Dan Makovec’s blog

Coffee anyone?

Dunc Margetts is enjoying the soy latte set down in Melbourne, and like a true Adelaide boy, he’s quick to highlight the wankishness of the cafe culture that has enveloped that town:

You are not your coffee.. you are not fucking swedish furniture, you are not the contents of your wallet, you are not your houses.. Pretentious tossers.. take a step back, you ARE your relationships with your family, you ARE what you contribute to society, you ARE your real skills…

The last thing you are is the fucking skinny macchiato you order…

Well Dunc, up in Sydney here it’s not the coffee you order, but the cafe you order it from. Everybody grabs a coffee in a cardboard cup on their way to work. I mean everybody. But depending on what street you’re walking down, you notice the class structure.

Receptionists and shop keepers usually drink Vittoria, purchased from Joe’s cafe on some street corner or pick up a latte with some donut balls from DCM. Working class mums in admin from the west tend to indulge in Michel’s Patisserie because of the oh so chic, naughty little pastries they can pick up for their morning break. IT geeks and accountants do Starbucks, managers do Gloria Jeans, and the fashionista set do boutique cafes that nobody’s ever heard of, with cups individually monogrammed with the cafe’s name.

If a Conde Nastie were to be caught with a Gloria Jeans in their hand, they’d be fired on the spot, and if a geek walked into his cubicle with Max Brennar’s he’d have dozens of those little foam balls lobbed at him by his colleagues.

The moral of this story is: if you come to Sydney, take a day not just to figure out where all the good cafes are, but which one fits your demographic. Getting it wrong could ruin your whole career!

Comments opened up

OK, enough people have complained about the comments facility on this WP blog being busted that I’ve opened it up so anyone can post without logging in. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’m not inundated with spam!

My next phone

Well, the old ten quid SE T630’s starting to get a bit long in the tooth. It’s all scratched up, and while the battery life is still reasonable, it ain’t what it used to be. The buttons usually work, but not always. The camera is completely useless (and always has been). It’s time to upgrade.

But what to get? With my current position at E-Info requiring that I be connected, or at least connectable, at all times, it’s time to think about getting more out of a phone than plain old GSM voice. I want a data connection and VPN capabilities which let me remotely access my network in an emergency while on the road. I want the ability to make cheap calls with VoIP, or have my VoIP number directed to my mobile at no additional cost. Hell, I even want to be able to check my email and web sites from a Hotspot-enabled cafe without having to lug my Powerbook around.

While this may sound like a bit of a wank, the number of times where I’ve been caught out through not having a computer handy in previous jobs, combined with the increased risks of being disconnected in my role now mean that I have to think about getting a decent, easy to carry around computer solution.

Enter the Sony Ericsson P990i. This baby was announced a year ago, and it’s finally coming out next month. It’s been a long time coming, but this promises to be the ultimate communications device (at least until the next one comes along anyway) for a tosser IT professional like me. It has VPN, wifi, bluetooth, touch screen, a full qwerty keyboard and a serious suite of applications that should keep me happy for quite a while.

I reckon it’s going to cost about $1500 by the time it makes it down here - demand alone will keep the price up. Looking at the current smart phone market, carriers in Australia don’t seem to want to subsidize these babies as much as they will, say a N80 or RAZR, so I’m probably going to get stuck paying close to full price for it. But if it gives me the ability to bugger off to the beach knowing that I can handle a network fault on location should I receive that dreaded call from home base, I reckon it’ll be worth it.