"Sorry, sir, can you..." The man gestures me out of his photograph, part of an encyclopedic survey of both sides of the lane, whose every brick is painted. Even the "Street Art Permit" is stencilled, with its number [STA015] hand-painted on the dotted line alongside a quotation from Simone de Beauvoir: "I WISH THAT EVERY LIFE MIGHT BE PURE TRANSPARENT FREEDOM."

"No," says a woman. "Why not," says a man, leading her by the hand toward the city's best shopping. Others slow down after a few steps, sufficiently immersed in paint to observe the walls as artwork. Tags weave around large-scale works, many signed off with a needless "2012," a gesture to a more permanent tradition.

Even now a man scrapes at the walls, bending to ground level, sometimes sharpening his tool against stone. Others have done this, and for stretches the wall seems to hover. He watches me from halfway along, both indifferent and suspicious, a kind of sanctioned criminal. He leaves when it's dark, and workers wheel bins out of the lane to Little Collins street, where they rest in a line of alternating colours, tagged with black lines.

Light traverses a rabbit-shaped lamp then wavers at the room's edges. I watch from the bed, measuring my body with a hot-water bottle - knee to groin, groin to chin. I tilt my head and snot rills down my throat. My face is a snot-fed ecosystem, with complex exchanges between surface and depth.

Sick day tomorrow. I plan to move furniture around, switching bed and rabbit, bringing the window to my left. Now I look out at light playing over a wall - rhythmically, like television spill. Someone's playing a trumpet - or is that the saxophonist from downstairs, made brassier by echoes? Things aren't what they seem: I spot light, but it's the opposite - birds in flight, momentarily blocking light. 

Back inside I devise a game in which I look at the rabbit, move my head around, then close my eyes and see several rabbits.

Folks, there are some things that are weighing on my mind.

I have a series of Big Things to deal with over the next month. I don't have a single good thing to say about any of these events. I don't believe the people I will find there want me to come. I don't think I have anything useful to contribute to any of them. Contemplating each one of these big events makes me feel like a colossal failure.

Tomorrow, I go back to work and see what sort of mess I have to deal with.
Have I achieved anything useful in the time I've been away from work? I think not. For every positive that I can think of, there's a much bigger negative. I've tried to sort myself out, to prepare myself for going back, and I don't have faith in my ability to cope. I don't know if I'll still be a manager, what my job will be, whether anyone in my office will have any respect for me. I know people will have been talking about my situation, because I've seen workmates go through the stress thing.

After this, I'll end up back at the choir I'm not singing with any more, and may not be singing with at all from this point. This makes me immensely sad, but I haven't made any real contribution there in so long that it shouldn't matter.

Wednesday, I go back to my Medicare-funded exercise physiologist. Part of me wants to rein in the weight loss talk my EP is giving me, but my dark side just wants to revel in the self hatred.

On Thursday, I attend my second-last impro course.
Impro is hard. It challenges me to think strangely, but I honestly don't think I've got the talent for it. So much of it runs contrary to my training (HA) as a performer, as a comedian, and I find it so frustrating. In a week or so, I'll get assessed and advised whether I have the potential to go on to more advanced courses. I am pretty sure what the answer will be.

On the weekend, we're going to visit my mother, wherever she happens to be. She's still extremely ill, and she's not going to get through this, but when I spoke to her last, she sounded pretty chirpy. Dealing with family is always complicated, but this is going to be hard. All the times I've thought "my mother doesn't understand me and she may never" are now replaced with "my mother will never understand me and when she's gone the rest of the family will stop caring I exist". Rinse, repeat.

At the end of this month, I'm attending a large gathering of choristers. This ought to be a giant party, but I'm crushed by the feeling that I don't belong in this movement any more. I have only the vaguest idea who's actually going, so it's hard to get excited by that. All the depression I feel when I'm alienated by my local choir is so much worse when people travel from across the country and I'm IN MY OWN CITY and I still don't fit in. If it wasn't for the money we've paid already I'd run away from that and never come back.

So, in no particular order -

I have no faith in myself as a performer of any sort, and feel I should just stop singing / playing / writing / pretending I know anything about anything.

I don't believe anyone really wants me around. When my mother dies, which will be sooner rather than later, I expect the rest of the family to abandon me.

I don't have a purpose, and any attempt on my part to find one leads to frustration and disappointment. I should just learn to be the world's doormat and learn to like it. Otherwise, I might as well walk in front of a train for all the good I do to anyone, anywhere.

And now for the grand finale -

I'm giving up writing here. I've learned the hard way that talking about my problems only serves to alienate me from the rest of the world. I'll leave this here for a few days, then I'll delete the journal. I wish I could say I have regrets. No comments anywhere please.

http://twitter.com/jasonbstanding/statuses/209330673805295617

jasonbstanding: RT @hellobuglers Anyway, it has been easily the best build up to a Viking funeral I've ever seen.

http://twitter.com/jasonbstanding/statuses/209329884055609344

jasonbstanding: RT @heppy Seriously, the Queen needs to put on the one ring and just fucking disappear now

http://twitter.com/jasonbstanding/statuses/209268351598473217

jasonbstanding: Celebrated Ardbeg Day yesterday with a soupçon of Airigh Nam Beist from the hipflask, and followed with Macallan. http://t.co/2Tp6ffZS

ethanthescribe recommended NetBeans, so I went looking for it. The latest version on their website is 7.1.2, and Ubuntu's Software Centre has 7.0.1. Close enough, so to keep the playing field level I installed the latter.

Run it. Weirdly, it doesn't show up in the Alt-Tab task order for some reason, or as an active application in the dock. Odd, and potentially aggravating, because it indicates a lack of integration with Ubuntu Unity. I choose New Project, and select Java Desktop Application. There was something on the splash page about installing plugins, which presumably includes support for more modern, feature-rich languages (you know -- COBOL, ALGOL, Fortran 77, or anything else that's better than Java, ie anything at all) but we'll ignore that for now.

And here's a wrinkle: "Disclaimer. Note that JSR-296 (Swing Application Framework) is no longer developed and will not become part of the official Java Development Kit as was originally planned. You can still use the Swing Application Framework library as it is, but no further development is expected.
If you are looking for a Swing-based application framework, consider using the NetBeans Platform [...]" OK, that's weird. I follow the link and it basically just says "Choose NetBeans Modules | NetBeans Platform Application instead of Java | Java Desktop Application". Okey-dokey, weird and clumsy, but that's bureacracy for you. I do that.

Typing in Captain's Log as the Project Name is still legal, but the auto-updated fields on that form make it clear that it's the wrong choice to include spaces and apostrophes, in a subtle but efficient way that saves me some aggravation. Points vs MonoDevelop already! I click Finish and we're apparently ready to roll.

Now for the compile-nothing test. This is the one that Lazarus failed. It compiles, and claims to run, but there's no default form so nothing appears on screen. Right, I can see that - not every Java app is a windowing app, so they don't assume. I right click on the tree -- unlike MonoDevelop, NetBeans appears to understand about 1990s-era user interface guidelines, so that's another win right there -- and am faced with two possibilities under the New submenu: JFrame Form or JPanel Form. JFrame Form has a picture of what looks like a window, with titlebar and widgets, so I pick that.

After typing in a name and clicking the appropriate button, I have a vaguely promising rectangle. I don't know if it's going to pop up as the main window, but let's try running again... and it won't, because there are errors. Apparently, some auto-generated code refers to some stuff that doesn't exist. Looks like the monkeys who set up the Ubuntu package didn't work out the dependencies. Typical.

OK, let's try that other option, JPanel Form. Again, it's referring to non-existent code. What kind of auto-generator doesn't check if what it's generating is legal? Weird.

All right, I know: if I spent the time to learn how this is all actually supposed to work, no doubt I'd work it out. But that's not the point of this test. I'm trying to do something relatively simple using techniques that were more or less functional in Visual Basic in about 1991, and perfected in Borland Delphi in 1995. Seventeen years later, Linux still can't manage a GUI "Hello World" application out of the box. That really is embarrassing.

So: open source. Stupid, or just malicious? I'm going with: lazy, insular and unmotivated. Open source software is written by people who are scratching their own itch. If you're writing software, you use the existing languages and tools. If you're used to them, you don't bother writing tools that are fundamentally different -- ie better -- for the same reason that Americans don't use the metric system: why throw away the personal investment of time and effort in learning a stupid system? It won't help you personally, only the people who come after, and without a salary to force you to work on it, you're not going to bother. So seventeen years after Delphi 1.0, we have a bunch of non-functional RAD IDEs and some "development environments" that are simply Not Good Enough. That's life.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/GHCgp/~3/5qwvoJPRFT0/i-appear-to-have-drained-adelaide-php.html

A week on, and my resume is certainly out there. I believe I've put in for every darned PHP job in the Adelaide market. I've had two or three good interviews, but I'm finding I'm not quite the right fit.

For example, one firm I started talking to forgot it was a PHP CMS customisation job in question when I asked about the other work they did in Java/C++ - the senior tech chap started interviewing me for that mid way through.
I could talk happily enough about OO concepts and quite strongly about business focused development topics (I'm language focused, not maths focused when I program); but the moment I said "I wouldn't have a clue, I'd hop on google and go find a relevant extract of The Art of Computer Programming if I ever needed to work that out" a great divide opened up between the interviewer and I.
You know what they say, there are 10 types of programmers - those that think binary jokes are clever/funny and the rest of us...

I think it's time to widen my approach a little more - Business Analysis is actually a pretty decent skill of mine, so this week's focus will be on that in addition to pure software development roles. Also, contracting is really quite appealing - I think I have enough of a polymath outlook on life to drop in and kick behind in a lot of different scenarios.

The hacking is going better. You can see me wading my way through python, and (less progress than I expected), a bit of tinkering with ruby.

I'm trying not to flit from thing to thing at the moment, but it's tricky not to. So many shiny things, so little time!

Priorities this week:

1. Job hunt
2. Getfridged
3. FixMyStreet AU - there's already an open project on github and the ACT picked up the content, even if we did lose It's Buggered Mate, there's a bit of progress here.
   This one is driving me nuts, as there's a bus stop near my house which is destroyed. At best I can ring a number to verbally report the damage - the last time I tried this no one would answer it. Where's this in Australia?
   I know Open Australia were looking at it, but that was 2009 - it needs more, it needs an iphone/android app, and it needs to be here yesterday.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ItsAboutTime/~3/9BKCSVX8Lv0/

http://www.timelady.com/blog/?p=7409

album: Want It Back (Digital Single)

http://www.last.fm/music/Amanda+Palmer+&+The+Grand+Theft+Orchestra/_/Want+It+Back

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ItsAboutTime/~3/g6wRLsW_HnE/

http://www.timelady.com/blog/?p=7407

album: Want It Back (Digital Single)

http://www.last.fm/music/Amanda+Palmer+&+The+Grand+Theft+Orchestra/_/Want+It+Back