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!

Work unlocked blogger posts?!

So work used to allow us to read blogger blogs, but the url to create posts and comments was blocked. I think it was because *.blogger.com was blocked, which is used for creations, whereas *.blogspot.com was left alone by the proxy overlords.

So absentmindedly commented this morning, then realised I had access! woo! Not sure how long this will ask. Obviously must resist the urge to abuse, so keeping this post short and sweet and not bothering to spell check :P

Go cards, nice idea, poorly implemented

Acursed Go Cards!

This started as a reply comment to one of my previous posts, but as the ranting continued I thought it deserved its own post (especially since its so long since the original post).

So on the way home, Toowong train station is definitely one of the busiest 'off' stops. There is a pyramid set up where steps about 2 carriages apart both lead up to the same platform, and once up that platform, you must move to the single exit point like below:

|---|

X...|

|...|

A...B

|---|

Where X is the exit, A and B are where the two stair cases come up to the platform.

Anyway,X used to be a nice wide exit, which was great, as people would come up the two stair wells at the same time, and a steady stream of people could exit the station.

Now with Go cards, they have put go card 'barriers' up across this exit. There is small exit on the near side (close to A) of the exit, then next to that the barriers begin. Closest is a wide gate that is always open, then 3 or 4 narrow gates that only open when a go card is swiped. So what happens in practice?

For everyone exiting, the nearest exit is the non baricade exit. So those without a go card would prefer to exit there. Those with a go card that have to swipe then prefer the next closest exit, which is the open one that doesn't require a swipe.

So now when coming up the B exit without a go card, you have to cross a sea of people coming up from A and also B trying to get to that very narrow exit. If you can't make it there, you go the only other option, the open go card gate. If there are no go carders, you pass through quickly. But go carders pause and block the gate to swipe there card, so you get a backup.

The backed up line causes another person barrier to form, stopping any go carders from exit A from being able to get to other go card gates. So only the very few Go carders from exit B who have gone right early get a chance to use the narrow gates.

In general, you only see a few people using the narrow go card gates, and I've never seen anyone exitting from stair well 'A' use any of those narrow gates. These narrow gates take up half the previous exit space.

Now double the people are trying to fit through the left side of exit, and half of that space only allows oner person through at a time.

They took a very streamlined exit and screwed it up. Wish they'd looked at crowd dynamics. I choose to presume they were absolutely boneheaded in screwing this up, and it wasn't intentional to frustrate everyone into getting a go card.

Words to remember - Demonym

So I was watching a movie the other day (one of those set in WW2) and noticed that Jewish people were called Jews but German people were called Germans. Found it odd/interesting that in a few rare cases we have a different word between the generic adjective for things that come from a place, and the people that come from a place. I found I could distinguish the two by saying:

A [x] is [y]

So a Jew is Jewish

But a German is German.

Using this to stop myself getting context confused, I started running through different countries to try and figure out how often this occurs.

Australians are Australian, Americans are American, Canadians are Canadian. Seemed like most places I could think of were all boring and used the same variants.

Then I though to Great Britain and surrounds:

An Enligshman is English

A Scottsman (or Scott) is Scottish

An Irishman is Irish

A Frenchman is French.

Not as boring as being the same, but still pretty boring.

So I wanted to look this stuff up, but couldn't think what to look up.

Then stumbled across this on wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonym

Turns out Demonym is the word for a name of a person derived from their location name. Quite interesting reading on that page, recommend it. For instance, sometimes the reverse is true, and a place is named after the inhabitants, such as Thailand. Never made the connection before that Thailand is the land Thais inhabit.

Anyway, found all this a while ago... then forgot the words demonym, so now i've posted it somewhere i shouldn't forget again!

One example of why government web filter would suck

Look at smaller examples to see how bigger ones work.

In many work places, internet filters are put in place to prevent access to things that shouldn't be allowed at work.  Obviously if you are going to look at certain things on a work computer you are an idiot, but blocking of some other 'time wasters' happens as well, so things like facebook and myspace get blocked.  At the end of the day if you really feel the need to look at something blocked, whether you believe it is rightfully blocked or not, you can view it on your personal internet when you get home.

Anyway, interesting thing is the false positives that happen.  The other day I was googling some semi-work related stuff to understand stress as an engineering/geological idea.  This lead me to wiki page on Buckling, which appeared oddly to be blocked by works filter.

Couldn't figure this out, but someone who had seen the filter rules said there was something in there to block "uck.in" .  Looking up uck.in when I got home, I saw that this is a site which provides lists of anonymous proxies, so understandably the kind of site you would want to block at work (where such proxies would allow you to bypass all works filters).  However the filter for "uck.in" does not just block the hostname.  This blocks any url with "uck.in" appearing anywhere in the address, be it the host, path, or part of the query string.

Confused about why uck.in would match buckling?  The filter list uses regular expressions.  In regular expressoin, a period is a wild card for ANY character.  So will match "uck.in" as well as "uckain" "uckbin" "ucklin" "uck?in" "uck/in" "uck5in" etc... you get the idea. 

A few days later, xkcd put up this comic: http://xkcd.com/537/ but the image would not display? What was going on?  The image was called duckling.png.  There's that nasty regex again, better block it!

So obviously there was a flaw in the filtering.  We raised a ticket with the relevant group in charge of the filter, pointing out how they had mistyped the pattern and were blocking extra content.  The response was "thanks, we'll take that as a suggestion", which effectively means we can't be bothered fixing it, you can't show you need access to a site for work purposes which is being blocked.

So the annoying part?  If during my day to day job I one day I hit a URL with that in it, how do I know if I need access to it?  It might have the exact answer to a problem I need, or it could be a bogus link trying to sell a product (this is what happens when googling for solutions).  It would be very hard to show that I do need access when I obviously can't no in advance what's behind that url.

So I can see the same thing happening with government filter.  They get over zealous, block extra content, but they have no motivation to fix it so why would they?  Once something is falsely blocked, how can you prove it is erroneously blocked when you cannot access it in the first place to prove their is no objectionable content there?

Many other examples of why government filter would suck, this is just one.

Alcopops are dead hurruh!

So the alcopops tax got rejected in the senate last week.  I'm so happy that one of the stupid things the government has tried to brought in has actually been stopped.  There really seemed to be little evidence that the alcopops tax was doing anything to curb binge drinking, but it was providing a nice revenue stream for the government.

So I could rant on this at length, and I might just do that in a later post, but I just wanted to jot something down before i forget.

Was watching late line the other day after the senate rejected the tax, and Julia Gillard was on to spin how awful this was.  She made the point:  (read whole transcript here http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2520098.htm )

"What the Liberal Party has voted for in the Senate today is to return $300 million to the distillers"

This is a blurring of the point i feel.  The senate refused to pass the tax because it didn't do what it set out to do, which was curb binge drinking.  So the tax they have been collecting up till now has been illegally collected, and so yes it should be returned.  The government should not get to keep it!  Just because they don't like the distillers, it doesn't give them a right to tax them illegally.

Brisbane's 3 Public Transport methods

So in sunny Brisbane we have three different mediums (is that the word?) which are integrated into our public transport system. Bus, Rail, and Citycat (there are ferries, which are a poor mans citycat ).

So they all have their uses, but one interesting thing I find is how their ticketing acquisition structure differentiates.

Bus - buy ticket from driver WHEN you get on
Train - buy ticket from vendor/machine BEFORE you get on
Citycat - buy ticket from vendor/mahine AFTER you get on

Which is better? Let's discuss buses vs trains for a bit, as this is what I have most exposure to.

You are running late for a train, you see it pulling into the station as you run to catch it. But you don't have a ticket. Do you jump on train without a ticket and risk a fine, or buy a ticket but accept you will miss that train, possibly waiting half an hour for another? But you run to a bus stop just as the bus is arriving! hurruh you made it. you jump on and get a chance to fish some cash out and buy a ticket.

So now we are on our form of transport we carry on. However the pro/con is now reversed. At each train stop, there is a specific stop time, usually under a minute where people can get on/off the train, and we continue on. All very uniform, no delays.

As each bus stops, you get everyone fishing their cash out, trying to find change, ask the driver what ticket they need, and you can end up with lengthy unpredictable delays at each stop.

Now look at the city cat. With the city cat, there is only a small delay at each port allowing people on and off the citycat, no requirement to have a ticket for this part. One on the cat (and after it has perhaps taken off and you are en route along with all other passengers), you can purchase your ticket.

Citycat is obviously superior! Why can't we use this on other forms of transport?

When visiting Melbourne, the Tram system there is run like the Citycat. The driver is seperate and only responsible for driving the tram, each tram has a ticket machine on board so you can buy a ticket. Would be great to have something similar on trains, though with the overcrowding we have I guess that's almost impossible to use in rush hour.

An interesting thing we saw in Japan with buses was that you pay for your ticket when you get OFF the bus. Gives a bit more leeway, as once on the bus you can sit down and work out how much you should pay. Gives people a chance to organize themselves more than when they get on (when running late for a train, you can't stop and pull out your cash in preparation easily)

I broke my ear

So the xmas rush is over, but it feels like i've spent most of the last few weeks under the weather.

Had some friends over for drinks a few weeks back, had a great time, but later in the night we decided we'd had enough beer and that gin and tonics would be the go.  I have a couple of kick scooters (like the skateboards with a stick for steering) so though it would be a good idea to ride down to the local bevan (7 11).

Now I live at the top of a hill and ride down it on my scooter on the wy to the train station each day I go to work.  Sit on the brake at the back to control speed, keep an eye on whats coming up, and everything's peachy.

After a few drinks however, going down in the dark seemed feasible.  So of course couldn't see much of what was on the road.  And also decided to let rip with the speed.  Surely worst that happens if i have to slam the break on at the bottom of the hill. Even knew where a soft patch of grass was at the bottom lest slowing down doesn't work and I need to bail.

Turns out, after picking up a bit of speed, the speed wobbles take over and bam!  Scooter went one way, I rolled the other. Landed on knees and left hand and rolled left, bang my shoulder, and finally my head.  Heard a bit of a bang or pop noise and the hearing in that ear went all muffled.

Got back up, found my glasses, and we made our way onto bevan and back.  Hearing didn't seem to be getting any better so rang 13 health to tell them my symptons.  They said probably not anything to worry about, but suggested I call out the after hours doc to check me out.

So rang that number, and they sent a doctor out, took about half an hour.  Checked I didn't have concussion, stuck a light in my ear and gave me the all clear.  Just to get it checked if it got worse or pained up.

So go to work the next day, and find out that chewing causes massive pain and clicking in my jaw near ear.  Got bad toward end of arvo, so bailed out (GF picked me up) and went and sat at dr's waiting for a chance to see one (no appointments available).  Only had to wait about 5 mins and got called in.  Same deal, shine light in ear, nothing to see.  Suggested I go for a CT scan.

So the next day I go to Wesley and get a CT scan.  Was kinda cool, though the waiting for results kinda sucked. They told me it would be an hour to hour and a half wait.  Ended up being two and a half hours.  Went back to doctor with results.

They had a little note there saying suspected frature around temple bone or something, because of evidence of air bubble, but no visible fracture lines.  Doctor couldn't see it and said give it a week and get  second opinion from ear nose and throat doc.

Since then pain has gone away, but hearing hasn't improved.  Constantly feels like there is water in my ear , but with consistency of air.  Same muffled feeling.

So now it's next week, but I have the flu.  Which has screwed up my ears nose and throat so doesn't seem much point seemed anyone about my ear at present.  I really hope it repairs because I'm a bit of an audiophile and while I can deal with it in the short term, the thought of never again hearing a song or movie in balance as it was originally intended frustrates me to no end.