I had just completed updating my web site with the content you see below (beginning with the section headed "Interesting Times"), when the hard disk on my main server failed. It makes repeated clicking sounds as if it is resetting and retrying every second or so, and I fear the prognosis is not good.

Almost all the content of the disk is backed up — certainly my photos and this website are safe. All of my own programming work exists in several copies on different machines, so I'm fairly confident I won't have lost much, if anything at all, in that category. But that still leaves some stuff that probably isn't backed up at all — like old email archives, or attachments I have received from friends, or configuration files for all the various software packages I use. I'm kicking myself for not instituting a more rigorous system of backups for the entire disk — I should know better.

The impact for the website is that my images are mostly no longer available for download. I have copied many of my more popular photographs, and most of the recent additions, to the hosting service in the U.S. But I don't have space for all my photos there, so most of the links will go nowhere for at least the next week or two. If there's a photo you want to see, try clicking on it — it might work (even though the red indicator shows that the server is not available).

So much has changed in the last few months I don't know where to start. You don't need me to tell you about what is now generally known as the Global Financial Crisis, although I will probably give you the benefit of my insight as a former Wall Street employee at some stage. But for the moment, let me just explain a little of how it has affected me personally.

I arrived back in Sydney just as the job market turned to custard — projects were being shelved, hiring freezes were being implemented everywhere and my Wall Street résumé had suddenly turned from an asset into a curiosity. I had expected to have little difficulty in finding a good job, but in the first few months I got only a few days of short-term contract work. Casting my net a little wider I eventually found work in the city of Canberra, so now I'm back in the familiar pattern of spending four nights a week away from home, just as I did when I lived in New York but worked on projects in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston.

For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Australia, Canberra is located a little under 300 kilometres south-west of Sydney. It's a new city, purpose-built as the capital of Australia, and it's a very attractive place, although it lacks many of the amenities that a only larger population can justify. I'm very happy to be spending time there, even though I couldn't see myself making Canberra my permanent home.

The neighbours in Canberra. This photo was taken just a few hundred metres from where I have been staying in the Canberra suburb of Watson.

The government of Australia, like many governments around the world, has embarked on a program of economic stimulus. Late last year many categories of welfare beneficiaries received one-off cash payments, and right about now over 8 million taxpayers are due to receive cash bonuses of $950.

The theory is simple — we know that if people lose their jobs or see their incomes fall they will spend less, and that will cause a snowball effect as retailers see less money crossing their counters and manufacturers see orders dry up. These sectors will then lay off staff, and the problem will be compounded. By distributing a large amount of money across the whole country the government hopes to avoid that cascade effect, and restrict the layoffs and the reductions in working hours to just those industries directly affected.

But what happens when we have paid out all this money, and the problem still remains? Are we not just delaying the inevitable, and putting ourselves hugely into debt to do so? The government tells us that these measures are designed to fill in the gap until the economy starts to improve, or until other programs to invest in infrastructure kick in. But the government and their economic advisors clearly failed to predict the onset of the current economic crisis, so why should we have any confidence that they can judge its likely duration?

And I have difficulty believing that putting $950 in the hands of the average taxpayer is going to buy $950 worth of economic stimulus. Most likely, $600 of that amount will go to an electronics manufacturer in China or Taiwan.

Of course, the government will not hear of any opposition to their plan. It's not often that governments get a chance to bribe the electorate with their own money, and the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have seized the opportunity with both hands. They clearly hope the voters will remember these handouts at the next election, and show their gratitude to their benefactors by re-electing them. So any contrary views are howled down with the contempt usually reserved for an opposing football team's star player. It's not an edifying sight, and it does nothing to increase the sense that these are people with the best interests of the country at heart.

If you do a search on Google for "Peter Wall", you'll find that it's not a particularly uncommon name. There's an academic from Sweden (yes, Sweden), a guitar teacher from France (yes, France), and a General in the British Army, to mention just a few of the Peter Walls you'll find.

And then there's a blog named simply Notes (formerly Res Ipsa Loquitur) by a student at San Joaquin College of Law in California. This Peter Wall uses his blog largely as a political soapbox, expressing views which overlap with my own in many respects, and diverge significantly from my views in others.

Then there's the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada — a gift from a Vancouver businessman named, unsurprisingly, Peter Wall. This Peter Wall is also the owner of the tallest building in Vancouver (I'd always heard Vancouver was a lovely city but now I have another reason for visiting). Because universities generate a lot of web references, the Peter Wall Institute tends to dominate the search results for Peter Wall.

There's also a former Liverpool football player, the Dean of the Diocese of Niagara, Ontario, a former Junior Mr. World (one of my favorites) and many, many more. And there's me.

So if you've found this page through such a search and you're wondering which Peter Wall I am, let me summarise: I was born in Cumbria in the north of England in 1951, moved to Manchester when I left school, and emigrated to New Zealand in my early twenties. I lived in Auckland for many years before moving to Melbourne, Australia, and then to Sydney. In late 2000 I moved to the U.S. and I lived in New York for almost 8 years before moving back to Sydney in 2008. If these facts fit the person you're looking for, chances are you've found me.

I knew I shouldn't have mentioned it. For some months this page was coming up as the first result in a Google search for "Peter Wall" (in North America, at least). It subsequently slipped to about ninth or tenth place, although right now it's back up to third.

But Google isn't the only game in town. If you search on Yahoo! for "Peter Wall", for a long while I was coming out in the first position after the sponsored links. Clearly Yahoo! is the superior search engine.

I'm still not sure how my high placements happen — the search engine companies are very secretive about their page ranking algorithms, and I have no way of knowing what it is about this page that causes it to rank so highly. Or what causes it to be demoted later. Let's see if Yahoo! will turn out to be as fickle as Google.

A few of my friends have websites. I'm mentioning them here for mutual support, and in the hope that it will raise all our search rankings.

Dermot Bremner has a website for his Transheldrake marine and yacht logisitics and transportation consultancy businesses.

Selwyn van Zeller has a website for his Maths In A Suitcase and Science In A Suitcase businesses.

Gary Stewart has a website featuring his art work.

Heidi Schuster has a website with photos and news (and that annoying dancing baby).

Chris Roberts also has a website.

And Heidi and Chris have a shared website.

Lily Chang has a photo website, but I think she updates it even less frequently than I do mine.

Kathie Callaghan has a website for her recruiting business in New York.

Rob Byrnes has a blog.

Will Schenk has a blog.

And Laam has an online retail store called Jesper-LA.

If I've left anyone out please don't hesitate to draw my attention to the fact.

I don't have the “in transit” excuse any more — my computer equipment arrived from New York in December and I've had the site back to its previous setup for a while now. But the Internet connection I have here in Sydney is very different from the cable connection I had in New York — the line speed into my computer is very much faster than I had before, but the speed of traffic from my computer is much slower. This is of course the way most people like it — they receive much more data than they send. But it's not very helpful when I want to use my machine as a server. You may find that images (and other files) download rather more slowly than before.

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