Category: General

Next to the Reuters story mentioned in my last post about the women turning up to the Madrid Training Bombing trials in a Mohamad cartoon T-Shirt:

Reuters via HotAir covering the Spanish trial of the alleged Madrid Train Bombers:

A woman who lost her husband in the 2004 Madrid train bombings displayed an infamous cartoon mocking the Prophet Mohammad on her T-shirt in front of 29, mostly Muslim, suspects on trial for the attacks on Monday.

The woman?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s white T-shirt showed Mohammad wearing a bomb as a turban ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù one of a series published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten which unleashed violent protests by some Muslims last year?¢‚Ǩ¬¶

The woman sat in the front row of the court wearing the T-shirt for around half-an-hour before getting up, walking up to the glass cage containing the defendants and finally walking out of the court, judicial sources said.

Now that’s a hero.

Chris Pirillo puts some perspective on the whole Kathy Sierra death threats meme. I totally avoided the issue in my post on Scoble’s chicken reaction at 901am because it’s difficult to talk about perspective when some one is legitimately upset about what has happened (as I have no doubt that Sierra is) without sounding like you’re either denigrating the victim or siding with the people making the death threats.

I’ve had death threats before, although none I’ve ever taken seriously, but unlike others I’ve actually been attacked with a Kitchen Clever. Luckily my friend and I backed right away on that fateful day about 10 days prior to the 1996 Australian Federal Election and the nutter Labor Party member swung the clever widly at us as he sought to steal the “Mutch for Cook” banner we’d strung on a highway overpass. I didn’t piss my pants, but I’ll admit I was pretty close to it, and it took me at least an hour to stop shaking. I’ll never forget that day till the day I die, and unless you’ve been the victim of any sort of crime like this it’s impossible to relate the feelings something like this brings up. But I digress, because I do sympathise with Kathy’s position, but others need to put it all in perspective, and actually stand up for free speech online, not back away from it. If you’re angry about the death threats, double your blogging efforts.

Michael Gray advisers in his WP advice video: block categories in Robots.txt to help Google SERPs.

Interesting.

We all know duplicate content is bad in Google, but it never dawned on me to consider category pages. I’ve got some work to do in the next couple of days 🙂

Latest Wii news: Wii is outselling PS3 2 to 1 in the US.

Question for Australian readers: Harvey Norman, arguably Australia’s biggest retailer of computer + electrical goods doesn’t stock Nintendo’s Wii, not just the console but the games either. The mind boggles as to why, but knowing that the Wii is a huge success, indeed supply is still a massive issue where I live from people I’ve talked to, will Harvey Norman not stocking the Wii affect the bottom line and therefore its share price? OK, so folks in Sydney and Melbourne have a huge range of choice in terms of retailers, in Regional Western Australia we don’t, and Harvey Norman is the biggest local seller, and yet I can’t buy Wii games there, I have to go to Target, BigW or EB Games, and that’s time I may have spent in a Harvey Norman store, not only buying Wii titles but also walking past the variety of other goods Harvey Norman sells. It’s money I’m spending with Coles Myer and Woolworths and not Harvey Norman. The PS3 is due out this week for memory in Australia, nearly $1k for the base model, can’t see it being anything but a failure here as its been in the States. Harvey Norman won’t win selling PS3’s when the hottest console in town is the Wii. We get a Good Guys opening here next week, wonder if they stock Wii games? They’ll certainly be getting my business on a range of other goods 🙂

SMH: Aussie dollar hits 10-year high

How do I respond to this without droping the F word over and over and over again. Sure, it might make it cheaper to visit the US, but ALL of my income at the moment is in US Dollars. And lets talk rip offs, I ordered a couple of new boxes yesterday, Paypal converted at 77c and yet I read today the exchange rate is 80c and climbing. For everyone else: sure, imports become cheaper, but exports become less competitive, and did I mention interest rates? The AUD is up because the market is factoring in an interest rate rise in Australia in the very near future, every 0.25 basis points is roughly $45 AUD extra a month on my mortgage, so I lose twice over. GRRRRRR!

Michael Gray doesn’t mince his words, but he is mostly spot on, although I would add that the next Danny Sullivan is probably posting away on some unknown blog as we speak. It’s a catch 22, yes, there’s too much noise, too much junk, but you’ve got to start somewhere as well, and who am I to judge the value of others, after all that’s a function of the market, not the individual, but again, sentiment is definitely in the right direction.

Zefrank’s last show. Sad. Thank you Ze for entertaining us for a year.

I’d comment on this post, but unfortunately like all Gawker Media blogs you need an invite to comment and so far I’ve only got commenting rights at Valleywag (hint, hint 🙂 ). Congrats though to LifeHacker on picking up the award for best group weblog at The Bloggies. To be honest I probably only subscribed 6 months ago, and some days I wish I hadn’t, it’s far too useful and I probably need less things installed on my computer, not more. It’s also great to see a site that has a positive message going well in an age where snark, gossip and snipping is par for the course. Today I’m hooked, and I hope to be for many years to come. LifeHacker should be the jewel in Nick Denton’s crown because it really is just a completely wonderful site, and if that sounds corny I can only apologise, it’s just that good.

Reuters:

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank is considering a bill to repeal a ban imposed last year on online gambling, said a spokesman for the lawmaker on Wednesday.

“Chairman Frank is considering legislation,” said Steven Adamske, spokesman for the Massachusetts Democrat, who chairs the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.

Now if only we had a politician with the guts to introduce legislation to overturn the ban on online gambling in Australia…ok, I’m dreaming, the chances of that happening are the same as having a true libertarian free market government elected later this year as well, zero and zilch.