Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at my desk on a dreary winter afternoon in rainy Melbourne wrestling with a cross-browser CSS issue, I was walking along the canal with Sal to Camden on a sunny summer day. Perhaps we were off for a pint of Fruli in the beer garden at the Edinboro Castle. Who Knows.

Of course I inevitably have a rose-tinted view of our past life–it’s easy to forget the freezing winter mornings and those commutes spent wedged into someone’s smelly armpits on a packed tube train that has just decided to hang around in a tunnel for a bit for no apparent reason–but regardless I miss the people and the places that we left behind.

Unbelievably it’s almost two years since we arrived in Australia (and now well over two years since we gave up our Marylebone flat and packed our London lives into 26 shipping boxes and a couple of rucksacks), and I began wondering how Australia has changed me (apart from the extra grey hairs, but I’m pretty sure they’d have sprouted regardless).

Clearly I’m still clinging to my old life in many ways–Private Eye turns up every two weeks to keep me informed about whatever hilarious japes those Coalition boys have been getting up to, and that VPN connection I signed up for gives me access to a certain online telly streaming service–but recently I’ve found that when I need a news fix I instinctively reach for www.theage.com.au before news.bbc.co.uk.

On the other hand, even after two years of living in this sports-mad, aussie rules obsessed city I’d still rather lose sleep to watch another depressing late night Everton result play out than sit through a whole AFL game. (And I won’t be losing sleep when the current season of that particular sport is over in a couple of weeks time, if only because it means that everyone will stop talking about it…)

Then again, with limited opportunities to expose myself to new British music, my Recently Added playlist is local bands all the way (a couple of notable exceptions aside).

So I find myself somewhat conflicted–no longer the person I was when we lived in London, but not quite a proper Australian yet. Still, there’s two years to go before I get to apply for this, so there’s plenty of time for that to change, whether I like it or not.

The invitation to Apple’s event on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena centre in San Francisco shows an acoustic guitar, with a soundhole in the shape of the Apple logo. Seasoned watchers of the company know that this is the time of year when the iPod gets a refresh, yet there’s a shadow over the digital music player that turned Apple from an also-ran computer company into a force in the technology world.

The latest sales figures for the quarter to June showed 9m sold – the lowest quarterly number since 2006. In short, the iPod, launched in October 2001, looks to be in terminal decline. While Apple is unworried – sales of its iPhone and iPad are booming – the drooping figures for the digital music player market are a concern for another sector: the music companies.

Some slightly disingenuous logic there, I think. I don’t see how you can consider iPod sales in isolation and use those as a basis for doom and gloom pronouncements on the state of the music industry as a whole.

For starters, you can’t just take iPhone sales out of the equation and pretend like that doesn’t matter, given that it is essentially an iPod with phone functionality. Why would any of those people contributing to the booming sales of the iPhone bother buying an iPod too? Surely no one loves Apple that much…

But more importantly, what does a decline in sales of the iPod have to do with downloads anyway? Isn’t this an issue of market saturation? There are only so many people in the world after all. How often does Charles Arthur think you need to replace your iPod?

But as iPod sales slow, digital music sales, which have been yoked to the device, are likely to slow too.

Why? My chunky 2005 vintage iPod still does a perfectly good job of playing music downloads.

Just because there are fewer and fewer people left who don’t own some form of iPod, it doesn’t mean that digital downloads are doomed.

Of course the small matter of whether people choose to download music legally, and whether they choose to pay for it is another issue entirely…

…and of course it is, as The Age confirms (BAT, Philip Morris and Imperial, to be precise).

But then I went to their website, to read that “this campaign has ended”.

Really? That’s odd, I thought, given that I had just seen their ad on TV (and I spotted a massive billboard promoting their message just yesterday).

Even stranger, for a campaign supported by three tobacco companies, was the “What We Stand For” page, because apparently they stand for:

# Emphysema
# Coronary artery disease
# Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease
# Bladder and kidney cancer
# Stomach cancer
# Bronchitis
# Peripheral artery disease
# Acute myeloid leukemia
# Colorectal cancer
# Abdominal aortic aneurysm
# Kidney cancer
# Liver cancer
# Prostate cancer
# Pancreatic cancer
# Erectile dysfunction in men
# Pneumonia
# Cataracts
# Periodontitis
# Cervical cancer

Very true. But I wasn’t expecting quite that level of honesty from the tobacco giants… Were they planning a new direction of truth in advertising, I wondered?

Elsewhere the site told me that:

You can find links here to information about why smoking is bad, common smoking myths, and why Tobacco companies love to pose as Associations

I wondered if someone had set up a fake website to counteract the campaign, but, as the whois database confirms, www.australianretailers.com.au is indeed registered to the lobbying organisation behind the campaign (“The Civic Group”, a 10 employee company without much of a website of their own).

And then, as soon as I’d finished writing my post they were back on message, with the site reverting to the version I’d found in Google’s cache.

How very odd. I guess someone hacked into their website and made a few subtle changes. I wonder who was behind that little bit of internet japery (and how long it was live…)

But something about my first Aussie election left me a bit cold. Maybe it’s because although I’m a Permanent Resident here, live here, work here and pay my taxes, my lack of Aussie citizenship denies me the right to have a say in who gets to run the place (bit unfair, that, I reckon, given that Sal got to vote in the UK when we lived there, by virtue of having been born in the Commonwealth).

Or maybe it’s because the narrow range of issues that dominated the campaign seemed like issues so far removed from my own life, and the race to the bottom by two parties eager to tell the electorate what they thought they wanted to hear left me not really agreeing with either side (but just hoping whatever happened that the winner wasn’t going to be the budgie smuggling mad monk they call Tony Abbott…)

There was much discussion, for example, of “Boat People”, the unpleasant catch all term for refugees travelling overland to seek asylum in Australia. You wouldn’t know it from the predominant political narrative, but the places they arrive in Australia are really very, very far away from where most of the population of Australia lives and there are really very few of them–far, far less than the numbers of “plane people” who migrate here each year like I did, or the number of “womb people” who add to the population on a daily basis (although neither group rated a mention in this campaign for some reason). My own view (that all nations have a moral responsibility to be treating asylum seekers with dignity, rather than locking them up in offshore processing centres and treating them like criminals) unfortunately wasn’t one that was shared by either of the main parties, who competed between each other to tell this nation of immigrants how tough they’d be on these unfortunate new arrivals.

So I couldn’t get excited about this election at all. That was until it all changed on Saturday when things suddenly got interesting. Proving once again that this place just can’t help taking its cultural cues from the old dart, the voters of Australia, like their counterparts back in the UK, basically voted for no one.

Well, probably. As I understand it this thing is so close that it could be weeks before all the votes are counted, but what we do know is that no one won.

And since neither party will get the magic 76 seats it needs to form a majority government, they’ll need to sign up the 3 nutjob independent MPs and one greens MP (who unseated the Labor incumbent here in Melbourne) who have suddenly been thrust into the spotlight as kingmakers…

So, in essence, this guy now runs Australia:

Bob’s on the job. We live in interesting times indeed…

But.

I think it’s time for a change and time for a bit of a new project, so as a sort of mid year resolution I’m moving everything over to this also rather neglected domain (well, it’ll all be here eventually, when I figure out a nice easy way to export all the old posts) and we’re going to start this up again.

But.

You know what it’s like when you move house: everything’s a bit of a mess for a while and it takes you a little time to get things arranged how you like them.

So.

Keep calm, stay tuned for updates and do not adjust your set…

I’m not quite sure how I was supposed to fill in this survey they sent me, however:

Luckily my three favourite arthouse films *are* tick, tick, and tick, so that’s all good, but I’m not sure what a Journalists is and whether or not I qualify…

I was thinking about The Davitt Awards, but it looks like I’ll have to brush up on my Latin…

I must have missed the announcement that the home nations have now begun competing as a single unified team, under the Union Flag. I hope The Age’s knowledgeable football writers have informed the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Football Associations that they will no longer be required.

I guess it does solve that old problem about us never being able to send a team to play football at the Olympics, though, hey…

So I was quite excited, on returning home last night, to find a small package from the UK waiting for me. I already knew that the shirt’s design was supposed to be a throwback to the 1984-85 shirt, and the names of the first 11 from that season appear in small type on the back at the top, which is a nice touch. But it was only when I tried it on that I suddenly realised that the last time I owned an Everton shirt, it was the original 1985 vintage…

Sheesh. Can that really have been 25 years ago?

Not sure if I can actually call myself a real fan if I only buy a new replica shirt once every quarter century (and I’m fairly sure that, even if I still had the old one, it wouldn’t quite fit me these days), but still, I look forward to my next purchase. Hope the 2034-2035 strip is a good ‘un…

The Daily Mail: “Long conversations on mobile phones can increase risk of cancer, suggests 10-year study”

Daily Express: “CANCER LINK TO HEAVY USE OF MOBILE PHONES”

The Daily Telegraph: “Half an hour of mobile use a day ‘increases brain cancer risk’”

The Times: “Heavy mobile users risk cancer”

The Age: “Study unable to rule out link between mobile phones and brain cancer risk”

Leave it to the excellent NHS Choices blog to talk some sense, with its usual sober and sensible reporting of the actual science behind the tabloid hysteria. I do hope that they survive whatever massive cuts are on their way for the NHS under the new regime…

[Take home quote for me from the NHS Choices report, btw, was this one: "The researchers say that much of the research into a supposed link between mobile use and cancer is to address public concern rather than any particular biological principle: the frequency of radio waves used in mobile phones does not break DNA strands, and therefore cannot cause cancer in this way." Hmm. I wonder where the public got that idea?]