Top five

[David]

I expect that most of you will be familiar with High Fidelity.

Your top five can be anything you like: movies, books, albums, memories, Collingwood players, girlfriends, boyfriends, pieces of furniture, Nick's BB threads... the choice is yours!

I'll kick things off:

Top five short-lived jobs:

5. Delivering The Valley View to about 1,400 houses (minus the ones with "no junk mail" signs) for the princely sum of $22 a fortnight as a 12-year-old. I was made redundant when competition with The Tuggeranong Chronicle became too intense and the paper went the way of all print publications.

4. Being the Canberra b-grade league's youngest boundary umpire at the age of 13. The one and only time in my life I have owned and used a whistle. I received $40 a game, which was a substantial improvement on my previous profession.

3. Doing the night shift at a hotel. Some of you may recall the tragic ending to this story, but it wasn't such a bad job: I came in at 11:30 at night and worked until 7 in the morning, doing a couple of rounds of the hotel each evening but mostly just sitting behind the counter chatting to my co-worker. I was there for two weeks and kind of loved it.

2. Tutoring a Russian immigrant's 9-year-old daughter in maths, which mostly involved writing short stories structured around maths equations. Sample: "On the sun, Space Chilli is selling ice-creams to tourists. Not many people visit the sun, so Space Chilli usually only sells 5 ice-creams a year. If each ice-cream costs $5.35, how much money does Space Chilli make in a year?"

1. Making choc-tops for a cinema. I lasted three hours. I thought I did a pretty good job, but I never heard back from them.

So, what's yours?

[stui magpie]

What's high fidelity? I'm not quite getting the concept, can I just pick 5 things I like from different categories?

[David]

What!? I could have sworn we'd had a discussion about it on here at one point.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_%28novel%29

Anyway, a top five from any category will do.

[stui magpie]

OK, I'll get onto it tomorrow.

BTW, how much coke must the people at the studio have been snorting to buy that plot. Really?

[Tannin]

Five non-Collingwood footballers I would pay money to watch play just one more time:

1: Garry Ablett Snr.

2: James Hird

3: The Wiz (Jeff Farmer)

4: Robbie Flower

5: Michael Tuck

Criteria: must not have played for Collingwood at all. Otherwise I'd have Dermie and Willow in there.

[Tannin]

Five Collingwood footballers I would pay money to watch play just one more time:

1: Peter Daicos (of course)

2: Rowdy

3: Wakes

4: Leon

5: Thommo.

Stiff: Billy Picken.

[Tannin]

Five Australian batsman I would pay money to watch play just one more time:

1: Alan Border

2: Kim Hughes

3: Dean Jones

4: Greg Chappel

5: Steve Waugh

[partypie]

Can we squeeze Doug Walters into Tannins list please?

[Wokko]

Top 5 Record Store Movies.

1. Empire Records

2. Ghost World

3. Pretty in Pink

4. Clockwork Orange

5. High Fidelity

I was tempted to leave High Fidelity off to mess with David, but I wont.

[Tannin]

Five brands of computer so bad they top my all-time hate list. (Several of them are deservedly defunct.)


1: Amstrad. Made a huge number of different models, only one or two of them any good at all, and those few were certainly accidents which slipped through by mere chance. A legend in their own lifetime.

2: Apple. The undisputed champions of grossly over-pricing very, very ordinary kit, and then tricking the credulous consumer into thinking that it is vastly better than in fact it is. But that's not all, Apple not only remain the World Champion of computer consumer lock-in, they practically invented it. Only not rated #1 on this list because their early products (back in pre-Mac days, well before David was born) were actually very good. You paid through the nose even then, of course, but you got genuine quality engineering in an era when that was not commonplace, and a level of long-term customer friendliness, upgradability, repairability and flexibility which would be starkly unthinkable today.

3: Hewlett-Packard / Compaq. Once the finest high-quality manufacturer in the industry, HP became a by-word for shoddy, rapacious junk some years ago and has not changed enough to mention since. Compaq too was a fine old company once, though far, far too prone to inventing expensive and non-standard ways to do standard, non-challenging tasks - to the fury of all working technicians, and cost of the poor bloody customers having to pay for it.

4: Commodore. One of the four great pioneers of micro-computing, and makers of fine, innovastive products .... in 1979. From there on, it was all downhill. Commodore's quality went backwards as their sales boomed in the early 1980s, and their move into PCs produced some of the shoddiest systems ever not made by Amstrad. In desperation, they bought a very good small company with a fantastic product (the Amiga) ... and mismanaged even that into oblivion. The company sank without trace around about the time that David started high school. (My understanding is that the two events were unconnected.)

5: Olivetti. Would rank #1 except that they went out of the business so long ago. Quite possibly the worst computers ever made. Not just non-standard and bad, some models were positively lethal. The fact that I wasn't killed by one of their insane exposed-high-voltage models serves as testament either to my careful, methodical work habits or just good luck. You decide which one.

Stiff: Dell. Possibly the most unscruplous major vendor in the game. Raises skating very close to the edge of consumer law into an art form.

[David]

Ghost World is a bit of a stretch, but I'm glad you included it, because it's great.

[Wokko]

Trying to remember 5 movies with record stores that I liked was hard enough, and indeed Ghost World is great. I really want to read the graphic novel at some stage too.

I nearly just made it a Top 5 retail themed movies so I could put in Clerks (video store).

[Wokko]

[Tannin]

[David]