Legislate lifestyle?

Just a short ranty post while watching q and a. They had bill shorten on and honestly as much as I have come to despise labour and Kevin rudd I really respect bill after seeing him a few times now on qanda. He really strives to answer the questions put to him and answers in a way that says he believes in what he is doing and less about scoring political points. Tony Abbott was on and really seemed that every statement he made contained a cheap shot at current government. Bill never seemed to rise to the bait and gave answers not excuses or political jargon.


But really interesting discussion at the end about how Kevin rudd was voted in on his mandate on climate change. Yet after Kyoto, very little leadership. One of the other panel members said that after the world found out the ozone was dying, we all stopped using CFC's very quickly! The ozone layer is now actually healing. But the apathy of Australian toward climate change means no one is willing to give up their lifestyle to address climate change.

The guy then mentioned that when Sydney was running out of water, the government set legislation overnight that people could only use water on alternate days. Apparently there was outcry it would destroy their lifestyles, but it turns out everyone adjusted. In fact when dams recovered and they wanted to remove restrictions there was another huge outcry - to keep the legislation in place!

So then they asked, where climate change is such an important issue, indeed it is Kevin Rudd's mandate, why no legislation? Bill shorten said they don't want to legislate what people do to tackle this issue, and instead working towards thing like the ETS.

So this is after I read this earlier:

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/venues-brand-2am-lockout-a-return-to-joh-era-20091027-hino.html

Another stupid piece of Legislation put forward to restrict people's lifestyle! The argument is to reduce violence, but honestly where are the stats and how many people are affected by this? Another annoying thing where the bulk of voting public aren't out at all hours and traditionally dislike those that do (the media does not paint a good picture) so they score points by clamping down on their lifestyles.

But climate change? Where scientists all tell us how much this will put out actual scores of people both in the immediate future as well as future generations. Oh no can't legislate a change there. Might be more effective in keeping people safe and healthy than restricting young people who want to go out, but you might upset too many voters.


Grrrrrr...


-- Posted from my iPhone

Twitter is good i tell you!

So i'm a twitter user, http://twitter.com/nathan_m

A number of people I've had conversations with don't seem convinced on the awesomeness on twitter so thought I should post about it.

The general view I get is that many people have been burnt by the promise of myspace and facebook. What started as a great social tool or place to post photos became a crazy spam pit of mess and bloat and having to deal with friend request from people you hadn't spoken to in years, and probably never actually would again. What's that another app called twitter? that's just another facebook wall no thanks.

I must say when I first got on the twitter bandwagon, i tried it out and didn't really like it. Every time I loaded twitter up it would ask "What are you doing?" to which the truthful uninspiring answer would be checking the internet. So i didn't post that. Everyone one else had such interesting things to post about didn't seem something i wanted to share with the world was that i only ever checked the internet. Sure i did other fun things, but in the midst of those it hardly seems appropriate to run off to you're laptop and write about it for the faceless masses of web. The thought never really crossed my mind: if it had, would really be a bit to sad to consider it.

But then... dah Dah DAH! i gots me an iPhone :) And my word does it revolutionize the twitter. Now it allows me to tweet what i'm doing WHEN I'M ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING! Wouldn't seem like much of a difference would it? Except whenever you're out having fun, there is invariably a minute or two there where you find you must amuse yourself: The person you're talking to has to dash to the bathroom; you're waiting in line for something; one of the many other times when you would otherwise pretend to check your messages so you can look busy :) Instead you now have a chance to tell the rest of the world what you're up to! It may sound a bit self indulgent, but its no more so than blogging, and actually gives you a more raw voice rather than the mass editting and thought and thus checking one does when one rights a blog (enjoy the royal pronouns there).

So I would say, twitter is really only realised if you can harness it on a mobile device. Indeed one of the cool features of the twitterfon twitter app on iphone is to insert a google maps link of your current gps location. A friend who was camped out on top of kangaroo point cliffs for riverfire tweeted his location so we could use google maps on my phone to find him.

Another very cool things was to use it on the snow trip. We had 10 guys at Thredbo a few months ago, almost all with iPhones. We all tend to split off into smaller groups heading out at different times, some off to do lessons or different parts of the mountain. Usually try to meet up for lunch or schnappy hour. So you finish a lesson and think lets try call people to see where they all at. For that, you need to have reception... so does the person you're calling. Then you need to hope they can answer. If they manage to hear it, they need to be able to stop, take off gloves, find phone and answer it. If wearing a helmet, speaker phone is best bet. You could try SMS, but once again you could send to 9 other people and then wait to check replies.

...or use twitter :) Would finish a lesson, check twitter. Someone would have tweeted where they were all having lunch, so could get over to join them easily. One morning went up early with skiiers but the conditions weren't good for snowboarding so went for hot chocolate on top of mountain to warm up and dry out. Other guys yet to head up saw tweet, knew i was somewhere where i had gloves and helmet off and could take a call, so rang to get a weather report. Handy to see where abouts people were on mountain as most people would tweet whenever they took a break. I call it passive communication, and it's a great form lacking on traditional phones which was so useful on the mountain! Instead of sending a message to many people to request information, you can instead leave a message once with latest information for anyone who might wish to read it.

And finally, if you're not convinced yet, i'll just say that you can also follow dr karl on twitter! http://twitter.com/DoctorKarl . Some days work is just going slow so a quick check of twitter can let me get some brain spark from some of the random factoids posted by the good doctor. Learnt a cool new word today http://twitter.com/DoctorKarl/status/5224195107 petrichor which means the smell before rain. Awesome, never knew there was a word for that :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor

That's enough about twitter. Scuse this post for being a bit rushed. i had a much calmer tone when i first wrote this on the iphone but then stupid blogpress deleted it all so just rewrote it all now rather than start a new rant on the stupidness of the app

Blogpress sux

Not fuckin happy! Blogger on iPhone doesn't auto save draft when you exit. Lost an hour of blogging grrrrrrrr

Alcohol Myopia

So you're out on the town having a few drinks. Having a great time with your friends and suddenly someone starts talking about how much fun, say, a game of golf would be some time, and next thing you know you're all excitedly making plans for a game the next morning!

Come the next morning... and nursing a hangover and lack of sleep, everyone suddenly realises that game of golf is just not going to happen.

This is just a single example of a a much wider phenomenon, and there was a very cool wired article about this a few weeks back: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/vodkagoals/

The cool thing to notice is the graph. For non drinks, the expectation of succeeding at a goal is proportional to their committment to that goal. For drinkers, you would expect that gradient to alter to a degree, but it turns out it absolutely flatlines! Someone experiencing the effects of alcohol feels the same degree of commitment in going to the shops next week as they do in going to the moon!

So while this may seem like a bad thing, I think this is definitely one of the things that makes alcohol such a great social lubricant (good thing). Some of the really great conversations you have with people at the pub are the passionate conversations people have about niche interests, goals and dreams. We all have a huge list of things we think would be great to do, but realise aren't likely or aren't easily obtainable, so have little committment on our part. As such, we probably wouldn't talk about it normally as we wouldn't want to be held accountable or show our lack of commitment to something we admit we would like to do.

But now in the pub, someone mentions something that overlaps with your vast array of things you would be interested in, and possibly others as well, and now you are all engaged in an authentically passionate conversation about it. Your normal reservations discussing something you know so little about, or your perceived waste of time in hearing information about something you will never do are stripped away.

So sure, you converse with people all night about stuff that bears little fruit as you would demand from a normal conversaion, but the shear wealth of conversation it generates, getting us to expose our normally reserved dreams and goals in life, really allows those gems that come up. The great conversations you remember, the others forgotten.

A boon to justify that tipple at the pub :)

Upload movie test

Painful experience to blog about later. Need to see if this works

-- Posted from my iPhone

Finally caved and bought blogpress

So I may have posted a while ago about my frustration with trying to blog from the iPhone. At any rate I made this aware to mate Dave someway or another because he emailed to let me know blogpress was releasing a free lite edition that worked with blogger! Woot!

Anyway. That wa around first September. Half way through month still no updates. Been checking app store but nothing. Anyway checked today and full blogpress edition was less than half price. Probably last ditch effort to get money out of folks before free version released, but at close to $1 could justify paying for it.

So here is first blog attempt. Everything smooth so far. If I start to blog more frequently you'll know it's working for me :)

Edit: had to use web front end to add labels to post grrr


-- Posted from my iPhone

Coles has self check in in Toowong!

Stepped into Toowong last night, and the checkouts have all been re-adjusted. They've taken out a couple of the shlowmo normal lanes and put in like 6 self checkouts. This is awesome! I've read about it in the States but doubted we would ever see it here in Oz.

With my job I tend to fly a lot, and I must say one of the coolest things Virgin Blue did is bring in the self service kiosks. Walk into airport, see the HUGE queue but a whole lot of empty kiosks. Since I travel without baggage, I can spend a couple of minutes checking in and done! I think the extra benefit is that those 2 minutes I'm engaged in doing something. Even if waiting in line for a couple of minutes, I'm shuffling along with nothing to do but wait for OTHER people.

People don't like waiting. You see this whenever someone takes a side street to avoid waiting at traffic lights. In my experience, the travel time often ends up longer avoiding the traffic lights, but knowing this I'm still a sucker for taking alternate routes to avoid waiting.

Getting side tracked with analogies on my analogies here :) I didn't actually try the self checkout the other day, but I will next time I'm in. There are friendly staff around there helping people so good time to try it out with the training wheels on. Just think how great this will be when you dash in during quiet times to buy a loaf of bread, and don't have to wait at the only open checking behind the lady doing her weekly shop!