It was a Steppenwolf moment.

Beginning of the week, (Tuesday when we had our one day of sun,) I had an appointment in town and, as per usual, rode the VMoto to the appointment. On the way back home, I was riding through the fairly new roundabout in Vic Park and because I was leaning the scooter way over, cafe racer style, and I was feeling pretty good, I launched into what I call song.

Unbeknownst to me, someone on a huge monster bike with cherry red paint and chrome all over it joined the roundabout just behind me and over took me as I was "singing." Here's a bit of a chronology:

1. I hook left, right, left, at a screaming 60kmh.
2. The Mood overtakes me and I launch into a rousing few bars of Steppenwolf.
3. Just as I'm bellowing "Booorrrrnnnn toooo bee Mii-ii-iilld!" the snazzy bike overtakes me.
4. The snazzy bike wobbles as the rider turns to look back and think "fark - did he just sing what I thought he did?"
5. We both stop at the Mint St lights, side by side. I look over and there are tears streaming down Snazzy Bike Rider's face.
6. The lights go green and since it's now beyond the point of worrying about dignity, I lay down into a streamlined racing position and "whhhrrrrrr!" my way outta there.
7. Seeing no Snazzy Bike, I look back. Snazzy Bike Riber turned off on Mint St, still wobbling and laughing.

Oh well...

Funny Quote of the Day

G. Gordon Liddy - "Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime."

So... Why is there a government?

He Reminded Me Of A Cornered Rat

"never been one to back away from a fight" Howard's posturing on TV today was just so damn reminiscent of all the worst megalomaniacs dictators and misfits we've seen in the world.

He is actually scaring me now, with his grim tooth and claw cleaving to the position. What is such a man capable of, in order to enforce what he thinks is "right" upon us? I mean, even his own team feel that "it's time," - and here he is vowing to not listen to a word anyone, including them, (and therefore by extension, us,) has to say. Why would I vote to elect a dangerous megalomaniac like that?

There was also a good touch of Gollum in the performance, and a smidgen of good ole Joh Bjelke Peterson. Defiance dissonance and denial, more defiance.

And yeah, he reminded me of Ratatouille's less sophisticated cousins...

The right direction for Facebook apps!

I have a Facebook friend to thank for pointing me at this, and it could easily become my favourite application of facebook.

http://apps.facebook.com/dropbox/

It lets you put webpages, videos - pretty much anything - into the dropbox for a friend or group of friends.

On the wishlist: That invites would work properly, that there was a browser link or add-on so I could "drop this now" and some way to drop to a Facebook group.

I've just manually invited a bunch of people to take part, and see if anyone has found an application that includes the bits missing from drop box. I'll also email their development people and see what happens...

It's still an application to keep an eye on.

You Let Your Son Drive A Company Car?

No-one seems to have picked up on this yet. Katie Hodson-Thomas' government car is in impound. Because her son drove it at excessive speeds. I don't know what that says for her abilities as a parent, and quite frankly I don't care - she's employed as an MP and a spokesperson for tourism etc.

But I do know that if I ever had a company car and had let anyone else drive it and be spotted - let alone arrested and have the car confiscated - I'd be fired or disciplined severely.

This is not just a company car we're talking about here, but a company car paid by taxpayer funds and which we entrust to Katie to perform her duties as an MP and spokesperson. I don't think any of those duties involve giving the keys to her son, do you?

So my question is - what discipline will be meted to yet another politician caught rorting the system in yet another small way? Not forgetting that for each transgression we let slip through the cracks, the cracks will get bigger and bigger, the rorts more and more brazen, the abuse more and more open....

What did Twitter get?

What did Twitter get?

As the whole Twitterverse know, Twitter spent time in surgery and recovery yesterday, a two hour outage blowing out into "well here I am almost eight hours later and I still can't get anything except the maintenance screen" type of experience that saw thousands of people flock to the competing short messaging sites.

One positive thing I have to mention - that godawful twitter birdie was absent at all times, and about halfway through the outage we got a kitty back as the maintenance screen, even if not a lolkitty.

Negative things that I have to mention - what changes plz? There's a very obvious new random link in the top of the sidebar and "Explore Twitter" leads to a page with a 3rd party app heading the list, followed by all the other apps that people have written for Twitter. A reload still brings up a flurry of data requests from assets0, assets1, assets2, assets3, and it still takes four times as long to load as the original Twitter pages took.

The other link that randomly appears there, "Search Gmail Contacts," I'm sure will do as expected, but honestly, we've probably all already done that and this is a feature few people will need or care about.

Blah things that I have to mention - after all this time, the single biggest useability issue with the site has not been addressed: I mean, how bloody difficult would it have been to put a "newer - most recent - older" set of links at the top of the page?

Blahthing 2 - after a previous update, the contact list got out of alphabetical order, which renders it mostly useless for anything other than wasting page space. Selecting a particular person for a direct message is bloody near impossible if you have more than about 70 contacts, thereby removing a sizeable percentage of the usefulness of Twitter.

Blahthing 3 - upgrades that I KNOW hundreds of users have asked for - nothing. I'm talking about being able to group your contacts, and being able to segragate conversation into channels or groups.

Blahthing 5 - (because there are two in the paragraph above) the other long time useability issue that everyone has asked about that I know of, that of putting a meta refresh into the page so that it reloads every five minutes or so. How difficult is this, really?

Blahthing 6 - Twitter only has ONE set of servers? So they have to bring down production machines, install the new software, and cross their fingers? That's hardly professional, definitely not very inspiring. I could design a better mixed dev/prod environment than that, come on Twitter, at least look at virtual machines!

All in all it looks like the only thing Twitter garnered themselves out of this latest upgrade has been a lot of negativity, and while I like Twitter and still use it rather than their competitors, you have to wonder how many more times they can do things like this before people just don't come back after such a seemingly pointless hiccup.

The scent of an asymptote.

Some years ago "the singularity" first passed into common useage, in fact Vernor Vinge is the person I credit with being the first person to bring the singularity concept to my attention with the linked article.

For those of you not up to speed, there is a geometric trend to the advancement of our knowledge and capabilities in all fields. For instance, Mendel first described the general principles of genetic inheritance back in 1865 or somewhere thereabouts, but it took almost 100 years for Crick, Watson, et al, to track that down to DNA - the "master plan" of life.

DNA is one of the most largest and most compact datasets we know, and it took the next 25 - 35 years to begin unravelling some of the more interesting parts of DNA and that in turn brough about quantum advances in medical technology that would be magical to Crick or Watson let alone Grigor Mendel.

In the last ten years, advances in the computing power of computers has made possible large scale decoding of DNA sequences and in fact the entire genomes of various species, a task that if started in Mendel's time and performed without the aid of computers would still be ongoing - for the first species...

Technology itself is described pretty well by Moore's Law, which says that the computing power of computers will double every two years. A corollary of which is that the same amount of computing power will cost half as much in that same period, and I would even amend Moore's Law to read that "the power, reach, and/or availability of our technology doubles every 18 months."

I read Engadget and other gadget blogs and I've noticed a trend - gadgets are being developed and released at a staggering rate. What was once a trickle of new devices released each week is now a steady stream, day in and day out.

From what I see, either the number of gadget blogs will have to increase exponentially to cover all the new gadgets, or we will soon not be able to keep track of all the new technology being released.

And if that's not a textbook example of singularity, I don't know what is... Halp halp! Gadjits be fluddin mah intarnets!

1 Tool For 7 Ways.

I'm going to expand and expound a bit on this lifehack article about 7 ways to recognise opportunity. And I'm going to simplify it, too. As it stands those seven rules can be simplified down, the tools (creative friends, contact, notebook, camera) can be reduced down to just one, maybe two.

One of the major points, made several times, is to write everything down. That's great advice for the steam age, as is carrying a notepad and camera with you everywhere. I always carry a camera in a spare pocket, don't you? And yeah - I carry a steno pad, because that's the smallest you can really go with a notebook and still get an idea to fit on one page rather than 3/4 filling a notebook with one idea, I have HUGE bottomless spare pockets, what do you mean you have a Hugo Boss?

First thing about the paraphenalia is that it's bulky bulky bulky. Second thing, specifically in regard to the notebook, is that eventually your notebook gets - yep, it gets full. And then you put it down and it ends up in the pile of paperwork you stick in a box and put in the garage and that's it - yep, those ideas are now as gone as if you'd never bothered to write them down.

With the camera - are we talking about a film camera here or a digital? Does Steve Olson think there are no such things as rolls of exposed film that get taken to the photo lab years after being taken, that get returned back with a sorrowful shake of the head? Or that there aren't hundreds of camera memory sticks out there that get silently erased and re-recorded without ever getting near a computer or printer? And then of course, those pictures are, yep, gone and will never tickle your memory to life again...

Getting a record of things is definitely important, I've lost track of how many times I get up in the morning and think to myself "that was a great idea for... for... ah bugger! Done it to myself again!" over some thing I had mapped out in my mind the previous evening and which is now gone for good.

Tell me what one tool do most of us have on us all the time, usually has a camera, usually has voice recording, and usually has some form of brief notes? Score bonus points for realising that you're probably sitting within a meter of your mobile phone as you read this!

If there is no voice recording facility, your carrier will generally provide a voicemail service - and there's no law against sending yourself a voicemail...

So if you're one of the lucky 80% of people with a mobile phone with the aforementioned facilities, then you're excused the half kilo steno pad and the battery-chewing "pocket" digital camera.

When you get an idea, record a voice note, or type in a text note if you can't speak right then. Take a picture and associate it with your thoughts. Use the phone - to call your creative friend(s) and discuss it with them.

And remember that now you're down to only four rules - much simpler to remember:

1. Record record record.
Just record anything unusual. Anytime, and where possible right there and then.
2. Contact Contact Contact.
Your friends and contacts are everything. They are your source of inspiration, your sounding board,your counterweight to overly buoyant optimism.
3. Everything is possible.
Nothing is too sacred or too stupid, nothing.
4. You can!
If nothing else, you should now realise that you can do this. You've reduced the extra equipment you need to carry from three extra items (pad, PEN, camera) to one item you already carry anyway. You've reduced the rules from seven down to four, and now that you realise it, you can throw away rule 4 so you've just reduced it down to three rules!

Oh - and I realise that stuff on a phone is just as likely to get recorded over, but at least instead of ending up in the garage in a box, you have all the information in one place. Besides, what with Bluetooth and all, I find it easier to copy stuff off my mobile than to find the card reader and empty the memory card of my pocket camera. At least you don't have to think too hard about where your notes are.

Multiculture + & -

Sometimes, we're a very open-minded and multicultural country, and I get all proud and choked-up about that, especially on Australia Day Skyshow where we see our European and American aircraft and helicopters, with an Australian flag printed in some Aussie shop on Korean cloth and dyed with Chinese dyes, illuminated with light globes that were probably made in India. The scents of a dozen countries' favourite perfumes wafts over, we eat satay sticks and cotton candy washed down with a Coke or Dr Peppers, find soft spring rolls and paratha side by side with cheese kranszky and bratwurst and pies and sausage rolls and pasties.

Kids are meanwhile running around waving little plastic Australian flags made in Hong Kong, attached to glow sticks that came from who knows where - little Asian and Indian and African and Arabic and Caucasian kids ranging in age from toddling right up to the elder and more pissed versions of themselves. And then the fireworks made with ancient Chinese techniques by cool multinational teams of firework builders are set up and launched expertly by pyrotechnicians using the latest software running on laptops assembled in China or somewhere similar using parts from all over. And our world is, for that brief beautiful half hour, united into one voice, one roar, one bellow of appreciation and awe after another.

But this article claims that that's it - that's where integration stops - when it comes to our phones, we want them to talk back in Australian English please! Actually I think we don't care about an Aussie accent, as long as it's an understandable one. I think the research article overthinks it a bit and attaches too much significance to the wrong things. I also think that whoever researched may have wanted us to sound a bit more parochial than we are, that there's some agenda in there.

Because, I'm wondering if they surveyed a true cross section of Australians or just our English-speaking European-descended white Australians. That would do it, but that is not the only section of our population, not by a long chalk these days. By not telling us exactly what groups that sample was composed of, I tend to disbelieve the whole study.

Some of our citizens have a lot of trouble understanding the Aussie accent and if a few of them were surveyed the survey might have come out differently indeed. Also, I doubt that anyone would like the thought of jobs going offshore, and that might be more of a contributing factor than "well, they talk funny!"...

What we could really do, if we really cared, and really really wanted to do something about it, is to have our help desks right here in Australia (what a radical thought!) and pay them what they're worth. And train them so that they could do a job that a villager in a third world country can already do. You know?