It may surprise you, but the there is one single thing that has increased my productivity in the last few weeks.

No it’s not getting up earlier or going to bed later. And no, it’s not watching less Top Gear, 5th Gear or Dr Who and neither is it revisiting my Torchwood episodes. In fact, I now take Budweiser the dog for a walk every day, and am trying to extend the length of these walks. The fishing still suffers, but the inventive cooking is coming back.

Nor have I farmed off more work to someone else – directly the opposite actually with plans for a third magazine and contemplations about creating a series of mini ‘workbooks’ on specialist products.

So what is this magic ingredient? H G Wells time potion? Nope. Typing faster after taken touch typing lessons?
Not that either.

Quite simply, it has been the addition of a 3G wireless card to my Acer Ferrari laptop. Now, precious business time that was uselessly wasted is being used productively without costing an arm and a leg.

In the past, as I fly regularly to Sydney and Melbourne, time wasted waiting for overdue planes and take off times would drive me spare. Sure, in some places you can get pay-as-you-go, but it is horribly expensive in comparison, the same as some of the in-house wireless setups are at hotels. I don't use too much data when on the road, so a 10GB plan for me is ideal, allows me to create and send the stories I do as a freelancer, and connect back to home base via LOGMEIN as needed.

Check each of the vendors out. It may help you too.

This is not strictly a 'Create' topic, so forgive me for that. But in the current climate, it is relevent.

In Western Australia, we have a bit of a power problem at the moment. Seems someone might have been a tad careless and forgotten to rust proof a little ol’ gas pipe. Someone else was careless and allowed a fire to start. A rather big one. Consequently, we have a bit of an energy dilemma for the next 6 months or so.

(There’s no truth to the rumour that the West Coast Eagles have been preserving energy this year in sympathy).

Seriously, the time has come where we all need to conserve energy; the papers are full of it, the politicians making mileage out of it and in winter, a lot of people are feeling a bit colder than normal with their heaters off, coupled with shorter showers and no electric blankets.

It was in this climate I have discovered an interesting little gadget that I had first seen on a TV show on the ABC called “Carbon Cops”. In essence, it is a transmitter that clips to the powerlines in your meter box (forgive the lack of knowledge in possibly correct terminology here, electricity is not my thing) and a wireless receiver placed somewhere convenient in the house. The receiver updates every 6 seconds with Kw currently being used, KwHr, $ spent and the carbon footprint being used. There are also various other settings, an internal memory and other things I am still finding.

There are some minor traps. It costs $99 from Bunnings, and some information on the website (www.efergy.com.au) intimates that a handyman can install it. Not so; you MUST be a licensed electrician. Secondly, if you have 3-phase power as I have, you need to by an extra two modules for the meter box transmitter at $30 or so each. This makes the total bill including a sparky to fit it (takes about 10 minutes) to a couple of hundred bucks. It’s quite possible in the shorter term you won't recoup that, but the results you see when the unit is operational are stunning.

Sony Playstation 3’s absolutely chew power! So does an electric kettle, oven and oil heater. Turning off all computers (4), printers (3), modems and associated peripherals barely created a blip. Incandescent lights v the newer energy globes showed their guzzle power.

All quite illuminating really if you’ll pardon the pun.

Even the simple act of taking everything off standby overnight by pulling the plug makes a difference. It becomes a bit of a game as to how low you can go in your power usage and still be functional!

On a flight back from Sydney yesterday, I had a sudden revelation. No-one could contact me for the next 5 hours, unless I suppose there was a very real emergency and the authorities could get a message through via the flight deck. However, I cannot imagine what sort of emergency that would be, and even then, there is bugger all I could do until landing.

So, except for whatever conversation the person next to me wanted to engage in (none hopefully and a set of Panasonic noise cancelling headphones usually fixes that), I was totally and utterly free of phone calls, text messages, emails, Facebook, Twitters, faxes – everything.

What bliss!

I indulged.

First I read Motor magazine from cover to cover, dribbled over Ferraris and then followed this with an hour of music from my Zune (Spock’s Beard if anyone is interested). Next I got serious and edited half a dozen stories for AusCam magazine, ZIPPED up the associated images and placed them all in the appropriate folder for later ftp’ing to our server.

Then I watched an episode of Torchwood on my ASUS EeePC that was stored on an 16GB Transcend USB stick.

And it was good.

I now wonder, are we TOO contactable? I remember in the early 80’s, a mate called Chris who I have since lost contact with, and who was a programmer at the original WARCC at the WA Uni on Cyber computers opined one day we should have the ability to contact each other anywhere in the world at anytime as the technology was there. It took another 8 years or so for the original mobile phone brick to appear. But he was sort of visionary. (Chris, if you are out there, do contact me!)

Today though, have we just gone too mad with the ability to converse, text, video and email? Have we lost the ‘timeout’ ability to think, create and muse? Perhaps we all need a shed to retreat to, with no computer, no power and no wifi where we can just sit and think. A bonus would be rain on the tin roof and a potbelly stove in the corner.

And a nice single malt scotch.

One current trend that really annoys the hell out of me is the copycatting of other current – or past – trends. Not as much as plagiarism annoys me mind you, but still enough for me to get the grumpy old man label from my other half whenever I see something along these lines.

I regret seeing the latest version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy compared to the original for example; why do people think they can do better? Is it artistic or creative to do a remake? I don't believe so, I think it is money driven. That goes against my grain.

But my current biggest gripe lately revolves around the person(s) who decided the latest US mania of abbreviating names should be transferred to Australia.

I would run a mile to miss a Tom Cruise movie and similarly, refuse to read any articles, story or whatever that now refers to “TomKat”. Then came J-Lo – or was she first – who cares? Now we have K-Fed for Kevin Federline, Fed-Ex for Roger Federer and God forbid, K-Rudd for our Prime Minister.

I freely admit that I am dead against American trends leaking into our society and this is one of them. Australia has a rich literary history, and simply ‘borrowing’’ stuff for the American vernacular is irritating to me at least. I saw a letter to the editor in the local paper last week that summed it up. He said, “we have beautiful young ladies in Australia, why do they all lately look like Paris Hilton though”.

I would hate to see the Aussie identity lost – literary, language, attitude, filmmaking and so on. I understand that the biggest market is the US one for ‘creative’ pursuits, but history has shown that ones that evolved around Aussie culture are the ones that have *really* succeeded – think Mad Max, Croc Dundee, Gallipoli, Rabbit Proof Fence and so on.

My point? Make a conscious effort to keep the Aussie identity going in all things and I reckon you will be rewarded far better than the ‘pretence’ of another culture – US or UK specifically (although the latter seems to have more of a favourable impact on Australians generally).

The question of legality in the sense of copyright has been around since man first put pen to papyrus or painted on cave walls. And personally, I am very strong on the issue of copyright; it continues to amaze me that despite all the warnings on packaging and so on, many people simply don't understand that copying music, DVDs or game console cartridges is simply breaking the current laws. (“I bought it so I own it to do what I like with it” is the normal chant.) Ignorance is no defence as they say.

But it strikes me there is a very grey area and that is when a TV program is downloaded from the ‘net and played back before it is actually shown here.

Now let’s see; Dr Who for example is paid for by public money in the UK and sold to TV stations all around the world. However, it is shown here on a free-to-air non-commercial (at this stage) channel and therefore no further money changes hands, unless you count merchandising. So if it is watched via an internet download, has anybody been swindled – especially as 99% if not 100% will also watch it on TV when it finally gets here and probably by the box set as well? In a sense, it’s a little like recording the show from TV to VHS or DVD and watching it later – or time shifting as is the current buzzword.

So is time shifting backwards illegal or immoral and forward time shifting OK?

This is of course a different ballgame to say Torchwood and Top Gear. While made by a non-commercial channel again (and we have to admit the BBC is damn good at this stuff, probably the best there is), they are shown, in Australia at least, on commercial channels. Yes, we can classify SBS as commercial even though like community radio, I believe they refer to it as ‘sponsorship’?

If we do not watch these shows on their designated channel and only on download, we are certainly depriving the advertisers their rights bought with cold, hard cash. The fact these should be on the ABC is a moot point of course.

What’s your take?