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  • Hey Bob Brown, shut the fuck up

    Up to 60 people dead, hundreds, possibly thousands of homes lost, and Senator Bob Brown (leader of the Australian Greens) uses the opportunity to warn people about global warming

    More fires to come as climate change continues: Bob Brown

    Global warming is predicted to make this sort of event happen 25 per cent, 50 per cent more,” he told Sky News.

    “It’s a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority our need to tackle climate change.”

    What, arsonists are gong be more prevalent with global warming…because that’s who the CFA is blaming for at least some of the fires. And wow, like we’ve never had deadly fires before either.

    Bob Brown, you’re an insensitive little turd who seeks to gain political capital off the deaths of your fellow Australians. Shut the fuck up.

  • Autumn leaves in the middle of summer

    The Age confirms what I observed the other day:

    THE leaves may be turning brown and falling, but it’s not an early autumn….

    Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens have been undertaking a program to save plants and director Richard Barley said they were in reasonable condition, but he is concerned about the long-term prospects for Melbourne’s established street trees such as planes and elms. “Dropping their leaves is a normal reaction for trees in these circumstances. They have been hit by the two factors of the extended dry and the extraordinary hot air temperatures of last week.

    “If we had cooler, wetter conditions to the end of April it is possible they could grow back some of their foliage, but if these conditions continue over the next two or three years, it will put them under enormous stress and it is likely a lot of them will die.”

  • TwitterCounter

    I must have been living in a cave, or just forgotten, but TwitterCounter tracks your Twitter followers (via Ross Hill on FF)

    TwitterCounter Stats: We Track & Analyze @duncanriley

    Conclusion from my stats: Twitter works best if you be yourself. I quite often share inane things, weather, finance, stuff I find, and sometimes what ever pops into my head, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My thx to all those following: you’re following because you either like me, or like what I have to say, not some social media friendly picture of what I should pretend to me. Hint to some others: you’re trying to hard 😉

  • Melbourne Tree Armagedon?

    skitched-20090203-160535.jpg

    The photo doesn’t do it justice (hard while driving) but I noticed today that around Hawthorn, Canterbury and Camberwell that all the trees are dropping their leaves….in January, and not Autumn.

    One of the best parts of living in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne is just how beautiful the streets are. In Autumn, the trees lining nearly every street drop their leaves, in spring they grow back. But if they’re dropping their leaves now, they wont be come autumn.

    A quick search of Google shows that the trees may survive, and that in drought European trees can do this; but likewise, they also drop leaves before they die as well.

    The solution of course is more water, but we aren’t getting more of that any time soon. It’s ironic really to consider that water restrictions in WA are less severe than Victoria, and WA is the drier state with the lesser opportunities for dams and water capture.

  • Michael Hill Jewellers FTW

    A big shout out to Michael Hill Jewellers.

    She who must be obeyed’s rather expensive 1ct diamond ring I gave to her for her 30th birthday (back when I could still afford to buy something like this) lost a diamond last week. They’re replacing the diamond under warranty, and were highly apologetic.

    It is insured, but it’s nice to see a company happy to help, even with something so expensive for them to fix.

    Michael Hill Jeweller FTW.

  • We’ll all be rooned, said Kevin Rudd

    Whoops.

    Rudd reveals $115b loss

    I read last week that Keating’s giving economic advice to Rudd, no surprise when you read this stuff.

    Sorry in advance about the language, but we’re now officially fucked.

    – $115 billion.

    Projected surplus in November was $5.7 billion.

    See the magic difference, and that’s before yet another stimulus package.

    In the space of a year or two, Rudd will run up the Government Mastercard to higher than Keating levels.

    Not bad for a first term. Wonder though who’s going to pay for it, and what interest rate they’ll demand.

    $115 billion.

    Struth.

  • Win

    Meg updated her Top 100 Australian blogs, the best and fairest top Australian blog list (we can’t even get added to some of the others, go figure) Australia Day. Here’s the result

    Top 100 Australian Blogs Index | Dipping into the Blogpond

    Win.

    It doesn’t pay the bills I might add, but to be up there after just short of 9 months with the Allure Media blogs and Darren Rowse is pretty cool.

    Also thx to Meg for doing the list. I understand how hard it is to do, having tried the top 20 manually a couple of times. Meg: donation button or advertising ops, contact me.

  • Bleg: Please browser makers, show a where the audio is coming from button

    I’ll admit it: I’m a tab fiend. I switched away from IE6 to Firefox all those years ago (when I was still a Windows user) for tabs. Tabs were, and still are the miracle of the modern internet. They allow you to open content and come back to it later.

    In my case, that’s opening content in Google Reader that I might want to read in full later, or even post about. On a busy day, that can be as high as 40-50 tabs…which is also why I do my reading in Safari today, even if I do my posting and stats work in Firefox, Safari is more stable.

    But I digress. The problem I have today is with audio. Sometimes I’ll open a tab (and they’re opened in the background, not upfront) and it will play music. Sometimes which ones are obvious, for example with auto-playing video. But many other times it’s not so obvious, and if you have dozens of tabs open, it’s hard to identify where the audio is coming from, if you can at all.

    Numerous times lately I’ve just had to turn off sound because I couldn’t find the source, which is where browser makers come in. Please, please add a tab, or icon, or something to identify the source of audio on webpages. It’s all I ask, honestly (well aside from FF stability).

  • A Proposal to Filter Christian Churches

    This is in response to Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby in the SMH (via Stilgherian)

    Hon Kevin Rudd MP
    Prime Minister of Australia
    Parliament House
    CANBERRA ACT 2600

    Re: proposal to filter Christian Churches

    Dear Prime Minister

    I write to you about the utmost urgency of protecting children from pedophilia and other deviant acts. As your Ministers (particularly Senator Conroy) have repeatedly told the media, somebody needs to think of the children.

    I take this opportunity to ask you to consider a proposal to filter Christian Churches in Australia in line with the Government’s commitment to protecting children with Internet censorship, and indeed would urge you to give this proposal priority status given the shocking risk to children Christian churches present.

    According to statistics published in the United States (ref), around 4% of clerics in the period from 1950-2002 were accused of abusing children. Worse still, this abuse, in over 60% of cases occurred for over one year. Notably, clerics who abused children usually did so at a rate higher than one child per cleric, at a rate of approx 2.3 children per cleric.

    There are, according to some figures around 7,000 Christian Churches in Australia, possibly more, with 2 million people attending a church every week. If the American experience applied here (and there is no reason to believe that it does not, particularly given we have more Catholics as a proportion of our christians) around 280 clerics (possibly more) will be fiddling with children this year. That is an unacceptable risk in a modern society, and it is vital that the Government think of these children.

    I propose the Government introduce a Christian Church filter on the same grounds as the proposed internet filter.

    1. That access to suspect Christian Churches be blocked, with no recourse or means of appeal once they are added to the Christian church filter.

    2. That “unwanted” churches have access blocked as well, such as those that don’t agree with the Government. Again, there will be no recourse should a church be blocked, and no means of appeal.

    3. That the speed of access to all Christian Churches be reduced to up to 87%. A national speed bump scheme would be effective here. Given the cost to Government, private operators could install the speed bumps and charge a toll for the cost of installing them.

    I’d note Prime Minister that the filter is not as effective with smaller speed reductions, and it would be ineffective without being properly implemented.

    4. That access to 3-6% of Christian Churches be blocked at all times, for no reason other than it’s acceptable, and you can never be too sure, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Who is blocked should change daily, just to keep the churches on their toes.

    5. That access to Christian Bibles be limited to adults who choose to opt-in. The bible, as you’d be aware, includes multiple accounts of illegal activity, including beastiality, murder, and even drownings….and sometimes this violence involves children. Children should be spared from this filth.

    Prime Minister, I urge your Government to truly protect the children of Australia from the Christian Church and implement this scheme at the first available opportunity. If the Government does not support this scheme, then truly it must be supporting pedophilia and child pornography, as Senator Conroy believes all opponents of protecting children are.

    Prime Minister, won’t you please think of the children?

    Yours sincerely

    Duncan Riley

  • Online Inauguration Video Fail

    My experience at 3:45 AEDT this morning:

    Hulu: audio/ video out of sync, could only be fixed by closing the stream and restarting it…then slowly the same thing would happen again

    CNN/ Facebook: people are gushing over this. I’m sure it was great, except that I got a message that it was full and I’d have to wait to get in. Yeah, I’m going to wait in the middle of Obama’s speech. Fail.

    Livestation: I love Livestation, but I don’t have the client installed on my laptop, only my desktop, and I had no intention of getting out of bed. Page time outs, and when you got anything up only half would load. Couldn’t download the client to watch.

    MSNBC: seriously delayed, maybe 10-30 seconds or more. So I’d switch to MSNBC from Hulu, then have to sit through parts of the speech I’d already heard.

    Suprisingly though, there was one site I like, but admitedly I only hit it AFTER the speech.

    Fox News, no, not the Hulu feed, the actual feed from the Fox News website.

    Quality was ok, not brilliant, but in sync, and easily went full screen. They also offered different camera angles in the same box, so you could watch raw footage, or footage with comentary, and you could also switch to Fox Radio. Next time there’s something live like this, I know where I’m heading.

    I didn’t get a a chance to hit Ustream, but I’ve heard quality wasn’t great, but it’s also a possible.

    CBS was suppose to be good from reports.