It’s five days before I leave Australia for fieldwork. Three before I leave Canberra. I don’t want to go.

I’ve been subconciously working on the false logic that if nothing’s arranged and nothing’s confirmed then the trip isn’t really happening and that I’m not leaving my comfortable surrounds for what promises to be a God-awful trip where I expand tireless energy in order to do God-awful interviews from which I will end up soliciting very little extra data or knowledge.

Some of you might wonder what’s so terrible about traipsing the world on a trip that is effectively paid-for by others in order to meet highly-positioned individuals working for powerful organisations?!? Well… let me just say that it’s not all it appears to be. It sounds very nice on the surface but it’s actually very stressful, very tiring and sometimes very unpleasant work in reality. The fact is I know better now having done one such trip exactly a year ago - and hence my very logical reticence, nay, reluctance in going on such a trip again. It’s just a very horrible experience.

Don’t get me wrong - I love travelling but travelling for a holiday. Not travelling for this…! This is really a God-awful reason to travel and it’s not going to be pleasant. In fact, I’m so alergic to this trip that I’m paralysed by the fear of it all. The thought of it sends shivers down my spine and tears through my ducts. I honestly wished I didn’t have to do it but like chemotherapy for cancer patients, this fieldtrip may not be pleasant but it’s good for me and it raises the chances that I will complete and succeed in the PhD…

I really have no words right now… I’m semi-catatonic, embraced by the fear of it all, working on auto-pilot… Paraphrasing my best friend, I wished it were true that if I stayed up all night, tomorrow will never come…

Posted on September 22nd, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Fieldwork | No Comments »

My best mate and I have set up a YouTube group to report on our fieldwork experiences in video-form. Here’s my first update.

Posted on September 20th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Fieldwork | 1 Comment »

My best friend and I have a rather unhealthy relationship going. I don’t know when it started exactly but at some point late in 2005, we both stepped onto this path of unending, interminably exciting, all consuming and consequently unhealthy path of not just chasing after electronics and gadgets but also synchronising and paralleling our purchases.

Posted on September 13th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech | 1 Comment »

15 days. That’s what my many countdown-timers on my Facebook profile and Google Homepage tell me is left to the time I have before leaving Australia for fieldwork.

15 days. It sounds so soon. It’s just a day over two weeks.

15 days.

It may not appear to be so on the surface but I’m seriously in a panic deep under.

Posted on September 5th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Fieldwork, Life!, love | 2 Comments »

When the Palm Treo 600 first came out in 2003 and I became the proud owner of one, I thought then that I had found the ideal gadget. The Treo 600 was one of the earliest of the better integrated PDA-cum-mobile phones and I thought it was in general wonderfully conceived and executed. The one criticism that I had of it - and it is a fairly major one which eventually led to my no longer using it - was the relatively poorly built hardware. My unit, like many others, developed a buzzing sound problem in the speaker that eventually became so bad that the phone function was unusable. I stopped using the Treo in late-2005 and went back to a relatively basic mobile phone, the LG U880.

Posted on September 5th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech | 2 Comments »