The JaYmes Escape

South Head is on the South side of the entrance to Sydney Harbour from the Pacific. Watson’s Bay, on the harbour side of South Head, is home to private yachts, expensive homes, fish restaurants and amazing sunsets. Pictures from my Watson’s Bay and South Head trip are now in the gallery.

In every city I’ve visited people complain about similar things; the roads are too busy, the trains are late, prices are high and the streets are dirty. You’d think then that these issues are as insurmountable as they are universal, and yet not all cities are alike. Some, like London and St Petersburg, have particular issues with the capacity of their public transport, and the rush hour traffic on the motorways in Auckland is bad enough to give LA a run for it’s money; even the M25 isn’t as bad.

It’s hard to find anything really dysfunctional about Sydney though; yes, the roads are busy but I’ve yet to see a real LA or Auckland-style jam. For sure, the trains run a bit late, but I’ve never seen one as crowded as the Victoria Line. The streets are a bit grubby but spotless compared to Nevsky Prospekt, or even Leicester Square, and prices aren’t the cheapest, but it’s not Tokyo or Helsinki. No city is a perfect machine, but Sydney seems to work better than most.

In Scotland and Wales, Central Europe and New Zealand, a mountain is a large conical-ish object with a pointed summit often topped by a cap of snow. In the great dividing range of Eastern Australia however, the Blue Mountains are not quite the shape or the colour that an international traveller expects them to be. This is not a tectonic crumple zone; these ‘mountains’ are formed by gentle erosion of sandstone over millions of years. They are characterised by sheer brown cliffs and deep tree-covered canyons that are home to some of the most remarkable and unusual species on the planet. The name comes from the blue haze that appears because the sun’s rays bounce off the oil droplets produced by indegenous trees such as the eucalypts.

After three days hiking around my legs ache and I’m absolutely shattered. I’ve mixed with the crowds of tourists in the most popular spots and ridden what claims to be the steepest passenger railway in the world, but I’ve also managed to veer away from the beaten track and traverse paths that are no more than horizontal crevices half way up cliffs, seeing first hand some of the wierd and wonderful flaura and fauna that evolved whilst Australia was still isolated from the rest of the world.

Pictures are now online.

When I first started working on DAB Digital Radio in London, no-one had heard of it. It was a geeky world of techno-babble and acronyms and bore very little relation to most people’s lives. So I didn’t really try to explain it. I just worked on computer-related technology for a radio company.

Times have changed though, and the chances are that if you’re in the UK, you might well have used a DAB radio and experienced some of my work. The most obvious thing is the dynamic text that scrolls across the screen when you’re tuned to a station. Around two thirds of DAB radio stations in the UK use technology built by myself and my former colleagues at Unique Interactive to manage what appears in that text and get it reliably on the air.

For the last 18 months or so that same technology has been used on trial DAB services down here in Sydney. It’s actually quite flattering to pick up a radio set on the other side of the world and see your work in action on the screen. However, unlike the UK, Digital Radio here is virtually unheard of, and at least 5 years behind. Receivers are not on generally on sale yet, primarily because (beyond the trial) DAB services haven’t been licensed. What I’m working on here then is demonstrating some of the capabilities of the technology for the benefit of the broadcasters.