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I've spent the past 45 minutesish trying to change the layout of my blog, thinking that something a bit more interesting would persuade me to blog more often, and now I've decided I've just been procrastinating from actually blogging.

I think a lot of stuff is going on, but most of it is pretty boring to write about. Back in classes, finished some work experiences, agro over other work experiences, agro over my university, painfully looking for a career, etc, etc. Nothing too exciting. But I think I should tell a story, so let me try to come up with something...

Seriously, I don't think I can come up with anything. I can bitch about my university billing me for a refund they were supposed to give me, solar cars and alternative technologies, transmission lines, trams, politics of event planning, people who work in insurance, funny things on the beach or frisbees but they're all kind of boring individual stories. So I'll just pick one at random and write about it anyway since I'm procrastinating and feel like I should have something of mild substance.

I'm in a class called Community Development, I believe I'm design a webpage for it as my final project, but that's not the story I'm going to tell, just an aside.

Anyway, I had a work experience as the company who runs all the electricity transmission and distribution lines and gas distribution lines in the state of Victoria. I was helping the evaluate a way to measure their ecological footprint. It was a bit challenging, but also quite interesting. Anyway, as I had little knowledge of the transmission and distribution biz, one day I was taken on a field trip to drive out to the country and see all the transmission centers and distribution centers. It was pretty neat. I got to pass into the fence that says 'Do not enter' and even walk into the little houses. They buzz (everything in the fence), and you can feel the electricity run through you. It's quite powerful. The little house was neat. Just thousands and thousands of switches all controlling the energy grid, or would be, but it's a 20 year system that has been upgraded and changed, so now all the grids are controlled from computers in an office in the inner city. But one could feel powerful being able to switch off at random energy sources for unknown parts of the state.

Here we have our wireless connections, high speed computers, stereos, phones, lights - all this stuff depended on something most people know nothing about and give little thought to until the bill comes in or you do something like move house and have to activate it, but most of the little gadgets in our life are entirely dependent on it. And the system is totally antiquated. A significant amount of electricity is lost in the transmission and distribution before it even reaches the end user. This is like having a car with a leaking tank. If that were the case, we'd fix that pretty quickly, but like a leaking tank, the dated power lines we see in our every day life lose copious amounts of electricity as they zip around the energy. While we've managed to upgrade everything else electrical in our lives, we've given little regard to what makes them work to begin with.

Anyway, next time you see an electrical pole, just look at it for a second and think how out of place it actually is. Everything else is all sleek and new looking except this old pole that is exactly the same as when we were all kids.

There was nothing funny in that story. I apologize for that. I did get to wear a hard hat though as I was touring around.