is cheaper there than in Australia, where she now lives, and here answer was unequivocal: no.

 Our experience verifies that with one exception: beer, very good beer of many varieties, costs less than a euro per bottle in stores and you surely can’t beat that in Brisbane.

 * One cannot live on beer alone.  But you can come pretty close if you add in cheese.  The Netherlands has incredible cheeses.

 * The Internet speeds I experience with my ADSL connection at home are put to shame by all the connections speeds we’ve experienced here. Gmail comes up fast! I watched a brief movie sent to me via email and there were no interruptions for more downloading. None. Amazing.

 * Really old things in Australia tend to be trees, like Read the rest of this entry »

This was supposed to be yesterday’s blog, but something more pressing came up. It would have been perfect for April Fool’s Day, a Y2K sort of story in 2008 … except that it’s all true.

Here is a paragraph from a report by Ryan Emery in “The Australian” for March 31: “Yesterday Western Australia returned to standard time, leaving NSW, the ACT, Victoria and South Australia keeping track with Tasmania … and Queensland and Northern Territory somewhere in the middle.”

That was, more or less, the good news. Before I get to the bad news, I need to offer my US readers a few translations and bits of fact. NSW means New South Wales and it is a state, as are Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia. “The ACT” is the Australian Capitol Territory, where Canberra is located. “Northern Territory” is a federal territory that occupies most of the north end of Australia.

Now, with the geography lesson done (don’t feel bad, I needed it, too), let’s turn to time. Time in Australia.

Australia has Western, Central, and Eastern time zones. Parts of the Northern Territory are in each of the three.

In Tasmania, until this year, daylight savings time ended on the last Sunday in March, which put that island state south of Victoria out of sync with its neighbors.

So, this year, officials in New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania agreed to a new plan — they’d all turn their clocks back one hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday, April 6. The only problem was that a lot of people and a lot of computer programs didn’t get the message about delaying the shift for one week.

They result was, in some parts of this country, a mini-Y2K.

Personal computers, some hand-held Blackberries, many cell phones, and even some automated telephone company correct-time services gave people Read the rest of this entry »

Angela Hoy, one of the two owners of the company that published my print-on-demand book, Moving to Australia: Two Texans Down Under, blew the whistle last week on a heavy-handed threat from a company about which I’d always had positive feelings, Amazon.com. Now their “goodwill” capital with me and lots of others is fading fast. This is not, unfortunately, an April Fools joke. It’s real, and here’s a short version of the story.

Print-on-demand (POD) publishers, and there are many of them, are being told by Amazon.com: We have our own POD company now. We’re going to sell on line only the POD books our company publishes or those of POD companies that pay us a hefty fee and meet other requirements. Take it or leave it.

Authors and would-be authors, who are among Amazon’s best customers, are getting the same message.

Kathy Hendershot-Hurd, my friend and advisor, correctly notes that this story is turning into a viral firestorm for Amazon.com. Of course, Amazon.com may be too dominant in their market to care. Might doesn’t make right, but it may, this time, let Amazon get away with a monopolistic dictate.

Or maybe not. At the end of this blog, you’ll see Kathy’s list of more than 60 bloggers who are speaking out and spreading the word, along with her invitation for the rest of us to help spread the virus. Maybe Amazon.com isn’t inoculated against this blatant power grab’s effects after all.

For the full report from Angela in Writer’sWeekly, click here. For Kathy’s views, go to her blog by clicking here. Here’s her invitation:

I’d like to do my part by listing the 60+ references to this story. Feel free Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine called my attention yesterday to the incredible story of Comcast and “the hammer lady,” Mona Shaw, 75, folk hero.

I won’t repeat the story of how she and her husband were misused by this huge corporation, or how she took matters into her own hands by smashing some Comcast equipment at their Manassas, Virginia, office. You probably know it already and if you don’t, you can type her name into a search engine and get, as I did, a page full of reports mostly about her action plus 350,000 other sites to check.

A highly successful consultant to business leaders, my friend Kathy wrote, “As someone who is a creator of ‘Marketing Messages’…. it is my worst nightmare that customers would begin to utter a catch phrase I’ve developed for a client as a profanity.”

But now something like that is happening. Just as “going postal” was born and then added to our language, the term “being comcastic” has been coined and launched. One day soon, dictionaries may list this entry: Comcastic – “adj., behaving with insensitivity to and disregard for the interests of customers.”

Mona Shaw, as my friend Joe in Houston tells me, is much revered by several members of his Unitarian Universalist Church who have had unfortunate dealings Read the rest of this entry »