Exception is the Soul of Humanity

Morris Iemma wants to sell off our state's power to private investors.

While the public on-masse has rejected this idea as stupid, he's pressing ahead with everything in his power to make it happen. He's spending big (possibly on taxpayers' money) to craft a campaign selling us on the idea of privately owned energy. I'm guessing the campaign won't also sell us on the idea that we're happy to be paying for the campaign.

To me this just smacks of John Howardism. It didn't take long after he became Prime Minister for John Howard to start doing things he liked, regardless of whether it was what the public wanted. He had us invade and murder in other countries, screwed over our workers in favour of businesses, and told our indigenous people to go jump for all he cared of what our forefathers did to them.

Yep, it's beginning to smell like little Johnnie is living on in little Morris.

Jeff Corbett is a journalist in our (relatively) local newspaper, the Newcastle Herald.

He has somewhat of a reputation as a rather non-PC, provocative columnist. We read the paper daily over lunch, and I've recently noticed a certain pattern to his writings (and other columnists around his area of the paper). I believe there's a certain pressure, a certain impetus for him to write on topics that have the capacity to become controversial, in a manner designed to elicit strong reader response.

Many of his silliest articles, where it seems he just pushing a ridiculous opinion to get a raise out of people, actually seem to work. He takes a stance which seems obviously fake and prejudiced, and a great many people seem to take the bait and send in replies railing against his opinion. I don't think many of them stop to consider that he may not strongly hold the opinion he's espousing, that he may in fact be simply trying to drum up comments for the paper.

In contrast some of what we feel are his better articles (like the recent ones on his son Scott's dramas with the RTA) often don't elicit such response from his readers, which is sad.

However in a possible statement on the intelligence of netizens versus newspaper traditional readers, the trend seems to be reversed on the blog version of his column.

Recently when we went to our usual McDonalds they had added a new feature - a 2 orders or less express lane. Firstly we were left wondering what constitutes an "order" - but aside from that, I don't think it's (yet) working as they perhaps imagined.

I decided to try it the other day, using the express lane even though the other lines were a little shorter. There were only 2 people/orders ahead of me, and yet it was probably 10 minutes before I was being served.

I think they may need to rethink a few things:

1. When you add an express lane, people jump into it expecting to be, oh I don't know, say FAST. So why would you put the trainee counter staff on that register?
2. While this would rule me out, I think they need to limit the types of orders that can be processed in the express lane, for example no custom items in the order, and perhaps commonly ordered items only. Anything that keeps the turnover quick.
3. Obviously they should put any such new rules on the express lane sign, as presently it appears no-one really knows what "maximum 2 orders" really covers - 2 simple meal deals, or the orders of two people who may order all sorts of wierd, custom items?

Recently I up and created a squidoo lens. There were two main reasons - 1. I wondered what earning potential they could have, and 2. at the time I was annoyed by the domplayer/winzix/zixplayer/divocodec/3wplayer scam playing out in torrents at the moment. Creating the lens was relatively painless, and as I was largely wanting to disseminate information about the scam I didn't create it with a bent towards earnings. Even so, the stats have surprised me.

I don't know what's normally a good increase in stats and decrease in lens rank, however when I recently revisited it I found that I was now ranked #197 in the "How-To & Education" category of lenses, and ranked #2711 overall. These figures seemed surprisingly good given how little thought I'd given its creation (though to be fair I thought it would be a popular topic).

I've even at last glance had 84 outbound clicks from my lens - now if only it was a topic that could lead to affiliate sales - hmm, perhaps I should check with symantec (the only AV link on the lens). And maybe, just maybe I can think up a more saleable topic for a lens.

References: 3wplayer, domplayer, zixplayer, etc on Squidoo.

Last night on some TV show on in the background, they were talking about things you can do to maintain health in old age, and among the offerings was to keep your mind stimulated mentally. They said it was important to be doing mentally active things like socialising that use the frontal lobes of the brain, rather than mentally passive things like reading a newspaper, that just uses the back portion of the brain.

In dredging up the effort to post on a blog I follow (Caroline Middlebrook) I realised that not only does it feel good to actively participate (rather than just trolling Shashdot articles, reading news articles, etc), but I'm left with an upbeat, doing things feeling that helps me to be productive in the other things I have to do today (work things - but when you work for yourself that's not too bad).

Well another year, another big U.S. import it seems.

We'd like to welcome Bitsy (Gemmell's Seabiscuit) to our country, our family, our home.

 

 

 

Technorati Profile

Timing, or why to plan even minor tech changes.

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I'd forgotten I'd even emailed Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. I shot him a question about productivity (his area of expertise), or my oft lack thereof, and thought no more of it.

Then just yesterday as I was porting this site to a new host/domain (not a particularly fun process for TextPattern), I noticed a spike in my (meager, some may even say pitiful) traffic, from a post of Leo's.

I popped over there, expecting it to be from some comment I'd made on one of his posts, only to find myself front and center (so to speak), the catalyst for one of his posts.

Talk about timing - this site was partially ported between hosts, and I hadn't even given thought yet to redirects from my old host. Nothing like panic to make one more productive, even temporarily.

Seriously though, thanks for the mention Leo. One of these days I'll have to get trackbacks working with TextPattern.

References: Unproductivity: 8 Fantabulous Ways to Make the Most of Your Laziest Days | Zen Habits

• Flock 1.0+ - CHECK
• Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Blogger and RPC blog tie-ins - CHECK
• Adblock, Flashblock, FoxyTunes, geoFlock, Torbutton and Web Developer plugins - CHECK

Now once I've fired up SecondLife, Skype, Winamp, Thunderbird, uTorrent, Joost and Clamwin (on Vista no less), all I need is another few Gig of RAM.

Re:Failure? (Score:5, Insightful)

That’s because this is slashdot.

When Linux “slowly gains market penetration,” it’s always a success.
When Microsoft “slowly gains market penetration,” it’s always a failure.

Is the cup half full or half empty? It all depends on who makes the cup.