Motorbike accidents in the media, part 13

If there has ever been a 13 cylinder motorbike I really don't want to know about it. (Actually I do, but I hope there hasn't been!)


The Courier Mail are keeping up their habit of long headlines: "Car mounts footpath in rush hour, injures pedestrian and motorcyclst in Fortitude Valley" (July 21).


Three paragraphs, but bad formatting makes it look like two at first. It doesn't say how exactly the two cars, motorbike and pedestrian were involved, which is surely the big question. I mean - what? Surely the police would have some idea what happened if it was during rush hour?


Unless, of course, by the time police got there through rush hour traffic it had been so long that nobody could remember.


Oh yes, and: "motorbike-rider"? Really? That doesn't fit any hyphenation rule I'm familiar with!


Slightly shorter headline from the CM from the same day: "Police seek witnesses after black sedan hits motorcycle in Mackay" (July 21).


The second paragraph desperately needs reworking to get rid of the commas, but the entire piece reads far too much like a mildly reworked police media release.


Mind you, there is a potentially amusing note that the black "SS or SV6" Commodore (and don't tell me you were even slightly surprised by that), "may have panel damage to the front right handside." For bonus points, kick the editor who posted that without fixing it.


There isn't really much I can say about this apart from saying that somebody should have rewritten it so that it wasn't quite so obviously a massaged media release. All it says is what the police are prepared to say, how they are prepared to say it.


From guess who, another long headline: "Harley-Davidson rider killed by Toyota Camry as he turned into driveway at Jimboomba" (July 23).


Okay, they hyphenated it correctly, but once again I am forced to ask: Why are HDs always identified in copy, when other brands very rarely are? Do journalists get a kick-back from HD marketing, or something? And why haven't I been told?


I could also go into the attribution of action to the car not the driver, but I've done that before. It's stupid, and unhelpful.


As an interesting insight: This story first hit the Mail's RSS feeds as "Man dead after motorbike accident", and then again as "Harley rider killed by Camry". Exact same copy. Hmmm...


Eight paragraphs, five about this story and then mentioning another couple of accidents.


I think this one's worth quoting in full: 
POLICE are baffled by a fatal motorcycle crash at Jimboomba, southwest of Brisbane, in which a 64-year-old riding a Harley-Davidson bike was killed.


Now that's weird. They name HD, but find it necessary to add "bike". 


Police said the man was turning into a wide, sweeping driveway on Cusack Lane, when he was struck from behind by a Toyota Camry towing a trailer.


Apart from the extraneous comma, that just screams a driver who was not paying attention. There is simply no excuse for running into the back of someone who has not just slammed their brakes on in an emergency.

The bike rider, Robert Walsh, died at the scene and the 68-year-old male driver of the car was unhurt.


It's amazing how people inside big metal cages are unhurt when colliding with small vehicles like bikes, isn't it?

His 66-year-old passenger was taken to Logan Hospital suffering shock and chest pains.


Heart problems, I'm betting.


The Forensic Crash Unit is investigating.


I should hope so. Preferably by taking the driver into a small room and asking pointed questions.


Full credit to the Courier Mail for embedding Google Maps links in this story.


This story needed more editing, fewer cliches and a quote from the police explaining the "baffled" part, but hadn't been too badly written to begin with.


I think that'll do for this episode. Three items, one media outlet, three excessively long headlines. 

Thoughts on writing and sleep, written while unable to sleep

I have recently been working to a roster that doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to 9-5 or even daylight hours.

That's not a problem - I don't have any particular attachment to concepts of normalcy, and I work well after dark. It's not even the first time I've worked bizarre hours, although it's a lot less physical than serving food and it's a whole lot more regular than the weird, scattered shifts which characterise the various caring jobs.

That regularity, in fact, has given me a fabulous opportunity to investigate sleep patterns.

For a start, regularity breeds regularity. Anyone who's ever tried to sleep in on the weekend after a week of early rising and woken up anyway has had occasion to curse the force of habit. My sleep cycles appear to slip into habit so easily it's downright depressing, not to mention inconveniently inflexible.

For example, I am currently typing this on my phone at 2am, wondering if I'm going to get or need any sleep at all this night.

If I don't it'll be annoying, because it'll be another 25 hours from now before I get another opportunity, and with all the politics I'm going to have to handle in this election run-up, I'm going to need all the sleep I can get.

Which is another thing - how much do I need, exactly?

On a work night I get home at about 2:30am, give or take. It takes at least another half an hour to be ready for bed (I don't like to rush things) and some of that is winding down time after riding home.

I can't usually expect to be nodding off until 3:30.

This is were it gets interesting:

If I have a glass of wine when I get home, I feel happier, sleepier, find it a lot easier to get to sleep and then wake up on or after midday feeling a bit grumpy until I've had tea, food, tea, coffee and sat in the sun until my bones are warm.

If I just try to get to sleep, I'll wake up soon after sunrise, drift off again, and probably be up by 11.

But if I try to read in bed I will recover some energy, realise the time at 4:30, go to sleep and wake up as above but minus an hour which I don't actually miss.

The fourth option, however, is the most interesting.

If I lie in bed and write on this phone - it doesn't particularly matter what, and most of it gets discarded in the light of hindsight anyway - I lose track of an hour, go to sleep at 4:30 and then wake up at 10:30 far too energetic to stay in bed and feeling more restless than I normally do after any normal night.

This intrigues me greatly. Quite apart from being an interesting management strategy, it suggests that whatever mental state I'm in while writing is replacing sleep, and doesn't that just sound too good to be true?

What it suggests to me is a slightly altered state of consciousness - altered compared to my normal, anyway - analogous to meditation. Which probably explains why I've never been able to still my mind whenever I've attempted any form of meditation, and had random running thoughts/daydreams instead. It's just how I'm wired.

What I want to know is: do other writers notice something similar? The phenomenon of any artist, not just writers, losing complete track and conscious sense of time while being creative is well known. But I don't think I've heard of how it affects their sleep patterns, if at all.

And that intrigues me even more.

It is now half an hour of typing with T9 on a phone keypad later, I'm no more tired than I was when I started and it's beginning to look as though sleep just may not happen tonight. Maybe after the sun's up, just to be contrary.

Motorbike accidents in the media - Part the V12

Knowing that people have put V8 and V10 car engines in motorbikes, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that they've done it with automotive V12s as well. In this case, a BMW V12 in a drag bike, god help us all.

Perhaps the most well-executed monstrosity I have seen for a while, however, is the Millyard V12, a Kawasaki with two Z1300 inline six engines grafted onto a common crankcase to make a 2.6 (or 2.5 with rounding)L V12. Info here, pictures here and video here.

Getting that out of the way, I need to clear a backlog of accident stories again.

Let's see if I can get them in chronological order, this time.

July 2: Motorcyclist loses control, crashes into brick fence at Macgregor (Courier Mail)

What is with the Mail and their headlines? Also, does it seem wrong to you that "Macgregor" is spelt with only the one capital?

28yo rider, residential neighborhood, thankfully didn't die but did receive head injuries so don't celebrate just yet.

The critical point here is "just before midnight", in winter. Cold, late. Drinking a bit? Dog ran across the road? Cold-numbed? Dazzled by car headlights? Run off road by car headlights?

Three paragraphs does not for a highly informative article make, but they did get a police comment, as uninformative as it was. The headline is really the only thing wrong, here.

July 3: Man loses leg in motorcycle crash (Queensland Times)

First off: Ouch.

This time, the headline is direct and to the point, and then the lead paragraph brings in "sickening". Oh, well.

The 34-year-old was riding his motorcycle at the intersection of Queen Street and Smiths Road at Goodna when he collided with a Kenworth tip truck.

Why, exactly, is the make of the truck relevant?

First off, he was a local, which may have make him a bit cocky and unobservant. Or, the truck stuffed up.

The intersection in question (Google Maps) is major, and a roundabout. Roundabouts should in theory work really well, provided the roads leading in are of roughly equal value, but they introduce so many horror scenarios it's not funny. I'm extremely familiar with this particular roundabout, and it's not my favourite.

The accident happened about 8.20am. Police said the truck driver was unharmed.

Time is probably relevant - rush hour, maybe somebody was running late. Or, the driver of the truck wasn't paying close enough attention and ran over a bike below his line of sight.

However, I am forced to ask again: How exactly could a collision with a bike harm a truck driver?

Touch of over-writing at the start, but a decent article.

July 3: Motorcyclist dies after hitting ditch in road (ABC News Online)

This is, typical of a lot of the ABC's short items that don't have a journalist's byline attached, very concisely written.

However:

A man has died after being thrown from his motorcycle on Bathurst Street in Sydney's north-west.

The 56-year-old failed to negotiate a bend and hit a ditch in the road.

Question one: "Was thrown" or "came off"? I'm not sure how I feel about anyone other than owners using language which imbues mechanics with intent.

Secondly, the second paragraph fails on two points: "failed to negotiate a bend" is police-ese not journalism-ese, and what was a ditch doing in the road? Did he fail to make the bend and run off into a ditch, or came around the bend, saw a ditch-sized pothole, thought "OH, SHIT" and been unable to avoid it? Should there, in point of fact, have been signs up? Were there?

Post-mortem will try and determine cause of crash. How, exactly? Short of a heart attack, that's probably a job for accident investigators.

Kudos, however, to whoever tried CPR. Give them a medal, they're a very rare breed.

This article, on the other hand, frustrates the hell out of me. It just leaves too many questions unanswered.

July 3: Motorbike rider dies after hitting parked car (ABC News Online)

The entire article is:

A 29-year-old motorbike rider has died after a crash in East Brighton, east of Melbourne.

The man hit a parked car after 1:30pm (AEST) today.

A passenger on the motorbike escaped unharmed.

What happened?

I really do question the value of this. It's not enough to make an interesting story, there's not enough detail to inform friends or relatives who may not have heard yet, there's not enough detail to make people sit and up and wonder if perhaps they should keep a wary eye out when they hit the road later.

It's a nothing vignette, existing only to let people know there had been another road accident, and leaving entirely open the baffling question of why someone would hit a parked car in the first place.

July 8: Officer in motorcycle accident (Queensland Times)

Um... Yes? Officer of what?

A POLICE officer from the State Traffic Task Force was injured in an accident on the Ipswich Motorway yesterday.

Oh, right. Police. Why couldn't you say so?

Okay, in all honesty it was probably a reasonable assumption to make and a reasonable headline.

The officer was conducting highway patrols on a motorcycle, which ran into the back of a Subaru sedan on the Brisbane-bound lanes at Redbank – near the Shell service station – about 12.27pm.

Now I, as a motorcyclist who has been pulled over by the police for doing something technically illegal but safe (riding on the verge past near-stationary traffic), am finding it hard not to giggle at this point, with a touch of schadenfreude.

Police officers are extremely highly trained and have extremely good bikes - BMW, Yamaha and Honda tourers that aren't cheap even before all the police gear gets bolted on. Exactly how did he manage that? I'm guessing that if the car did something extremely wrong somebody, a colleague perhaps, but definitely somebody would have booked the driver then and there.

And the Ipswich Motorway is a horribly inadequate road, but midday is not the really busy time.

He didn't require hospitalisation, so it wasn't even a big shunt.

What interests me, however, is that the police have launched a departmental inquiry, not "forensic accident investigators will examine the scene."

Okay, one more:

July 14: Man injured in motorbike crash (ABC News Online)

Ummm... Yes? That's generally what happens.

This story has a byline, and that means we can assume a slightly looser, flowing style of writing, and that's what we get.

This may well be the first article that I really can't fault.

Man lost control in a jump while riding a dirt bike and training for a race, hit a tree, suffered spinal injuries, was taken to hospital. As an added bonus, the helicopter service provided two pictures, although they really don't add all that much except atmosphere.

There aren't any really unanswered questions here. I'm not sure it's of any interest at all outside the circle of locals and dirt bike riders, but it's not a bad little item.

Motorbike accidents in the media, part 11.

Has there been an eleven cylinder motorbike? Possibly, but I can't find it, and for that I am profoundly glad.

This is really getting away from me. I have several stories open in Firefox tabs, several more waiting to be opened, and there's almost a complete row of tabs. At this point, I'm not sure if this represents an increase in accidents or an increase in reporting.

From the Courier Mail, May 31: Two injured after a motorcycle and a car collide in Townsville.

That is a slightly odd headline. Using the indefinite article twice looks like a slightly clumsy attempt at correct grammar, and one which headlines usually ignore in favour of brevity. The headline also doesn't say who was injured, leaving the reader to assume it may have been the driver and the rider.

Actually, no: Two young men on the bike, aged 25 and 20, both received compound fractures.

The five paragraphs in this story contain enough information for three solid paragraphs, and any mention of circumstances, or even the apparently usual "The driver of the car was unhurt", is not included.

There was an odd formatting error in the web page, however.

It feels rushed, both in writing and posting.

Next up, also from the Courier Mail, is Woman killed in Townsville crash between motorbike and truck (June 01).

Interestingly, not only is this article better written, but includes an inline link to the approximate address on Google Maps. Which is, unsurprisingly, a major intersection, although there is no information given about what each vehicle may have been doing.

The interesting thing about this collision is that it was at 11am - everybody should have been awake, and it was no longer rush hour.

In contrast to a great many stories I've covered in this series, this one didn't contain any more information but was better written and presented.

Still from the Courier Mail, Man dies in motorcycle crash in Toowoomba, from June 14.

Seven paragraphs here, and surprisingly they're not all wasted - largely because only five of them are dealing with the accident.

6pm - dark, rush hour - a ute was waiting to turn right across traffic from a multi-lane road.

Traffic behind the vehicle was merging into the left lane but the motorcycle failed to merge and crashed into the back of the ute.

I can't really fault this article beyond putting "slamming into" in the opening paragraph.

I do have to question whether the ute had its lights on, and how the rider had a big enough lapse in concentration to crash into the back of it.

Since he was DOA at the hospital, we'll never know.

The last two paragraphs of the story are:

The fatality takes Queensland's 2010 road toll to 107 lives lost, including 20 motorcyclists.

At the same time last year 166 people had died on Queensland roads, 36 of them motorcyclists.

My personal wish is that any politician who gets up and says "This proves that being tougher on speeding saves lives" gets forced to write out "Correlation does not prove causation", 10,000 times or until they cry for mercy.

And if anybody has done an in-depth analysis of all the road-safety factors in recent years, I would love to know about it.

I'll finish with one more article, from the Ipswich-based Queensland Times: Motorcyclist airlifted to hospital, June 28, a headline so terse it's frustrating.

Five paragraphs, the last of which is "A spokesman for RACQ CareFlight said she was in a stable condition."

Essentially, a woman was riding a motorbike by herself at 9.45am on a Saturday morning when she "fell off her motorbike going around a corner."

Near the Maroon Dam probably means the Boonah Rathdowney Rd, which looks rather interesting and is immediately on my list of places to visit one of these days. From the look of the road, I'd say the usual suspects apply: oil, leaves, gravel, running out of talent.

Thankfully she's not dead, but suspected spinal injuries is nothing to be grateful for. I'm wondering why she was taken to the Toowoomba Base Hospital, not Ipswich or even Gold Coast - prevailing winds may have decided the pilot, for all I know.

For a nice change, this article is written in a very readable style instead of over-terse news-ese, and couldn't really include more information without actually talking to the woman, who was probably highly sedated at the time.

Four stories, none of them saying enough but, on the other hand, none of them really getting anything majorly wrong, either.

You paid *how* much for that bottle? You twit.

The concept of "value" is rather an amusing one.

It should mean what something's worth but it doesn't, or we wouldn't have old sayings like "he knows the worth of everything, but the value of nothing."

What it means is what something's worth, and right there we have the main reason why sticklers for language can't get along with normal people and why the phrase "that's not what I meant" has any legs at all.

Value, then, steps outside of purely commercial, monetary, supply-and-demand, free-market considerations. It's a bit more personal. Or at least, it's a bit more than point-of-sale.

Value, for example, is when that $26,000 BMW motorbike lasts you ten years, three times around Australia and weekly usage.

Value is, to nick an example from Terry Pratchett (bonus points for identifying the character), when a pair of boots that costs you $300 lasts you ten years, and a pair that costs $100, lasts you two years.

But what I really want to talk about, and why I started this otherwise fairly pointless post, is wine.

Immediately there will be people (assuming anybody's reading this), who will be rolling their eyes and calling me a philistine and going off in a flounce, which is like a huff but for people who drink wine without caring about the cost.

You see, wine is one area that, more than most, defies rational discussion. And I don't just mean because it has a history of causing otherwise sane men and women to say things like "creamy mouth-feel" in public and get away with it.

No, it's because of this: One 5L cask of plonk can cost $10, and a bottle of Penfold's Grange Hermitage (or whatever it's called now, since grape names became copywrit) costs upwards of $400 $500 600.

And before you say that it's worth it: No, it isn't. It is worth it only for two very clear reasons: So you can drink the world's highest-regarded red wine, and so that other people can know you're doing it. Sharing with them may also give you a feeling of smugness or even, let's be charitable, genuine sharing pleasure.

But how much better is it, exactly?

Take the catalogue that fell out of today's paper, from a large-scale franchised distributor of retail alcohol.

It helpfully includes ratings for each wine, out of the standard agreed 100.

There is a 1986 Grange, given 99/100. For $699 (breath! It's only numbers!)

Right next to it on the page, something French from 2006 is 96/100 and $899.

Wait, what?

How does that work? On the same "Something rare" page, a 98 is $499, but a 94 is $59.90 (when prices hit three figures, they stop bothering to put cents on).

At the start of the catalogue, on the very first two-page spread, the cheapest bottle is $9.40 and 94. There are 7 bottles more expensive and lower-rated, and one bottle for $119 is 96. Frankly, I know which one I would be buying.

Turn the page and there's an 88 for 11.90 and a 91 for 44.90.

The catalogue continues in much the same vein until we get to my favourite section, the Fortifieds (yes, I'm a Port man from way back).

At this point, we meet the first perfect score, attached to a 100 year-old Tawny for, wait for it and possibly sit down as if you weren't already, $1,000 for a 375ml bottle.

On the same page, a Tokay receives 93 and is $14.90 for 750ml.

Again, I know which one I'd be buying.

There is, in case you were wondering, one more perfect score - a Muscat which goes for $106.90/375ml bottle.

That's little more than 1/10th the price for the same volume of liquid which is, according to the critics, perfect.

At this point may I suggest that some people are, perhaps, getting ripped off?

Normally I would be quite happy to see anybody who can afford to pay $1,000 for a Port or $699 for a Shiraz, do so. I like wine-makers and want them to do well, preferably at the expense of people who can afford it (i.e.: not me).

But this just baffles me.

Beyond a certain point, your taste (and I will admit that everybody reaches this point at a different, um, point) can't tell the difference between one wine and another, higher-rated, wine. People have even done experiments showing that when subjects think they are drinking expensive wines, they rate it higher even if it's exactly the same as the wine they were told was cheap.

That point may mean that someone genuinely can't tolerate a wine of 94 or below, and I feel genuinely (well, sort of) sad for them.

This isn't even a case of "Oh, you obviously can't appreciate the better wines. No. Honestly, there's something wrong with the rating system when $10 bottles score higher than 90 and there is no nicely usable, real-world correlation between rating and price. Caveat emptor and all that, but shouldn't there be some connection between quality and price? Actually, there's something wrong with the rating system when the lowest score on sale in 88.

Plus: If a 95 bottle can be easily had for $20, that means it takes anywhere up to $200 to add each extra rating point. Except, oh look: here's a Sherry which scores 97 and costs $36.90. 

People, you are being conned.

I'm not sure who by, exactly, but you are definitely being conned.

Motorcycle accidents in the media, part the V-10

Wait, what? A V-10 motorcycle?

Yes, I'm afraid so.

At least, sort of.

The Dodge Tomahawk Concept Motorcycle is, natch, a concept. It is also not technically speaking a motorcycle - it has four wheels, just a very, very narrow wheelbase so it sort of behaves like a motorcycle.

It's a lot better executed and more interesting than most massive-car-engine motorcycle concepts but, as with the others, I'm really not sure they should have done it at all.

Moving onto the important stuff.

I'm only going to do one story, because it's a decent length and I end up talking about it quite a lot. (Note for the chronologically confused - yes, I wrote this bit last).

It is another take on a story I addressed last time - the ABC's Man jailed for killing motorcyclist. This one is 70yo jailed for rider's death (Queensland Times - June 10).

This story has a bit more detail. Journalist Felicity Caldwell is a court reporter who goes and sits in the gallery each day, so that's no surprise. She also got quotes from relatives of the deceased, which is macabre but a bit traditional.

AN ELDERLY Ipswich man, who was found guilty of killing a motorbike rider after crossing the road’s centreline in his van, will face the next four months behind bars.

I would have edited that opening paragraph a little for tightness, but it gets the pertinent facts in. Four months, by the way, is the non-suspended part of two years. Truth in sentencing is a whole other issue entirely.

The rider, Joseph Vella, was 39 and died in hospital 7 days after the collision, which sounds unpleasant.

Prospect St where it happened is one of the major streets in a minor town. Google maps only has the major portion on Street View, but it looks as though there's only one crest, and not much of it. Also, hardly an abundance of streetlights.

For added self-referential macabreness, the driver was doings his rounds delivering the QT at the time. That may bring a clue - if he was distracted from the road by checking an address, or stocks, or fumbling for a pen, drifting sideways is only too possible.

But there's this little bit of weirdness:

Sergeant Darryl Morrison told the court he discovered an 11-metre skid mark on the road which was probably caused by Mr Vella braking before the collision.

But one of the first officers on the scene, Senior Constable Gregory Henricksen said he had not seen the skid marks on the night of the crash.

Skid marks on a road aren't that easy to see in low light conditions, but surely your first instinct would be to at least look?

Skid marks, however, reveal one very sad truth: Mr Vella may have been able to avoid or minimise the accident. A speed limit of 60km/h means a closing speed of 120km/h and up and that means precious little reaction time. But if Williams was driving his van only partly on the incorrect side of the road at the time, then there was some leeway for an emergency swerve to the left. And hitting the curb and going for a tumble has more opportunities for survival than hitting a solid wall of approaching metal.

Skid marks are not a good thing. Locking the wheels reduces braking power and removes all ability to steer. That's why ABS is a good idea.

To step out of media-analysis mode for a moment: If you ride a bike or a scooter, then please, please, practice emergency braking and emergency manoeuvres, and get some advanced training. Thank you.

I must, however, ask: Why no skid marks from Williams' van? Was he still distracted when a bike ran straight into him? No matter what options may have been available to Mr Vella, Williams put him in that position and was therefore found guilty.

Mr Vella's older sister thought the sentence was fair:

“While Mr Williams’ actions were negligent, it was one of those things where people don’t think about what the consequences will be,” she said.

“The public prosecutor thought that he would’ve been given a larger sentence if it wasn’t for his health – he’s actually not very well.”

And that just reinforces my opinion that he will be lucky indeed to get his licence back after four years. And if he does, well, that's another discussion.

To sum up, it was a quite well written article with, finally, most of the details I would like to hear with only one omission - what Williams' side of the story was, after pleading not guilty.

One more thing: QT really, really needs to fix their RSS feeds. All you normally get is the headline and that, compared to any other media outlet, is just not good enough.

In praise of hackers and modders

(Edit: I called the i8910 the Omnia Icon in Australia. Actually, that's a winmob device. The i8910 is the HD Icon. Which doesn't sound any less stupid.)

Before I start, let's get a little something out of the way, first:

A hacker is someone who tries to take things apart in order to understand them, and fiddle with them in order to improve them.

A cracker is someone who tries to break things in order to break them for fun and profit.

Right, moving on.

Here's the thing: The world relies upon hackers to advance. Engineers? Hackers, if they're any good. The spirit of "What would happen if..." and "Hey, how does that work..." drives productive creativity and improvements.

Scientists? Hackers, by definition. Hackers of reality and of life.

But the term is a computer one, and it's computer programmers who fiddle who I want to talk about now.

All programmers, if they're any good, are hackers. They want to know how somebody else did that cool thing, they have to chase down bugs in their own code, they're dissatisfied when they see something functioning below-par. They'll sooner spend two days building a replacement than twenty seconds being frustrated.

And they make really cool toys for the rest of us.

Commercial software is built by waged hackers with deadlines and managers. Open source software is built by hackers, some of whom have wages and managers while they're doing so.

And then there's the ones producing not the major product, but the improved version. The one you have to work to get. The operating system that works the way it should have done, if only the company producing it hadn't had commercial obligations or, well, deadlines and managers.

I had a Sharp Zaurus SL5500 for years. It was unabashedly a toy when I got it - a chunky PDA with a QWERTY keyboard and a Linux operating system which satisfied my twin desires of having a cool toy, and being able to type lying in bed. Laptops are too clumsy, too bulky, for lying on your back jotting down thoughts and chasing ideas. Oh, and an ebook reader for Project Gutenberg classics.

Being Linux, an open-sourced system, built using a variety of also open-sourced toolkits and projects, it was only a matter of time before OpenZaurus arose, flexed its muscles, and started producing an alternate, community-built, better-performing, less rubbish software platform.

Okay, buggier as well, but that's the price you pay for development.

I have no idea how many times I reflashed that poor device with new updates, but by the end I could do it in my sleep and it was probably a contributing factor to its eventual, inevitable, demise.

Eventually, however, the SL5500 was replaced with the sexier (black) SL6000, and then the C-series came out with a mini-laptop form factor and a swivelling screen and all the sex appeal that chunky SL5500 never had, and development on the now rapidly aging devices slowed and then stopped, lingering bugs left untreated.

At the same time, my progression through mobile phones landed me at a device with a big colour screen and enough of a java platform to run ebook readers, and then I found a text editor for the phone, and the Zaurus was doomed. The next time I actually tried to turn it on, no amount of hard-resetting, battery-replacing and fiddling would produce the merest flicker of life.

That phone was replaced with a much more powerful one running an open-standards operating system called Symbian with an open-standards interface called S60.

And that brings us neatly to my point, really, because we are now in the realm of smartphones which are more powerful than dedicated PDAs or even laptops of years gone, and one of the defining points of a smartphone is that you can upgrade it.

Which, of course, decent companies do on a regular basis - buy a top-end or even middle-range Nokia and you can confidently expect a new firmware version to bring speed, battery life and functionality improvements every other month for a year or more.

But some don't and, occasionally, others take up the slack.

And then there are those which invite it.

Google's Android operating system is Linux, customised. Which, to geeks and hackers, is like walking into a lion enclosure waving a chunk of dead goat over your head.

While companies pander to network operators and take special note of commercial agreements, hackers cheerfully take the code, rip out the rubbish, port across a cool toy from the next release, drop in something else to fix what everyone except the distributor thinks is a problem, and hey presto! You void your warranty but, frankly, the advantages outweigh that.

If you use an HTC device running Android, you really should be using Cyanogen's replacement ROMs.

Motorola managed to alienate a large community of current or potential users, me included, by preventing this practice on the non-USA Milestone.

It's healthy to have people like this keeping the big boys on their toys.

But let's return to Symbian. The platform, used by nearly everyone but championed by Nokia, who bought S60 and dominated the ecosystem to such an extent that they, in my amateur opinion, damaged its competitiveness, has its roots in 8-bit greyscale devices running for two weeks on a pair of AA batteries, and has been evolving healthily ever since, becoming the most resource-efficient, flexible and potentially powerful of all smartphone systems without, at the same time, really extending itself.

It can support network protocols that are still in the laboratory, but read the international press and you'd get the opinion it's doomed, dead in the water, rubbish, horrible to use, out-dated and slow, part of which relates to S60, which quite frankly is old and has always demanded a little effort to use it properly, and part of which is Nokia being parsimonious with hardware, relying on the efficiencies of Symbian to keep costs down while still providing class-leading functionality.

But then there's Samsung. Unlike Nokia, who cut back on hardware and then spend time and effort optimising the software, Samsung produce truly mighty devices and then just sort of... forget them.

The current king of Symbian, the most powerful and the most impressive, is not the all-singing N97 family but the one-piece Samsung i8910, variously known as Omnia HD (because it was the first phone able to shoot HD video) or, in Australia, the slightly nauseating HD Icon. Great 8MP camera, great stereo speakers taking up each end of the device, great big 3.7" capacitive toughened glass AMOLED screen, 600MHz processor with full graphics acceleration and oodles of RAM.

But the first release had crippling problems, and since then it's had, well, a couple of firmware updates, but not what you'd call love, care and attention from momma and papa in Korea. The C: drive, where the operating system lives, is so small that a couple of system updates fills it. And the discerning smartphone power-user these days demands updates, currency, movement, dammit!

Roll on HyperX. Yes, it's possible to produce custom firmwares for Symbian. Generally, this hasn't been needed, and it's presumably tricky enough that people haven't tried. But for a megaphone like the i8910, hoops were, as the saying goes, jumped through. And even people who normally run a mile from the innocent suggestion that hacking a phone to customise the home screen might not mean the end of the world, have dipped their toe in the water and declared themselves impressed.

I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung sell a few more i8910s thanks to HyperX. I may very well, in the next month or so, be one of them.

Raise your glasses to the hackers and the modders - we wouldn't have got this far without them.