Monday 29 December 2008

New Pet, New Blog Post, Yeah Yeah...

This Christmas I bought Trish a canary, to replace a canary she had a few years ago which died of old age.  She'd been pretty sad about it so I thought this year was enough time to be over it, and found a little canary for her, not a gold one but a green and black little guy, and a cage for it. While I was at Panton Pets with my sister, I spotted a little black and white bunny that seemed quite playful and clever, and I was hugely amused by it.

My sister told Trish about it later, plans were made, and at Christmas I was told that I had a gift that couldn't be delivered until it's weepy eye had been cleared up...  So on Boxing Day, Trish and I were out tracking down materials to make a hutch, and the next two days were spent building the combination hutch/run.  Not a moment too soon, because on Sunday, Peta Rabbit was ready to pick up.

Today marks the first full day for it to call this place home, and of course the temperature is on the way up, a dangerous time for hutch buns.  But Pet has her combi in a very cool spot in the yard, and besides, she spent more time indoors running mad laps and kicking up her heels.  I took a series of videos, not very good because I'm using a still camera in video mode, and stitched together a short movie, also not really great because A) I have NFI what I'm doing with video editing and B) I did this on a hot day, constantly distracted by more antics by the animals.  Bear with it though, it's mildly amusing.






When I put the little rabbit down in front of Ghostie there, I had to cut the last bit of the video for the sake of his dignity - when Peta bobbed her head down, Ghostie jumped backwards and ran off.  Would never do to show that kind of thing publicly...  %)

Suffice to say, today has been a lot of amusement, and I hope the next few days don't get too hot for a fluffy little bunny - I'll be sitting the worst heat out in the bus and might allow the two animals to run around in there with me, Ghostie is very well housetrained and Peta has shown herself to be a neat tidy little thing, using the same spot in her run for a toilet, so a tray with some of that sand in it should keep her neat as well.  And the bus is pretty cool with the A/C on.


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Friday 26 December 2008

OMGWTFFSM (go on - you WANT to know!)

Just saw this in a "year in review" article and don't know how the obvious OMGWTFFSM? reference escaped me at the time.


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Wednesday 24 December 2008

(de)Press here for the best religious experience

And therein lies the key to why meditation and nirvana are spiritual concepts.  If you can find a way to depress the "S-spot" then you experience much more of a feeling of spirituality.  Since the S-spot defines your identity and sense of self, the more you strive to remove your sense of self, the more you will depress activity in the right parietal lobe, and the more intense will be your spiritual high.

Only problem is - if you are too successful at suppressing the RPL, who will be there to experience the mystical feelings?

But it certainly does put all the religious principles of selflessness and meditation in a whole new light now, doesn't it?


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Monday 22 December 2008

Blog Roll Broke Roll Bah Humbug!

Blogrolling has been broken for so long now that I' just about given up hope.  But the announcement has given me a bit of hope, and made me stay from switching to another BR site just yet.  I have about a dozen blogs I either wanted to add and have by now forgotten or have added as bookmarks so I will be able to find them again once the drought lifts.

As you might see if you checked my blogroll in the days before Blogrolling crashed, I do tend to keep the list updated and add new worthwhile blogs as I come across them.  I was in fact about to split my blogrolls into categories when BR went down bigtime.

I figured I could set up a BR each for technology, cooking, greenovation, and general chat, and then put the relevant one on each of the blogs I keep running.  And yep - I manage to keep four main blogs on four very different topics going, generally managing to post between 2 and 50 articles a week between them.  If you haven't checked out the other blogs, take a look in the sidebar, they're all mentioned there.  You never know, you might find something of interest in there, heaven knows it's a broad enough range of topics...

Keep your fingers crossed that Blogrolling.com comes back up with a minimum of fuss and bother, I'd HATE to lose all that research and reading.  And in case I don't get your traffic again between now and the new year:

Wishing you and all close to you a
Joyous Christmas
and a prosperous
New Year!


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Friday 19 December 2008

The Marketing Rules They All Ignored.

I'm just going to let my late father paraphrase "The Influence Of Arousal" section of this book review - and I suggest the author and the reviewer take note and next time, opt for the much more simple homily: A standing prick knows no conscience.

BTW I love the site and I really do love this particular book's summary - many of these principles are used by companies and sales people, but generally, no one company/salesman/product ever seems able to go to market while honouring all these principles.  Imagine if some smart company got hold of this book and actually did everything by the book - what a force to be reckoned with they'd be!

There are some pretty commonsense observations in  that book, things which people knew, 150 years ago.  If you appeal to a person's sense of honour and honesty, you get more out of them than if you appeal to their rationality.  If you treat people fairly, they will reward you with loyalty.

Problem with current products (especially companies wanting to appear green and/or internet-savvy) is that they try and blur the lines between economic and social standards, between free and perceived as free.  With so much dishonesty being displayed, is it any wonder consumers got ripped off to the tune of the Mortgage Market Crash the USA has just experienced and however much it cost?

Ironic to my mind is the fact that one of the least honest sectors had been the auto segment - and now they're reduced to bankruptcy.  I can only see the collapse of the current auto industry only as a damn good thing.  The Age Of The Automobile is dead, and collapsing the huge corporations makes room for new players in the field, smaller and more ecologically-friendly (it's to be hoped) vehicle manufacturers, hopefully wiping away the huge car showroom culture as well.

And if people continue to get such dishonesty and poor return from banks, who were another major contributor to the crash, then perhaps The Age Of The Shylocks will also be over and smaller more human style financial organisations will take their place.

We can but hope that the current economic situation will backlash all over the people who caused it...


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The Australian Has Shit Headlines

WTF?  The Australian needs to hire someone other than a fucking monkey to compose headlines.  This is the most disgusting piece of don't give a fuck writing I've ever seen...  I know Kazakhstani bloggers that write better.  Shame shame shame...  (Apologies to Derryn Hinch...)


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Wednesday 17 December 2008

Speed Bumps That Don't.

Just back from a flying visit to Perth so my sis could do her christmas shopping, bought myself a cheap toaster oven so I don't have to endure the weird noises and stinks the electric stove oven makes.  Should be making mini pizzas or something else to test the new acquisition out but instead I'm watching a re-run of Rush and nibbling on snacks.

Go to this article on Treehugger and go on - have a good laugh at the picture, I did.  But the story underneath the picture tells how many GREAT ideas are coming out of the woodwork, in an effort to save precious ounces of fuel and kilos of emissions.

As anyone that reads my TEdADYNE Systems and Zencookbook support blogs knows, I'm all for anything to keep speeds reasonable and fuel and pollution levels low.  I even had a few suggestions, such as putting what by now are extremely simple traffic speed and volume detecting cameras at every intersection controlled by traffic lights and penalise anyone who approaches lights at too high a speed by changing the lights to stop them, and evening out traffic flows by intelligently adjusting light cycles depending on the amount of traffic in each direction.

If each little baby step like this is adopted and taken up, then we can and will be able to undo some of the damage we've been causing, one baby step at a time...


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Sunday 7 December 2008

Invisible Pranks

I think this would work in Perth - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_15G4Y11dY

Maybe even this - but I couldn't keep a straight face... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrwrQoRxzxo.


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Validate



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Saturday 6 December 2008

My Own Personal Bailout

I too have made a long and tearful plea for a billion-dollar bailout to the Government.  After all, literally dozens of people depend on me for their livelihood, and they will all feel the pinch if I go down the tubes.  Right here, is an example of that - how will you feel, having to read someone else's dribble, if I go belly-up?

The very wheels of industry might fall off, via some unimaginable butterfly effect.  I mean - my landlord and his property manager each stand to lose, so does Amcom (bless their hearts for trying hard to keep up with my Internet needs) and *cough*elstra for supplying my phone line, then of course there's electricity suppliers and shire rates and water rates and my newspaper delivery.

Then there's Woolworths and Coles and IGA and Gull Petroleum and Shell and Caltex and BP.  McDonalds and Burger King aka Hungry Jacks will take a small hit from my insolvency.  And all those specialty grocers and markets I support.  Who are they going to get their .037% of their income from if I tank it?

Sadly, the government turned me down after they took one look at my history of spending money unwisely, making wrong business decisions, exploiting my workforce, contributing to world pollution.  No, wait - that *was* the automakers...


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Sunday 23 November 2008

Web Is Not A Babysitter

It's always sad when someone passes away, even more sad when someone commits suicide.  And the recent suicide of the boy who webcast his suicide is extremely sad and concerning.  I'm the first person to say that suicides belong in two classes, the ones who do so out of necessity and the ones who do so for attention  and assistance, but it's hard to see where this boy's death fits.

What I AM sure of, though, is that blaming the Internet is just wrong.  Sorry Mr Biggs Sr - but the people who attempt suicide for attention, that is usually due to not enough attention being paid to them.  And you even say you weren't aware of his "Internet presence" so one can see pretty clearly where the attention shortfall was.  Please don't balme "website operators" - they don't watch the videos, they just run the servers.  Don't blame the people on the other end - they are online for entertainment and socialising, not as counsellors of troubled teens who are lacking the attention of their family.

So please - I know it's easy to strike out and blame the first thing that springs to mind.  But instead, you need to evaluate your own position first, and only when you're really really sure, should you look anywhere but your own backyard.


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K-Rudd Can't Even Fix Broadband

While the Australian Broadband Guarantee has been around longer than the Rudd government, you'd think with all his bullshit promises he could at least make sure the ABG is applicable and used appropriately.  Here's what we pensioners living in caravans or mobile homes cop as the bullshit excuse to not have to bother to fulfill that guarantee:

" Dear Mr Russ

Thank you for your email dated 7 November 2008 concerning eligibility for a subsidised broadband service under the  Australian Broadband Guarantee.

The Australian Broadband Guarantee works by paying a subsidy to registered providers to connect either a land or satellite‑based broadband service for those Australians who are unable to receive a metro‑comparable service at their principal place of residence or small business.

I note that your principal place of residence is your caravan and that it is not permanently located at a caravan park.    Under the guidelines 2.1.1.1 c) any mobile premises (for example, boat, caravan or bus) or a demountable or other temporary building that is not permanently located in a particlar location, are excluded from the program.  Therefore you are not eligible to receive a subsidised broadband service under the Australian Broadband Guarantee.

If you have any further enquiries or would like more information you can contact the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy on freecall 1800 883 488 weekdays between 8.30 am and 5.00 pm and a consumer support officer will be happy to assist you.

Regards
"


and here's my just-sent reply, let's see if there's any justice in Australia:

" Do you know, that is total and utter discrimination against a large and growing segment of the population who are forced by economic constraints to live in one of those "any mobile premises (for example, boat, caravan or bus) or a demountable or other temporary building that is not permanently located in a particlar location" and is not acceptable to me as a solution. It's inherently unfair to assume that anyone living in a caravan is a carefree million-dollar-a-year-earning playboy who's just out to have a holiday and rort the government, because dammit these ARE our homes, our "residences" as you call them. We don't have anything else, and now you're washing your hands of us and leaving us in the lurch with broadband.

I'd like to ask you to have some discussions with managers and directors about people whose ONLY address is a mobile premises, and see if there can't be a solution for us.  You're talking battlers in these cases, either people trying to make a living in the workforce but unable to afford the sky-high rents, or pensioners trying to get by on what is now well known to be an amount well under the poverty line. Because we live in what to you is a holiday home, we're discriminated against, treated like second class citizens.  I didn't think that was what Australia is about...

You can't fix things, nor are you doing your job properly, if you just quote guideline 2.1.1.1.c.  Life isn't like that... 
"

In these modern times (yes, every bit of that sarcasm is intended) there are marvels like mobile broadband.  There are sad signs of the times such as pensioners living in their caravans or buses and (gasp!) not permanently rooted to one caravan park.  And there are unfortunately still petty bureaucrats who will spend their lives pushing guideline 2.1.1.1 c and thinking they're doing the job we're paying them to do...  

I've just spent over 20 minutes on opportunistic wifi which is right at the limit of being useable to edit this article and watch it publish.  I can't afford to activate or use the mobile broadband USB modem I have here, because I'm on a pension and it's not subsidised for me, which would be the quickest way to fix the ABG.  If I could pay the same as I paid for my landline ADSL and still get my 2 - 5 Gb a month at a speed a bit over the 1500 bits/second I'm curently enjoying, that would be sufficient.  

But because I haven't taken the wheels off the bus and become a permanent resident at a caravan park, I'm not eligible.  So what if I said I was permanent, and subsequently had to move to a new caravan park?  Would I get sued, ridiculous as it sounds to sue a pensioner?  Would I have to go through the whole application process and all this shit again?  

Or would it be fair to say that if I have no other address than the registration plate of my caravan or motorhome, then perhaps that is my "permanent residence" and realise that the game has to change a bit, and supplying a mobile broadband service would be cheaper simpler and more effective than supplying a satellite broadband service?

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Friday 21 November 2008

Moved: One Teddles

The domestic news:  I've pretty much moved to a little cottage about 19km east of Mandurah, on the Murray river, and got the bus settled and Ghostie settled and some veges growing.  It now feels a lot more like home.

Has been a series of Karmic coincidences, all good, all positive, so I feel quite happy.  And I'll have a bit more room to work on the bus' last few modifications I want to make.

It's a small 1br ex beach shack cottage, no I haven't been fishing yet, yes I intend to rectify that soon... %)  Lovely and peaceful and quiet, only problem is that Telstra is taking so long to connect a phone line for me so I'm using "opportunistic WiFi" which is very flakey and patchy.  And once I do have a phone, it may turn out that the area is borderline for ADSL again.

At least I've managed to update my blog, that's a Good Thing I guess.


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Monday 10 November 2008

"Well-tanned" Barak Gets "Green-Rolled"

Gawd but this story makes Obama much more real to me.  Right down to the wry laugh during the actual interview.  Yep, greenwash will come up and bite ya at any time.  How Barak dealt with it shows a lot of patience and humour.


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Sunday 9 November 2008

Thus Bringing The Death Toll

... to 205 ...


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Can Someone Tell Us What Flavour The DNA Was?

So is this a tacit admission, a nice quiet way to make the whole story go away?  Or is it just designed to shut the Whytes up?  Can someone please tell us the results of the DNA tests on that "gel-ass-o?"  Inquisitive people need to know!  I mean, The Coogee hotel is still in manure until those results are published - because, if, as they say, the Whytes didn't "do" the icecream, and they deny that any of their staff did, then they are by tacit default implying that their gelato supplier is full of it.



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Saturday 8 November 2008

So Much So, It's Still Spinning!

When is spin doctoring not so much spin doctoring, as drilling right through the planet and landing on some alien landscape?

When it's the GOP trying to salvage a shred of dignity out of that whole Sarah Palin thing:

"The candidacy of Sarah Palin was immensely helpful, absolutely essential to making this a reasonably close race," said Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia. "  SFGate Article

"Reasonably close?"  OMG they would have done better if McCain had run the entire campaign himself - on foot.  Palin aggravated millions of voters into voting Democrat, attracted maybe a paltry few hundreds of thousands to the Republican side.  Had it not been for Palin, the result might have become "close." How did that make her "absolutely essential?"

Q: "What's closer, the ex USSR or the moon?"
A: (a blonde) "The moon, dummy.  I mean, can you SEE Russia from here?"
A: (Sarah Palin) "Please explain?"

UPDATE: (Sort of)
You can put any amount of makeup and clothes on it, but in the end...  She lied outright, about not asking anyone to buy those clothes for her - aides were asked, by her directly, to buy clothes for her using their own credit cards.  She also directly bought, or asked to have bought, clothes for members of her family.  Look, if she wanted to do that I'm sure she could have used her own personal credit card - but she did not, she used campaign funds to do those things.  Me, I would buy the stuff myself and then ask for a reimbursement of those items that were directly and legitimately campaign related.  That's what I consider the responsible way to deal with taxpayers' money... 


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Thursday 6 November 2008

Broadband For Grey Nomads? Not Guaranteed.

Did you know we have a Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy? Well, we do.  You can contact them here - I've done the link finding for you.

Why would you want to contact them?  Well, DBCDE agrees that broadband is these days a necessity of life, and they have a thing called the Broadband Guarantee.  Basically they say that if you're in an area that's disadvantaged, they will provide some way to get broadband to you, at an equivalent rate and speed as someone in an urban area.

Around the world, broadband is acknowledged as a necessity rather than a luxury, as evidenced by this article - and others like it.  People often buy property now based on availability of broadband rather than proximity to shops or transport.

And so I thought to myself  - what about us Grey Nomads and Winter Drifters in our buses and caravans, what broadband guarantee do we have?  And there's really none.  Despite the fact that mobile broadband is available all along the major routes and cheap enough to provide to us, we seem to be in a (pardon the ageist joke) a "grey" area...

Meanwhile, I've developed a few tips and tricks for getting wireless inside caravans and buses, I'll take a few pictures and put together a few articles over the next few weeks.

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Monday 3 November 2008

Open Letter: Objection to Mandatory Internet Filtering




Dear Senator Conroy

As an Australian and an internet user, I have serious concerns about your mandatory Internet filtering initiative.

Given the importance our Government has attached to modernising Australia's broadband network, pursuing a policy that will slow down and increase the costs of internet access seems misguided at best. Australian households are diverse, and most do not have young children, so mandating a one-size-fits-all filter will not serve the public well. Nor do I think it is the Government's role to decide what's appropriate for me, and neither do most Australians.

Given the amount of Internet content available, no filter will ever be able to classify it all - and filters will always result in an unacceptable level of over-blocking. That alone is a price too high to pay, for all those using the Internet as a research tool for studies, technological development, or health and medical reasons.

I feel that the time and money could be spent in better ways to improve Australia's digital infrastructure. Trying to rid the Internet of what the government decides is objectionable or censored content is futile, and can only distract from that mission, and lead to further erosions of our rights.

As a voter and Australian ecologically aware citizen, your plan strikes me as very overly simplistic, worrying, and irresponsible.  

Why Simplistic?  Because I know children in primary schools who regularly and routinely already employ various means to circumvent content filters.  You seem to want to waste time, money, and our already scarce resources to put in place a system any child knows to circumvent.

Worrying? From the point of view of eco-friendliness, this plan is a disaster.  At a time when ISPs are working to sustain the load from Australian Internet traffic while at the same time trying to reduce their footprint on resources such as electricity, air conditioning, and space, this filter will make it a requirement for them to put in place another array of servers to cope with the filtering process.  (Which, as we just established, won't work anyway.)  This will cost dearly because there need to be extra machines built over and above the normal expansion, these machines will have to be powered, and housed in airconditioned data centres, and this will have to scale up with increasing Internet use.

Not all our ISPs are going to be able to absorb that extra cost.  The smaller ISPs in particular will fall by the wayside, and we'll effectively end up with a situation similar to having had Telstra as a monopoly for almost a century.  Look how well *that*  turned out, with Australia now having a very high tariffs for cellphone voice, data, and SMS usage compared to many countries.

Of those ISPs that are left, their performance will suffer a hit of 25% (and up to maybe 75%) in speed and performance.  On top of that, they will probably charge me 15% - 30% more for that privilege.  In a time when our economy is already in trouble, do you actually want to cause this kind of financial turmoil among an entire industry sector and its customers, this kind of wholesale waste of resources on something which will be bypassed by 75% of your target demographic?

Which probably also covers my next point.  Irresponsible.  

I seem to remember that few years ago now, the government had already put in place a scheme whereby anyone who felt that they or their family needed to be filtered, could freely download filter software and assistance, provided by the government.  Thus saving the kinds of environmental and economic and political costs which you propose now to impose with your filtering scheme.  It's a system that is already in place and working right now.  You could spend one tenth of the budget for the Clean Feed Filter on advertising the existing software and assigning a tech support contact in each capital city.  

It seems irresponsible to me that money is being spent on an unwanted and unwarranted system when there's already a system in place, to put in place that  new system that will cost Australia economically, ecologically, socially, educationally, technologically, and worst of all, will make us no better than a dictatorship or communist country in the eyes of the world.  


Please go here and here if you are a citizen and wish to 
register your discontent with mandatory filtering.

Perth, Third Most Liveable City In The World.

A bow and a nod to Australian cities, as Mr Murdoch said in his first Boyer lecture this year, Australia has four of the top ten spots, with five of our cities in that bracket.

Mega-nod to Perth for ranking third in the world!


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Australia Is "Unprepared."

Rupert Murdoch says Australia just isn't prepared.  Much as I love Australia, I have to agree with him. We're used to the idea of "them" fixing everything for us.  By "them" we tend to mean the government but also insurance companies, banks, restaurants, councils, committees, and the lawn mower bloke.  We tend to think that external things control and moderate our lives, when in fact that's a myth created by decades of "nanny-state" mentality, which the government sought to actively promulgate and bolster at every opportunity.  Like every other chicken the government ever laid, this one to is now going to come home to roost, as hundreds of thousands of Australians sit back, live the lifestyle, and expect the government to "fix it all, a bit down the track..."

K-Rudd, much as he is showing us that he's environment-savvy and ecologically cool and an economic saviour, is continuing to try and both stay on as the moderating nanny, and at the same time, make businesses responsible for being the nanny also.  The one person he's discounting is the general voter.  Our part is to sit back and take what they shove into the trough in front of us...

I will hammer and hammer this point - take personal responsibility.  Don't - under any circumstances - leave it all to the government and businesses.  Whose interests will they have in mind?  Do you think that you're important to the company accountant of a big supermarket?  Really?  The CFO is only there to care for one group of people - the shareholders who pay him.

Imagine this - purely imaginary! - scenario:
In another three years, and knowing about the melamine poisoning scare, if you and 5,000 people die from melamine poisoning because the supermarket bought the cheapest shit milk products it could source worldwide, that's collateral damage to the CFO and to the people in the supermarket making money from your purchases.  Tough.  People will sue the supermarket for damages but that's small potatoes compared to the profits the company made selling 5c/litre milk for $3.00 for the last three years before people started dying...

But if you take a personal responsibility for yourself, do some research, and decide not to just take whatever crap that supermarket shoves at you, they will drop that product like it's hot, and not only will you have saved yourself, you'll have saved other people who might not be into reading labels as closely as you, and you've also saved the cost of all that litigation...  It may not amount to much if you only boycott milk - but if you apply this personal responsibility ethic to all your purchases, the effect will quickly turn into a habit.  And a lot of people with this habit will quickly turn into a tsunami of activism.  And that will prepare us better than anything else.


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Sunday 2 November 2008

Spam Figures Confuse Me

I wonder what this figure means, exactly.  "One in 416" - that's about 0.25%, right?  So they are saying one quarter of a percent of all email is spam.  And they are bemoaning it.  "Oh that's so much worse a result than one in 3,333!  Oh woe is us!"

A year or two ago, these same firms were bemoaning that they figured between 25% and 95% (depending which firm you listened to) of all email was spam.  There's something a bit fishy fishy fishy here.  My email quantity has been increasing at about a linear rate over the last four years, no major blips or dips.

If I turn off spam filters on all my email programs and let them fill up for a day, I get a few hundred.  Say I get 240 emails across the four accounts I use.  That's a rough figure, but tends to be close to the lower end of the quantity.  About ten (10) per account are real emails sent by real people, let's say 12 to get to a round figure that will divide nicely into that 240 figure.  That's 15% of my mail is stuff that are real emails.  I'd say another 24 to 36 (to stick with round figures) per account are what was briefly called bacn, i.e. emails sent by supplier listbots, security systems, jokes lists, etc.  That's about 48 emails per account that I can say are not spam.  Out of an average of 60 emails, that's at least another 20% of my emails that is, by definition, spam.

And I'm being generous indeed there - because the amount of solicited email (i.e. the stuff I want or have requested) stays about the same from day to day, while the maximum number of emails I receive generally goes much higher, some days double, very rarely lower than 150.

So I'm blessed if I can figure out where they got their figures from.


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Friday 31 October 2008

Do You Live Safely Securely And Privately?

Add another security scare - software that can analyse a picture of your keys and prepare the cut schema for making a new key.  If your keys can be photographed by someone, they can in theory be copied, and people are being urged to treat keys like credit cards.  But wait - wasn't there some similar panic about a year or two ago about so-called "bump keys?"

Basically, our security is about as vaporous and tenuous as as our fabled privacy.  While we should not let that stop us from trying to stay safe secure and private, we should be aware that it's not always going to happen, and adjust our lives accordingly.


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Thursday 30 October 2008

How To Fail At Ideas. My Ideas, Let Me show Them To You...

I had an idea, about two years ago.  An idea I stupidly held close to the chest.  Now I see this and I wish I'd posted this two years ago...

The idea was actually to place an oil press and a biodiesel reactor into a 20ft container, making them able to be shipped anywhere in the world that there was something to be turned into oil.  Place a small diesel generator in there too, and once you've generated the power to extract and refine your first batch of diesel, you're running on your own product .  And generating useful electricity as a side effect...

My first target was the olive farms here in Western Australia, because it seemed that all those stones and bits left over from pressing were an ideal feedstock for such a setup.

Second target - and I'm going to put this out now before I find yet another idea of mine developed in parallel but years later - is vineyards.  They throw out tonnes of grape seeds and skins each year...  Those are the same seeds that in other vineyards get turned into grapeseed oil for cooking, yes.

And seriously, I am sooooo bloody tired of having ideas and never getting them off the ground...




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Pear Shaped

According to the news, we're about fifth most resource intensive in the world, our per person use of land for all our needs and wants accounting for quite a few hectares per person per year.  But then too we have a strange kind of land, where we're trying to balance productivity with lower environmental impact more and more.  So a hectare for us may not produce quite as much consumable resources as for some intensively-farmed countries.  In other words, we may be using more land per person but we're not taking as much from it.  I think we do quite well, and as new greening initiatives take hold, we'll start doing more with less, and bring our footprint down.

I remember also that we were among the more polluting people in the world too, with a carbon footprint that put us in the top end of the offenders.  It will be interesting to see how that fares in the next few years, too.

And we're also one of the hardest-working, according to this article.  It seems though that we're perhaps not as productive, because we're still tipped to slide into a recession,  and our dollar is worth less and less compared to the greenback.  Hardly seems fair does it?  America plunges everyone into a recession and their dollar increases in value relative to ours, even though we're supposed to be only heading for a shallow soft recession.

Something's not quite in shape here....




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Tuesday 28 October 2008

WMML 5

GelatiGate... Much ado about doo doo.


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WMML 2

And for one second I thought we'd found a way to put WiFi into every pair of trousers...


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Monday 27 October 2008

The Balltower Has No Bells?

So on Sunday the Swan Belltower aka Richard Court's big green erection rang 29 times in a row somewhere in the middle of the hour rather than at the appropriate start/end.  How do I know?  T. and I were sat in a car at the lights as this happened.  This is the first thing I've written about that incident because at the time I hardly noticed it. Trish did, because she picks things like that up.  "25," she said, "26, 27, 28, 29..." at which stage the lights had changed and we were rolling again.  The bell may have pealed more but we were out of there.

I've also NEVER seen anything for the Swan Bells or the Belltower appear in Google Ads - and yet, when I opened Gmail, the sponsored link was this.  Talk about spookily synchronous...  And spookily asnychronous too, because our daylight saving time (another Richard Court favourite) kicked in at 2AM Sunday morning and I have no doubt it bollixed the bell recordings.  
And - I know, people have chipped me about this before, but come on...  Has anyone actually seen any bells in the belltower?  I had a short discussion online with someone who claimed to have worked at the Belltower and they swore that the tower really has bells, not just a big loud recorded carillion. But I've never seen anything that would even vaguely resemble a doorbell as I drive past it, so I prefer to think that just like Dick Caught, this erection has no bells...  

(For non-Western Aussies, the Belltower was commissioned by a second generation premier of the state (Charles Court is Richard Court's father) as some kind of shot at a lasting memorial, I guess.  The trouble is that it is ugly, expensive, a blot on the riverscape, and it was the butt of many jokes, some not really repeatable. Follow the thread of thought I've established, and run with it.  You'll get the idea... )

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Friday 24 October 2008

Failed War On Drugs?

It seems that drug use is increasing by 12% per year.  The video states that they think that legalising marijuana would prevent young people getting into harder drugs.  In other words, marijuana is the gateway drug.  This is probably true, but let's run with this for a moment...

Say dope is legalised.  So anyone over a certain age can have access to it legally, across the counter.  Haven't they heard of tobacco?  It's a drug too, a legal poison, and it's available to "anyone over a certain age" as well.  But it's not stopping children as young as five from walking around their homes with a cigarette, and not stopping primary school students smoking behind the bike shed.  How did they get tobacco?  Same way they'll get choof if it's "legalised."

Whatever way they can.  As also happens with alcohol and every other drug known to mankind.  Can you see how, in a society where those same kids can buy sixteen different kinds of street drugs, the "gateway" drug will just be one of those others?  If governments were really serious about the drug problem, they'd have a death penalty for supplying harmful drugs, and several tobacco and alcohol cartels would already have been put to death.

But if you "legalise" marijuana, there's another source of revenue and excises....  Do the maths people.  The only way to stop bad things like tobacco, alcohol, drugs, petrol and fossil fuels - is to take personal responsibility, take a stand, and say no...


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Wednesday 22 October 2008

Location, Location, Lights, Camera!

What colour are your dreams?  Apparently if you dream in black and white you're likely to be in a specific age group that was exposed to B&W TV and film programs a lot.  The fact is that either side of the B&W film and TV era, most people dreamed in colour.  It kind of makes sense, too.

Before the advent of B&W, the only monochrome experience people were likely to have was the odd charcoal or pencil sketch - and they hardly have much impact, generally.  And afterwards, TV and films were in colour.  Actually, I can kind of prove it.  The people who were in their formative years in that era, were people as young as my age, and upward.  Luckily for me, there was a brief encounter with B&W TV in the early Sixties when I was still quite young, then I had no access to TV again until I was about 13 - 14.  (Because we lived in rural Australia in the late 60's and early 70's when TV coverage was still mainly confined to cities.  My parents didn't remove TV privileges, they removed us from the TV...)

And my dreams are in glorious colour.  I'm sure had I been exposed to mono telly and films I would also be having drab dreams.

Which leads to a bit of an understanding of how environment affects and shapes us:  Suppose you lived in a drab place with little colour other than the greys whites and blacks of permafrost - you're 25% likely to have monochrome dreams.  Actually - since B&W TV would only have taken a few hours a day of your life while living in permafrost is - permanent - I'd say you would find that people in such environments are 50% or more likely to dream in monochrome.

These people were the drivers of technology and modern life.  They had to be, because the land was inhospitable.  And maybe it's easier to think logically in B&W.  Whatever - I've just noticed and drawn your attention to what may well be an important correlation:  People who lie in drab colourless environments invent things.  And people who live in wonderfully friendly environments with a riot of colours (think jungles and tropics) were more content to adapt to life rather than adapt life to them.

Who knows if that's true, it certainly makes sense and explains the wide spread of stages of technological development of the different races.  All it took was location...


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Friday 17 October 2008

Can haz gremlin?

My first boss was a great one for "gremlins."  Way before the movie came out, a gremlin was a mischievous imp that caused things to fail.  Dave and I worked on B&W TVs and later on colour TVs, and the odd car radio, stereo, and two way radio, and "gremlins" were responsible for about half the failures we repaired every day. 
I'm still very much in that kind of frame of reference, to me, there are still gremlins that haunt particular TVs, or certain poor cellphone reception spots, and yes, even the odd vehicle here and there.  So would I buy this:
This is supposedly a picture of a 2010 Prius, and it has this gremlin right there, in the press materials.   I wonder if the 2010 model will have a string of failures, problems, and recalls?  I'm pretty sure I won't be able to afford one when they are released, but even if I could, I wonder if this will make me reconsider?
BTW no that is not a photoshopped picture - here it is on its article page on Wired.  

The Wallet Is The New Tinfoil Hat.

The new tinfoil hat is...

Your wallet!

Yep, where once we stuck our heads into clumsy inelegant home-made Faraday cages to prevent someone getting in and changing your identity, now this article shows you how to make a clumsy inelegant "tinfoil hat" for your RFID cards and prevent your identity getting out...

I love duct tape, don't get me wrong.  Duct and gaffa tape are the kings of clumsy inelegant solutions to many of life's little problems.  But that's just it - they are clumsy and inelegant.  They are meant to be temporary.  Also, I prefer to keep the solutions arrived at with duct tape, very very hidden...

In these days of conductive threads and circuits printed onto cloth, leather, and flexible plastics, there have to be a dozen solutions that look better.

Also - and call me radical for thinking this - I think privacy is a thing that was a brief fad between the Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution, either side of that there wasn't much of it around, and no-one actually cared.  I'd much prefer my SmartRider card to be available without having to dig a duct-taped folder out of my wallet, try and separate the oozy melted adhesive-glazed sides, rip my SmartRider out, wave it at the card reader - and get it stuck to the screen.  All while fifteen other riders are lined up behind me, tut-tutting and sighing loudly and pushing me ever so politely past the reader...

I'll accept that people can probably make a copy of the RFID part of my passport and probably make a decent copy of it, too.  But they could do similar things to me before, too - skimming my letterbox at home for personal details, or in a public place, a bit of pickpocketing isn't exactly unknown, you know?

So I'll take my chances I think, keep identifying stuff at home in a lock box like we're supposed to, and if I absolutely have to carry some kind of secret agent ID I'll hold out for a nicely woven metallic cloth folder or something.

Thursday 16 October 2008

Meta-Meta-Meta-Post. Thanks TechCrunch and Scoble!

Now this is a twist!  FriendFeed (where I have a stream , yes) has an embeddable page.  TechCrunch has the article, Scoble made me aware of it via a Twitter post, and I looked it up from those leads.  This is an example of how things ricochet around the place.  Wheee!  

The only problem is, why am I going to embed someone else's blog into mine?  FriendFeed is already doing that, and I think that's where it would stay for me.  If an article popped up that was of interest of me, I think cut and paste would be fine thanks.  I want people to come read my blog, yes.  But I don't want to do it by collecting other articles, nor do I want to do it by being an RSS aggregator.

So the article Michael wrote is about blogging (making it metablogging) - but hang on, this is a blog article about a tool that collects blog articles.  And now I've written an article about it.  After seeing it on a microblogging site...

Just tickled my sense of humour I guess... I'l go back to writing now...

Broadband, U Doin It Rong...

Okay - a few linkable articles have showed up, I'm happier.  Then I read this and I get sad again.

See, I have for almost five years fought with my ISPs and with Telstra about getting new copper line or something because, frankly, my ADSL connection sucks the big one.  Right at the limit for ADSL, the line wasn't even good for dial-up, with every modem I ever tried having to reconnect ten to thirty times a day.  (Yes, that is definitely THIRTY on some days, costing around $8 in dialling fees on those days.)

When ADSL became possible I used an ADSL modem that had given great results in the city of Perth, and watched the connection stay unconnected up to 12 hours a day, in annoyingly random chunks.  Sometimes there would be a whole hour of staying connected, sometimes the connection would drop out after five minutes and stay unconnected for an hour or so...

Multiple complaints over many many months produced a slight improvement when a technician replaced water damaged connectors in the comms pit, but it was still dodgy and slow.

Oh and did I mention that this was NOT country WA, but still in the capital city, Perth?  Yeah, that's right, I feel very sorry for people in rural areas but come on, why talk about doing rural areas right when you still haven't mastered basic urban areas?

Oh - and lastly - I will be minding a friend's farm which is within 30km of several midsized towns.  It has satellite Internet, a lag of 2 seconds for everything you do...  Broadband?  She wishes she could have dialup speeds as long as it didn't take half a day to do the banking online. 

(exits stage left muttering something about utter balls-ups...)

Some Days Just Have No Links

So far it's a "No Links Thursday" here - not much going on online that seems comment-worthy, but listening to a "science" show on the radio just now got me thinking along some weird lines.

The presenter made the odd comment that films are like a fertility cycle, or something close to that.  We have a certain "fertile window" during which we can usefully (from the point of view of evolution) get into relationships, and there was some mathematical strategy that gave the best times of one's life to go looking for The Partner, etc.

It's a load of wossname, as in the very next breath he admitted that arranged marriages are more successful than random social marriages, which knocks the whole matter out of the realm of biological cycles and fair and square into the realms of social norms, which is where it belongs.

But he then went on to say that various films have revivals - I think X Files was the example - and of that he said that 2018 or some such time would have been the ideal time to release a sequel, based on the cycles above, somehow.

Which I suppose is why the Terminator series used their own cycles, the Star Wars series used *their* own cycles, and so forth.  Yeah right.

The fact of the matter is that social things like advertising, publicity, and hype are what determines whether a sequel will fly, as much as the actual quality of that sequel,.  It's the same factors that shape whether a particular site, meme, or video will go viral, similar factors to what decides whether the stock market follows the economic trends or diverges from them.

I generally like he idea of science shows and books.  Done right, they make science much more accessible to a wide audience.  But many of them propagate myths that are not based much in science, like the cycles of films thing above.  That's a dangerous kind of science to teach, and will lead to inevitable mistakes.  We're currently reaping benefits (if you can call global warming a benefit) of a scientific generation, composed of people who know the importance of starting with the right assumption, the right hypothesis, proving it, then using that to build further science on.  Things like transistors and modern medicine arose out of solid science.

So it's sad to see this kind of misdirection - seemingly, designed to dumb the next generation down.  As our need for better science (to deal with the bad applications of reasonable science, such as petrol engines and food additives) increases - and indeed, becomes imperative for control of the climate crisis - the generation that's growing up to deal with it are being fed this particular kind of haphazard science.  It bodes ill for survival beyond this generation.

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Ah "Mac"Cain...

If I see more things like this in articles online I may just revise my opinion of the States.  "In case you just woke from some kind of a coma (or you are a certain older gentleman running for a particularly prominent public office), today Apple revealed new additions to the MacBook family" - so funny that even all the way over here in Australia I know they didn't mean Barak Obama...   Quick thought - if John McCain was a computer ... 

Not so funny - All Apple, All The Time...  My eyes just glaze over, and I think I'll just mark all my feeds as read for a few days...

Tuesday 14 October 2008

The High Cost Of - Bull?

Well - what else do politicians seem to produce in quantity?  Such as K-Rudd's fine gesture to pensioners, wow give them a whole $1100 (if they're a couple, that's what each gets) just before Christmas.  The fact that they've all had to make do with about a $100 a week shortfall for the last year and are already $5200 short of where they should be, let's not worry about that.  Just give 'em a lump sum and then tell 'em to piss off until I'm good and ready, okay?

Not that I'm bitter Mr Rudd - but dammitalltohell here's this article in the news which shows that the public service can quite happily do without $34,000,000 a year's worth of senior bull slingers, and I'm thinking - that is just one state!  So if we did that for every state and territory (NT, WA, SA, VIC, TAS, NSW, ACT, QLD hmmm times eight so that's ummm hummm...) $272,000,000 that could be put towards those troublesome pensioners...  Every year!

Oh yeah and also - with a pensioner's annual income being somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000 - which you have to admit is pretty shitty - that $34m is for 171 senior public servants who obviously didn't do an awful lot cos they won't be missed - and they were earning an average annual salary of $198,800 each.

I'd say there is some inequity there somewhere.  You may not have authored this problem Mr Rudd - but you sure as shit aren't dealing with it too well...

Added FeedBlitz

Hey all - I've put all the blogs together on FeedBlitz if anyone wants email delivery of all articles on all blogs nightly.  You can go to http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Sub=245899 to subscribe, the feed for all the blogs seems to vary between 5 a day all up to maybe 2 a week sometimes.  All depends if I have access to the Internet, have time, and if there is interesting stuff going on in the world.

The blogs in the FeedBlitz email are:

TEdALOG Lite - General commentary, bullshit, yarn spinning, and what have you. I enjoy seeing such articles, and I enjoy writing them.  I hope you also will enjoy them. 
TEdADYNE Systems - Cyborg Ethics - with technology and our bodies seemingly destined to get mingled, what are going to be ethical questions we face, what technology is around to make it happen now?  Also, ideas for IT and technology - I tend to have quite a few...
Zencookbook Blog - Anything that's eco friendly, green, good for your body - this blog is a companion to the book.  Some ideas for sustainable living, occasional DIY projects that will save your money or your environment or both, and links to great green ideas out there.
TEdAMENU Tuckertime - Recipes I've developed, tried out, or enjoyed. Generally healthy-ish and very varied.  Some of them fit into the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook range, they will usually have a list of active constituents at the foot of the recipe.

You can also go to The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook site.  It's not a blog though (not yet, at any rate!) so it stays pretty static.  That said, I will be updating that site over the next few months though.

Please refer anyone you think might benefit from these sites - the ideas may well be just what some business has been looking for - in which case they are welcome to use them, if they will only attribute them to the right person, i.e. me.  Recipes for healthy easy meals - you're more than welcome to them.  A neat project for yourt home or garden that will save power, or water, or money?  Take the article and have fun!  And everyone can do with a laugh in their lives - so if TEdALOG Lite made you grin, I feel happy too.

US Politics. Irrelevant, But Fun To Analyse.

Political things in the States is slowly culminating.  Climaxing, even.  I have to say that it seem to me that either way they vote, the people of the USA are going to be screwed.  Putting a politician in power is like putting a kid in charge of a candy store, a glutton in charge of the pork barr...  Oh yeah - they already know that, they invented the term I think...

Anyhow - the States are faced with a choice of a Bush clone whose running mate is a hausfrau, or a black african american who grew up to be more upper crust than Lord Milquetoaste, and whose running mate is pretty much out of the news.  Biden who?  What?  And the ridiculousness doesn't end there.

Really.  Ah McCain, you've done it again.  I believe sales of pit bull bitches and lipstick are through the roof, while sales of Canadian Justice have just about exhausted the justice available.  Because, that was an indictable offense. The only reason I can think of that they didn't sling Sara's ass in jail is because either elitism is alive and well (oh! never!) or else that stocks of justice and commonsense have run  out.

And McCain's not above getting someone else to do his dirty work either.  It's a textbook smear, placed right at the right time, to take advantage of the fact that Jews and Arabs don't get on so well.

Mind you, poor old Obama BA bin Barak has been copping it even from local government.  Poor sod is doubly tarred with that brush.  Interesting sidetrack:  Will they reprint and resend, will people get confused by having two sets of ballot papers?  Consider that probably half of them won't know which is the correct set of papers if they do...  And then - if they leave the papers as they are, will McCain be able to say that a vote for "Osama" is not the same as a vote for "Obama" and thus invalidate those votes?

Luckily there's also support for Obama in the form of video, pity it limits itself to the "Florida vote."  As Sarah says in the video, it's probably the last chance for America to lose the title of assholes of the world.  It'll be interesting to see what the USAians choose...

Update: Sara Palin has her own fan club!

Last observation on the American sense of "justice:" It's not okay to use the word "niggah" there to refer to black americans - but it's fine to use the term "redneck" because let's face it, it's almost a term of endearment...   Wonder how the votes will go?

Monday 13 October 2008

SMS charges - another rip-off...

Fark!  And I thought Telscum were bad with their charges!  No wonder Twitter are not giving us SMS here in Australia, we're pretty close.  Read some of the comments, they mention prices per SMS on their regular plans that would make you weep, 1c or so...  

Sunday 12 October 2008

Rethinking Freelancing In A Recession, Take Two

I follow a lot of blogs.  Maybe not all the blogs I should, all the time.  But I do try.  I haven't caught up with this blog for a while, but I think just as well I did.  It's something for me to think about.  This article, specifically , has caught my attention.

I'm sort of in this situation.  I've worked freelance and short term contracts for a few years due to ill health, and now that I'm on a medical pension I can still work, but these days my efforts have to be somewhat less strenuous than a fulltime freelancer.

I like "don't panic" as a leitmotif but really, the current economic situation is unlike anything we've ever experienced in recorded history.  It's also more than an economic situation - we have a global climate crisis, a population explosion which is causing some serious re-balancing problems for a significant percentage of species on earth, and political climate going wild all over the world.

Be conservative?  I prefer to say that we need to be frugal and each one of us take responsibility for our contributions to the current situation.  What?  You didn't?  Let me just say that unless you have been living off planet, you're full of it if you think you aren't a contributor.  In the current environment, you'd better consider the impact of EVERYTHING you do or consume or use.

Last in, first out - try contracts - post grads - all well thought out.  I personally consider short term contracts and freelance to be equivalent kinds of work, in both cases you're working short term, and the difference between a freelance job and a contract spec is minimal as far as practicality is concerned.  Studying is my least preferred option, because it's the one where you are least productive in the short term in exchange for a later increased productivity.  And that, as I'll explain a bit later, may not be nominal.

The last four or five points I won't cover in detail.  Suffice to say, there's arguments for and against each of them.  For now, consider them in light of the analysis I've made so far:

The lower part of Australia has been in an ongoing and steadily worsening drought for what is claimed to be 12 years but which I from my own experience can safely say is closer to 25 years long by now.  Our farmers also used the most modern tools at their disposal (newspapers, the postal mail, telephones, travelling to meetings which today we'd call "unconferences" or something similar) to develop strategies and methods to deal with the weather crisis they were undergoing.

In the meantime, every year more farmers walked off their properties and left them to the banks.  For them, the situation never ended, they became victims of a series of conditions which have cost entire fortunes.  When they started strategising, they assumed the situation would end soon, or at the very worst, end before it had completely ruined their chances.

Farmers presumed that if they stuck to wheat, for example, they would be the ones with the best crop when the drought finally lifted.  Others diversified into canola and other crops, and a few basically said to hell with traditional crops and went for things like macadamias, olives, and other non-traditional crops.  At this point, many of those farmers are now still in business whereas their more traditional counterparts are in dire straits.

And therein lies the lesson for IT and web workers today, in this situation.  There may not be a "breaking of this drought" in our lifetimes.  There may not be a break, full stop.  It's just too early to predict whether this will be a fairly significant bump on the graph or a new median.

Meanwhile, non-traditional endeavours will have payoffs.  Web work will be around, yes.  But so will lots of people to do it.  And while you may have regular clients, that's subject to change just as everything else is.  Short term contracts building applications and online presences will still be around, for sure.  Just maybe under a lot of competition and with a much lower financial return than you can live with.  Working as a system or network admin, a helpdesk droid, an IT technician - there will be work in the field, yes.  But ruling economic climate may well make those jobs overly lowpriced.   Don't forget, one thing that the new frugal living will do, is make high tech less popular and IT less desirable.  That's what the new green awareness will do for us.

So think about how to make whatever you're doing, truly green and environment-friendly.  Thought of a way to use existing IT resources for longer or make existing IT resources do more?  Clients and employers will be more likely to take your solution if they can be seen to be green because of it.  Same server, double the amount of your web applications can be run on it without needing an upgrade?  You can see how something that would have just been the cherry on the icing on the cake a few months ago can now be a significant selling point.

Also, of course, there's that social responsibility - we should all be thinking in terms of the difference we can make.  That's what may well be the difference between this situation easing or going on.  The difference will be made by being pro-active and not waiting for "someone else" to "do something..."

Friday 10 October 2008

Trading in the Face of Recession - U Doin It Rong.

Ding! "OMG it's another TEdALOG!  Drop the feed, 42 so far this week and counting!  Sheesh the most opinionated tosser in WA's blogging scene."

Yes it's true, listeners and losteners.  I managed 42 posts in a week, and that may not have included them all because I really only added one blog to FeedBurner a few days ago. (And it wasn't all that graet an experience, ackshuwally.)

This would be #43, or #1 of a new week, not sure which to call it.  And it contains a burning, timely, incisive, insightful question which confuses the utter shyte out of me.  Here's the setup.  K-Rudd says we'll escape the recession because our resources market is still strong.  The world'd stock markets plunge, ours takes a bit of a dive, but it's alright because K-Rudd says we'll escape the recession because our resources market is still strong.

Then comes that nasty news that our largest market may be wanting to take a rain-check on a lot of that natural resource.  Now, what K-Rudd said, is no longer so certain...  "But hey!" say Portman, "They're asking us to reduce the amount we send.  But we stitched them up good, there's a firm contract they can't get out of, yay for our sales and legal teams!"

So now I wonder - if a country is feeling an impending recession (and who knows, China may well be in such a situation given the prodigious amounts of projects they have on the stove at any time) and says "uncle" that's a sign right there.  Maybe shoving the contract in their faces will keep income coming in now - but how much damage will it do the Chinese economy?  And will that add to the recession domino falls?   Cos if it does, then we're definitely going to hit our recession.  And some of our trading partners may not feel quite so enthusiastic and loving towards us once we've dunked them.

Just a thought...

Thursday 9 October 2008

Almost Obligatory Crap Article

This article has been broken out of another article today, due to the proliferation of bodily function humour to be gained from so many posts on similar topics.  It's here now because it brought a huge grin to my face as I kept reading, and so I hope you too will get at least a "hehe" out of it.  Also, if it makes just one more person ecologically aware, that makes this whole article worthwhile.

From "Solar. Now U Doin It Right.":
First, a random thought about "poo humour." Why?  hehehehe when someone has an article like this one, why mess with the words "poo power" when they could just come right out and say "shitricity, fo shiz!"  Much better "ring" to it.  (oops, no pun intended.  yeah.)  

UPDATE: Awwww crap!  Just too many articles on this topic for me to 'void it, must be a movement... 

From there, the day just got better:  We've all referred to toilet plumbing as "the shit-pipes" but that's just alimentary...  (Hmmm, why did the phrase "no shit, Sherlock" just cross my mind?)

Slightly less crappy is the drive to convert waste to energy, as in this article. They can do it more simply - I mean, we had goats and chickens and other animals when I was a kid, they turned almost all our rubbish into this neat, pelletised fertilizer for the garden... 

And just when you thought it was safe, here's an article which will lead to an urban myth that goes something like "you'll wake up in a bath of ice, with a dull ache down below.  DO NOT GET OUT OF THE BATH, they have put you there to facilitate the natural retraction reaction!" 

Stay tuned.  Today can only get better! %)

Wednesday 8 October 2008

Perth City Council Fails Disabled, General Public Responsibility

Way to FAIL, Perth City Council!

Took these pics today at PRAWNHEADS lunch .  On our wheelchair/stagger from food overload/walk from the Saigon  restaurant to the Dome coffee shop, the wheelchairs nearly got stuck in:
... some nice traps that were even hard to walk through, I can only imagine how nerve wracking it would have been for the people in chairs.  There is no alternative access, and also this is a now covered-over Telstra connection pit.

That's two photos, two resounding FAILs - you may not obstruct access to disabled person nor may you fail to provide some means of disabled access.  This site failed on both counts of that, as there are no ramps by the kerbs for wheelchairs, and there are those holes in the footpath endangering people who use shairs and mobility scooters.

Second resounding fail, and actually totally illegal and punishable by hefty fines, is in the first picture, obstructing a public telephone booth is an offense that can cost up to $10,000 per phone.  Thats's $20,000 worth of FAIL right there.

More picture among the last few on this album on Picasa , you can see they've blocked off about 40 metres along each street, blocked off public phones, provided no access for disabled people, and it's been in place for weeks now, it's not a one day disturbance.  Perth City Council needs their asses kicked over this!

Tuesday 7 October 2008

LiFi?

Honey!  Turn the light back on, I was just downloading!

How's this for a very clever idea?  This is pretty clever.  Put the network transmission and the control circuit in the light bulb.  Things that are not so hot are the power vampire effects of electronics in each bulb, even a few milliwatts of radiated signal can cost a few whole watts of energy, and of course there has to be a signal receiving portion of the circuit switched on for a definite period every few milliseconds to capture any commands that come along in case the light and the wireless AP are both turned off.

And before anyone says "they will switch it off when not in use, dummy," I refer you to the light switch in their diagram which mentions it will provide "encoded data - on/off" and that means the power on power off signals will only put the LED bulb in a kind of suspend mode, not switch off current altogether.

The other thing I can think of is a bit more prosaic.  Even LED bulbs will fail from time to time, and that means some areas will be without light - and without network coverage.  I can still work at my desk if the lights go down to quite dim, but I couldn;t do much if my network connection vanished.

Sunday 5 October 2008

Someone At Google FeedBurner Please Read This!

RESOLVED: Problem resolved. How?  Used IE.  And FF.  In fact, it seems almost any browser other than Google own Chrome, works just fine with their FeedBurner pages.

How's this for fail?  Google bought FeedBurner, right?  I've had a FeedBurner account for about a year beforehand, everything worked just fine, I have my blog on another Google acquisition, blogger.com, and the ad code fitted right in the sidebar code for the site.

Then I saw a bit on the FeedBurner site or support pages, you could now link your FeedBurner account to your Google AdSense account and save a lot of mucking around and loading up pages with multiple lots of code etc.  It all seemed to make sense.

Until I went to do it.  The only way to do it is to go to the FeedBurner contact page, and the only link there is a link to submit your FeedBurner account name and your Google account name so they can link your accounts for you.  That was about a month ago now, and there's been no follow-up whatsoever.

Apparently, at any rate...  Because weird things are now happening:

Now a check of my FeedBurner stats yields 0 subscribers, - reach, yada yada.  For all the feeds...  I figured something pretty simple has to be wrong, go to the feed setup tabs for one of the feeds.  "Site stats are not active for this feed."

So I click on that link hoping to figure out why the one reason for me to use FeedBurner would be switched off.  Down the bottom of the form is a button that says "SAVE".  And next to that is the text "This service is always active."  Damn I wish someone had told the sidebar about that.

Meanwhile, clicking on the Statistics tab again brings up the subscriber stats.  For a second, then when I reload the page it's all zeroes and dashes again...  *sigh*  All this, mind you, has only started happening since I stupidly submitted my account and email to Google because they didn't trust me to be smart enough to do this on my own, but were too ignorant to actually tell me if they had done it, were going to do it, or had just lost my request among a million others.

Go back to FeedBurner Support pages, oh yeah - "and the only link there is a link to submit your FeedBurner account name and your Google account name so they can link your accounts for you." how could I forget that there IS NO WAY to contact FeedBurner Support?  So I go to the FeedBurner blog , hoping they have comments switched on.  Yay!  They do!  I may be able to ask in a comment why there's no support at all for anything at all...

Until I open the latest (several months old) blog article and trail down the comments, which are now closed, so I can't actually enter anything.  Oh - and did I mention that the blog is not hosted on blogger.com?  Hehehehe, right down the bottom of the page is this little gem:


Maybe Google needs to take ownership of their property and do some of the scut work instead of just developing Chrome-y Androids and invading people's Streets...  %)

Open letter to Kevin Rudd

I wonder how hard it would be for Australians to demand a new election?  I thought I liked what K-Rudd stood for, initially, until I realised how little he carries in the way of testicular fortitude.  But right at this point, I'm less for a re-election and more for a taking down of the existing government.  It needs to be dismantled - to remind it that it's the representative of the people, not the lord and liege thereof.  That went out in Middle Ages England and is no longer appropriate here.

What other country has as much budget surplus, as much raw income, as many resources - and lets its old folks live on cat food?  What other country has so many people working and bringing in foreign trade dollars - but lets the banks and petrol companies run amok amongst them and rob them of their share of the wealth they helped create?

Mr Rudd - right now, you truly suck at everything, you are Teh Fail.

You might be doing wonderful things overseas, and I don't begrudge that overseas travel which the Libs try to tar you with, because we need a good foreign diplomat after the dismal pond slime that was John Howard.  At least you've taken a few firm stands against some issues, and have not been the obsequious  kiss-ass that he was.

I'm glad that you said you'd take the environmental issues bull by the horns, too.

I'm just not too pleased that you then patted said bull on the head and then (in Army parlance) retreated to a safe distance.  Because, waiting for the rest of the world to reduce their greenhouse footprint first may be all well and anal retentive, and may ensure that our precious producers are not "disadvantaged" in the short term, but in the long term it means we'll all be that much more stuffed.

You see - saying you're going to do something commendable and then only half doing it, that falls short of even being halfway competent.  Competent people don't fail or falter.

I'm a pensioner myself so the pensions issue does weigh on me.  But then, so does your decision not to put the boot into the banks and "strongly encourage" them to pass on that rate cut, because at this pension rate and without that interest rate cut, I can't afford both my rent and my food...

Also I find that your handling of your government in regards to the petrol price and excise issues has been less than I'd expect from someone who's supposed to be the head of the country and thus have some control over the political process.  Because that directly impacts how often I can drive to get my shopping and how many times I have to walk my emphysemic ass to the shops and then gasp and pant my way back with two shopping bags.

I realise that you have a lot of issues to sort out - but that's why we elected you.  You seemed to be a member of the PDA set, able to prioritise and multitask and deal with multiple issues.  The trouble seem to be that you've set yourself the goal of just coasting at each of the multiple tasks.  Right now, Australia has shown that despite your less than strenuous efforts at home, we can weather a global economic disaster better than almost everywhere else.  That's not thanks to you, that's despite you and your predecessors.  Australia is better than you and JWH have been.

We've for decades shown that we have brilliant ideas and technologies, which then end up overseas because of restrictions and funding shortfalls here at home.  That's something that has been due to lack of government support as much as it has been due to all other factors combined.

We have some of the world's most plentiful sunshine, making Australia an ideal place to harness clean solar energy.  Yet our solar rebates, while extremely good, could be much better.  And our subsidies for electric vehicles that could use that clean solar energy, are so poor as to be absent.  Our incentives to develop solar/electric vehicles are non-existent, the assistance for these technologies is poor, and even more poorly policed when given out.

We're now in an economic climate when faith in stock markets and banks and high finance has been shaken to the point where world economics will never be the same again.  A political climate where the United States is plummeting down the political top ten chart, where political power will soon boil down to what a country truly has in the way of resources, intelligent innovators, and a population willing to sacrifice in order to ensure that we have a world to pass on to our children and grandchildren.

In this climate, Australia could so easily become a respected world leader in every aspect.  Australia could be the example which other countries aspire to become.  Our technology could power nations.   Our policies could become the blueprint for a new world with a healthy future.  But it needs to start here, now.  Not all this stalling and pandering to the very organisations that precipitated the economic crisis, that caused the ecological crisis, and which stand behind every war or atrocity ever committed.

For all those reasons, Kevin, I'm asking you as a favour to me and the Australian people to either start acting in our interests or else resign and let's have another election.