Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
Dear Santa...
Dear Santa,
There aren't many things I want or need in this world. The few things on my list are mostly spiritual in nature, and I know that you're a materialistic kind of guy so I've been looking around for the perfect gift for you to bring me pm Christmas Day.
I've decided I like one of these please. No... "like" is a bit mamby-pamby. I WANT one of these, and frankly, I'll be pretty pissed off if, after I've gone to all the trouble of finding it, you don't deliver.
So thanks in anticipation, and yes, I have been a good boy all year.
Chester.
There aren't many things I want or need in this world. The few things on my list are mostly spiritual in nature, and I know that you're a materialistic kind of guy so I've been looking around for the perfect gift for you to bring me pm Christmas Day.
I've decided I like one of these please. No... "like" is a bit mamby-pamby. I WANT one of these, and frankly, I'll be pretty pissed off if, after I've gone to all the trouble of finding it, you don't deliver.
So thanks in anticipation, and yes, I have been a good boy all year.
Chester.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Exposed
Anyone remember "Global Warming"?You know... evil humanity destroys all life on earth by triggering cataclysmic climate change caused entirely by over-indulging in greedy consumption of fossil fuels to enrich their selfish pathetic lives. Or something. I think that's how it went.
Apparently, it was a lie, and the people telling the lie clearly knew it. But like all lies, they were eventually undone by their own duplicity.
The unraveling started in a tiny little nation called Australia, which was responsible for just one hundredth of the total "carbon emissions" that were allegedly destroying the world.
It was there that ex-bureaucrat Prime Minister Kevin Dudd announced, with big fanfare, his government's commitment to reduce that country's "carbon emissions" by a whopping 5% by introducing a new "carbon tax', which he then promised to give back to everyone who asked. Yes, finally, a government had found a way to tax the air you breathed.
Now some maths are important here... five percent of one percent is five ten thousandths which, last time I checked, is hardly anything at all. I mean, imagine you have a hundred bucks, and you accidentally lose 5c. Or let's say you're on a two hour and forty five minute flight, and the captain announces that you're going to arrive five seconds ahead of time. Yes, That's the amount by which Prime Minister Dudd was going to reduce "carbon emissions".
Remember too, that 5 percent of 1 percent was actually 5 percent of 1 percent of 2 percent, the two percent being the total contribution to all of the world's "carbon emissions" made by human activity. So Kevin Dudd was prosing to cut, by Australia's action, the total amount of "carbon emissions" going into the atmosphere each year by one one hundred thousandth. That was such a small amount that the instruments capable of measuring that reduction don’t exist.
It was a joke. It must have been, because surely, if "Global Warming" was the problem everyone was being told it was, and "carbon emissions" were to blame, then governments around the world would actually be doing something about it. After all, the technology existed to fix it. All that was missing was the will.
That's when people started realising that this Global Warming thing was a scam. They realised that the government's policy was all spin and rhetoric, with no substance at all. They realised it was all about raising taxes and about ideological dogma. They realised it was about "giving the masses something else to worry about" to distract them from inept and corrupt government.
They realised it was pathetic.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Homeless World Cup
They've just finished playing the "Homeless World Cup" football (soccer) tournament in Melbourne. Hundreds of (homeless) players from 56 countries were flown in for this week-long tournament, which was apparently won by Afghanistan (who beat Russia 5-4).
Oh... where do I start...?
Look. I feel awfully sorry for homeless people. There, but for the grace of God (and the generosity of family) go I. No-one actually chooses to be homeless. Well... nearly no-one anyway.
It is therefore natural that I support any initiative that makes their lives better, in so far as everyone "supports" initiatives that makes their lives better, keeps their smell away, and hides them out of site so we can get on with our Christmas shopping.
I guess, in this respect, bundling them onto an aeroplane and sending them somewhere else serves a real purpose, in much the same way that Rudi Guilianni served a similar purpose when, as Mayor of New York, he scooped up all the homeless people he could find and bought them a one way bus ticket to San Francisco (where many remain today).
But is this really "helping"?
The Homeless World Cup website contains some interesting statistics. For example, there are around 200,000 homeless people in Canada, costing the Canadian economy $6billion a year. If you put your calculator through its paces, you'll soon realise that this is $30,000 a year each, which, if handed to each homeless person, would deliver an income so far over the poverty line that there are people in full time employment who go to bed at night dreaming of an salary that high.
Of course, it isn't handed out to homeless people. It's spent on "programmes" which, you'd have to conclude, haven't really done much to reduce the numbers of "homeless".
I suspect, too, that "homeless" means different things in different parts of the world. Think about it... the Afghan National Football Team could probably qualify as "homeless" given the crappy state of affairs over there. It's no wonder they won. The same could be said for Zimbabwe and a long list of other tin-pot African disaster zones. And let's face it... "homeless in New York" is going to mean something very different to "homeless in Mogadishu". This is reflected by the number of competitors who came to Melbourne, saw how good the homeless there have it, and immediately applied for assylum.
Put yourself in their shoes. Here you are, living on the street, eeking out an existence and barely surviving from one day to the next. The following day, you're on a plane to Australia, you're put up in a hotel, you're fed and clothed, and your only worry for seven days is whether you kick he ball to the wing or the midfield. Then you're bundled back on a plane, and the following day, you're trying to shoo away some homeless guy who moved into your spot under that overpass while you were away.
Not that I begrudge any of them the trip, and the respite from the desparation of their lives. Good luck to them, and I hope they had a great time.
But at the end of the tournament, where does that leave the homeless?
Millions of dollars spent. Sponsorships. Press releases. The usual 1:1 ratio of hangers-on pretending they're really helping. And a select and very lucky few who got to do something which, even by the standards of the non-homeless where they live, was extraordinary.
The answer is "still homeless".
Oh... where do I start...?
Look. I feel awfully sorry for homeless people. There, but for the grace of God (and the generosity of family) go I. No-one actually chooses to be homeless. Well... nearly no-one anyway.
It is therefore natural that I support any initiative that makes their lives better, in so far as everyone "supports" initiatives that makes their lives better, keeps their smell away, and hides them out of site so we can get on with our Christmas shopping.
I guess, in this respect, bundling them onto an aeroplane and sending them somewhere else serves a real purpose, in much the same way that Rudi Guilianni served a similar purpose when, as Mayor of New York, he scooped up all the homeless people he could find and bought them a one way bus ticket to San Francisco (where many remain today).
But is this really "helping"?
The Homeless World Cup website contains some interesting statistics. For example, there are around 200,000 homeless people in Canada, costing the Canadian economy $6billion a year. If you put your calculator through its paces, you'll soon realise that this is $30,000 a year each, which, if handed to each homeless person, would deliver an income so far over the poverty line that there are people in full time employment who go to bed at night dreaming of an salary that high.
Of course, it isn't handed out to homeless people. It's spent on "programmes" which, you'd have to conclude, haven't really done much to reduce the numbers of "homeless".
I suspect, too, that "homeless" means different things in different parts of the world. Think about it... the Afghan National Football Team could probably qualify as "homeless" given the crappy state of affairs over there. It's no wonder they won. The same could be said for Zimbabwe and a long list of other tin-pot African disaster zones. And let's face it... "homeless in New York" is going to mean something very different to "homeless in Mogadishu". This is reflected by the number of competitors who came to Melbourne, saw how good the homeless there have it, and immediately applied for assylum.
Put yourself in their shoes. Here you are, living on the street, eeking out an existence and barely surviving from one day to the next. The following day, you're on a plane to Australia, you're put up in a hotel, you're fed and clothed, and your only worry for seven days is whether you kick he ball to the wing or the midfield. Then you're bundled back on a plane, and the following day, you're trying to shoo away some homeless guy who moved into your spot under that overpass while you were away.
Not that I begrudge any of them the trip, and the respite from the desparation of their lives. Good luck to them, and I hope they had a great time.
But at the end of the tournament, where does that leave the homeless?
Millions of dollars spent. Sponsorships. Press releases. The usual 1:1 ratio of hangers-on pretending they're really helping. And a select and very lucky few who got to do something which, even by the standards of the non-homeless where they live, was extraordinary.
The answer is "still homeless".
Monday, December 08, 2008
Suspended?
I was flicking around the channels looking for something moderately interesting to watch at 5.30 this morning (couldn't sleep... feeling it now... bloody tired). We have Fox cable with the whiz bang on screen TV guide thingmy, to aid in viewing choice.
Fox Sports had this synopsis...
NY Giants v Philadelphia
The Giants will be without star receiver Plaxico Burress, suspended for 4 weeks for accidentally shooting himself.
I'm sure it's an old story for those of you living in the Excited States, but for the rest of us, the whole concept is absurd.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Phew
Yes. It's nearly finished. I'm referring to Wroof!, my fab content manager that I stupidly announced would go line on August 24.
It's been a slog, and the hold up has been a complete rewrite of the part of the user control panel that alows you to create stories.
At 10.22 this morning, that task was done, tested and ready to go.
To be honest, I feel a little empty. I mean, this bloody project has been all consuming and the last three months have been a vivid demonstration of the need to know what you're doing before you start doing it.
There's still a little way to go, but the rest is definitely downhill... just some loose ends to tie up which would only take a few days.
And after that, I get I'll have to do some real work.
It's been a slog, and the hold up has been a complete rewrite of the part of the user control panel that alows you to create stories.
At 10.22 this morning, that task was done, tested and ready to go.
To be honest, I feel a little empty. I mean, this bloody project has been all consuming and the last three months have been a vivid demonstration of the need to know what you're doing before you start doing it.
There's still a little way to go, but the rest is definitely downhill... just some loose ends to tie up which would only take a few days.
And after that, I get I'll have to do some real work.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Vegas and Other Stuff
You know your lucks out in Vegas when you pass a slot machine which is loudly named "Luck Changer... Change Your Luck Here"... and it's out of order.
TV
We watched a little TV in the Excited States. It seems there are more commercials for drugs now than there were. Actually, I think they were all commercials for drugs, and they went something like this...
Announcer:
Suffer from [insert disease here]?
Ask your doctor about [insert drug name here].
Another Announcer (at double speed):
[Insert drug name here] may cause blindness, deafness, impotence, increased appetite, reduced appetite, headaches, nausea, vomiting, difficulty breathing, rash, stupidity, gout, diabetes, pancreatitis, kidney failure, liver failure, depression, bowel cancer, infertility, hayfever, palpitations, heart failure, club foot, hair loss, hair growth, sleeplessness, drowsiness, anaphalaxis, leprocy or death. If you experience any of these symptoms, please see your doctor.
The first announcer takes about 5 seconds. The second, 25.
And I want to take [insert drug name here] because...?
Toys
I did catch an absolutely appalling ad for a new Fischer Price toy in between drug ads.
It featured a hispanic looking child creating a toy burger at his own toy burger restaurant. They even had a counter with cash register and toy money, and a microphone into which the child, after careful preparation, shouted "number 34, your order's up".
I'd hate to think the good folk at Fisher Price were pitching this toy as future vocational education.
If I can find it on You Tube, I'll post it.
The Grand Canyon Skywalk
Bloody awesome. You stand on a glass platform out over the edge of the Canyon. The only bummer is that they don't let you take your camera out there.
Directions
Regular readers will know I love America and Americans. I've spent a lot of time there and find the whole experience akin to slipping on a favourite sweat shirt. That's code for saying "critical comment coming, but I hope it's in some way constructive".
What is it with Americans and directions... or... more to the point... a lack of maps. We drove a fair bit... from Vegas to the Hoover Dam, and then from the dam to the Canyon Skywalk. No-one had maps. All they had were little cards with directions, which were either incorrect, or omitted key information that would get me to where I was supposed to be going.
"Take the 95 south." Oh... Ok... Which way is South? (And before you say "The signs of the freeways all say which way is south, I'll correct you... no they bloody don't.
Just give me a fecken map. I can read maps. Apparently, the average American can't. It's a shame really.
Red Rock Canyon
We have a couple of hourse to kill at the end of our conference, so we drove the 10 miles or so to the Red Rock Canyon. It was sort of like looking at a miniature Ayers Rock. Probably worth it if you're sick of faux Roman buildings, fountains and the tinkle of slot machines next time you're in Vegas.
Just head west on the 215, and then west on Charleston. You can't miss it.
Blue Angels
Possible the coolest thing I saw in eight days in the US were the Blue Angels (is that what those stunt planes are called?).
There was a big airshow at Nellis Air Force Base, just out of Las Vegas, and these guys were practicing formation flying... right over me... so close that I think one of the pilots had a scar on his left cheek.
It was bloody awesome. F16s flying very fast, very low, and just a few metres from wingtip to wingtip. And there were other planes too. I think one might have been the new Raptor because it kept disappearing... rally... it'd fly overhead, go straight up, and then... poof... it was gone, only to be seen again coming from somewhere it wasn't just a second ago.
TV
We watched a little TV in the Excited States. It seems there are more commercials for drugs now than there were. Actually, I think they were all commercials for drugs, and they went something like this...
Announcer:
Suffer from [insert disease here]?
Ask your doctor about [insert drug name here].
Another Announcer (at double speed):
[Insert drug name here] may cause blindness, deafness, impotence, increased appetite, reduced appetite, headaches, nausea, vomiting, difficulty breathing, rash, stupidity, gout, diabetes, pancreatitis, kidney failure, liver failure, depression, bowel cancer, infertility, hayfever, palpitations, heart failure, club foot, hair loss, hair growth, sleeplessness, drowsiness, anaphalaxis, leprocy or death. If you experience any of these symptoms, please see your doctor.
The first announcer takes about 5 seconds. The second, 25.
And I want to take [insert drug name here] because...?
Toys
I did catch an absolutely appalling ad for a new Fischer Price toy in between drug ads.
It featured a hispanic looking child creating a toy burger at his own toy burger restaurant. They even had a counter with cash register and toy money, and a microphone into which the child, after careful preparation, shouted "number 34, your order's up".
I'd hate to think the good folk at Fisher Price were pitching this toy as future vocational education.
If I can find it on You Tube, I'll post it.
The Grand Canyon Skywalk
Bloody awesome. You stand on a glass platform out over the edge of the Canyon. The only bummer is that they don't let you take your camera out there.
Directions
Regular readers will know I love America and Americans. I've spent a lot of time there and find the whole experience akin to slipping on a favourite sweat shirt. That's code for saying "critical comment coming, but I hope it's in some way constructive".
What is it with Americans and directions... or... more to the point... a lack of maps. We drove a fair bit... from Vegas to the Hoover Dam, and then from the dam to the Canyon Skywalk. No-one had maps. All they had were little cards with directions, which were either incorrect, or omitted key information that would get me to where I was supposed to be going.
"Take the 95 south." Oh... Ok... Which way is South? (And before you say "The signs of the freeways all say which way is south, I'll correct you... no they bloody don't.
Just give me a fecken map. I can read maps. Apparently, the average American can't. It's a shame really.
Red Rock Canyon
We have a couple of hourse to kill at the end of our conference, so we drove the 10 miles or so to the Red Rock Canyon. It was sort of like looking at a miniature Ayers Rock. Probably worth it if you're sick of faux Roman buildings, fountains and the tinkle of slot machines next time you're in Vegas.
Just head west on the 215, and then west on Charleston. You can't miss it.
Blue Angels
Possible the coolest thing I saw in eight days in the US were the Blue Angels (is that what those stunt planes are called?).
There was a big airshow at Nellis Air Force Base, just out of Las Vegas, and these guys were practicing formation flying... right over me... so close that I think one of the pilots had a scar on his left cheek.
It was bloody awesome. F16s flying very fast, very low, and just a few metres from wingtip to wingtip. And there were other planes too. I think one might have been the new Raptor because it kept disappearing... rally... it'd fly overhead, go straight up, and then... poof... it was gone, only to be seen again coming from somewhere it wasn't just a second ago.
Election Fever
I know. The "Election" is old news, but I was there, in 'Vegas' and watched the whole thing... well as much of the thing as is possible on CNN/Fox News.
I have just one comment... which is that for the few days after Mr Obama won, Americans of a darker colour seemed to hold their chins just a little higher, and their chests just a little further out. Actually, some acted like they own the place.
It was nice.
I have just one comment... which is that for the few days after Mr Obama won, Americans of a darker colour seemed to hold their chins just a little higher, and their chests just a little further out. Actually, some acted like they own the place.
It was nice.
Woo... Wheer Has The Time Gone?
Bloody Hell!
It's been more than a month since my last posting. Where does the time go?
You must think I'm slack. Really. If I didn't have a couple of really good excuses, I'd think I was slack too.
Excuses?
Well for one, I've been away... in Las Vegas and Fiji (an odd combo, but stopping over slashes about 50% off the airfare).
And second, I've had my head buried in Wroof!, which is just days away from being people ready.
Oh... and I nearly forgot... I've had the mother of all colds... picked in in Fiji I think. Laid out flat for a week and a half. Much coughing and blowing of nose. The sort of pox you wish on enemies if you just want to inconvenience them for a few days.
Ok?
It's been more than a month since my last posting. Where does the time go?
You must think I'm slack. Really. If I didn't have a couple of really good excuses, I'd think I was slack too.
Excuses?
Well for one, I've been away... in Las Vegas and Fiji (an odd combo, but stopping over slashes about 50% off the airfare).
And second, I've had my head buried in Wroof!, which is just days away from being people ready.
Oh... and I nearly forgot... I've had the mother of all colds... picked in in Fiji I think. Laid out flat for a week and a half. Much coughing and blowing of nose. The sort of pox you wish on enemies if you just want to inconvenience them for a few days.
Ok?
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Hood Lumps
You've gotta love those Nigerian Scammers.
This came today...
FROM THE DESK OF INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT,INDEPENDENT CORRUPT PRACTICE COMMISSION(ICPC).MAITAMA-ABUJA,NIGERIA.
This management is hereby to inform you that,out of our records,for the year investigation,it is dawn to us that you have been victimized by the men of underworld(Pretenders).However,the management has been dutifully empowered by the Investigation bureau office of the President and Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Federal Republic of Nigeria to curb all illicit transaction and workload of this perpetrators.
In line with the Anti-corruption crusade of the presidency,Umaru Musa Yaradua(GCFR),you are by this Email notification to stop any contact regarding this illegal transaction with this Hood-lumps.Out of our finding,the image of this country has been dented Internationally during the past administration of the Federal Government of Nigeria.Presently,we have employed a strategy to remit sanity,and vow to terminate the activity of this fraudsters,by consolidating our security Network all over the country in view to monitor all outgoing and incoming communication to enable fish out and avert all illegal and suspicious transaction both domestically and internationally respectively.
Moreover,it occur that some of our Financial Institutions(Bank) serve as a conduit pipe by which this fraudsters use to perpetrate the undo crime.We have signalized all these financial institutions to implement scrutinized investigation before carrying any transaction.Any bank found culpable of breaching the law,must have their operational license revoke.
In accordance with the criminal and other related offense act,25 of
1999 constitution, we have been officially compel by Senator.
A.Aminu(JP),Chairman, Senate committee on Foreign Affair to mapped out billions of Dollars from the Annual Budget to compensate all defrauded victims as part of the ongoing National Reform Scheme of the presidency,and means to radiate immunity for criticism.
In view of this,we have been informed that you are still dealing with those hood-lumps in all your attempts to secure the release of your fund.We wish to advise you that such an illegal act has to stop if you wish to receive your payment since we have decided to bring a solution to your problem. Do be informed that we reserve the right at our discretion to sue you for damage on recognition of further contact with this people.
You have been approved US$550,000 as a compensation funds.Therefore you are required to contact the Verification department for proper evaluation into your file.Do be informed that your file security code is W53889BR.You are to quote these file number for proper identification when contacting this office.Contact the Head of the Verification Unit::
Name: Prof.Bellow William
E-mail: verificationdepartment.icpcngr@live.com
Direct line: +234-803-85-30542
Fax:+234-80-688228
You are to contact this office upon receipt of this notification immediately to enhance proper consideration and immediate release of your approved compensation funds as the defrauded victim.
Vision:
To fight corruption to a standstill and restore Nigeria to the enviable standard of respectability and dignity within the comity of nations.
Best Regard,
Justice O.David Kenneth Akanbi
(Chairman,Independent Corrupt Practice Commission,ICPC.)
Can they remit some of that sanity to my bank account?
This came today...
FROM THE DESK OF INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT,INDEPENDENT CORRUPT PRACTICE COMMISSION(ICPC).MAITAMA-ABUJA,NIGERIA.
This management is hereby to inform you that,out of our records,for the year investigation,it is dawn to us that you have been victimized by the men of underworld(Pretenders).However,the management has been dutifully empowered by the Investigation bureau office of the President and Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Federal Republic of Nigeria to curb all illicit transaction and workload of this perpetrators.
In line with the Anti-corruption crusade of the presidency,Umaru Musa Yaradua(GCFR),you are by this Email notification to stop any contact regarding this illegal transaction with this Hood-lumps.Out of our finding,the image of this country has been dented Internationally during the past administration of the Federal Government of Nigeria.Presently,we have employed a strategy to remit sanity,and vow to terminate the activity of this fraudsters,by consolidating our security Network all over the country in view to monitor all outgoing and incoming communication to enable fish out and avert all illegal and suspicious transaction both domestically and internationally respectively.
Moreover,it occur that some of our Financial Institutions(Bank) serve as a conduit pipe by which this fraudsters use to perpetrate the undo crime.We have signalized all these financial institutions to implement scrutinized investigation before carrying any transaction.Any bank found culpable of breaching the law,must have their operational license revoke.
In accordance with the criminal and other related offense act,25 of
1999 constitution, we have been officially compel by Senator.
A.Aminu(JP),Chairman, Senate committee on Foreign Affair to mapped out billions of Dollars from the Annual Budget to compensate all defrauded victims as part of the ongoing National Reform Scheme of the presidency,and means to radiate immunity for criticism.
In view of this,we have been informed that you are still dealing with those hood-lumps in all your attempts to secure the release of your fund.We wish to advise you that such an illegal act has to stop if you wish to receive your payment since we have decided to bring a solution to your problem. Do be informed that we reserve the right at our discretion to sue you for damage on recognition of further contact with this people.
You have been approved US$550,000 as a compensation funds.Therefore you are required to contact the Verification department for proper evaluation into your file.Do be informed that your file security code is W53889BR.You are to quote these file number for proper identification when contacting this office.Contact the Head of the Verification Unit::
Name: Prof.Bellow William
E-mail: verificationdepartment.icpcngr@live.com
Direct line: +234-803-85-30542
Fax:+234-80-688228
You are to contact this office upon receipt of this notification immediately to enhance proper consideration and immediate release of your approved compensation funds as the defrauded victim.
Vision:
To fight corruption to a standstill and restore Nigeria to the enviable standard of respectability and dignity within the comity of nations.
Best Regard,
Justice O.David Kenneth Akanbi
(Chairman,Independent Corrupt Practice Commission,ICPC.)
Can they remit some of that sanity to my bank account?
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Ratchet Saved
Anyone following Ratchet's story (see a few blogs back) will be pleased to learn that he arrived in the US today to be re-united with the American soldier who rescued him from a burning pile of garbage in Baghdad.
More than 65,000 people signed the Save Ratchet petition, forcing the US Army to relax its strict "no pets" rule.
More than 65,000 people signed the Save Ratchet petition, forcing the US Army to relax its strict "no pets" rule.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Save Ratchet
There's a story on the News website this morning about efforts to save "Ratchet", a dog rescued by US soldiers in Iraq. Apparently, US Army rules prevent the rescuing soldiers from taking Ratchet home.
The story is HERE.
The petition to save Ratchet is HERE. By the time I singed it, more than 32,000 others had done the same.
The story is HERE.
The petition to save Ratchet is HERE. By the time I singed it, more than 32,000 others had done the same.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Baby What?
Thanks to Rove and Peter Helliar for bringing Baby Pee Pee (or Wee Wee, depending on which side of the Atlantic you live) into my life.
Or this one, which is even more disturbing...
Or this one, which is even more disturbing...
Yet Another Representative
They just keep coming. This yesterday...
Dear,Friend.
It is my pleasure to let you know about my success in getting those fund transffered under the cooperation of a new partner from Japan. I didn't forget your past efforts to assist me in transffering those funds.
Now contact my secretary Mr. Sunday Henry his email.
(henry_ifeanyill24@yahoo.co.uk) ask him to send you the total($800.000.00) cheque which I raised for your compensation .so feel free and get intouch with him and give him your address where to send the cheque.Do Let me know immediately you receive it ok.
Best regards,
Dr.Johnson Williams
I replied, of course, because it would be rude not to do so, wouldn't it?
Dear Mr Henry,
I appreciate the notification from Dr Johnson Williams, but unfortunately, problems with the Tax Office here prevent me from accepting delivery of the funds at this time.
Therefore, please be a good chap and invest the $800,000 in Kitty Litter futures. With the current global financial meltdown, my sources tell me there is likely to be a massive world shortage by the end of the year. Those sources have a 100% track record so far, and I'd be foolish to ignore them. Please open the futures account in your name and I'll split the profit with you when we sell early next year. My sources are predicting the price will quadruple by the end of January next year so the $800,000 will become $3.2mil. Your share of the profit would be $1.2mil (if my arithmetic is right).
Thanks
*Sigh* You'd think I have nothing better to do.
Dear,Friend.
It is my pleasure to let you know about my success in getting those fund transffered under the cooperation of a new partner from Japan. I didn't forget your past efforts to assist me in transffering those funds.
Now contact my secretary Mr. Sunday Henry his email.
(henry_ifeanyill24@yahoo.co.uk) ask him to send you the total($800.000.00) cheque which I raised for your compensation .so feel free and get intouch with him and give him your address where to send the cheque.Do Let me know immediately you receive it ok.
Best regards,
Dr.Johnson Williams
I replied, of course, because it would be rude not to do so, wouldn't it?
Dear Mr Henry,
I appreciate the notification from Dr Johnson Williams, but unfortunately, problems with the Tax Office here prevent me from accepting delivery of the funds at this time.
Therefore, please be a good chap and invest the $800,000 in Kitty Litter futures. With the current global financial meltdown, my sources tell me there is likely to be a massive world shortage by the end of the year. Those sources have a 100% track record so far, and I'd be foolish to ignore them. Please open the futures account in your name and I'll split the profit with you when we sell early next year. My sources are predicting the price will quadruple by the end of January next year so the $800,000 will become $3.2mil. Your share of the profit would be $1.2mil (if my arithmetic is right).
Thanks
*Sigh* You'd think I have nothing better to do.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
My Representative
This arrived in my inbox yesterday...
新しいメールアドレスをお知らせします
新しいメールアドレス：
Good day dear,We have been instructed to effect the release of your funds meanwhile we receive a letter from a lady your rep. instructing us to pay her, do we pay her?
Confirm ASAP- Colly Williams
So of course, I replied...
Yes. Pay her and confirm amount by return email.
She is our representative.
Of course, there is no "her" so I thought that might be the end of it. I was wrong. This came today...
THANKS FOR YOUR URGENT CONFIRMATION, WE WIL PAY HER AS INSTRUCTED. THANKS.
DR COLLY WILLIAMS.
Bizarre.
新しいメールアドレスをお知らせします
新しいメールアドレス：
Good day dear,We have been instructed to effect the release of your funds meanwhile we receive a letter from a lady your rep. instructing us to pay her, do we pay her?
Confirm ASAP- Colly Williams
So of course, I replied...
Yes. Pay her and confirm amount by return email.
She is our representative.
Of course, there is no "her" so I thought that might be the end of it. I was wrong. This came today...
THANKS FOR YOUR URGENT CONFIRMATION, WE WIL PAY HER AS INSTRUCTED. THANKS.
DR COLLY WILLIAMS.
Bizarre.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Where's Wroof! ?
Yep. It's delayed again. If this goes on much longer, Wroof! will start to look like a New South Wales Government project.
But here's why... I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I want Wroof! to be right. I want it to be worth the wait. And each time I tinker with a part of it to make it better, there's a domino effect, which means I need to tinker with another part of it, and then another, and another.
It's close. Really. Just a couple more weeks.
PS. All this explains why postings from Chester The Bear have been a little thin of late.
But here's why... I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I want Wroof! to be right. I want it to be worth the wait. And each time I tinker with a part of it to make it better, there's a domino effect, which means I need to tinker with another part of it, and then another, and another.
It's close. Really. Just a couple more weeks.
PS. All this explains why postings from Chester The Bear have been a little thin of late.
Logic
We've just changed telephone companies, and received our first invoice today.
The email said this...
Dear Chester,
Please find attached your current invoice for your People Telecom services. A detailed breakdown of the charges is found within the attached invoice.If this invoice has been sent to the incorrect email address, you can change the address online.
Um... so they're sending an email to my incorrect email address to tell me that if it's an incorrect email address, I can change it. Does anyone else see the fatal flaw in that logic?
The email said this...
Dear Chester,
Please find attached your current invoice for your People Telecom services. A detailed breakdown of the charges is found within the attached invoice.If this invoice has been sent to the incorrect email address, you can change the address online.
Um... so they're sending an email to my incorrect email address to tell me that if it's an incorrect email address, I can change it. Does anyone else see the fatal flaw in that logic?
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
And While We're On Spam...
As if to underscore the damage that spammers like Jayne or Solway are doing to our economy, I thought, in a moment of free time over lunch today, that I'd classify the spam just one of my accounts has received in the last 72 hours.
Here are the results, and I'm sure you won't be surprised.
Out of 215 spam emails (vs just 28 legit emails), they divide up as follows;
Spam flogging Viagra, Penis Enlargement or some other male sexual performance enhancement product: 152
Spam flogging fake watches, usually Rolex (though Patek Philippe and Tag Hauer got a mention too): 39.
Scams of the Nigeria style, or notifications that I've won fictitious lotteries: 16
Spam inviting me to a porn site: 6 (which is unusually low)
Spam offering pirated software: 2
213 is the number of spam emails that managed to slip past my mail server spam filer and actually arrive in my mail box. Our server tells me that the number of filtered items that didn't make it that far is around six times that number, or 1,200. Fortunately, the it's configured to kill the spam it filters completely.
1,400 emails in 72 hours, only 28 of which were legitimate.
"Constitutional right" my arse!
Here are the results, and I'm sure you won't be surprised.
Out of 215 spam emails (vs just 28 legit emails), they divide up as follows;
Spam flogging Viagra, Penis Enlargement or some other male sexual performance enhancement product: 152
Spam flogging fake watches, usually Rolex (though Patek Philippe and Tag Hauer got a mention too): 39.
Scams of the Nigeria style, or notifications that I've won fictitious lotteries: 16
Spam inviting me to a porn site: 6 (which is unusually low)
Spam offering pirated software: 2
213 is the number of spam emails that managed to slip past my mail server spam filer and actually arrive in my mail box. Our server tells me that the number of filtered items that didn't make it that far is around six times that number, or 1,200. Fortunately, the it's configured to kill the spam it filters completely.
1,400 emails in 72 hours, only 28 of which were legitimate.
"Constitutional right" my arse!
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Constitutional Right? Bah!
See the guy on the left? Remember his face. Throw darts at it. Deface it with a felt pen by drawing horns on his head, or perhaps a little Hitler moustache, or, maybe, Joseph Goebels glasses. That's "Super Spammer", Jeremy Jayne.He's a free man today, because the First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to "anonymous" free speech.
Ok... for those of you who don't follow this sort of stuff, here's some background. Way back in December 2003, the State of Virginia filed felony charges against this scumbucket under anti-spam laws that make it a criminal offence to falsify email header information. In other words, it was against the law to send out an email that you pretend is from someone else. That's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for spammers, who hide like cowards behind the complexities of the web by faking return addresses and originating server information on their junk emails.
Sadly, this week, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the conviction, deciding unanimously that the law was in breach of the US First Amendment right to free speech. The court actually went further, deciding that free speech really meant "anonymous" free speech, citing the example of the one of the key triggers for the American Revolution, the "Federalist Papers", published anonymously under the pen name "Publius". They were actually written by US founding fathers James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.
In its ruling, the court found that, had email been around in 1776, the Federalist Papers may well have been sent by anonymous email. It therefore concluded that protecting the right to send such emails and to falsify their origin to attain anonimity was entirely consistent with the spirit of the First Amendment.
Hmmm. I have to admit to very mixed feelings on this.
On one hand, I'm a passionate advocate of free speech, and I'm a great admirer of America's founding fathers whose collective intellect in framing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States laid the foundation for a world of unprecedented wealth, comfort and freedom.
However, there is a line in the sand with this, and the challenge is to have the wisdom to draw that line in the right place. For example, we have Racial Villification laws in Australia that make it an offence to denegrate anyone based merely on their race, religion or sexual preference. I support that, even though it impinges the right to free speech we enjoy.
We also have laws which amke it a criminal offence to incite a riot, and I'm not so excited about that. Inciting a riot is, after all, the first step toward revolution, and while government would have have to be exponentially worse than it is now, I still want to retain the right to chuck it out.
But defining spam as free speech? Nah. I don't think Americas founding fathers would have considered the ability to send email flogging fake Viagra as a "right" worthy of protection under the Constitution.
I also don't think the court thought this through. The principal difference is that spam in my mailbox costs me money. If you don't understand how, CLICK HERE for a post I wrote way back about another Super Spammer, Robert Solway.
What the court has decided is, in effect, that the US Constitution mandates that I pay for the delivery of the message when someone who I don't know, and who has never ask my permission, seeks to exercise his right to free speech. In a perverse kind of way, that's taxation without representation, the very notion that started the whole shebang in 1776 in the first place.
It is clear that the judges sitting on the Virginia Supreme Court do not understand just how much, in real dollars, spam costs their economy.
I am expecting the Virginia decision to be overturned in the US Supreme Court soon.
Friday, September 12, 2008
And Even More Silly Politics...
I forgot to memtion that our local municipal government elections are being held tomorrow (Saturday). Voting is compulsory, which means one is required to turn up, scribble something on the ballot paper (like "None Of The Above), fold the ballot up and stuff it in a big cardboard box.
I'm going to be elsewhere, so I took the opportunity, while on a walk with Zac this morning, to drop into the Council offices and vote.
Surprisingly, there was a gaggle of candidates outside jostling to thrust a "How To Vote" card into my spare hand. Of course, in these more environmentally conscious times, it isn't card any more but rather a very thin "recycled" piece of paper. Recycled is politically correct, apparently, and somehow makes wasting resources on this nonsense ok. It clearly doesn't occur to them that recycled paper is also a finite resource.
One of tha candidates was from The Greens... which is the party you vote for if you want everyone else to think you're young, hip, in-touch, and are concerned about "global warming".
Oh oh. Regular readers will know my views on that. I politely listened to the Green candidate tell me her party was determined to make our municipality "carbon neutral" by 2012.
I then told her I didn't believe in anthropomorphic global warming and she started to sprout the party line about carbon, and greenhouses, and other less interesting things.
You can probably predict the outcome... I opened fire (metaphorically, of course). I gave her both barrels.
"Well we'll have to agree to disagree on that, but really, this election is about local issues", she said.
"No it isn't. You just told me you want to do the carbon neutral thing. Global warming's about as far away from as local issue as it gets."
"But we're opposed to selling the local bowling club", she quickly added.
It was at this point that another candidate joined the fray. "But there is no proposal to sell the bowling club", he said.
"Yes, but we're opposed to its sale anyway", replied the Green.
It reminded me of a wonderful scene from one of my top 3 fave films, "Wag The Dog", which is really a documentary and ought to be compulsory study in any political science degree.
In the scene, the "Political Consultant", Conrad Breen (played brilliantly by Robert DeNero) is planning a diversion from a breaking story that the President had been caught having sex with a girl scout in the Oval Office. He points at one of the President's staffers and says "You, call the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Scott. Get him on an aeroplane to Seattle tonight."
He points to another and says "You, I want a press release saying General Scott has not gone to Seattle to talk to Boeing about premature deployment of the B3 Bomber."
The first aid says "But there is no B3 Bomber".
And Breen replies "which is exactly why General Scott has not gone to Boeing to talk about it."
Brilliant. And so, today, life reflected art.
On a more serious note, I was offended that they wouldn't let Zac vote. He lives here too, and some of the decisions our Council will make will effect him directly. It's an outrage.
I'm going to be elsewhere, so I took the opportunity, while on a walk with Zac this morning, to drop into the Council offices and vote.
Surprisingly, there was a gaggle of candidates outside jostling to thrust a "How To Vote" card into my spare hand. Of course, in these more environmentally conscious times, it isn't card any more but rather a very thin "recycled" piece of paper. Recycled is politically correct, apparently, and somehow makes wasting resources on this nonsense ok. It clearly doesn't occur to them that recycled paper is also a finite resource.
One of tha candidates was from The Greens... which is the party you vote for if you want everyone else to think you're young, hip, in-touch, and are concerned about "global warming".
Oh oh. Regular readers will know my views on that. I politely listened to the Green candidate tell me her party was determined to make our municipality "carbon neutral" by 2012.
I then told her I didn't believe in anthropomorphic global warming and she started to sprout the party line about carbon, and greenhouses, and other less interesting things.
You can probably predict the outcome... I opened fire (metaphorically, of course). I gave her both barrels.
"Well we'll have to agree to disagree on that, but really, this election is about local issues", she said.
"No it isn't. You just told me you want to do the carbon neutral thing. Global warming's about as far away from as local issue as it gets."
"But we're opposed to selling the local bowling club", she quickly added.
It was at this point that another candidate joined the fray. "But there is no proposal to sell the bowling club", he said.
"Yes, but we're opposed to its sale anyway", replied the Green.
It reminded me of a wonderful scene from one of my top 3 fave films, "Wag The Dog", which is really a documentary and ought to be compulsory study in any political science degree.
In the scene, the "Political Consultant", Conrad Breen (played brilliantly by Robert DeNero) is planning a diversion from a breaking story that the President had been caught having sex with a girl scout in the Oval Office. He points at one of the President's staffers and says "You, call the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Scott. Get him on an aeroplane to Seattle tonight."
He points to another and says "You, I want a press release saying General Scott has not gone to Seattle to talk to Boeing about premature deployment of the B3 Bomber."
The first aid says "But there is no B3 Bomber".
And Breen replies "which is exactly why General Scott has not gone to Boeing to talk about it."
Brilliant. And so, today, life reflected art.
On a more serious note, I was offended that they wouldn't let Zac vote. He lives here too, and some of the decisions our Council will make will effect him directly. It's an outrage.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Politics... Bah!
Mark Twain once wrote "It doesn't matter who you vote for, you still end up with a politician."
There's interesting political shows on right now on either side of the Pacific, and they're worth a comment.
Now that the interminable American primary season is finally over and the candidates are oficially endorsed, the US Election can get down to the pointy end.
And the candidates are...
Some young handsome black/white dude with a silver tongue and very nice suits, who has chosen Mr Boring as his second, or some old white guy who managed to get himself captured by the Vietcong (which qualifies him as a war hero), who has, appropriately, chosen Rambette as his second.
And one of these two will be the Leader of the Free World. Are you kidding Americans? Seriously? You couldn't find anyone better?
Here's my take...
Obama is The Hollow Man. He's all talk, with absolutely no substance. From this distance, it seems all he's ever done is promote Obama, though if success in what you've done is an indicator, then he's going to make a fine President because he's clearly promoted himself extremely well.
McCain is eight years too late. I like the guy, and suspect he would have made a great President in 2000. If the job hadn't gone to The Idiot, I think the world would be a different place. But now... I just get the feeling he's past his use by date (though at least he can pronounce "nuclear").
Ah well. Dr J and I will be in America on election day. I'm really looking forward to that.
Over on this side of the Pacific, our State government has imploded, and in such a spectacular way as to remind us of just how disgustingly slimy and self serving those who seek public office in this country really are.
The outgoing state premier's press conference said it all. "I'm resigning today, because it's best for the party that a new team be allowed to take up the reins. In my entire career in politics, The Party has always come first."
Um. Mr Premier, don't you mean "the voters come first". No apparently not.
His successor is a nobody, very much like Mr Obama. He's been in Parliament for just a couple of years, and really hasn't distinguished himself. But here's the problem...
Before that, he was chief of staff to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, a guy called Milton Orkopolis, who is currently serving a jail term for luring under-age boys to his Parliament House office, supplying them with drugs, and having sex with them. (Yes, if nothing else, politics in New South Wales can be "interesting").
There can only be two possibilities...
Either, as Chief of Staff, our new Premier was incompetant in not knowing what his boss was up to, which means he shouldn't be Premier, or he turned a blind eye to his paedophile boss, and if that's true, he should be sharing the prison cell.
Sadly, the next state election is in March 2011. That's more than two years away, a lifetime in political speak. The long suffering people of this state are counting the days.
And on that... when the politicians in this state moved to a "fixed term" (previously, the Premier could call an election any time during his term), I campaigned to adopt an American style "recall" system, which would allow The People to fire an inept or corrupt government. Sadly, the suggestion was howled down by the self serving slimeballs who sit in our legislature.
What a pity.
There's interesting political shows on right now on either side of the Pacific, and they're worth a comment.
Now that the interminable American primary season is finally over and the candidates are oficially endorsed, the US Election can get down to the pointy end.
And the candidates are...
Some young handsome black/white dude with a silver tongue and very nice suits, who has chosen Mr Boring as his second, or some old white guy who managed to get himself captured by the Vietcong (which qualifies him as a war hero), who has, appropriately, chosen Rambette as his second.
And one of these two will be the Leader of the Free World. Are you kidding Americans? Seriously? You couldn't find anyone better?
Here's my take...
Obama is The Hollow Man. He's all talk, with absolutely no substance. From this distance, it seems all he's ever done is promote Obama, though if success in what you've done is an indicator, then he's going to make a fine President because he's clearly promoted himself extremely well.
McCain is eight years too late. I like the guy, and suspect he would have made a great President in 2000. If the job hadn't gone to The Idiot, I think the world would be a different place. But now... I just get the feeling he's past his use by date (though at least he can pronounce "nuclear").
Ah well. Dr J and I will be in America on election day. I'm really looking forward to that.
Over on this side of the Pacific, our State government has imploded, and in such a spectacular way as to remind us of just how disgustingly slimy and self serving those who seek public office in this country really are.
The outgoing state premier's press conference said it all. "I'm resigning today, because it's best for the party that a new team be allowed to take up the reins. In my entire career in politics, The Party has always come first."
Um. Mr Premier, don't you mean "the voters come first". No apparently not.
His successor is a nobody, very much like Mr Obama. He's been in Parliament for just a couple of years, and really hasn't distinguished himself. But here's the problem...
Before that, he was chief of staff to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, a guy called Milton Orkopolis, who is currently serving a jail term for luring under-age boys to his Parliament House office, supplying them with drugs, and having sex with them. (Yes, if nothing else, politics in New South Wales can be "interesting").
There can only be two possibilities...
Either, as Chief of Staff, our new Premier was incompetant in not knowing what his boss was up to, which means he shouldn't be Premier, or he turned a blind eye to his paedophile boss, and if that's true, he should be sharing the prison cell.
Sadly, the next state election is in March 2011. That's more than two years away, a lifetime in political speak. The long suffering people of this state are counting the days.
And on that... when the politicians in this state moved to a "fixed term" (previously, the Premier could call an election any time during his term), I campaigned to adopt an American style "recall" system, which would allow The People to fire an inept or corrupt government. Sadly, the suggestion was howled down by the self serving slimeballs who sit in our legislature.
What a pity.
That Announcement Was Premature
More than a few weeks ago, I proudly announced at "Wroof! Is Coming". I even set a date, August 24. I blew my trumpet long and loud. "Brilliant", "Inspired", "Stunning". The dictionary of superlatives was depleted.
And then I hit a bump... a crash of Photoshop which I was using to tidy up some graphics.
It was then that I realised that Wroof! just wasn't good enough yet. I say "yet" because it will be all of the things those superlatives describe. In many ways, is IS all those things, but not entirely.
You see, it isn't finished, and by "finished", I mean polished, shiny and very warm to touch.
It took a tiny little bug to make that penny drop. It was something to do with the way Wroof! handles shopping carts, and as I was trawling through lines of code looking for the error, I started to see some big design problems.
For example, Wroof! lets you choose fonts and colours for your pages. On testing, I discovered that the method for passing the page reference from one page to the next was flawed. It wasn't a bug... it worked exactly the way it was supposed to... it just didn't do the job required. It needed to be fixed, and the fix meant combing a hundred thousand lines of code to insert a page reference whenever your site's visitor moves from one page to the next. Boring, time consuming, and a pain in the rear end.
There have been more like that... errors in logic or design that haven't bothered me in creating our company websites, but which would break your patience if you tried to use it.
As if those issues weren't enough, I looked at the two pages where you get to decide how your website will look... the two most important pages in the whole thing... and they sucked. Big time. Really sucked. They were clumsy, unintuitive and clunky. Wroof! has to be better than that so a rewrite was required. It was a timely reminder of one of my mantras... "if you're going to do something, spend a little more time and do it right".
Wroof! is still coming... but I've put the date back a little... to October 1. Given the history of the last few weeks, I'm not going to set that in stone... but I'll be bloody pissed off if I need to push that date back again.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Freezing Balls
I received a little linguistic history in my mailbox yesterday that makes me feel whole lot more comfortable about using an expression sometimes spoken to declare unusually cold weather.
Back in the days when sailors were real men, ships were made of wood and Britania ruled the waves, engineers struggled with a rather serious problem.
To rule those waves, ships needed cannon, and a cannon is just an expensive ornament without cannon balls. There's not much point having cannon balls, thouigh, unless they're right next to the cannon that's destined to fire them. The problem is, they're balls, which, by their very nature, like to roll around under (or over) your feet.
So how do you store the balls next to the cannon safely and securely, especially when your deck isn't a stationary platform?
You put them in a box, right? Wrong! If you put them in a box, they're too difficult to get out. Remember, life or death could depend on the speed of reloading, and besides, anything wood might be damaged in battle, which would mean all you'd have to do to render your enemy's cannon inoperative would be to break the box holding the balls.
The best storage method was one you've seen in any swashbuckler... stack them in a square based pyramid... one on top, resting on four, resting on nine, resting on 16, stacking 30 cannon balls right next to the cannon. The problem with that, though, is that you need to stop the bottom layer from sliding out under the weight of the rest. First, they tried creating a wooden square on the deck but they quickly found that under the weight of the balls, the wood would eventually wear down, making the pyramid unstable. Wood also flexes, which is great if you want your ship to survive the first volley of shot, but really bad if you want something held in place by the wood to stay exactly where it is.
So the engineers struggled with ways to keep those pesky cannon balls on deck next to the cannon without them rolling around because as effective as these things were against your enemy's timber, if they went-a-rolling, they were even more effective against your ankle.
The solution was a heavy metal plate with 16 round indentations, called a "Monkey". In their simplest form, monkeys were the bashing bits at the end of pile drivers, and you could imagine that, with repeated bashing, the pile driver would develop a pile sized indentation in the metal.
Make a monkey with 16 indentations that exactly matched the configuration of the cannon balls and your problem was solved... almost. Unfortunately, if the monkey was made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it so engineers turned to the next available metal, brass.
Yes. It was called a "Brass Monkey".
Brass, though, has an interesting property. It expands and contracts with temperature much more than iron and an unfortunate consequence of that meant that if the temperature dropped too far, the plate would shrink to a point where the indentations would no longer line up with the cannon balls and your beautifully stacked pyramid would collapse.
It was, quite literally, cold enough to "freeze the balls off a brass monkey".
Like me, you probably thought the expression was some vulgar reference to testicles and brass ornaments. How quickly language forgets its roots.
Back in the days when sailors were real men, ships were made of wood and Britania ruled the waves, engineers struggled with a rather serious problem.
To rule those waves, ships needed cannon, and a cannon is just an expensive ornament without cannon balls. There's not much point having cannon balls, thouigh, unless they're right next to the cannon that's destined to fire them. The problem is, they're balls, which, by their very nature, like to roll around under (or over) your feet.
So how do you store the balls next to the cannon safely and securely, especially when your deck isn't a stationary platform?
You put them in a box, right? Wrong! If you put them in a box, they're too difficult to get out. Remember, life or death could depend on the speed of reloading, and besides, anything wood might be damaged in battle, which would mean all you'd have to do to render your enemy's cannon inoperative would be to break the box holding the balls.
The best storage method was one you've seen in any swashbuckler... stack them in a square based pyramid... one on top, resting on four, resting on nine, resting on 16, stacking 30 cannon balls right next to the cannon. The problem with that, though, is that you need to stop the bottom layer from sliding out under the weight of the rest. First, they tried creating a wooden square on the deck but they quickly found that under the weight of the balls, the wood would eventually wear down, making the pyramid unstable. Wood also flexes, which is great if you want your ship to survive the first volley of shot, but really bad if you want something held in place by the wood to stay exactly where it is.
So the engineers struggled with ways to keep those pesky cannon balls on deck next to the cannon without them rolling around because as effective as these things were against your enemy's timber, if they went-a-rolling, they were even more effective against your ankle.
The solution was a heavy metal plate with 16 round indentations, called a "Monkey". In their simplest form, monkeys were the bashing bits at the end of pile drivers, and you could imagine that, with repeated bashing, the pile driver would develop a pile sized indentation in the metal.
Make a monkey with 16 indentations that exactly matched the configuration of the cannon balls and your problem was solved... almost. Unfortunately, if the monkey was made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it so engineers turned to the next available metal, brass.
Yes. It was called a "Brass Monkey".
Brass, though, has an interesting property. It expands and contracts with temperature much more than iron and an unfortunate consequence of that meant that if the temperature dropped too far, the plate would shrink to a point where the indentations would no longer line up with the cannon balls and your beautifully stacked pyramid would collapse.
It was, quite literally, cold enough to "freeze the balls off a brass monkey".
Like me, you probably thought the expression was some vulgar reference to testicles and brass ornaments. How quickly language forgets its roots.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
More Bloody Brilliance
I saw this for the first time last night, though I'm led to believe it debuted a year ago.
Bloody exceptional!
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Catastrophe!
Photoshop stopped working last night. It just won't load. And before I hear any sniggering behind my back, yes, it is a legit copy.
This is going to put the Aug 24 launch in doubt because there's a mountain of graphics that need to be tidied up to make everything look nice. (And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that looking nice is important.)
Frustrating.
UPDATE: It's now 11:30pm. Photoshop's been off line for more than 30 hours. I've been working on this all day, and finally found the solution buried deep in the web. It seems my Photoshop preferences file was corrupted, though how or by what I know not.
I'm exhausted. Tracking down a failure like this is bloody hard work. Damned computers. Today was a timely reminder of an important axiom... "the problem with computers is that they don't work, so as long as you start from that basic preconception, everything you get from there is a bonus".
The upside... Wroof! is back on track (sort of).
The downside... I've decided to take some pressure off and put the launch back a couple of weeks.
This is going to put the Aug 24 launch in doubt because there's a mountain of graphics that need to be tidied up to make everything look nice. (And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that looking nice is important.)
Frustrating.
UPDATE: It's now 11:30pm. Photoshop's been off line for more than 30 hours. I've been working on this all day, and finally found the solution buried deep in the web. It seems my Photoshop preferences file was corrupted, though how or by what I know not.
I'm exhausted. Tracking down a failure like this is bloody hard work. Damned computers. Today was a timely reminder of an important axiom... "the problem with computers is that they don't work, so as long as you start from that basic preconception, everything you get from there is a bonus".
The upside... Wroof! is back on track (sort of).
The downside... I've decided to take some pressure off and put the launch back a couple of weeks.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Quality Representation
There's no doubting it... a career in politics is attracting quality candidates in Australia.
This is Jason Wood from the opposition Liberal Party and MP for LaTrobe, who, in June this year, was trying to get his head (and tongue) around whatever benefits GM foods will actually bring to the people of Australia.
Thanks, but I'm happy with mine just the way it is.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Nine Days, Sixteen Hours...
So much to do, and so little time. And, of course, it doesn't help that I've decided to make a few changes, just to make life a little more interesting.Imagine having a blog, just like this one, where your entires are arranged by category on different pages.
And imagine those different pages having different formats... on one page it's your regular blog, on another a photo gallery, while on another, your own private forum.
It's all possible with Wroof! In fact, that barely scratches the surface.
Wroof! is coming. August 24.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Bloody Excellent
I got me one of these.
It truly is an inspired piece of technology, and I have to admit that I didn't understand what all the fuss was about until I got mine home and started playing with it.
Put the iPhone on Chester's "highly recommended" list.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Going To Hell!
Yup. I'm sure, if I believed in that sort of thing, it would be true. I'd be going to hell. Fortunately, I'm Jewish and we don't believe in hell, so I guess I'm safe.
This arrived in by spambox today...
Hello ,
It is a pleasure meeting you at last for I have waited for this golden moment.I am Roger Bird manager in one of the prime bank in united kingdom.Six months ago ,my late customer died in a fatal accident and was buried at the state cemetry.My late customer (Sir mark jones ) has an accountwith a credit balance of twenty million pounds (20,000,000:00),which has beendormant for a very long time.
All efforts to contact the named beneficiary to late Sir jones's estate,with the supplied information proved futile.My good friend ,am contacting you because i want you to claim this money with me. i have the necessary information and documents that would enable us this claim.Please kindly send me your urgent reply to enable me know which other step to take towards the claim of this money.
Regards,
Roger Bird
I hated it. It's poorly written and unconvincing, and I couldn't help myself. I just had to rewrite it so I sent the following back to the scammer...
Oh come on 'Roger'. If you're going to run this scam, you have to do better than this. There are too many typing and/or spelling mistakes in your email for this to be real.
Seriously... I thought you scammers were more professional than that.
The email needs to look something like this...
-----------------------------
Hello,
I have been given your email address by a former colleague of yours who has asked not to be identified. He has told me you may be interested in a "special transaction" that will significantly benefit both of us.
First, allow me to introduce myself and give you a little background. My name is Roger Bird and I am an Account Manager at Prime Bank in the UK.
About eighteen months ago, one of my Personal Banking customers, Sir Mark Jones, passed away. He had considerable wealth, and left no will.
Thus far, the bank has gone to much effort to locate next of kin, but it appears Sir Mark left no living relatives. In cases like this, the Bank holds deposited funds for a fixed period of time, usually two years, before passing those funds on to Her Majesty's Government, where they end up in Consolidated Revenue, doubtless to be wasted on useless ideology inspired social engineering or some Ministerial junket.
With all avenues of inquiry now exhausted, the file has arrived back on my desk to be closed, which is a shame, because Sir Mark managed to accumulate some twenty million pounds in his less than reputable business career.
Without a validated claimant, all that money will disappear into some treasury black hole, never to be seen again. I have the necessary paperwork to validate such a claimant, but as a bank employee, I'm unable to approve a claim of my own. That's where you come in...
What I'm proposing is that you claim the money. I'll validate your claim, and we can split the account 50/50. Interested?
Please reply ASAP, because I'm not going to be able to hold this file in my top drawer for too long before someone notices it's not been processed.
Warmest regards
Roger.
-----------------------------
It's written in English, it makes sense, and it doesn't try to hide the fact that there's a big scam going on here, which means anyone who falls for it deserves what they get!
Feel free to use it... just remember where it came from and let me know if you get anyone stupid enough to bite.
Look for it in your spam box soon.
This arrived in by spambox today...
Hello ,
It is a pleasure meeting you at last for I have waited for this golden moment.I am Roger Bird manager in one of the prime bank in united kingdom.Six months ago ,my late customer died in a fatal accident and was buried at the state cemetry.My late customer (Sir mark jones ) has an accountwith a credit balance of twenty million pounds (20,000,000:00),which has beendormant for a very long time.
All efforts to contact the named beneficiary to late Sir jones's estate,with the supplied information proved futile.My good friend ,am contacting you because i want you to claim this money with me. i have the necessary information and documents that would enable us this claim.Please kindly send me your urgent reply to enable me know which other step to take towards the claim of this money.
Regards,
Roger Bird
I hated it. It's poorly written and unconvincing, and I couldn't help myself. I just had to rewrite it so I sent the following back to the scammer...
Oh come on 'Roger'. If you're going to run this scam, you have to do better than this. There are too many typing and/or spelling mistakes in your email for this to be real.
Seriously... I thought you scammers were more professional than that.
The email needs to look something like this...
-----------------------------
Hello,
I have been given your email address by a former colleague of yours who has asked not to be identified. He has told me you may be interested in a "special transaction" that will significantly benefit both of us.
First, allow me to introduce myself and give you a little background. My name is Roger Bird and I am an Account Manager at Prime Bank in the UK.
About eighteen months ago, one of my Personal Banking customers, Sir Mark Jones, passed away. He had considerable wealth, and left no will.
Thus far, the bank has gone to much effort to locate next of kin, but it appears Sir Mark left no living relatives. In cases like this, the Bank holds deposited funds for a fixed period of time, usually two years, before passing those funds on to Her Majesty's Government, where they end up in Consolidated Revenue, doubtless to be wasted on useless ideology inspired social engineering or some Ministerial junket.
With all avenues of inquiry now exhausted, the file has arrived back on my desk to be closed, which is a shame, because Sir Mark managed to accumulate some twenty million pounds in his less than reputable business career.
Without a validated claimant, all that money will disappear into some treasury black hole, never to be seen again. I have the necessary paperwork to validate such a claimant, but as a bank employee, I'm unable to approve a claim of my own. That's where you come in...
What I'm proposing is that you claim the money. I'll validate your claim, and we can split the account 50/50. Interested?
Please reply ASAP, because I'm not going to be able to hold this file in my top drawer for too long before someone notices it's not been processed.
Warmest regards
Roger.
-----------------------------
It's written in English, it makes sense, and it doesn't try to hide the fact that there's a big scam going on here, which means anyone who falls for it deserves what they get!
Feel free to use it... just remember where it came from and let me know if you get anyone stupid enough to bite.
Look for it in your spam box soon.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
18 Days 9 Hours And A Handful of Minutes.
I've generally tried to keep business and blog separated by a wide gulf. It's better that way. After all, this blog isn't a subtle advertisement for our latest nutritional products... it's just a bear pontificating, pretending he knows more than he probably does.Today though, and for the rest of August, I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to bombard you with some unashamed self promotion.
About 6 years ago, I started something... a small web programming task that was supposed to take a couple of weeks. Now don't get me wrong. Those of you who know me will quickly point out that I definitely don't have a pocket protector and that I used to find it too easy to pick up girls to be a programmer. No. I was just dabbling, writing something called a "content manager", mostly because I wanted to teach myself something new.
A "content manager" is software that's supposed to make it easy to create and update web sites by storing the content of the site in a database. You know what I mean because Blogger is a content manager.
We were trying to write an on-line magazine for a little side-project I was involved in back then, and creating the content manager seemed easier than coding a brand new web page each time I wanted to add a story. If only I'd known then what I know now, but there's nothing like a retrospectoscope to clarify one's thoughts and I don't have one.
So when that business was stillborn, I kept the code and continued to work on it, and work on it, and work on it, and work on it. (Six years. That's nearly 20% of my adult life. Fuck! What a potentially huge waste of time.)
My simple project's grown a bit since then, and we use it in my other business every day. (If you want to see it at work, go to http://www.rplus.com.au/, though what you're looking at there is the version before the version before last... what I have now is way more powerful and infinitely easier to use.
So for six years, line by line, piece by piece, sometimes by evolution, sometimes by osmosis and sometimes by blind luck, I've been cobbling this thing together. It's probably been harder than it otherwise might have been because I'm not a really great code cutter, but oh my...
... the end result is brilliant. Really, it is. And if you had the slightest inkling of how it actually works, and the pain I suffered to make it work, you'd think so too.
What's so brilliant about it? Oh. I'm glad you asked.
Wroof! (that's what it's called) is the ultimate in content management. You can create a magazine, with stories, forums, blogs, photo galleries, and comments. You can allocate different sections in your magazine to different editors, and then tie magazine stories into products in the built-in shopping cart, which is then linked to an optional built-in multi-store point-of-sale system. Wroof! even comes with an up-to-date currency converter.
You can put different content on different pages, and control who sees what content via an 8 level security system. You can even sell subscriptions to your site, with different subscription levels having access to different content.
And that's just the beginning.
Wroof launches to the world on August 24... 18 days 9 hours and a handful of minutes away.
Want to see for your self? Go to http://www.wroof.com/ and watch the little clock count down.
Care Factor = Zero
The Olympics are coming. Just days away, apparently. TV's full of stories. Presenters sit in the Peking smog inhaling lungfulls of toxic fumes, trying to get us excited about the world's premier drug trial. "The Olympics this". "The Olympics that". Blah Blah fecken blah.
Does anyone care?
Does anyone care?
Monday, August 04, 2008
My Dog Needs What?
Regular readers will know how much I love our K9 friends, but even for me, this might be a little over the top. Or maybe not.
Apparently, there are dog opthalmologists in the USA who can determine, from the shape of Rover's eyes, whether he needs glasses or not. Yes. You read that right. Glasses. For your dog. Apparently, the dog opthalmologist prepares a prescription which is then sent to Doggles, better known for their stylish, high quality dog sunglasses and protective eyewear. (The dogs involves in the WTC rescue/recovery mission wore these, so they must be ok.)
I have just one question... no... that's not right... I have a long list of questions, but I'll start with this one... how do I convince Zac to keep the glasses on?
Apparently, there are dog opthalmologists in the USA who can determine, from the shape of Rover's eyes, whether he needs glasses or not. Yes. You read that right. Glasses. For your dog. Apparently, the dog opthalmologist prepares a prescription which is then sent to Doggles, better known for their stylish, high quality dog sunglasses and protective eyewear. (The dogs involves in the WTC rescue/recovery mission wore these, so they must be ok.)
I have just one question... no... that's not right... I have a long list of questions, but I'll start with this one... how do I convince Zac to keep the glasses on?
Monday, July 28, 2008
YouTube With Neurones
I came across the most wonderful website today. It's called TED, and you can find it at www.ted.com.
Refreshing, energising, stimulating, expanding, thought provoking, captivating, mind blowing. I'm sure there are more superlatives but it's after 11 and I'm tired, mostly from spending much of the evening stimulating my brain.
You see, TED's tagline should give you a hint. "Ideas Worth Spreading."
I'd like to think of it as a YouTube for people with a 3 digit IQ. I can guarantee you that you won't find anything that remotely resembles "Funniest Home Videos", "Big Brother" or even "Cops". What you'll find is a collection of great minds sharing great thoughts.
Go to TED. Spend a few hours. Expand your brain, your horizons, and your outlook on life. I did, and I've just scratched the surface.
Refreshing, energising, stimulating, expanding, thought provoking, captivating, mind blowing. I'm sure there are more superlatives but it's after 11 and I'm tired, mostly from spending much of the evening stimulating my brain.
You see, TED's tagline should give you a hint. "Ideas Worth Spreading."
I'd like to think of it as a YouTube for people with a 3 digit IQ. I can guarantee you that you won't find anything that remotely resembles "Funniest Home Videos", "Big Brother" or even "Cops". What you'll find is a collection of great minds sharing great thoughts.
Go to TED. Spend a few hours. Expand your brain, your horizons, and your outlook on life. I did, and I've just scratched the surface.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
I just love this ad...
It just makes me smile every time I see it... and for hour, I walk around the house singing "Boomdeeyahdah boomdeeyahdah" in my head.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Invading The Land of the Long White Shroud
Of course, the easiest part about invading New Zealand is that most of them are already here, in Bondi, so one strategically placed low yeild tactical nuke would go a significant way towards getting the job done (and leave some prime beachfront land cleared and ready for redevelopment).
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Woo Hoo! I Won! I Won!
I'm SOOO excited. This came to my inbox this evening...
Microsoft Promotion Award
20 Craven Park, Harlesden London NW10,
United Kingdom.
Ref No: BTD/976/06
Batch No: 401978G
Dear Lucky Winner
WINNING NOTIFICATION-------Ref No:BTD/976/06---Batch:401978G The prestigious Microsoft and AOL has set out and successfully organized a Sweepstakes,we rolled out over 100,000, 000.00 e-ticket for our Monthly Draws.The selection was made through a computer draw system attaching personalized email addresses to ticket numbers.
Your email address as indicated was drawn and attached to ticket numbers 008995727495 with serial numbers SBTD/9080648302/06 and drew the lucky numbers 14-21-25-40-40-47(21) which subsequently won you (£500,000.00)(Five Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds)as one of the jackpot winners in this draw.
To begin the claim processing of your prize you are to send the below informations to your Claims/Fiduciary Agent.
NAME:.....................
SEX:.....................
AGE:.....................
DIRECT PHONE NUMBER..............
ADDRESS:..................
OCCUPATION:...............
NATIONALITY:..............
COUNTRY.................
CHOOSE MEANS OF RECEIVING YOUR WINNINGS.
1.COURIER DELIVERY
2.BANK WIRING
File your winnings by sending the above informations to our Claims/Fiduciary Agent by Email for the processing of your winnings.
MR DONALD GRAY,
Email : remitclaims_dept@live.com
CALL :+44-704-574-0889
***Reply to this email only***
Mrs.Gloria Bent
(Microsoft Award Coordinator).
Wowee zowee! I didn't even know I'd entered...
...seriously people... does anyone believe this crap? [If answer 'YES' then they deserve whatever's coming to them.]
Microsoft Promotion Award
20 Craven Park, Harlesden London NW10,
United Kingdom.
Ref No: BTD/976/06
Batch No: 401978G
Dear Lucky Winner
WINNING NOTIFICATION-------Ref No:BTD/976/06---Batch:401978G The prestigious Microsoft and AOL has set out and successfully organized a Sweepstakes,we rolled out over 100,000, 000.00 e-ticket for our Monthly Draws.The selection was made through a computer draw system attaching personalized email addresses to ticket numbers.
Your email address as indicated was drawn and attached to ticket numbers 008995727495 with serial numbers SBTD/9080648302/06 and drew the lucky numbers 14-21-25-40-40-47(21) which subsequently won you (£500,000.00)(Five Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds)as one of the jackpot winners in this draw.
To begin the claim processing of your prize you are to send the below informations to your Claims/Fiduciary Agent.
NAME:.....................
SEX:.....................
AGE:.....................
DIRECT PHONE NUMBER..............
ADDRESS:..................
OCCUPATION:...............
NATIONALITY:..............
COUNTRY.................
CHOOSE MEANS OF RECEIVING YOUR WINNINGS.
1.COURIER DELIVERY
2.BANK WIRING
File your winnings by sending the above informations to our Claims/Fiduciary Agent by Email for the processing of your winnings.
MR DONALD GRAY,
Email : remitclaims_dept@live.com
CALL :+44-704-574-0889
***Reply to this email only***
Mrs.Gloria Bent
(Microsoft Award Coordinator).
Wowee zowee! I didn't even know I'd entered...
...seriously people... does anyone believe this crap? [If answer 'YES' then they deserve whatever's coming to them.]
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Second Amendment
It's sometimes difficult for those of us born and raised outside the United States to understand the American love affair with firearms.
Especially when we read stories like these two, pulled from the Fox News website this morning.
Story #1
Man Accidentally Kills Pregnant Wife While Cleaning Gun
Associated Press
ORLANDO, Fla. — A pregnant woman and her unborn child have died in central Florida after being accidentally shot by the woman's husband, authorities said.
Yailen Abreu, 23, and the fetus died Tuesday at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Orange County sheriff's officials said Abreu was hit in the stomach while her husband was cleaning his gun late Monday at their Orlando-area home. She was six months pregnant.
The bullet struck 39-year-old Enio Abreu in the hand before hitting in his wife, authorities said.
Seriously tragic.
Story #2
Woman Shoots Herself While Trying to Kill Mice
Associated Press
POTTER VALLEY, Calif. — A Mendocino County woman who was trying to kill mice in her trailer with a gun ended up shooting herself and another person.
The 43-year-old woman pulled out her .44-caliber Magnum revolver after she saw the mice scurrying across the floor of her trailer on Highway 20 in Potter Valley, sheriff's officials said.
But she accidentally dropped the gun, which went off as it struck the floor. The bullet went through the woman's kneecap, bounced off the keys sitting on the belt loop of a 42-year-old man in the trailer and grazed the man's groin before ending up in his coin pocket.
Authorities did not release the shooting victims' names.
The mice escaped the shooting unharmed.
I'm somehow comforted that the mice escaped unharmed.
Especially when we read stories like these two, pulled from the Fox News website this morning.
Story #1
Man Accidentally Kills Pregnant Wife While Cleaning Gun
Associated Press
ORLANDO, Fla. — A pregnant woman and her unborn child have died in central Florida after being accidentally shot by the woman's husband, authorities said.
Yailen Abreu, 23, and the fetus died Tuesday at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Orange County sheriff's officials said Abreu was hit in the stomach while her husband was cleaning his gun late Monday at their Orlando-area home. She was six months pregnant.
The bullet struck 39-year-old Enio Abreu in the hand before hitting in his wife, authorities said.
Seriously tragic.
Story #2
Woman Shoots Herself While Trying to Kill Mice
Associated Press
POTTER VALLEY, Calif. — A Mendocino County woman who was trying to kill mice in her trailer with a gun ended up shooting herself and another person.
The 43-year-old woman pulled out her .44-caliber Magnum revolver after she saw the mice scurrying across the floor of her trailer on Highway 20 in Potter Valley, sheriff's officials said.
But she accidentally dropped the gun, which went off as it struck the floor. The bullet went through the woman's kneecap, bounced off the keys sitting on the belt loop of a 42-year-old man in the trailer and grazed the man's groin before ending up in his coin pocket.
Authorities did not release the shooting victims' names.
The mice escaped the shooting unharmed.
I'm somehow comforted that the mice escaped unharmed.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
How Big?
Regular readers will know how much I enjoy the occasional trawl through my spam folder, and today's catch nearly made me blush.
I'm not sure there's any need to explain what this is about...
What you can expect
First month you will notice an increase in size of up to 1/2 inch, you will also notice an increase in sexual desire, stronger erections and more enjoyable sex.
Second month you will notice an increase in size of up to 1 inches, plus an increase in Girth (Width) of 5%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Third/Forth month you will notice an increase in size of up to 3 inches, plus an increase in Girth (Width) of 10%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Fifth/Sixth month you will notice an increase in size of up to 4 inches, plus a increase in Girth (Width) of 20%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Now I'll tell you that wasn't one of the guys standing around in the school change room with a ruler, so I have no point of reference other than my own, but an EXTRA four inches seems like a mighty uncomfortable size for any purpose. Ah well. Maybe if you're going to get sucked in by this spam, it's very very small to start with.
I'm not sure there's any need to explain what this is about...
What you can expect
First month you will notice an increase in size of up to 1/2 inch, you will also notice an increase in sexual desire, stronger erections and more enjoyable sex.
Second month you will notice an increase in size of up to 1 inches, plus an increase in Girth (Width) of 5%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Third/Forth month you will notice an increase in size of up to 3 inches, plus an increase in Girth (Width) of 10%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Fifth/Sixth month you will notice an increase in size of up to 4 inches, plus a increase in Girth (Width) of 20%, plus all the benefits of the first month.
Now I'll tell you that wasn't one of the guys standing around in the school change room with a ruler, so I have no point of reference other than my own, but an EXTRA four inches seems like a mighty uncomfortable size for any purpose. Ah well. Maybe if you're going to get sucked in by this spam, it's very very small to start with.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Owen And Emzee
Very occasionally, stuff arrives in my email inbox that's worth sharing. Today, an email with these pics arrived.
Accompanying the email was a story credited to AFP...
NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.
The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.
'It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother',' ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.
'After it was swept away and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,' the ecologist added. 'The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it followed its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,' Kahumbu added.
'The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,' he explained.
I suggested to Dr J that we could adopt the little fella, but she quite rightly pointed out that with two cats and a dog already vying for the available free space on the bed, there probably isn't room.
Accompanying the email was a story credited to AFP...
NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.
The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.
'It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother',' ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.
'After it was swept away and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,' the ecologist added. 'The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it followed its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,' Kahumbu added.
'The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,' he explained.
I suggested to Dr J that we could adopt the little fella, but she quite rightly pointed out that with two cats and a dog already vying for the available free space on the bed, there probably isn't room.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Beans
There's a man in those beans somewhere. Really. I kid you not, and once you find him, you'll wonder why you ddin't see him instantly.
I don't know where this came from, but the story in the email (thanks Robin) suggested that if you find the man in the coffee beans in 3 seconds, the right half of your brain is better developed than most people. If you find the man between 3 seconds and 1 minute, the right half of the brain is developed normally, and if you find the man between 1 minute and 3 minutes, then the right half of your brain is functioning slowly and you need to eat more protein. If you have not found the man after 3 minutes, the advice is to look for more of this type of exercise to make that part of the brain stronger.
It took me a little while. I was too busy looking at the Predator (from the movie of the same name).
Friday, June 20, 2008
Are We Going Mad?
"Young people today have no respect!"
I used to hear my father say it, and his father before him. My great grandfather probably said it in some foreign Eastern European language, and I suspect there's probably a well worn Latin or Ancient Greek version.
It seems each successive generation looks at those who come after with disbelief, fearful for the future of society and the world. Despite those fears, each successive generation seems to muddle through, and the world our forefathers have built is a pretty good one.
That's changing because I believe that world is about to come crashing down.
Young people today really do have no respect. They don't respect the law. They don't respect those around them. They don't respect standards of common decency.
Why? Because our generation of stupid bleeding hearts has removed punishment as a sanction. If you're under 16 these days, you can do pretty much anything you like knowing that the worst that's likely to happen is you'll get a session of "counselling" during which some limp do-gooder will tell you in their softest, most unthreatening voice, that what you might have done may not have been appropriate.
No criminal conviction is recorded. You're not sent away to some child correctional facility, and no-one is allowed to give you a swift kick in the backside (literally, not metaphorically).
So that there's no mistaking the point I'm trying to make, let me state it clearly. I believe the success of Western Civilisation has been built on mutual respect and a sense of community. At every level of society, our forefathers acted (mostly) for the common good. Yes, they had a degree of individual freedom, and yes, that freedom allowed them to do much as they pleased, but there was an understanding that expression of that freedom came with a responsibility to use it to preserve common values and build a better future.
Today, young people are raised to believe it's everyone for themselves. We pander to the excesses of youth with plattitudes... "oh... they just need better guidance", or "they're just expressing their individuality".
We don't even draw proper boundaries. Last week, the government here in New South Wales was forced by public outcry to withdraw a brochure advising teenagers of how they should experiment with drugs "responsibly". They called it "harm minimisation", and all the bleeding hearts were shouting "but kids will take drugs, so we have to give them the right information".
Crap. It's the wrong signal. It says "look... we know these drugs are illegal, but we also know you're going to take them and that's ok." No. It's NOT ok, and to say it sends very mixed signals indeed.
Take the case yesterday in Canada, where the Quebec Superior Court overturned a father's decision to ground his 12 year old daughter as punishment for disobeying his direction not to visit websites he deemed "innapropriate". (She had disobeyed him by going to a friends house to post improper photographs of herself on some "social networking" site.)
Are they serious? First, what is a 12 year old girl doing taking her parents to court so she's not grounded. Second, why is the state funding this stupidity, and third, what was the judge thinking?
I don't know what it's like in Canada, the UK, the USA, or any of the other places my readers live. I just know what it's like here in Australia. Children are an undisciplined rabble, subject to minimal parental cotrol, prone to binge drinking, antisocial behaviour and an utter disregard for theose around them. They seem born to accept that the world owes them, and that there are no sanctions for ill manners, or even criminal activity. They get into their 20s unemployable, with a sense of entitlement that they have not yet earned.
Enough is enough. It's time we wrested control back from the social engineers and began applying and enforcing standards of decency and behaviour. If we don't, Western Civilisation will continue to teeter towards the edge of a precipice.
I used to hear my father say it, and his father before him. My great grandfather probably said it in some foreign Eastern European language, and I suspect there's probably a well worn Latin or Ancient Greek version.
It seems each successive generation looks at those who come after with disbelief, fearful for the future of society and the world. Despite those fears, each successive generation seems to muddle through, and the world our forefathers have built is a pretty good one.
That's changing because I believe that world is about to come crashing down.
Young people today really do have no respect. They don't respect the law. They don't respect those around them. They don't respect standards of common decency.
Why? Because our generation of stupid bleeding hearts has removed punishment as a sanction. If you're under 16 these days, you can do pretty much anything you like knowing that the worst that's likely to happen is you'll get a session of "counselling" during which some limp do-gooder will tell you in their softest, most unthreatening voice, that what you might have done may not have been appropriate.
No criminal conviction is recorded. You're not sent away to some child correctional facility, and no-one is allowed to give you a swift kick in the backside (literally, not metaphorically).
So that there's no mistaking the point I'm trying to make, let me state it clearly. I believe the success of Western Civilisation has been built on mutual respect and a sense of community. At every level of society, our forefathers acted (mostly) for the common good. Yes, they had a degree of individual freedom, and yes, that freedom allowed them to do much as they pleased, but there was an understanding that expression of that freedom came with a responsibility to use it to preserve common values and build a better future.
Today, young people are raised to believe it's everyone for themselves. We pander to the excesses of youth with plattitudes... "oh... they just need better guidance", or "they're just expressing their individuality".
We don't even draw proper boundaries. Last week, the government here in New South Wales was forced by public outcry to withdraw a brochure advising teenagers of how they should experiment with drugs "responsibly". They called it "harm minimisation", and all the bleeding hearts were shouting "but kids will take drugs, so we have to give them the right information".
Crap. It's the wrong signal. It says "look... we know these drugs are illegal, but we also know you're going to take them and that's ok." No. It's NOT ok, and to say it sends very mixed signals indeed.
Take the case yesterday in Canada, where the Quebec Superior Court overturned a father's decision to ground his 12 year old daughter as punishment for disobeying his direction not to visit websites he deemed "innapropriate". (She had disobeyed him by going to a friends house to post improper photographs of herself on some "social networking" site.)
Are they serious? First, what is a 12 year old girl doing taking her parents to court so she's not grounded. Second, why is the state funding this stupidity, and third, what was the judge thinking?
I don't know what it's like in Canada, the UK, the USA, or any of the other places my readers live. I just know what it's like here in Australia. Children are an undisciplined rabble, subject to minimal parental cotrol, prone to binge drinking, antisocial behaviour and an utter disregard for theose around them. They seem born to accept that the world owes them, and that there are no sanctions for ill manners, or even criminal activity. They get into their 20s unemployable, with a sense of entitlement that they have not yet earned.
Enough is enough. It's time we wrested control back from the social engineers and began applying and enforcing standards of decency and behaviour. If we don't, Western Civilisation will continue to teeter towards the edge of a precipice.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
No Substitute For Stupidity
These are pictures of the wreck of a brand spanking new Etihad Airbus A340-600. Etihad, as my well traveled readers will know, is the National Airline of the United Arab Emirates and sprukes itself as the "world's best new airline".
In November 2007, an Etihad flight crew was given the responsibility of moving their still unfinished aircraft out of the hangar to the aircraft run-up area. We're really talking "unfinished". The 'plane was an empty shell... no seats, no carpet, no overhead lockers, no entertainment system, no catering equipment, nothing. Just a very light empty aluminium tube with wings, a cockpit, a tail and a few engines.
The Airbus supervisor, in an oversight that I suspect will never be repeated, decided he didn't need to accompany or supervise his Arab friends, so they were left to figure it out on their own.
For reasons I'm not sure anyone will fully understand, the Etihad crew took all four engines to takeoff power. Maybe boys were just being boys, or maybe the gene pool needs thinning a little (or both), because they had no clue just how light of an empty Airbus really is. No chocks were set (not that it would have mattered at that power setting), and the brakes weren't going to hold the 'plane back at full power.
The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because the computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not yet been fully configured. Somehow, it didn't occur to these guys to simply throttle back... or maybe that wouldn't have been as much fun. They decided instead, in what can only be described as a stroke of pure genius, to pull the 'Ground Sense' circuit breaker to silence the alarms.
Big mistake! All they did was fool the aircraft's computers into thinking they were in the air. As soon as they did that, the computers automatically released all the brakes and set the A340-600 rocketing forward. The poor bastards had no idea that this is a Safety feature so that pilots can't land with the brakes on.
The result is pictured. [*sigh*].
In November 2007, an Etihad flight crew was given the responsibility of moving their still unfinished aircraft out of the hangar to the aircraft run-up area. We're really talking "unfinished". The 'plane was an empty shell... no seats, no carpet, no overhead lockers, no entertainment system, no catering equipment, nothing. Just a very light empty aluminium tube with wings, a cockpit, a tail and a few engines.
The Airbus supervisor, in an oversight that I suspect will never be repeated, decided he didn't need to accompany or supervise his Arab friends, so they were left to figure it out on their own.
For reasons I'm not sure anyone will fully understand, the Etihad crew took all four engines to takeoff power. Maybe boys were just being boys, or maybe the gene pool needs thinning a little (or both), because they had no clue just how light of an empty Airbus really is. No chocks were set (not that it would have mattered at that power setting), and the brakes weren't going to hold the 'plane back at full power.
The takeoff warning horn was blaring away in the cockpit because the computers thought they were trying to takeoff but it had not yet been fully configured. Somehow, it didn't occur to these guys to simply throttle back... or maybe that wouldn't have been as much fun. They decided instead, in what can only be described as a stroke of pure genius, to pull the 'Ground Sense' circuit breaker to silence the alarms.
Big mistake! All they did was fool the aircraft's computers into thinking they were in the air. As soon as they did that, the computers automatically released all the brakes and set the A340-600 rocketing forward. The poor bastards had no idea that this is a Safety feature so that pilots can't land with the brakes on.
The result is pictured. [*sigh*].
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Oops.
I forgot to put the bins out last night. You know how it is. You're tired. You're grumpy because your state just lost a big football match. You just forget. It happens.
But by the reception from Dr J this morning, you'd think I'd had a personal hand in scheduling trains during the WWII.
Dr J: You didn't put the bins out last night.
Me: Oh. Of course. Wednesday was garbage night. Sorry. Are they out now?
Dr J: Yes. I was able to put them out just in time.
Me: Oh. Good. That was lucky. Has the truck been? I'll bring them in.
Dr J: No.
Me: [looking puzzled... brain trying to redefine 'just in time']
Dr J: I am not happy. [glare]
Seriously. What is it with women and the putting out of the garbage?
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Vacuous
We've spent a great deal of time in my business skirting around the edges of an industry that can best be described as vacuous, shallow and facile. I'm talking, of course, about the "Beauty Industry", that collection of salons and pseudo spas dedicated to the shrines of youth and beauty.Today, Beauty Business launched their on-line magazine, leading with a story archetypally titled
"Tanning: Choosing the right shade for those cooler months."
Other stories in this launch issue included
"Hair Removal: Why winter is the BEST time for removing the fuzz"
and
"Celebrity Beauty Tips: Demi Moore, Beyonce Knowles and more."
*sigh*.
This is a magazine pitched at the "beauty therapists", and it would be nice to think their industry magazine was devoted to improving professional standards and elevating the knowledge base. Sadly, it isn't, not because the editors are incapable of creating such a worthy tome, but because the magazine, as it should, reflects its target market.
And what's really scary is that in Australia, according to our market research numbers, we have one salon for every 100 women aged between 35 and 60. I'm guessing the numbers are similar in the US, Canada and parts of Europe.
In a thousand years, when historians are giving lectures on the decline and fall of Western Civilisation, there will be an entire semester devoted to this cult and culture of bimbo.
I suppose, if you're interested, GO HERE. (But only if you must.)
Saturday, May 31, 2008
ET or BS
In another bizarre piece, appropriately headed "ET or BS", Fox News linked to a Denver Post story about some grainy footage of "aliens" peering out of a Denver window.
The frame, above, was apparently extracted from a 3 minute video, taken after a guy installed surveillance cameras because he thought someone was spying on his teenage daughters.
I've told you "Stargate" is a documentary. And Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado.
Homeless
There was an Associated Press piece today on the Fox News website that I thought I'd share with you.
Apparently, a homeless woman was arrested in Japan today after living undetected in a man's closet for the last year. She was caught after he became suspicious that food was disappearing, and set up comeras to relay images to his mobile phone.
Police found the 58-year-old woman hiding in the top compartment of the man's closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.
The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone and one of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home after he had left. He called police believing it was a burglar, but when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.
"We searched the house ... checking everywhere someone could possibly hide," Itakura said. "When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man's house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.
She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."
This raises two important issues.
Adn second... this guy had room in his closet? Seriously? What's his secret? It wouldn't matter how many closets I installed here, they'd be full in a week.
Apparently, a homeless woman was arrested in Japan today after living undetected in a man's closet for the last year. She was caught after he became suspicious that food was disappearing, and set up comeras to relay images to his mobile phone.
Police found the 58-year-old woman hiding in the top compartment of the man's closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.
The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone and one of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home after he had left. He called police believing it was a burglar, but when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.
"We searched the house ... checking everywhere someone could possibly hide," Itakura said. "When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man's house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.
She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."
This raises two important issues.
First, someone else was living in his house and he didn't notice? I think I'd notice. Wouldn't you?
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Illusion
I was (metaphorically) thumbing through Scientific American online today, and came across a great piece on illusion. GO HERE.The pic above is an example. Square A and Square B are actually the same shade of gray. No. I didn't believe it either, so I copied the pic into photoshop, cut out a piece of B, and watched amazed as it disappeared when I moved it over A.
The point of the article? Nothing is real. What we see and feel of our outside world is only an immaginary construction by our brain of what it thinks the outside world is like...
...which all comes back to a point I've made time and time again here... beware of what you see. Beware of what others see, and try to push on you as "truth". It's all just made up.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Ideology Drives An Awful Wrong (Or Two)
In what can only be described as a stunning, sickening decision, a court in Melbourne last Friday granted a twelve year old girl permission to begin hormone treatment prior to a sex change operation.
Lawyers for the girl's mother successfully argused that the girl, at twelve years of age, had a full understanding that she was actually a man trapped in a girl's body. Those lawyers were paid for by the Victorian Government, heavily supported by ideological special interests.
Are they mad?
Look, as far as I'm concerned, once you're 18, do whatever you like with your body. It's none of my business. Change it from female to male. Change it back again. Even change it into an elephant for all I care. It's your body and you're an adult, making your own decisions.
But is a twelve year old really equiped to make this decision?
The story's here.
Which brings me to the other furore involving a twelve year old this week... a photographic exhibit at an art gallery in Sydney featuring photographs of nude male and female 12 year olds.
Furtunately, the police reacted swiftly, impounded the offending "art works", and are pressing child pornography charges against the gallery and the "artist".
Let's leave the issue of what the children's parents were thinking when they granted permission. This is bigger than that.
What's amazing about this is that the art elite are incensed. They believe "art" is somehow "pure", and "artists" are above the law.
I'm sorry. There's something not right about taking full frontal photographs of a naked 12 year old girl or boy, even in the name of "art".
It's stunning that the "art community" doesn't get it. Their warriors, some of them curators at the biggest publicly owned art galleries in the country, bombarded the media in defence of the artists right to express his creativity. Somehow, they thought it was ok.
Really... they just don't get it. What's the difference between their "artist" taking pictures of naked children and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars in the name of "art", and some low life taking pictures of naked children and posting them on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference.
And I'm sorry, even if I buy the "art" line... I don't care how pure the art is... some sick bastard is going to look at that "art" and get his jollies. You might not be a paedophile, but you're certainly feeding them.
The ideological left is screaming. "Censorship", they cry. Yes. It bloody well is... because you start drawing that blurry line between "art" and child pornography, and you're on a very slippery slope.
*SIGH*
Is the world going mad?
Lawyers for the girl's mother successfully argused that the girl, at twelve years of age, had a full understanding that she was actually a man trapped in a girl's body. Those lawyers were paid for by the Victorian Government, heavily supported by ideological special interests.
Are they mad?
Look, as far as I'm concerned, once you're 18, do whatever you like with your body. It's none of my business. Change it from female to male. Change it back again. Even change it into an elephant for all I care. It's your body and you're an adult, making your own decisions.
But is a twelve year old really equiped to make this decision?
The story's here.
Which brings me to the other furore involving a twelve year old this week... a photographic exhibit at an art gallery in Sydney featuring photographs of nude male and female 12 year olds.
Furtunately, the police reacted swiftly, impounded the offending "art works", and are pressing child pornography charges against the gallery and the "artist".
Let's leave the issue of what the children's parents were thinking when they granted permission. This is bigger than that.
What's amazing about this is that the art elite are incensed. They believe "art" is somehow "pure", and "artists" are above the law.
I'm sorry. There's something not right about taking full frontal photographs of a naked 12 year old girl or boy, even in the name of "art".
It's stunning that the "art community" doesn't get it. Their warriors, some of them curators at the biggest publicly owned art galleries in the country, bombarded the media in defence of the artists right to express his creativity. Somehow, they thought it was ok.
Really... they just don't get it. What's the difference between their "artist" taking pictures of naked children and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars in the name of "art", and some low life taking pictures of naked children and posting them on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference.
And I'm sorry, even if I buy the "art" line... I don't care how pure the art is... some sick bastard is going to look at that "art" and get his jollies. You might not be a paedophile, but you're certainly feeding them.
The ideological left is screaming. "Censorship", they cry. Yes. It bloody well is... because you start drawing that blurry line between "art" and child pornography, and you're on a very slippery slope.
*SIGH*
Is the world going mad?
Human Global Warming Now Apparently Effecting Jupiter
Jupiter's Three Red Spots Credit NASA, ESA, M. Wong, I. de Pater (UC Berkeley), et al.This picture, taken by the Hubble Telescope, was published on the NASA website a week or so back, along with the following description;
Explanation: For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue.
Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown.
For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August.
Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.
Of course, Al Gore has already issued a statement blaming the increaseing storm activity on Jupiter on Global Warming, and the UN International Committe on Climate Change has recommended further drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Bureaucrats are already drawing up appropriate protocols, and climatologists have again altered their modelling to accomodate these new Jovian variables.
Do I need to say any more?
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Chester At War
It's official. In response to repeated incursions into my privacy and sleep, Chester formally declared war today on his two neighbours.
This is a real David and Goliath struggle, because on one side, the neighbour is a BP service station and convenience store, and on the other side, it's a construction compound operated by one of the largest builders in the country.
"You live where?" I hear you ask.
It's kind of a long story. When Dr J bought her townhouse twelve years ago, it backed onto a mechanic's workshop. About 6 years ago (before I met her), BP acquired said workshop and built a mega "BP Connect" centre there. At the time, Dr J was distracted by other things and didn't pay attention to the Notice of Proposed Development stuffed into her mailbox.
So now, right over the back wall, we have a 24 hour petrol station lit up so brightly you could, I'm sure, see it from space. Compounding the problem, the actual convenience store closes at 10pm "for security reasons", and customers pay for their fuel at an outside "pay point", which, of course, means that at all hours, said customers shout something like "pump number 4 mate, and can you get me a pack of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild, a carton o' milk and a sausage roll with sauce" through glass about a foot thick.
A few weeks ago, another Notice of Proposed Development l0bbed into the mailbox. BP has decided it wants the site seen from other planets and not just low earth orbit, so it needs more illuminated signage.
Not on your bloody life, and the first shots in the war were officially fired in response to this callous provocation.
Before that, we've had border skirmishes but nothing you'd call real war. We regularly complain about deliveries at 11pm, or 5am on Sundays. They've pretty much ignored the complaints. We regularly complain about the shouting customers. They ignore us.
I even regularly poke my head over the back fence and shout something pithy and eloquent at roudy customers at 3am... usually something like "hey dickhead... shut the fuck up". This generally doesn't work because as anyone living in Sydney will know, those who are awake at 3am have most likelybeen clubbing since about 9pm, and are therefore too pissed to respond with anything more intelligent than "fuck off".
So in response to the Notice of Proposed Development, the Bear penned a nuclear tipped strategic missile and aimed it right at the local town council. The weapon went through BPs application with surgical precision, citing case law and slamming the applicant's callous disregard for human life (aka, my life). It also contained lots of big words and a few important sounding expressions like "amenity of the adjoining property", and "failure to organise their business activity to ensure minimal impact".
Boom. Round one to The Bear, and a shocked council planning inspector was forced to come to my back yard and actually look at the devastation first hand. Now irrevocably drawn into the conflict, he responded the way only bureaucrats can... with a letter back to BP.
Round two happens on Tuesday when I meet with BP's lawyers. They expressed "shock, distress and surprise" at the war declaration. They wish to sue for peace, but they'd better come prepared to meet our terms.
Across the street, the guerilla war's been raging for years.
The construction compound was created to build a new underground tollway, and while the land's zoned residential, they have planning exemption to use it for what can only be described as "neighbourhood destroying activity".
The compound created two problems. The first, during the day, is the incessant "beep beep beep" as assorted bobcats, back hoes and dump trucks flit around the site. It's an extremely annoying distraction, but there's not much I can do about it.
The second is far more important. They sometimes do it at night, and unlike the BP station, which is on the other side of the house to my bedroom, the compound is right at the bedroom window.
This week, they escalated, turning the occasional incursion into full blown war games. I say "games" because that's clearly what's happening. The workers on the site have obviously been briefed about the grumpy neighbour with the sharp and offensive tongue, and so they sneak onto the site at 4.30 am, do some beep beep beeping, and then bolt as soon as they see my flowing white bathrobe appear at my front door. One brazen truck driver actually turned towards me and gave me the finger this week as he gunned his giant two megawatt diesel motor.
Fortunately, they're nearly finished, though their "decomissioning" process involves lots of jack hammers, after which, they'll sell the site to a property developer who, I'm sure, will deliver another year of hell.
After that, if the world if still here, it should be quiet.
This is a real David and Goliath struggle, because on one side, the neighbour is a BP service station and convenience store, and on the other side, it's a construction compound operated by one of the largest builders in the country.
"You live where?" I hear you ask.
It's kind of a long story. When Dr J bought her townhouse twelve years ago, it backed onto a mechanic's workshop. About 6 years ago (before I met her), BP acquired said workshop and built a mega "BP Connect" centre there. At the time, Dr J was distracted by other things and didn't pay attention to the Notice of Proposed Development stuffed into her mailbox.
So now, right over the back wall, we have a 24 hour petrol station lit up so brightly you could, I'm sure, see it from space. Compounding the problem, the actual convenience store closes at 10pm "for security reasons", and customers pay for their fuel at an outside "pay point", which, of course, means that at all hours, said customers shout something like "pump number 4 mate, and can you get me a pack of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild, a carton o' milk and a sausage roll with sauce" through glass about a foot thick.
A few weeks ago, another Notice of Proposed Development l0bbed into the mailbox. BP has decided it wants the site seen from other planets and not just low earth orbit, so it needs more illuminated signage.
Not on your bloody life, and the first shots in the war were officially fired in response to this callous provocation.
Before that, we've had border skirmishes but nothing you'd call real war. We regularly complain about deliveries at 11pm, or 5am on Sundays. They've pretty much ignored the complaints. We regularly complain about the shouting customers. They ignore us.
I even regularly poke my head over the back fence and shout something pithy and eloquent at roudy customers at 3am... usually something like "hey dickhead... shut the fuck up". This generally doesn't work because as anyone living in Sydney will know, those who are awake at 3am have most likelybeen clubbing since about 9pm, and are therefore too pissed to respond with anything more intelligent than "fuck off".
So in response to the Notice of Proposed Development, the Bear penned a nuclear tipped strategic missile and aimed it right at the local town council. The weapon went through BPs application with surgical precision, citing case law and slamming the applicant's callous disregard for human life (aka, my life). It also contained lots of big words and a few important sounding expressions like "amenity of the adjoining property", and "failure to organise their business activity to ensure minimal impact".
Boom. Round one to The Bear, and a shocked council planning inspector was forced to come to my back yard and actually look at the devastation first hand. Now irrevocably drawn into the conflict, he responded the way only bureaucrats can... with a letter back to BP.
Round two happens on Tuesday when I meet with BP's lawyers. They expressed "shock, distress and surprise" at the war declaration. They wish to sue for peace, but they'd better come prepared to meet our terms.
Across the street, the guerilla war's been raging for years.
The construction compound was created to build a new underground tollway, and while the land's zoned residential, they have planning exemption to use it for what can only be described as "neighbourhood destroying activity".
The compound created two problems. The first, during the day, is the incessant "beep beep beep" as assorted bobcats, back hoes and dump trucks flit around the site. It's an extremely annoying distraction, but there's not much I can do about it.
The second is far more important. They sometimes do it at night, and unlike the BP station, which is on the other side of the house to my bedroom, the compound is right at the bedroom window.
This week, they escalated, turning the occasional incursion into full blown war games. I say "games" because that's clearly what's happening. The workers on the site have obviously been briefed about the grumpy neighbour with the sharp and offensive tongue, and so they sneak onto the site at 4.30 am, do some beep beep beeping, and then bolt as soon as they see my flowing white bathrobe appear at my front door. One brazen truck driver actually turned towards me and gave me the finger this week as he gunned his giant two megawatt diesel motor.
Fortunately, they're nearly finished, though their "decomissioning" process involves lots of jack hammers, after which, they'll sell the site to a property developer who, I'm sure, will deliver another year of hell.
After that, if the world if still here, it should be quiet.
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