Inspired by Darren’s recent list making competitions, I present some facts for those who think Australia is nothing more than an American State:

The 10 ways Australia would be different if we were an American State

1. Our currency would be made out of paper and would be green. Not only would it be really easy to forge, North Korea would be one of the worlds largest producers of it.

2. We’d be one of only 3 countries in the world that don’t use the Metric System.

3. We would only have been on the winning side in major 20th century wars if we’d turned up late.

4. We’d drive on the wrong side of the road, mainly because we decided to do so to spite the British.

5. We’d also wouldn’t be able to spell in English correctly, and hence we would have adopted our own version of English spelling which we would then try to impose on the rest of the world.

6. Our murder rate would be at least 4 times higher, and most of those murders would involve guns, which many of us would own and keep at home.

7. Instead of having a $10 billion+ Federal Government Surplus, our Federal Government would have a trillion dollar defecit.

8. Terrorist attacks on home soil wouldn’t just include the Hilton Hotel Bombing, and yet we would never have been attacked on home soil during a war.

9. English would not be our official language (the US doesn’t have one). Everyone in Victoria would speak Spanish, although we’d still call them Mexicans.

10. McDonalds would include pickles on their McOz burger, and instead of serving Sausage and Egg McMuffins for breakfast, we’d be eating Burritos.

Via the SMH

COLES MYER is likely to fall into foreign hands in what is shaping as the biggest corporate takeover in Australian history, valued at more than $16 billion.

A group of US financiers, believed to be led by the private investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, is understood to be behind an approach to the retail giant, founded in 1900.

A successful bid for Coles Myer, valued at nearly $15 billion, would easily top BHP’s $9.2 billion buyout of WMC Resources last year. It would be one of the world’s 10 biggest corporate takeovers.

That’s one big takeover, and it a takeover that will affect 100% of all Australians, after all, there would be no Australians who don’t at least on occasion shop at a CML store or buy stuff from them…..

Update: had the radio on since I wrote this, all the normal idiots were on talking about how they’d boycott CML stores etc…how we cant let it be bough by foreigners…these are the same morons who bag CML anyway, calling them things like an evil multinational despite the fact that it’s a great Australian sucess story. I hope the Americans do buy it, then these morons can actually call the company multinational accurately.

What would you rather, a Windows PC that runs for weeks without crashing (like mine do, indeed I’ve not rebooted my XP MCE PVR box for about 6 weeks now, and that then was only because of a critical systems update), or a Mac that crashes every other day?

Lets ask some high profile Mac users, like Dave Winer: “Good question. The answer is that computers crash, even Macs. In my experience, they [Macs] crash more than Windows machines.”, or even Robert Scoble:”Last week on the way home from Montana Ryanne was editing her video on her Mac. The app just suddenly disappeared from screen. In my book that?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s called a crash. I found that to be very strange cause the hype on Macs is that they never crash. But, those commercials are so strong. The hype is so strong.”

Now sure, PC’s aren’t perfect, particularly when you run Thunderbird on them, but’s it’s just nice to sit here and watch Mac users noting that the hype isn’t all its cracked up to be 🙂

Tags: Mac, Macs crashing

From Slashdot:

[in] an interview in USA Today with Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime confirms that the Wii’s online component will be free to play. The outspoken Nintendo advocate says “We will offer online-enabled games that the consumers will not have to pay a subscription fee for. They’ll be able to enjoy that right out of the box. The Wii console is going to be Wi-Fi enabled, so essentially, you’ll be able to plug it in and go. It won’t have hidden fees or costs.”

Tags: Wii

Looks like a kiddies game called “kickball” which is big in the school yards of America (never heard of it myself) is booming amongst adults, at least according to MSNBC. Which begs the question for Australian readers, will handball be the next big Australian sport? Certainly I spent many, many lunch breaks playing and observing the Quintessential Australian school yard game as I was growing up. It wasn’t of course just about playing it, it was also the social thing around it…ok, I’m being old again, I’m reminiscing….time to be quite 🙂

When is an email not deleted from your system? when it’s deleted using Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

I finally found out why it took me over a day to convert my Thunderbird emails to Outlook (just the conversion part…it took several days to work out how to convert it): it’s because Thunderbird doesn’t delete your old emails from it’s files, even when you empty out your trash cans, they just remain in the file, there to be read by anyone wanting to look for them.

The net result for me: a inbox in Outlook 2007 Beta 2 this morning (I actually ended up going to bed last night at 10pm with the import sitting on 97%) of 76,000 odd emails dating back to 2004! All the stuff I had deleted was there, nearly 2 years worth of emails!

I’ve just managed to delete 50,000 out of my Outlook Inbox (this itself took 40 minutes for the initial delete then a further 10 minutes for the empty deleted items part), with another 25,000 odd to go.

My advice to people thinking of using Thunderbird: don’t.

And this is after the 2 hours it took to get the Thunderbird files converted so Outlook Express would take them (I finally found a solution that worked), from which I could then convert them into Outlook 2007 Beta 2….dum, dadum, dadum…..

Tags: Bloody Mozilla Thunderbird