Interestingly enough, Peta picked the day after Bunday to deliver these little ones. Maybe our pets hate 'Caturday" and "Bunday..."
Thursday, 16 July 2009
First Bunnies Litter
The latest news from the cottage, more affectionately known as Possum Hollow - Peta Bunny and Eddie Rabbit have managed to produce what looks like around six very cute pink and wriggly little kittens.
I've resisted the urge to picke them up and check them out and count them, there's about six, and at least one will be black and white like Peta.
Interestingly enough, Peta picked the day after Bunday to deliver these little ones. Maybe our pets hate 'Caturday" and "Bunday..."
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Interestingly enough, Peta picked the day after Bunday to deliver these little ones. Maybe our pets hate 'Caturday" and "Bunday..."
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Wild West Intarnets!
Around three decades ago, a new world opened up. It was the wild west, but no-one realised it. Starting with computers and on to computer based communications systems (CBCSs) like bulletin boards, a whole ecosystem was born, modified by the inhabitants, and still evolves to this day. Look, this gets all complicated and meta, so either bear with me or click another link for a few minutes, okay?
Nothing evolves by itself, it evolves with its environment. And the environment is affected and changed by the organism. Which causes further evolution of the organism. In the case of humans, it has been said that our information and communication forms part of our evolution. (Please note that there is also tacit acknowledgement of that organism/environment interaction evident, they even title it " . . . the planet has entered a new phase of evolution . . . ") I'll add "technology" to those evolution indicators.
Remember that all our technology is obtained from our environment. The ideas may have come from our brains, but the material to make those ideas concrete was obtained from the environment. So far, this follows pretty closely to my scenario - we evolve, get ideas, turn parts of our environment into the manifestation of our ideas, and those manifestations (and the lacunae created in the "natural" environment) become part of our new environment. We evolve to be more fit to survive in the new environment.
So, the CBCSs and now the Internet have become a new part of our environment. And we've already evolved tools to deal with this new environment, made changes to it, and to ourselves. We've also brought with us a large dollop of the opportunism which got us to this point in the first place, the people who swindle and con and cheat and steal are now firmly ensconced in cyberspace and making their livings as they have always done, by taking it from the rest of us.
Now we come to the really tricky bit. (And you thought we'd gotten past that hey?)
Let's say I work at writing for a living, articles and copy and so forth. What I'm doing is not rocket science, and I sometimes feel like I'm taking money under false pretenses for something I enjoy doing and can't imagine being difficult for anyone. So am I a con-artist or working for an honest wage? It's a job in the online ecosystem, after all.
Now let's ratchet that up a notch. Suppose I write a really lousy piece, but convince my patron to pay me an ultra-premium rate for it. Now am I a thief, or just a person who writes really well and gets along well in the ecosystem? What about if the person I sell my article to for a pittance, on-sells that article to a large organisation for millions of dollars? Are they a con, exploiting me, exploiting the large organisation, or just good businessmen? And suppose someone helps themselves to the text, sitting there on my hard drive, and then on-sells it to that large organisation? What are they? Suppose they get their million dollars for my article, and anonymously pay me twenty dollars, which is twice what the agent might have paid me?
See? the only difference between a thief and a businessman is the office. Only now, online, there's even less of a difference between the thief and the businessman. It kind of begs a question or two about this new online environment, doesn't it?
Well, firstly, crime as a business has pretty much evolved at the same rate as business has, no matter if that was robber barons vis a vis dukes, pirates as contrasted to merchant shipping, terrorists vs military, Mafia vs business, bikies and police. Being surprised that online criminals have business training and do risk analyses is a bit of a comic relief, really. I'd venture to say that at the head of any cyber crime outfit you care to trace, there will be a business-suited person at the head somewhere.
We're stuck, because actually, either side is a valid means of surviving, either side of the equation equals staying alive. One way is a bit less sociopathic, it's true, but survival is a tricky thing, do you consider yourself successful if you perish but your two offspring survive, or is success measured by personally staying alive to generate lot of offspring, but maybe conning some of them out of their living?
Online, is it reasonable to expect "someone" to pursue and prosecute "criminals" much as has been happening in the real world? And how much good has that prosecution done in the real world? Are police effective? Or is it true, as some wit once said something like "a police force is an army that you turn on your own population?" (And no, I don't remember the precise quote or whose it is.)
My point is that we've already evolved to adapt to the new environment; we have people to whom the question "what's on the TV?" will trigger reaching for their 3G cellphone rather than look for a paper or TV guide. When someone asks me what he weather will be, I go to www.wunderground.com and open my favourites. If someone asks me a question, my first thought isn't "library!" - it's "google it!"
Nothing evolves by itself, it evolves with its environment. And the environment is affected and changed by the organism. Which causes further evolution of the organism. In the case of humans, it has been said that our information and communication forms part of our evolution. (Please note that there is also tacit acknowledgement of that organism/environment interaction evident, they even title it " . . . the planet has entered a new phase of evolution . . . ") I'll add "technology" to those evolution indicators.
Remember that all our technology is obtained from our environment. The ideas may have come from our brains, but the material to make those ideas concrete was obtained from the environment. So far, this follows pretty closely to my scenario - we evolve, get ideas, turn parts of our environment into the manifestation of our ideas, and those manifestations (and the lacunae created in the "natural" environment) become part of our new environment. We evolve to be more fit to survive in the new environment.
So, the CBCSs and now the Internet have become a new part of our environment. And we've already evolved tools to deal with this new environment, made changes to it, and to ourselves. We've also brought with us a large dollop of the opportunism which got us to this point in the first place, the people who swindle and con and cheat and steal are now firmly ensconced in cyberspace and making their livings as they have always done, by taking it from the rest of us.
Now we come to the really tricky bit. (And you thought we'd gotten past that hey?)
Let's say I work at writing for a living, articles and copy and so forth. What I'm doing is not rocket science, and I sometimes feel like I'm taking money under false pretenses for something I enjoy doing and can't imagine being difficult for anyone. So am I a con-artist or working for an honest wage? It's a job in the online ecosystem, after all.
Now let's ratchet that up a notch. Suppose I write a really lousy piece, but convince my patron to pay me an ultra-premium rate for it. Now am I a thief, or just a person who writes really well and gets along well in the ecosystem? What about if the person I sell my article to for a pittance, on-sells that article to a large organisation for millions of dollars? Are they a con, exploiting me, exploiting the large organisation, or just good businessmen? And suppose someone helps themselves to the text, sitting there on my hard drive, and then on-sells it to that large organisation? What are they? Suppose they get their million dollars for my article, and anonymously pay me twenty dollars, which is twice what the agent might have paid me?
See? the only difference between a thief and a businessman is the office. Only now, online, there's even less of a difference between the thief and the businessman. It kind of begs a question or two about this new online environment, doesn't it?
Well, firstly, crime as a business has pretty much evolved at the same rate as business has, no matter if that was robber barons vis a vis dukes, pirates as contrasted to merchant shipping, terrorists vs military, Mafia vs business, bikies and police. Being surprised that online criminals have business training and do risk analyses is a bit of a comic relief, really. I'd venture to say that at the head of any cyber crime outfit you care to trace, there will be a business-suited person at the head somewhere.
We're stuck, because actually, either side is a valid means of surviving, either side of the equation equals staying alive. One way is a bit less sociopathic, it's true, but survival is a tricky thing, do you consider yourself successful if you perish but your two offspring survive, or is success measured by personally staying alive to generate lot of offspring, but maybe conning some of them out of their living?
Online, is it reasonable to expect "someone" to pursue and prosecute "criminals" much as has been happening in the real world? And how much good has that prosecution done in the real world? Are police effective? Or is it true, as some wit once said something like "a police force is an army that you turn on your own population?" (And no, I don't remember the precise quote or whose it is.)
My point is that we've already evolved to adapt to the new environment; we have people to whom the question "what's on the TV?" will trigger reaching for their 3G cellphone rather than look for a paper or TV guide. When someone asks me what he weather will be, I go to www.wunderground.com and open my favourites. If someone asks me a question, my first thought isn't "library!" - it's "google it!"
Invite people over for an impromptu dinner and movie? SMS them, or post on their wall. These are the evolved. How are they affecting this online environment? Well, they create new killer sites, introduce other people to those sites, and then move on when the environment is full of newbies and oldies...
The equation is - 200-300 years ago, a family would move into an environment, and alter a chunk of it to provide them with sustenance. Built that log cabin from the trees in the environment, levelled some of the land and grew crops and ran livestock. In time, the environment changed to include people who'd adapted to the next stage of this evolution, large farms with controlled environments, to provide for the towns and cities.
Now we've created computers from natural resources, then connected those together using energy from natural resources, then created internets and LANs from that. At each stage, we're using one form of resources and converting them to another form.
Even on today's quite stringently managed farms, the original occupiers of that environment keep popping up, from bacteria and fungi to large animals. What worries me and will keep me looking over my virtual shoulder for a long time yet, is the native wildlife online - who knows what business-suited native critters will appear on the Internet when it evolves a bit more?
Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!
The equation is - 200-300 years ago, a family would move into an environment, and alter a chunk of it to provide them with sustenance. Built that log cabin from the trees in the environment, levelled some of the land and grew crops and ran livestock. In time, the environment changed to include people who'd adapted to the next stage of this evolution, large farms with controlled environments, to provide for the towns and cities.
Now we've created computers from natural resources, then connected those together using energy from natural resources, then created internets and LANs from that. At each stage, we're using one form of resources and converting them to another form.
Even on today's quite stringently managed farms, the original occupiers of that environment keep popping up, from bacteria and fungi to large animals. What worries me and will keep me looking over my virtual shoulder for a long time yet, is the native wildlife online - who knows what business-suited native critters will appear on the Internet when it evolves a bit more?
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Hi Honey, I'm...
. . . not home apparently. I love my GPS and I'm pretty sure that between it and my road maps I can confidently find 90% of the places I need to, weird unmapped cul-de-sacs and odd split one-way streets excepted. But would I send in a wrecking crew to just GPS co-ordinates without giving them a sanity check, at the very least? Wonder how they'll solve this...
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Sunday, 5 July 2009
Sunny Bunday
Today wasn't a midwinter day. It can't have been. And yep, it's almost two weeks after midwinter, but that's no excuse for a lovely day that today was. T. was down for the weekend and we let the rabbits have an extended run (first one for ages due to the rain and bad weather) on the front garden. And sat in the sun ourselves, soaking up the sunshine and blue skies. Apparently Perth averages (!!) eight hours of sunlight a day, putting it firmly in the upper range of sunshine cities. Today was such a day, just beautiful.
Next door has two shi'itzu cross looking dogs, and today they were out at the same time as the rabbits. Eddie is generally the most timid little guy but today he figured out what fences are for. To let him sneak up and sniff noses with a barking little dog that looks like it has a healthy splash of Ewok in its ancestry... We watched him, getting a little closer each time, realising that he was still safe, and then finally just flaunting it to those noisy yappy neighbours.
Pity that the smaller Ewok has figured out how to squeeze under their gate and wander into our yard. Mind you, the rabbits' piece of the front yard is fenced all around but Eddie still got a shock and hightailed for the pile of branches that are stacked up waiting to be thrown out in the next garden refuse pickup. His second scare for the day, the first having been when the neighbour across the road blipped the accelerator of his big bore V8 restored Falcon just as Eddie was throwing a nice high binkie jump. I'd never actually seen a rabbit get traction on thin air before that...
Better news: We drove through the new Bunbury highway works later in the day and the lines are all painted, traffic lights are all installed but not switched on, and all that's missing from the look of it is to remove the traffic barriers and throw the switch. This means Bunbury is now just a straight freeway ride away from Perth, because basically the freeway becomes the new highway from what I can see. Also means that I can get on the highway and be about an hour in either direction from either city. Also means that if I decide to move southwards I have a nice straight run for Duckzilla, too.
By the way I'm looking for a piece of land that I can lease for cheap, something that would let me drop garden and crop areas among some otherwise unused bushland and maybe run a few livestock, preferably southwards of Bunbury a bit and inland, if any of you know of anything like that please put me in touch. There's a nice cheese or a few links of farm style sausages in it for the spotter... %)
Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!
Next door has two shi'itzu cross looking dogs, and today they were out at the same time as the rabbits. Eddie is generally the most timid little guy but today he figured out what fences are for. To let him sneak up and sniff noses with a barking little dog that looks like it has a healthy splash of Ewok in its ancestry... We watched him, getting a little closer each time, realising that he was still safe, and then finally just flaunting it to those noisy yappy neighbours.
Pity that the smaller Ewok has figured out how to squeeze under their gate and wander into our yard. Mind you, the rabbits' piece of the front yard is fenced all around but Eddie still got a shock and hightailed for the pile of branches that are stacked up waiting to be thrown out in the next garden refuse pickup. His second scare for the day, the first having been when the neighbour across the road blipped the accelerator of his big bore V8 restored Falcon just as Eddie was throwing a nice high binkie jump. I'd never actually seen a rabbit get traction on thin air before that...
Better news: We drove through the new Bunbury highway works later in the day and the lines are all painted, traffic lights are all installed but not switched on, and all that's missing from the look of it is to remove the traffic barriers and throw the switch. This means Bunbury is now just a straight freeway ride away from Perth, because basically the freeway becomes the new highway from what I can see. Also means that I can get on the highway and be about an hour in either direction from either city. Also means that if I decide to move southwards I have a nice straight run for Duckzilla, too.
By the way I'm looking for a piece of land that I can lease for cheap, something that would let me drop garden and crop areas among some otherwise unused bushland and maybe run a few livestock, preferably southwards of Bunbury a bit and inland, if any of you know of anything like that please put me in touch. There's a nice cheese or a few links of farm style sausages in it for the spotter... %)
Friday, 26 June 2009
Heartfelt Plea From A Special Needs Mom
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Something Said In Haste: Utegate
The biggest thing Malcolm Turnbull has done wrong here is to break the cardinal rule:
He took what I can only assume was a piece of bait handed to him in order to damage his credibility, and ran with it. Without checking it all out himself first...
I think someone will end up charged with a crime here, so Opposition claims that Mr Rudd is using the government machine to intimidate are not really well founded. One of the prime reasons for the government and the criminal investigative and prosecution systems is to investigate, identify, intimidate, and prosecute people who have committed a crime. An email is a document, and forging a document, and uttering a forged document, are all crimes.
The unfortunate thing for Mr Turnbull is that he's now come off as being a premature utterer. Would I vote for the Opposition knowing he'll be leading the country if I do? Most emphatically not! Imagine this scenario:
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If you want something done, do it yourself.
He took what I can only assume was a piece of bait handed to him in order to damage his credibility, and ran with it. Without checking it all out himself first...
I think someone will end up charged with a crime here, so Opposition claims that Mr Rudd is using the government machine to intimidate are not really well founded. One of the prime reasons for the government and the criminal investigative and prosecution systems is to investigate, identify, intimidate, and prosecute people who have committed a crime. An email is a document, and forging a document, and uttering a forged document, are all crimes.
The unfortunate thing for Mr Turnbull is that he's now come off as being a premature utterer. Would I vote for the Opposition knowing he'll be leading the country if I do? Most emphatically not! Imagine this scenario:
Kevin Rudd: (on the phone speaking Arabic he's just learned at TAFE and disguising his voice with an Osama burr) Meester Turmbool? I just want you to know that I have slept with your wife, meester Turnbool. And also, my cadre of 72 virgin suicide bombers, they also have slept with your wife and your mamma! To show them how pointless life is, meester Turnbool!"
Malcolm Turnbull: Hello? Defence Department? I want us to declare war on Iran, Iraq, the Emirates, and any other place where they believe in 72 virgins and suicide bombing! That'll show them!"I rest my case...
Monday, 22 June 2009
Not Green, Child...
This should be in the Zencookbook Blog but it's also funny, so it's here. Spotted among emails I get from one of those recycle/don't waste style email lists is this message:
"Sharp Carousel Microwave 32l works ~ just upgraded to silver one to match new kitchen location: xxxxxxx"
Someone using a green recycle email list to feel better about buying a microwave just to match the kitchen decor is quite funny. After all, the whole ethos is to save resources and save wastage.
Even funnier? Their email address: "earthgreenchild@xxxxxxx.xxx" ....
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"Sharp Carousel Microwave 32l works ~ just upgraded to silver one to match new kitchen location: xxxxxxx"
Someone using a green recycle email list to feel better about buying a microwave just to match the kitchen decor is quite funny. After all, the whole ethos is to save resources and save wastage.
Even funnier? Their email address: "earthgreenchild@xxxxxxx.xxx" ....
Some Kind Of Veges, At Any Rate.
"Anyone want to join a allince? just let me know! we are the saveges"
Hehehe really?
Friday, 12 June 2009
Super. stition.
I don't know where you stand on the touchy subject of religion. Some people regard it as an absolute truth, others as a superstition. I don't know where I stand on the topic of an unknown, unknowable, intrinsic force of nature that has to be taken on faith and apparently is how the Universe was made. Oh wait - that could be called God OR The Big Bang...
You see how deeply troubling this topic can become? If you allow yourself to believe in The Big Bang, then you have to accept that Schroedinger's Cat is both dead and alive and that you - yes you, you murdering scum! - cause it to either live or die by merely looking at it. And if you believe in a spirit named God, then you also have to admit that ghosts, evil spirits, and all the accoutrements of superstition are equally possible.
One thing you should not do, however, is change your language on account of it. That would be plain idiocy - oh wait - America. What was I thinking? Of course it's normal over there...
America - and, increasingly, Australia - is a place where they debate such deep and vexing questions such as "should nursing mothers be allowed to flop a boob out in public, maybe where other people are trying to have dinner?" and coming up with the answer "Yes! Yes! We must not impede population explosion!" yet if someone drops his wanger out in a park at 3AM on the walk home (to avoid having to drive home drunk because by then no effing buses are running) he can be arrested for "public indecency" even if there isn't any public around for miles. It all makes perfect sense doesn't it? And I mean, that is despite knowing that urine has better purposes than to provide a job for some sewage treatment worker...
As the good little prudes we are, we know that God created The Big Bang so that we would have clothes to wear and water to waste on flushing our piss. Because if that's not the Meaning Of Life, The Universe, And Everything, then we may as well throw caution to the wind and stop burning witches and black cats...
You see how deeply troubling this topic can become? If you allow yourself to believe in The Big Bang, then you have to accept that Schroedinger's Cat is both dead and alive and that you - yes you, you murdering scum! - cause it to either live or die by merely looking at it. And if you believe in a spirit named God, then you also have to admit that ghosts, evil spirits, and all the accoutrements of superstition are equally possible.
One thing you should not do, however, is change your language on account of it. That would be plain idiocy - oh wait - America. What was I thinking? Of course it's normal over there...
America - and, increasingly, Australia - is a place where they debate such deep and vexing questions such as "should nursing mothers be allowed to flop a boob out in public, maybe where other people are trying to have dinner?" and coming up with the answer "Yes! Yes! We must not impede population explosion!" yet if someone drops his wanger out in a park at 3AM on the walk home (to avoid having to drive home drunk because by then no effing buses are running) he can be arrested for "public indecency" even if there isn't any public around for miles. It all makes perfect sense doesn't it? And I mean, that is despite knowing that urine has better purposes than to provide a job for some sewage treatment worker...
As the good little prudes we are, we know that God created The Big Bang so that we would have clothes to wear and water to waste on flushing our piss. Because if that's not the Meaning Of Life, The Universe, And Everything, then we may as well throw caution to the wind and stop burning witches and black cats...
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