Clouds and planets

Hello blog, it's been a while! How's things? I've been busy over on Twitter: http://twitter.com/beet

Austin Mini Planet by Hi I'm Santi

Just wanted to quickly recall a conversation I had with my son the other day:

We were walking home from school on a grey, rainy day when he asked me where planets come from. Whenever he asks anything which is even vaguely philosophical I always avoid offering my own opinion and just reply with "what do you think?".

He went on to say something along the lines of: "Well, clouds kind of stick together to make rain drops, so maybe planets were made the same kind of way. Maybe there was all this dust and stuff and it kind of stuck together and turned into planets."

I was taken aback and had to ask if he'd heard something like that somewhere before. He then went on to ask where plants and animals came from, and how people were made. Maybe the cloudy weather had him in a contemplative mood that day.

Fortunately we arrived home just in time to save me from having to either offer my own opinion or pretend I don't have one. I really want him to keep asking awesome questions like that and find his own answers as he grows up.

He never ceases to amaze me with how a child's mind which has been spared any kind of indoctrination can see things so clearly sometimes.

Green bins

An update to the ongoing saga with the gardens in our rented town house:

I've previously mentioned our real estate agent sending us a confrontational email about being in "breach of contract" because the gardens were not up to spec. Well recently we received a much more civil email asking us to attend to some creeper vines taking over the front garden. We've just renewed our lease for another 12 months, at a 4% rent increase, and were assured that the weed situation would be taken care of by a contractor because the weeds were present before we moved in. Two quotes from independent contractors later, nothing happens, and I get an email asking me to attend to it...

What we thought were some nice little bushes have since proved themselves to be be poplar trees by growing from only a few feet to over 1 story high. Meanwhile, the creeper vines do their part to try and overtake the garden by continually overgrowing and if left unchecked inevitably covering everything. This is the second time I've had to spend a day getting rid of them.

Rather than making a big deal of it, I reported that I have removed the vines, and asked if when a contractor does finally come to attend to the poplar trees they could dispose of them. The reply simply asked if I can just use our green bin. To explain, each of the 30 or so town houses in this strata have a tiny wheely bin for general rubbish which is collected daily, and those with gardens are supposed to have an additional green bin which can be used for garden waste, but only once a month or something. The closest thing to a green bin present at the property when we moved in looked like this:




The agent was aware of this, having received the very same photo via email and then coming to inspect the situation in person after we moved in over a year ago. Nothing has been done since, but rather than a pile of crap in one corner of the garden I'm fairly sure that we should have been provided with a functional green bin. Actually, there shouldn't have been any noxious weeds in the garden in the first place, and if there are it is certainly not the tenants responsibility to dispose of them...

Well fuck it, we're thinking about buying something soon, but we'd have to think twice before buying from this agent.

Conroy wants $43 BILLION dollars to build his own damn broadband network then...

In his relentless pursuit of Australian internet censorship, Senator Stephen Conroy has proposed that the federal government let him build his own fourty three billion dollar broadband network, undoubtably with filtering built in. Our 3 main ISPs, Telstra, Optus, and IInet have refused to participate, so he thinks he'll just roll out his own... the man is clearly insane.

Listen Conroy: we don't need faster internet connections, we need more bandwidth!!! We also don't want or need a mandatory internet filter.

Steven Conroy fielding questions about The Great Firewall Of Australia (internet filter) on ABC1 Thur 26 9:30pm AEDT

GetUp! are taking questions to be posted to Steven Conroy when he appears on ABC1 for a Q&A session about his proposed Australian internet filter at http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet&id=580.The form only appears to allow you submit one question though, so here's a few more that I'd like to hear his answers for:

"Please explain how the internet filter is more effective at addressing issues in society than educating parents and children to raise public awareness about the internet and how to use it responsibly?"

"Please explain how limiting access to information about issues in society does anything to address the actual problems that cause them? "

"How will making it more difficult to access inappropriate content online in any way prevent people from engaging in inappropriate behaviour - will they not simply find other communication channels?"

"What specific research can you refer to that clearly shows a correlation between an increase in inappropriate behaviour and an increase in internet usage?"

"Quoting specific research sources, what are your predictions for the decrease in inappropriate behaviour that will result as a direct result of the internet filter?"

"Please give a specific example of a well case of inappropriate behaviour that could not have been perpetrated without access to information on the internet."

"As the vast majority of inappropriate behaviour is conducted offline, would it not be more effective to address the societal problems causing it directly and in so doing affect both offline and internet behaviour?"

"Please quote specific research which shows the percentage of inappropriate content found both online and offline and explain why it is more important to target the internet."

"Why do you feel your role as Communications Minister includes deciding what comprises "inappropriate" content and what gives you the right to impose your moral compass over others?"

Cultured Code support broken?

Please, Cultured Code, maybe it's just me but I'm having major issues with Things Mac/Touch:

• Syncing between Mac/iPhone is sloooow.... Once it's finished sending data, Things Mac saturates the CPU for at least a minute while "Processing"...


• Moving items is also slow. Just dragging a single item out of the inbox into an area invokes the spinning beach ball of death for several seconds.


• Seems to affect anything related to moving/re-positioning items

Your support system seems to be broken, I submit bug reports, get an automated response, and that is the last I ever hear of it. So I tried using the forums, but after creating 2 accounts with different email addresses I am unable to log in and post questions. I can search and browse though and see that I'm not the only customer experiencing similar issues.

Please help! I love things, I written before about why I prefer Things' tags/areas to OmniFocus' more rigid GTD contexts/projects. I'm begging...

Only humans dream?

Web censorship plan in it's final death throes

From http://www.smh.com.au

Senator Nick Xenophon's stocks just went up in my book:

Xenophon said instead of implementing a blanket mandatory censorship regime the Government should instead put the money towards educating parents on how to supervise their kids online and tackling "pedophiles through cracking open those peer-to-peer groups"

So glad to know that I'm not alone in opposing the internet filter:

The policy has attracted opposition from online consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children's welfare groups, the Opposition, the Greens, NSW Young Labor and even the conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who famously tried to censor the chef Gordon Ramsay's swearing on television.

Thank you to GetUp for their efforts, glad to have given my support. Their telephone poll found miniscule numbers of people backing the filter:

This week, a national telephone poll of 1100 people, conducted by Galaxy and commissioned by online activist group GetUp, found that only 5 per cent of Australians want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online and only 4 per cent want Government to have this responsibility.

Looks like Netspace found most of their customers strongly opposed, 6% strongly for, and the rest presumably not giving a shit:

A recent survey by Netspace of 10,000 of the ISP's customers found 61 per cent strongly opposed mandatory internet filtering with only 6.3 per cent strongly agreeing with the policy.