• Revenge of the Tattooed Nerds. I've wanted to get a tattoo for a long time, but I can never come up with a design that I'm happy with. You have to live with it forever, after all.
• Aussie inventor plans to ICE television advertising: News. From the guy who brought us the Fairlight Music Synthesizer, a Tivo-ish device which could make those bloody TV ads shut up (I don't care what the stations claim, ads are at a much higher volume than the programs).
• An Activists Guide to Exploiting the Media. Actually "exploiting" is overstating the case, this is basically a Public Relations/Publicity how-to.

Passing boats rescue crashed helicopter crew. 30/07/2004. ABC News Online / NEWS.com.au | Chopper crashes after take-off (July 30, 2004). Emergency vehicles, news crews, helicopters over the river... You can tell when Something Is Happening.

Update: includes photo - NEWS.com.au | Chopper crash in Brisbane CBD (July 30, 2004)

• Why you shouldn't be using passwords of any kind on your Windows networks: So here's the deal - I don't want you to use passwords, I want you to use pass-PHRASES. This would be great if you only had to log in once to access everything. Most people don't live in single-sign-on nirvana however. For example, the start of my work day I log in for network (1), internet access (2) and email/groupware client (3). Then if I have to access a secondary groupware system I'm authenticating again (4), one (5) or both of our portals (6), shell (7), FTP (8) and restricted web tools (9+)... and that's just the most common stuff. I'd hate to be banging away at a pass phrase for every one of those.
• Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report | Only defenestrate: Douglas Bowman?s 'Throwing Tables Out the Window' is a compelling crash course and proof of concept on the business benefits described at length in Designing With Web Standards. I'd link to the Stopdesign article directly, but Zeldman used the word "defenestrate" and it's such a cool word...
• Stopdesign | Throwing Tables Out the Window, ok so Stopdesign deserves traffic too. Basically the article details just how much bandwidth a high-traffic site can save by converting from bloaty, table-based design into clean CSS-based design. Check out the table near the end.
• Eight things I wish I?d known when I started ~ Archives ~ 26 July 2004 ~ Authentic Boredom. Sage advice.
• super mario rampage (flash game). Mario gets tooled up and goes on a shotgun rampage.

• NEWS.com.au | Saddam suffers a 'stroke' (July 29, 2004): ONE of Saddam Hussein's legal team has claimed the former Iraqi dictator has suffered a stroke and could die before his trial. Amazing how a trial brings on terminal illness like this.
• Online ad spending tipped to increase. 28/07/2004. ABC News Online: Internet advertising will grow 27 per cent this year to $8.4 billion, with double-digit growth for both paid search listings and display ads like banners, Jupiter said in a report.
• Custody overhaul to improve men's access to children. 29/07/2004. ABC News Online: The Federal Government has announced an overhaul of family law arrangements, with plans to give men involved in marriage break-ups greater access to their children. Note the implicit admission that the current system is stacked against men.
• A daughter's agony, her family's suffering - National - www.smh.com.au / Five may go free as rape family calls it quits - National - www.smh.com.au: The parents of a gang-rape victim want to stop her giving evidence for a third time if her attackers are granted a retrial, meaning the five men who attacked her may walk free. This sort of thing has got to stop - making victims testify over and over again is undue stress, particularly when all they can do is say the same things again. Unless the testimony itself is the reason for retrial/etc, then transcripts or video of the original testimony should be used if the victim is unable to reappear - they should still have the choice to reappear, but they shouldn't be forced into it.
• In the zone - Upgrade - smh.com.au, a tech review about how wonderful ZoneAlarm is. Also a review of a CPU fan which keeps running for a few minutes after you shut down the computer, to avoid a heat spike.
• Fahrenheit 9/11 - FilmReviews - www.smh.com.au: [W]hen journalism becomes so degraded that Fox News can get away with the slogan 'We report, you decide', then Michael Moore is what you get in opposition. Damn straight. Journalism has been compromised by media monopolies and a failure to meet its own standards. Yes, journalism has standards; and they are actually quite comprehensive, idealistic and based on ethical considerations. Then you leave University, enter the industry and suddenly you are faced with the realities of media in the modern world. The majority of the public doesn't actually want news, facts and discussion; it wants entertainment. The people making the money don't want the public to think, so they also want entertainment going out. However the public still expects journos to break the big stories, and the people making the money know the journos have to look like it. The journos are stuck in the middle of all that crap.

Toowong French Patisserie has cinnamon gelati. Wow. Yum. YUM. Wow.

That is all.

• Seagate extends HDD warranties to five years | The Register. Hot damn, I need to buy a new drive anyway.
• WAT makes websites accessible | The Register: Adjustments that are possible using WAT include changes to colours, background, text sizes, line spacing and fonts. Users can also choose to eliminate banner advertisements and other images and adjust keystroke timings. OK. It's great that IBM has noticed accessibility, particularly considering its atrocities in that field via Lotus Notes. But this package sounds like ...well, Opera. WAT sounds like it was developed by people who didn't know a browser other than MSIE existed. One key feature would be the screen reader, assuming it works as well or better than JAWS. Being free, WAT does give users an alternative to extremely expensive screen readers. But overall this sounds like IBM waving old ideas around and acting like they came up with them.
• IT industry warned over wasted money | The Register : Four in ten of the UK's bosses reckon they've wasted money on new technology. ... [The survey] also found that many company bosses rely on friends, family or colleagues for info on new software and products rather than turning to IT vendors for help.

• NEWS.com.au | Staring down the barrel at charges (July 27, 2004): THE female security guard at the centre of yesterday's shooting could now face murder charges, leading legal experts said yesterday. ... Since February 2002 [the law has stated that] you can't intentionally or recklessly cause death to protect property or to prevent criminal trespass. It's a slippery slope to giving attackers more rights than their victims. Obviously you can't have free reign to kill people, but at the same time you do wonder where the line is. This case sounds like it will come down to an interpretation of whether the guard was in danger at the precise time of the shooting. Apparently if she'd shot him while he was belting her with the knuckle dusters it would have been ok.
• Worm slows search engines. 27/07/2004. ABC News Online: Security researchers say the new MyDoom worm scours victims' computers and Internet search engines for email addresses and propagates itself by sending an infected file to the addresses it finds. Take out Google... now there's a bit of cyber terrorism. There are a lot of people who don't seem to realise there are other search engines. Take Google away from them and it's like taking away the net.
• Wiring blamed for Jetstar emergency. 27/07/2004. ABC News Online. That's two incidents in a matter of weeks. Jetstar is fucked.
• Trevor takes TV's biggest prize. 26/07/2004. ABC News Online: He takes home $1 million, the largest cash prize in Australian television history. I wonder if they've had to sedate Eddie Macguire over that statement ;)
• FOX SPORTS | League | NRL defend 'whipping boys' (July 27, 2004): Chief operating officer Graham Annesley has defended referees after a dramatic weekend which centred on at least five controversial incidents. This is the NRL reaping what it sowed by giving all the big games to the one referee for years on end... now that he's retired we've got a bunch of inexperienced refs. Just like inexperienced players, they make mistakes.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report | The New Samaritans: discussing the emerging 'good samaritan' phenomenon in which independent web designer/developers, frustrated by a hard-to-use or inaccessible site, voluntarily rework the site in question. This has been done for many high-profile sites (Google springs instantly to mind), yet these freebies are almost never used. This article talks about the reasons, and also why these actions are still worthwhile to the web as a whole.

• Philippines, Spain reject Aust terror claims. 26/07/2004. ABC News Online: The Philippines has called Australia 'narrow-minded' for suggesting its pullout from Iraq triggered the latest rash of hostage-takings. There's nothing to say it didn't trigger more hostage-taking. It certainly isn't a long bow to draw - terrorists now know how to get what they want from the Phillippines. Why not other countries too? I'm torn on this issue. If it was a member of my family I'd want them back no matter what, but I realise that giving in to terrorists potentially opens the floodgates.
• Slow on the draw - Spike - www.smh.com.au: In the wake of Mark Latham's admission that he tried marijuana in his youth, the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, and the NSW Premier, Bob Carr, have been sucked into the dope debate. Sounds like both of them smoked it too, but want to keep some sort of moral highground. Personally I'd rather Latham own up than spin that fucking stupid line "I smoked but didn't inhale". That's like saying "I drank but didn't swallow". So what if he tried a spliff when he was younger? So long as he isn't bonging on every day now it really won't make any difference to his performance as a leader. Well, it would preclude a major crackdown on pot smokers, but frankly that's a good thing: concentrate on cracking down on the hard stuff. A few stoned hippies is hardly as bad as OD'ing junkies and psychotic amphetamine freaks.
• Voters don't care about my age: PM - National - www.smh.com.au. That's true. We don't like him purely on his own merits.
• Olympic sites give taxpayers rough ride - National - www.smh.com.au: NSW taxpayers are contributing about $46 million a year to keep struggling Olympic venues across Sydney open, four years after the "best ever" Games. Every games gets called the Best Ever, it's traditional. But there's no doubt that Olympics cost massive amounts and leave a bunch of non-viable venues afterwards. Last I knew, the winter Olympics has actually recognised this and no longer requires host cities to build a bobsled run since they just don't pay for themselves in the long term. Bobsled events can be held elsewhere in parallel.
• Internet release may thwart U2 album thieves. 24/07/2004. ABC News Online: Irish rock band U2 might rush release its upcoming album as a legal download on Apple's iTunes music store [if pirate copies turn up on the net]... Experts say such a move, which is being contemplated as a response to the presumed theft of a U2 compact disc in France last week, would be unprecedented.
• OK, so I do watch the odd reality show. NEWS.com.au | Entertainment | Block bids miss mark (July 26, 2004). Two of the four couples on The Block got $0 for their work... that just isn't right. I know they went into it willingly, but those reserve prices seem awfully high ($800k *reserve*?) - they'd have to auction for a phenominal price to win any cash. Surely Channel 9 could have ponied up some cash for a minimum prize. They'll be stuffed getting applicants next time (if there is a next time) - you might be slightly famous at the end, but that's hardly going to make up for winning nothing after working for 102 days while still keeping your day job.

• Highway 4: Who said it? G.W. Bush or Homer Simpson. The worst thing is when you think it was Homer and then find out it was Dubya. Just let me vent this: HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT AMERICA DO NOT RE-ELECT THAT MORON!!! Ok, I feel better now.
• Strange & Unusual Dictionaries. These days that probably includes a dictionary that gets used.
• Guardian Unlimited | Online | Listen to the flip side: [A] recent study has shown that ... 'Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. ... [D]uring the past nine months, CD sales in America have increased by 7%, despite continued growth in file sharing. The industry sticks to its guns. After all, cassette tape trading destroyed the industry..... oh wait, no it didn't.
• Boing Boing: Secret Swing visit report. One art installation in about a million is actually cool in some way.
• Boing Boing: US Copyright Office Wants to outlaw VCRs? Uhh. Uhmmm. Oh what the hell, like anyone could still be surprised by this sort of crap.

Extremely nifty. Australian IT - Lexar Jumpdrive Trio (Ian Cuthbertson, JULY 20, 2004). I've been thinking about getting Sony's version of this, which has 128mb on board plus your memory stick as well. However... this is very cool, and extensible and replaces annoying cables!

Be still my geeky heart.

This sort of stuff - The Monty Hall page - is the reason I just don't get maths. I can't follow the probability logic.

Bigger breasts offered as perk to US soldiers. 22/07/2004. ABC News Online: The United States Army has long lured recruits with the slogan 'Be All You Can Be' but now soldiers and their families can receive plastic surgery, including breast enlargements, on taxpayers' money. ... an Army spokeswoman [is quoted] as saying, 'the surgeons have to have someone to practice on'.

Maybe it's a new strategy - send only DD women to the front line to distract the enemy. Seriously though, how does a tit job prepare a surgeon for removing bullets from people? Are they saying the surgical trauma of a facelift is about the same as a gunshot wound?

Boing Boing: Bottle-cap tripod, then in response someone has done the DIY bottle cap tripod.

Livid festival cancelled. 21/07/2004. ABC News Online: Organisers have called off this year's Livid music festival, with organisers blaming a shortage of international headline acts. I'm quite surprised that they'd do this... there must be a really serious drought of talent if even Livid can't find a headline act. It has, after all, been years since the first "Livid sold out before the tickets" jokes started to appear. *mreeow*

Pity Livid couldn't try going back to its roots and doing something on a smaller scale with local/alternative acts.

• Internet addresses 'for all'. 21/07/2004. ABC News Online: Mr Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some "25,000 trillion trillion times". / Slashdot | IPv6 is Here includes some less glowing comments.
• FOX SPORTS | Athens Olympics | Cycling | AOC may face legal action (July 21, 2004): CYCLIST Sean Eadie may sue the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) because he lost a lucrative sponsorship deal, his manager said today.
• Athletes achieve a personal best in sex - News in Depth - : American athletes have revealed that for many competitors life in the athletes' village was just an extended party fuelled by sex, booze and rock 'n' roll. There's a news flash. Imagine putting a bunch of elated, fit people into an exotic location... and finding out they party!
• Cyber cop going, going, gone - Next - smh.com.au : It will be MacGibbon's job to protect eBay users against online scams, focusing primarily on prevention. He says educating users can eliminate 97 per cent of scams, but even then there are no guarantees.
• Do we want to see the biff again? - League - www.smh.com.au. It'll probably always happen during State of Origin and occasionally in club matches. It's clearly not condoned by the league bosses, but beyond that you can't control it.
• Developers play air guitar to Megadeth | The Register: Shockingly, the results of its poll among 200 students at the Training Company's UK residential courses reveal that developers are malodorous headbangers playing air guitar to Megadeth, Microsoft Certified professionals get their rocks off to Britney while IT directors can be found sipping the finest wines while Mozart tinkles away in the background. No stereotype-fulfilling findings there, then.
• Slashdot | Let the Mindgames Begin: relaxation turned into a game. Maybe you could follow up with a round on the Painstation :)

i just got a recording which include "Welcome I'm Jo!". why the fuck do i need to know who is behind a recorded voice?

tweaker @ Myspace.com, includes a neat preview/play system (four tracks). Vrenna was a member of Nine Inch Nails and he's remixed/collaborated on a metric shitload of stuff you've probably already heard.

• smh.com.au | Sean Eadie cleared - now for Athens. Begs the question why dump him until this finding was made.
• The Australian: Police halt fighting factions [July 14, 2004]: A Left vs Right power struggle in the National Union of Students erupted in a brawl at a recent meeting at the University of Sydney. See, real politics is different from student politics - in real politics they've learned to bolt the chairs to the floor.
• The Australian: Anti-smoking campaign uses lies [July 20, 2004]: The Swedish organisation A Non Smoking Generation on Monday covered Stockholm in posters claiming that smoking stunts penis growth and that cigarette filters are filled with mouse excrements. ... [and] that second-hand smoke is killing birds and that girls usually start smoking because they're stupid. Now that's funny.
• Yahoo! News - Schwarzenegger mocks California legislature as "girly-men" . Why have a serious politician when you can get this sort of entertainment?

Ctrl Alt Del - Tragically l337 | 2004.07.19

The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art | Chapter 6 | 43278613. A neat example of how to work up an image.

• Jetstar defends pilots over 'near miss'. 18/07/2004. ABC News Online: Jetstar chief executive Alan Joyce says the pilots involved in an alleged near miss 'did the right thing'. How very enlightening. Here's everyone else thinking the pilots should have just run into each other.
• Bus drivers in the seat of power - National - www.smh.com.au: Bus drivers will be able to order unruly school students off their buses and refuse to pick up students who have misbehaved under revised transport laws. This could only work if a second person was on the bus along with the driver. The driver cannot both drive the bus and watch the kids well enough to know what's going on - enough to identify exactly who did what. That, or buses will end up with cameras recording everything - stills can then be sent to schools and THEY can identify the kids. But that's a pretty serious privacy issue. Frankly, bus drivers are part of a group of people who I *used* to have sympathy for... but having been tailgated by speeding buses one too many times, fuck 'em.

Dilbert Comic Strip Archive - 2004.07.18

One terabyte of email... it sounds like a great deal, huh? Well it's not so great when the sysadmin thinks the Bastard Operator From Hell is a manual and not a satire.

There's an email system called youvegotpost (screw giving them any referring links, add a .com if you're curious) which has become the subject of a Something Awful forum thread (jump to page 11 for the really nasty stuff). To cut a long story short, the sysadmin doesn't just read user email; they delete email/accounts pretty much at whim and when judged to do most damage. They not only delete any account linked with Gmail, they have harvested email addresses off Something Awful and deleted those accounts too.

Take a look throught the forum... it's incredible reading.

(thanks to Alan F for the link)

If Architects had to work like Web Programmers

Brisbane Goth Community - RIP Will Serantak. Not 100% confirmed, but sadly this does seem to be true - Will has been lost to drugs.

I didn't know Will very well, but I spoke to him many times out-and-about and online, and knew him as a nice guy. There's no doubt he was a talented artist and DJ and his contribution to the scene was tremendous.

For those who don't know, Will ran a string of excellent clubs (including the Midian events) and DJed at a great many others (including Ward 10b). He was also a notable artist - his club flyers have been kept for years by a great many Brisbane sceners.

My condolences go to his friends and family.

• Anti-Howard website faces legal action. 16/07/2004. ABC News Online / Howard 'lies' website denies Labor ties. 16/07/2004. ABC News Online / Australian IT - PR linked to Howard site (, JULY 16, 2004). I keep thinking.... it must hit pretty close to the bone to get Howard/Liberals all riled up like this!
• Search firms hunt the next dotcom boom - National - www.smh.com.au: The boom days of the internet are back, but this time it's not the content, but the means of finding it that is causing the excitement. Sensis' PR firm is doing incredibly well - it's just another fucking search engine, yet it's all over the news. On top of that... Sensis is responsible for the Australian Yellow Pages website, which doesn't fucking work. Quite literally - search for stuff in your own suburb and you'll get results from different states. In short, the level of quality is about the same as everything else Telstra does...
• NEWS.com.au | Smarter skimming device found (July 16, 2004): Michael Boutouridis, from the NSW fraud squad, said the new skimming device showed that technology used by fraudsters had moved up a notch.
• NEWS.com.au | Entertainment | U2 hunt lost album (July 16, 2004): Police in southern France were today investigating the disappearance of a rough cut of the forthcoming album by Irish rock group U2, amid fears it could be posted on the internet months ahead of the official release.

Questions and Answers. Antony Green's Election Guide. Federal Election 2004. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This is quite a good site - particularly since you can pose any question you like. It's not like the AEC does anything this useful...

Winnebago Man.

The Courier-Mail: Probe call on website targeting PM [15jul04]

Prisoner of Azkaban movie, an emoticon summary. Harry Potter as done in emoticons.

• NEWS.com.au | Eadie vows to beat drugs claim (July 15, 2004). So far nothing has actually been proved, yet he's been dumped from the team. What happens if he can prove his innocence, but it takes long enough to miss the games? If he's guilty then screw him, but we are supposed to presume innocence.
• Australian IT - The way the web was won (Sheena MacLean, JULY 15, 2004): The web is unique in that news editors can measure what stories are being read and how long people spend reading them. The results can challenge conventional judgments about news values and, with visits to online news sites increasing tenfold in recent years, they may help to define the environment in which media buyers are increasingly spending their dollars.
• BBC NEWS | Americas | Senate rejects gay marriage ban : An attempt to change the US constitution to ban gay marriage has been rejected by the Senate. I don't understand people who think allowing gay marriage will cause the decline and fall of civilisation. Maybe someone should explain that gay people don't disappear just because they aren't allowed to get married.

• Aust may ship nuclear waste offshore. 14/07/2004. ABC News Online: Prime Minister John Howard says the Commonwealth may send its low-level radioactive waste to an offshore island after abandoning proposals for a national waste dump in South Australia. ... Opposition leader Mark Latham says the Government has scrapped its plan for a dump in South Australia because of the looming election. / NEWS.com.au | PM caves in over nuclear dump (July 14, 2004): After furious cabinet negotiations over the damaging political issue, John Howard has agreed that South Australia - where three key marginal Coalition seats are under threat at the coming election - will not be used as a national waste depository in either the short or long term.
• NEWS.com.au | Tobacco's formula for attracting young (July 14, 2004): Australia is one of the nations where Formula One continues to brand cars with tobacco names, with a ban not due until 2006. In markets such as Europe, where bans are already in force, car liveries remain largely intact, leaving tobacco sponsors easily identifiable. This is why you see cars in some grand prix events done up with the driver's name in big letters - it replaces the cigarette brand name (eg. 'West', or whatever the brand is, becomes 'Kimi' on Makkinen's car).
• James Hardie makes asbestos compo offer. 14/07/2004. ABC News Online: Building materials company James Hardie has announced it is willing to spend extra money to fund compensation for victims of asbestos-related diseases if a new system capping pay-outs is put in place.
• Speed drunk: state bans 'ultimate party toy' - National - www.smh.com.au: A product that promises to get people drunk 10 times faster without the punishment of a hangover or calories has been banned by the NSW government.
• China welcomes birth of panda. 14/07/2004. ABC News Online: The first panda of the year has been born in captivity in China. The 'first panda of the year' sounds like 'the first rain of the season'... amuses me, don't know why :)
• NEWS.com.au | Druid charged for carrying sword (July 14, 2004). Those wacky druids.

• The Forbidden Library: Banned and Challenged Books. I love this one: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Four members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee (1983) called for the rejection of this book because it is a 'real downer.'
• iTunes iSbogus: So why does iTunes give artists such a raw deal? Because it's the exact same deal that artists have always gotten from the big five record companies. Despite huge new efficiencies created by internet distribution --no CDs to make, no distributors to store and ship them, no CD stores to build and run-- artists receive the same pathetic cut. Reading this I ponder... what we (music fans) really need is a list of postal addresses for our favourite bands, so we can just send them $5 or whatever. Or even go the whole hog: rip the CD, send them the $30 direct. It's not robbing the artist since they get the cash. The record industry would have to admit they don't give a toss about the artist in their bid to sue people for doing it. It wouldn't change anything, but at least we wouldn't have to hear the bullshit argument "you're forcing the artists into poverty". musiclink is a site which acts as a conduit for sending cash direct to artists.... personally, I'd rather do it myself so I know it actually got sent to the artist. But I acknowledge that I have some trust issues :)
• John Howard Lies, a site which tracks all the lies told by John Howard. Once upon a time, the media did this sort of thing. Now they're on far too tight a leash to make a real difference. So we should turn to the net. A good quote:
  'My Government will not introduce any new taxes, and will not increase existing taxes.' John Howard, 1996
  Since 1996, the Howard Government has introduced or increased taxes 144 times.

• Latham 'betting each way' on Iraq. 13/07/2004. ABC News Online. This could also be couched in terms of going along with the UN line, instead of the US line. / Australia sends more troops to Iraq - After Saddam - www.smh.com.au: Australia is to send an extra 30 troops and six armoured vehicles to Iraq, Defence Minister Robert Hill said today, taking the number of personnel there to 880. ...speaking of following the US line...
• Indigenous voters urged to have their say. 13/07/2004. ABC News Online: A Greens' candidate for the federal election says Aborigines are being alienated from the political process because of low voter turnout. I'm not sure I've ever seen this issue raised before... it certainly needs attention if the turnout is low in all electorates across Australia. It may not be a perfect process, hell it may not even be a good one, but it's what we have.
• I don't want to lead again: Beazley - National - www.smh.com.au: Beazley ... said he viewed his new role as that of an 'active participant'. He was not a leadership aspirant, he said. Didn't he say that last time, just before he challenged for party leadership?
• Philippines to pull out troops to save hostage - Global Terrorism - www.smh.com.au: The Philippines says it will withdraw its troops from Iraq as soon as possible to save a Filipino hostage threatened with death by militants. Doing what the terrorists want... I guess someone was going to do it at some stage. I wonder if the hostage will actually be released.
• NEWS.com.au | Pamplona bulls 18, humans 0 (July 13, 2004). You can't top that headline :)
• NEWS.com.au | New dads tired of staying mum (July 13, 2004): A report on the study said new fathers felt confused and unprepared before their baby was born because most of the available information was directed at women.
• NEWS.com.au | Garbos on strike after union delegate fired (July 13, 2004). Ahh hell, even it had been my suburb it wouldn't have been the first time the slack fucks didn't tip our bin. They do a rotten job - most bins knocked over and/or left in the middle of the road, driveways blocked, bins simply not tipped (for no reason - if there is a reason they are required to place a notice on the bin telling you why they didn't tip it).
• 'New Beatles songs' found in Victoria. 13/07/2004. ABC News Online: A British tourist travelling in Victoria has reportedly found a treasure trove of material related to the Beatles which may contain previously unheard songs. Moral of the story: open the suitcase before you sell it for $50...

Oh wondrous client software. I clicked and dragged email into various folder, only to discover that it had gone and done half a refresh - so my Inbox was out of synch with the backend. So each email I dragged into a folder was *actually* the email two or three lines above that email. So now I have to go back, manually, through each fucking folder and find each fucking email and put it back in the fucking Inbox and then drag them all into the fucking folders again and FUCK! I hate having to use this fucking software..... *gasp*

OK. Calming down again now.

• For some, you just have to spell it out - Opinion - www.smh.com.au: Using correct English is important because it reduces class distinctions, writes Lynne Truss. Ohhh this is pure therapy for someone like me, who gets enraged by apostrophe abuse. My favourite quote: Why is there a silent "p" in "receipt" and not in "deceit"? Well, the quick answer is: life's a pain sometimes; stop whining; if you don't like it, go and speak German.
• Make uni fun, or we're out the door - National - www.smh.com.au: Students ... increasingly see themselves as clients ... and want their money's worth: online lectures and email-friendly tutors; course work matching career aims; great student support services; an Animal House social life, and 24-hour computer facilities. However they don't want to work for anything, don't want to fill out their own paperwork and expect to get a higher grade on their exams purely based on the fact that they have put in an appeal (not because the exam actually merits a higher mark). In my day we did our own damn enrolment forms and we didn't question an exam/assignment mark unless it was clearly and grossly unfair. Worst of all, students today make everyone else sound like their parents. Fuckers.
• Don't assume no one is scanning your email - Breaking - smh.com.au. Simple rule: treat email like a postcard. You have no idea who is going to read it... and while it may not be interesting to anyone else, ut absolutely everyone involved between you and the recipient has ample opportunity to read it; copy it; even tamper with it.
• NEWS.com.au | Microsoft hires hacker suspect (July 12, 2004): A MAN accused of hacking into search engine company AltaVista's computer systems about two years ago is now employed by Microsoft, reportedly working on search technology. This from the same company that puts a bounty out on hackers heads if they attack MS products. Not that we are surprised by double standards from MS.
• Beazley to take defence portfolio. 12/07/2004. ABC News Online: Federal Opposition leader Mark Latham has announced that the man he beat to the ALP leadership, Kim Beazley, will return to Labor's frontbench. Beazley, the Rasputin of Australian politics... :)
• The Courier-Mail: Net piracy hijacks sales [12jul04]. OK, let's have a look at this.... Almost one in five Australians illegally download movies from the Internet, and most are buying fewer DVDs and videos as a result. "Most" huh? Well let's read further: Australians were more likely than anyone, except the Koreans and French, to curb their spending on movies, with 17 per cent saying they bought DVDs and videos less often now. Oh, so "most" now means "fewer than one in five", I must have missed that memo. This quote is also very vague - did they ask why they curbed spending? Could it be the high cost of living is preventing people spending as much on leisure stuff? [T]he trend was primarily fuelled by 'sheer impatience' as people were forced to wait up to eight months for films to be released on DVD. So release earlier.
• The Sunday Mail QLD: Transport figures don't add up [11jul04]: Public transport usage has remained static at 7 per cent of all trips, the same figure as in 1992. Transport 2007's target is 9 per cent. ... Critics said it was time for the Government to 'face reality' and stop trying to force people to use a public transport system that was unable to service southeast Queensland properly. Despite the millions upon millions poured into busways, the actual service remains expensive and unreliable. We have a new ticketing system, whoop-de-fuckin-doo, the bus didn't turn up.
• NEWS.com.au | That bare belly is no longer hip (July 12, 2004): The belly and g-string baring combination of hipster jeans and cut-off top has had its day. Apparently now everyone will just have to guess what colour your undies are...

• Netcraft: Browser Wars to recommence?: [B]ugs in Internet Explorer have been part of the Internet landscape for years. What is novel is that this time people may have had enough, prompting what has been rightly called 'a growing crisis of confidence in Internet Explorer'.
• PCWorld.com - Mozilla Gains on IE: Over the last month, Internet Explorer's share of the browser market dropped by 1 percent, the first noticeable decline since WebSideStory began tracking the browser market in late 1999. Keep in mind that a 1% drop in IE's market share is a tremendous number of individual users switching to something else.

Maybe there really will be a second browser war.

• Boing Boing | Bait-cars play theme from "Cops" during bust
• Boing Boing | Mac OS X Tiger: a new dawn of the browser war. I think it's a little early to get that excited.
• Salon.com Sex | Sexy specs: Glasses, like small breasts, seem to be one of those things that women automatically assume men find unattractive.
• Trapped in Sticker Factory, Send Help
• OTOFTC Home Page. Operation Take One For The Country... women who fuck American troops before they go to war (and are proud of it). From the site: OTOFTC is a movement of like-minded women ... who have covertly organized into groups to frequent eating and drinking establishments near armed service bases where troops are preparing to ship out overseas, and take one for the country, so to speak. I guess some people can find patriotism in almost any activity...!

Autoblog | Insert "just hangin' out" or "just hangin' around" joke here

We should know more about our Prime Ministers through history. I suspect many Australians know more about American Presidents than they do about Australian PMs. For example, can you name our very first PM off the top of your head? Australia's Prime Ministers - A National Archives of Australia Project has a lot of info; while the Wikipedia has an entry with a quick timeline.

Meta-linkage! I'd happily repost most of these, but why double up - Exit, pursued by a bear. - Gnus Roundup (July 8th).

b3ta.com | Biromash frenzy (118k image): 11 sheets of A4, three biros worth of ink and three weeks of night shift.

• NEWS.com.au | Australia signs up to Star Wars (July 8, 2004). I can't help thinking that in the Star Wars world Australia would be the Ewoks. On a more serious note .... WHAT THE FUCK??
• NEWS.com.au | Top dealers facing speedo checks (July 8, 2004): All Holden new-car dealerships in Brisbane will be investigated for odometer fraud amid claims a second franchise has been caught illegally winding them back. I really don't understand why you would wind back an odometer when the car has done less than 100km. I would imagine it's more likely that you'd admit that when the reality is hundreds of kms - it seems very fishy. On another note: ridiculous headline, considering "speedos" aren't involved.
• NEWS.com.au | Obscene Gus mars the moment (July 8, 2004): I don't deserve the s--- youse f------ give me, not one word of it. ...oh yes you do, Gussie boy. On the topic of the game itself... some very poor refereeing yet again. The NRL is reaping what it sowed by giving every single big game to Bill Harrigan for years on end - nobody else has the experience required

Server Error
Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

I've never had a service tell me to cross my fingers before :) I guess errors can be more fun when you're in Beta.

• TJ not chased, followed, court told - National - www.smh.com.au: [P]olice evidence suggests he was not being pursued, and no police were near him when he hit the fence, apparently travelling fast on a bike with faulty brakes. / NEWS.com.au | Police admit: we were following TJ (July 6, 2004): [A] police patrol truck mounted the kerb at the end of Renwick St and drove behind Thomas through parkland, then stopped at a set of gates. ... Thomas continued through the gates ... and cycled up a driveway, where he lost control on a left-hand bend and became impaled on a fence. It sounds like an accident in a location where the Police truck would not actually fit... but I guess we'll see when the inquest's findings are handed down.
• Downer: Latham should be last person to complain - National - www.smh.com.au: Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said ... Latham needed to understand that someone wanting to be prime minister of Australia had to be big enough to stand up and defend himself and his record. What Downer needs to do is listen to what Latham said... namely that it was fine to attack him, just leave his family alone. Funny when people vehmently agree with each other. Cheap shot, too obvious, no points.
  Finance Minister Nick Minchin said ... What we want to hear about is how he would run one of the world's biggest economies and manage a very big government budget. We have heard nothing from him about how he would do that. If that's what you want to know about, stop attacking him over his personal life and ask those questions. Recursive levels of ad hominem attack, no points.
• Musharraf warns 'iron curtain' dividing West, Muslims. 06/07/2004. ABC News Online: An iron curtain is descending between the West and the Muslim world, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has warned. ... If you manage to finish off one organisation like Al Qaeda ... you've chopped off a branch of that tree, but the tree will still grow. You must identify the root, and the root happens to be political disputes ... the root happens also to be illiteracy and poverty. The west replies: got any oil?
• NEWS.com.au | Half of women infertile 'in a decade' (July 6, 2004): Up to half of all Australian women could become infertile within a decade due to the growing epidemic of obesity, specialists warned yesterday.
• Music downloaders hit by geek-speak. 06/07/2004. ABC News Online: A format war has broken out among online music vendors, with competing compression and anti-piracy software determining what songs play on what devices. I think it's reasonable to say that the music industry knows that a format war is stupid and cannot be won; I suspect they are doing it to drive people back to purchasing CDs (which are copy-protected but at least relatively well supported). What kind of fool would make their music dependent on a specific bit of hardware? What happens when the companies stop making the devices in a year's time? Buy all your music again? It's enough to drive you to a life of crime: piracy vs. daylight robbery.
• Bendigo slams door on killer kitties. 06/07/2004. ABC News Online: Bendigo council, in central Victoria, is said to be the first country council in the state to adopt a night-time curfew for cats. We had to do this with a flatmate's cat once... he got too good at hunting at night. He was still pretty happy having a go during the day, even though he never caught anything :)

the stop bush project. images of street art against dubya.

fire twirling in slow motion - more interesting than the average fire twirling shot.

A few days back I thought I was getting MSN spam due to sending an email from Gmail to Hotmail... looks like I was a bit too quick to judge; see update: the gmail plot thickens.

The Awful Forums - Homegrown PVC flamethrower (56k image heavy)

• Ousted leader accused of genocide and war - After Saddam - www.smh.com.au / NEWS.com.au | Saddam: I am still Iraq's leader (July 2, 2004). Iraq begs to differ, it seems. Plus they've reintroduced the death penalty. I think we can see where this trial is heading.
• Landmark ruling on music downloading - Breaking - smh.com.au : Canada's Supreme Court ruled in a landmark judgement that Internet service providers (ISP) do not have to pay royalties on music downloaded by customers. In a unanimous 9-0 decision Wednesday, the court ruled that ISPs are not responsible for material web surfers download. ...just as road crews are not responsible for people speeding on the highway, the ISP can't control web surfers (no, they can't, not really).
• Telemarketers signal need for national register. 02/07/2004. ABC News Online: Direct phone marketers admit there is a need for a national 'do not call' telemarketing register but say it should be set up in consultation with the industry. The Labor Party is promising to ban unwanted telemarketing calls if it wins this year's federal election. Roll a do-not-call list NOT run by the telemarketers...
• NEWS.com.au | Prickly feeling makes sense (July 2, 2004): Scientists have found evidence to suggest we do have a sixth sense and can tell when we are being watched, even through CCTV. ... [Researchers] noted that the data was ambiguous but found that 'for both data sets there is a small but significant effect''.
• Brisbane Broncos - DeVere likely to go: Broncos point-scoring machine Michael DeVere will head to England next season. Fuck. That's the last thing we need. The Broncos suffered for years for want of a kicker like De Vere. Having him on the side is like having a guaranteed two points on every try... and then some.

AT&T - Text To Speech Interactive Demo. Very cool; and much potential for sillyness.

The Phone.

Thirty-eight dishonest tricks: Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them