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Archive
Posts from 2004 to 2017. This was a personal blog during a fairly chaotic decade in independent publishing — some of it tech commentary, some of it Australia, some of it ephemera. It’s kept here in full for anyone who arrives via an old link.
Current writing lives at SiliconANGLE.
Culture wars and Stephen Conroy
Australian Minister for Censorship Stephen Conroy appeared on the ABC’s Q&A Thursday night. Transcript and video here (I’m not sure if the video is available outside of Australia). I won’t rehash it all, but some interesting takeaways: Political Content STEPHEN CONROY: But that is not what is being proposed. I mean we believe that there […]
Sydney Airport, where fruit is banned, but being beaten to death is OK
SMH: Bikie killed in Sydney Airport brawl The man was beaten to death INSIDE the Qantas Domestic Terminal. Where in the world was security? I know, it was too busy looking for forbidden fruit (like Apples from Victoria) in the baggage collection area, or making sure the pram going through X-ray wasn’t carrying a bomb. […]
ACMA Prohibited Links: where does the liability fall?
Is it illegal for Australians to link to the alleged ACMA blacklist on Wikileaks? Here’s ACMA quoted at news.com.au ACMA threatens fines of up to $11,000 a day for linking to sites on its secret censorship blacklist I’m not a lawyer, so I could be wrong, but is it actually illegal for individuals to link […]
Telstra channels Yes Minister
Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud: Last night I said that Telstra hadn’t shut down Leslie’s Twitter account. This was based on the advice of my colleagues. It’s factually correct, though it’s also true that Leslie’s senior managers independently told him last night to stop. So it’s factually correct that Telstra did not ask that […]
Freeview spoof response
Margaret Simons wrote about the now infamous Freeview spoof in Crikey Tuesday. She left something out. This was my response to Crikey, although it wasn’t published. Margaret Simons’ otherwise excellent coverage of the Freeview spoof video saga was somewhat sullied by a last line that reads “At the time of publishing, you can view the […]
Job ad reporting: you’re doing it right
Latest job figures out today show more bad news for the Australian economy. Notable though was how they were reported. News.com.au grouped newspaper ads (5-6% of the total) with online, and didn’t offer split figures: The ANZ survey found total job advertisements slipped 10.4 per cent in February, the largest recorded monthly fall since the […]
Pacific Brands lynching
As is not unusual when backed by a media that likes nothing more than pitting company owners against a presumed proletariat, the Pacific Brands lynching continues. For those outside of Australia, Pacific Brands announced recently it was shutting down its Australian manufacturing plants. The company owns brands such as Bonds, Hard-Yakka and more. It was […]
Sure sign of a bad economy
Always a sure sign of a bad economy: cheaper cuts of meat, and booming chicken sales SMH: THE bleak economic climate is forcing shoppers at Coles to trade down from T-bones to sausages, in an attempt to cut their shopping bills. In the latest sign of the drift to thrift, consumers are also swapping expensive […]
Fail to Win
Jeremy Schoemaker makes a lot of sense Money quote: I am always amazed at how scared people are to fail. I fail all the time?¢‚Ǩ¬¶. or at least what other people would consider to be failures. I would rather call them experiences. Learning from your failures and trying until you find success is an amazing […]
From the depths of despair rises the true Australian spirit
I’m still just….fuck. Victoria is like a morgue today. People are quiet, the look of horror on their faces, even if they weren’t directly affected. This isn’t to say that they are some how worse off than those who were directly affected; they simply aren’t. But this State is in a state of shock, that […]
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 […]
Obama to the Right
Via Larvatus Prodeo an interesting piece from The Monthly Review placing Obama to the right in a world sense with this nifty graph. Money quote: “In other words, Barack Obama does represent change from the era of the Bush administration. He is the limited change that’s possible within the logic of the current system.” More […]
King St. Newtown the Song
Via FullTimeCasual, King St. Newtown the song. Besides what I think is an XC Falcon early in, not much has changed on the street. Well, the Hub closed down, long the Sydney Adult Theatre location of choice, and Coles New World doesn’t look that way anymore…but the rest looks very familiar. Still, I’ve only done […]
Inquisitr December 2008
Pageviews: 1,962,105 (per Google Analytics) Traffic profile: highest post accounted for 13.5% of traffic. Finances: profitable (that is, more income than the cost of paying writers excluding me). However unbeknown to us, the ad figures we were working with were make believe from one provider. We’re profitable, but not by as much as we’d believed. […]
Bleak Shopping Christmas
I’ve so far managed to avoid Christmas shopping, not helped by the fact that I can’t stand crowds….probably some sort of medical thing, but I feel claustrophobic in large crowds and ill to the point of near panic. Only at Christmas I might add, I wonder if there’s a phobia for that? But I digress: […]
How long now for the Australian Car Industry?
The above chart comes from Key Automotive Statistics from the The Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. With GM likely to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy before Christmas with the bailout package failing to pass the US Senate, and Chrysler and Ford not far behind it, how long now for the Australian Car Industry? […]
Fence sitting on an Australian Bill of Rights
So the Governments latest shiny media promotion tool is an Australian Bill of Rights, starting with a “nationwide consultation on human rights.” I’m not quite sure where I sit on it, at least until what’s going to be in it becomes clear. The Libs have come out hard against it naturally, and any over extension […]
More sloppy newspaper reporting on job ads
You’d think it was the end of the world when you see things like this crap from The Oz “Ads in newspapers suffered the biggest two-month fall in the 30-year history of the ANZ job ads survey.” Of course the newspaper figures are always quoted first Jobs ads in newspapers fell by 12 per cent […]
Ghostbusters Video Game
Via Lee, Want. Imagine playing this with a Wii remote.
Missing F9 + F11 new Mac Keyboard
So my old Mac keyboard died earlier this week, or to be more precise the TAB and CAPS LOCK keys stopped working, so it was time for a new keyboard. I’d seen the new flat key Mac keyboards before, but after 25 years of typing I liked having raised keys. However I wasn’t impressed by […]