So there I am, frantically searching the Interpipes for a job because this one is starting to shit me no end lately, what with all the extra crap dumped on my desk because someone pisses off without giving due notice. And I’m doubly pissed off because finding a job now is bloody hard since Teh Age sacked most of its hacks and replaced them with redundant ballboys from the Australian Open, so now the job market for journos is flooded with jobseekers who have been Fair-fucked. Anyway I find a vacancy for something called an ‘Online Journalist’, which reads OK and pays slightly more than a week’s shift work at McDonald’s (always a bonus in the lucrative field of journalism). And then I see this line:

Familiarity with C#, Linux, Apache, Perl and Python

And I’m thinking “…unless this is a gig reporting on music performance, Snoopy characters, native Americans and the herpetology scene, I may be under-qualified”. Apparently to be an ‘online journalist’ these days you’ve got to be able to hack into the NASA mainframe and re-task the Hubble telescope to read over Bolta’s shoulder through the window of his suite at Docklands. Being able to research, interview, write, spell, proof, edit and format are optional skillz.

I must be a Luddite.

The Editor coming out of the nerd closet has traumatised me. Though we have never met, I always envisaged him as being so uber-cool that he makes Connery’s James Bond seem like a bogan. Sure, he wears glasses, runs a blog, uses words liked ‘pwned’, plays Guitar Hero, goes to indi film festivals and owns a cat. But it just never occurred to me that he was anything else but a suave, strutting sex-god who oozes charisma.

Anyway, I have news to warm the cockles of Ed’s nerdy heart:

Thousands of science fiction aficionados will make their way to Melbourne in 2010 to attend the 68th World Sci-fi Convention, it was announced today. Aussiecon 4 – the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society, which has affiliations in more than 30 countries – will run for seven days in September 2010 at the Melbourne Convention Centre.

Major Projects Minister Theo Theophanous says the event has universal appeal and he’s expecting more than 3,000 fans to converge on Melbourne, generating about $18 million in economic benefit for Victoria.

Greeeat. For a week in spring 2010 Melbourne will be filled with thousands of social misfits who look like Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter movies. They’ll swarm the streets dressed as Stormtroopers, Cybermen or Yul Brynner in Westworld. Internet cafes, video arcades and fast food outlets will do a roaring trade. They’ll hover along Southbank with their Tom Baker scarves and their light sabres; they’ll duck into shadowy corners and make nerd babies. But even scarier… it will give The Editor opportunity to don his David Bowie codpiece for a week.

Yuck.

…you’re sitting at the computer and you think you can hear rain outside but you’re not sure. So instead of getting up, walking two metres to the window and looking out, you log onto the Bureau Of Meteorology and check the rain radar.