Michael Arrington at TechCrunch posts about changes to Ning. I thought I’d drop by and take a look, found this shot. Way cool, and cute as well, although what does it say about Mac users? 🙂

Scoble points to a newish US based flight tracking service Flightstats.com. My first thoughts were: why bother checking the site out, most US based sites don’t track Australian flights. I was wrong, not only do they track Australian flights, they also compile historical data on flight times and rate it. In my experience Qantas has a terrible track record in flying just about anywhere on time, but having said that most of that experience is out of Perth Airport. Virgin Blue on the other hand in my own experience has been brilliant, indeed it’s the only airline I’ve ever flown where the flight took off early! Yep, they actually went around the terminal in the very early days when they had 1 flight a day ex-Perth and would tell everyone that if they got on the plane quickly enough, they’d take off early…that one flight left 15 minutes early 🙂

But I digress some what, because my belief in Qantas’ tardiness is proved by the site, this stat for QF 580 Perth to Sydney:

Things look a little better for Qantas looking at all their flights ex-Perth to Sydney, but it’s still not a performance that’s acceptable, indeed Sydney commuters complain about their trains running late at percentages higher than this:

Digging deeper it looks like Qantas has a lot of problems out of Perth, these stats show Perth-Melbourne at 70% on time. Sydney-Los Angeles is only 68%.

Worth a look.

According to the SMH, Sydney residents are upset by counter-terrorism training exercises being undertaken around the Sydney CBD by Army Black Hawks…due to the noise of the helicopters.

Given the safety record of these birds, if I was a resident I’d be far more concerned about the odds of them crashing and killing people on the ground than I would be concerned about the noise. Sadly the odds of that occuring, given their record in service here, isn’t remote.

I accidently stumbled onto NSW Premier Morris Iemma’s faux-blog today at News.com.au, and read a whole pile of irrelevant rubbish about Nick Grenier helping the Debham campaign (Greiner was a pretty good Premier but as a former Liberal Party Member I always saw Fahey as the pathetic disaster in Macquarie Street, but that’s another story)…anyhow looks like I was first to the scene, and fresh from reading yet another horror story about Sydney transport (I did 3 years of commuting from Miranda to Martin Place in my younger days) I asked a simple question:

That?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s all very well and good Premier, but will you fix the trains?

That was about 11am WST today. I was all set to write that the blog was a joke, I’d refreshed the page a number of times and yet the comment count continued to read “0” and then this:

He may admit to the problems, but hasn’t Labor had 12 years to fix the issues? mind you, in fairness the trains weren’t exactly perfect under Fahey, Greiner, Unsworth or Swifty Neville Wran either, and if you go back to Askin he was probably selling trains with cash delivered under his table in a brown envelope. Given I’ve not been on the electoral roll in New South Wales since 1996, I’ll leave it up to the voters of my home state to decide, I’ve made my contribution 🙂

Tags: Morris Iemma, NSW election

For all the US bashing in the world, this video makes a very, very good point about the positives the United States has bought to the table. (via Hot Air)

Its been going 18 years…I’m getting old! Trailer for the Simpsons Movie below, enjoy.

Tags: Simpsons, Simpsons Movie

I’ve discovered today, much to my own satisfaction, that at least one person reads my Bluedot feed. It’s not by any stretch of the imagination a Robert Scoble style link blog, but having said that it does probably share a few attributes. It’s an eclectic mix of my daily reading, sometimes a couple of links, other times 8-10 links. Anything and everything goes, essentially the stuff I personally find interesting but either cant be bothered writing about, or as the case usually is, I don’t have the right audience to blog about it.

Hence I’m opening up by Bluedot feed to applications/ suggestions. Sure, only a handful of people read it, but I’m guessing that they are all highly influential and wonderful people who you’d want your content exposed to 😉 On a more serious note though, if you do have anything of interest, send it through, email as per the sidebar. You’ll get consideration in this order: 901am, duncanriley.com, Bluedot. I’m always looking for stuff that is interesting, just like I was back in the Blog Herald days, so don’t be shy, but having said that if you spam me with automated crap I will ignore it 🙂

Geek Entertainment TV: Wii Fight.

If you watch the intro, you’ll understand the title of this post 🙂

On Wii’s though, my 4 year old takes me to points in Wii Boxing, and he kicks my backside in bowling, he even bowled a 180 the other day! Time to start working out I guess 🙂

One problem solved. As I mentioned in (possibly my last) weekly column at The Blogging Times this week, I’ve had to spend money on infrastructure, another box (dedicated hosting box) to be precise, making my sum total of boxes to 3. The problem I had was the new box wasn’t provisioned until yesterday (Tuesday) lunchtime, and in the mean time Box 2 was flipping out, it got so bad that Apache was failing every 5-10 minutes, sometimes more often, every single time resulting in an email from the box to me. It’s over, god bless, and now the numbers are sweet, apache has been up for a day, and all is good in the world again…and no more apache failed email messages. A personal victory, but one I thought I might share 🙂

I’m no Howard hater, I was a long term member of the Liberal Party (until 2005), I wept when Howard was elected in 1996 (mind you, it could have been the beer, and the fact I hadn’t slept for 3 days prior), I’ve worked on marginal and non-marginal Federal Campaigns since, twice as a staffer, once as Campaign Chair, so I say this with a background of someone who has voted Liberal my entire adult life.

John Howard: shut the f*ck up.

Sorry about the language, but beyond the pale utterances deserve it. For those of you who missed what the Australian Prime Minister said about Barak Obama’s run for President and his call to bring Amercian troops home from Iraq:

“I think he’s wrong. I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory…If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.”

What an extremely nasty, evil, horrid piece of rhetoric. On the other hand I’ve got only praise for Barack Obama, who replies:

“I think it’s flattering that one of George Bush’s allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced. I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops in Iraq, and my understanding is Mr Howard has deployed 1400, so if he is … to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.”

Prime Minister, this man could well and truly be the next President of the United States of America, and might I add, one who I believe would make a very, very good President. Don’t think he isn’t going to remember Australia as being a nationfrom which its leader sought to paint him as being in bed with al-Qaeda…aside from the fact saying what you said is just down right beyond stupid. Remember the saying: if you’ve got nothing important or clever to say, don’t say it. Shut the f*ck up, before Australian exporters are destroyed by the next US Administration, before ANZUS is ripped up, and before next time I get strip searched instead of just getting patted down at an American Airport!

Tags: John Howard, Barack Obama