Exception is the Soul of Humanity

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.

Or how quickly and completely life can change, in such a short span of time.

It’s been a while since I’ve learned so much in so short a period of time – probably not since starting my last job. There is just so much to manage in running your own business!

We’ve survived the first two months of running a mobile dog shop as our (currently) primary and only income, and while it hasn’t gone entirely as smoothly as planned, we’re still here.

We’ve mostly finished setup of an online (discount) outlet for the products, and promotion of the site has been easier and so far cheaper than expected. We have successfully traded at four dog shows, and had one (extremely) late trade booking cancellation. Most of the shows we have traded at have even been more profitable that expected.

At the same time (with the same limited funds) we’re juggling importing of breeding stock and card stoppages for fraudulent transactions (don’t these things just have a way of knowing when to hit you?).

All in all, however, I’d not trade this new career for the world. While there’s always the overlaid anxiety of where you’ll find the funds for the next 3 months, the freedom is priceless.

Interesting (vaguely). I imagine this must make Rising Tide happy.

Living in Newcastle I can certainly vouch for the stated delays – on any given day you can count up to 50 coal ships anchored off the coast – it makes an interesting backdrop to the beachgoers and surfers on the beach.

References:
Australia Said Missing Out on Mineral Boom (chron.com)

Interesting. Another free-to-us service by Google. I like their style, presumably relying on advertising revenue to pay for these “free” services, and then making those ads pleasant to view – not battering you around the head.

However I have to wonder how long this can continue. Can Google really compete with companies like Microsoft, and US telcos? If Google, Skype, etc offer too many “free” services built upon telco platforms, will the telcos survive? And without them, will someone like Google survive?

References:
1-800-Google Launches (via Slashdot)

In the last year or so we’ve been approached in person, via phone calls and via snail mail many times by Energy Australia (EA) representatives, and they’re all pushing the same pitch. If we sign a contract saying we’ll only use them exclusively for the next 3 year for electricity and gas, we’ll save up to a whopping $120 (over the next 3 years, if we use both electricity and gas).

My initial thought was that some competitors were about to enter our local market and we’d be seeing some competitive benefits soon. It’s probably been a year now and I’ve yet to see or hear from any such competition. We’ve never been approached in any way, by any other energy provider, and yet EA keeps pushing the 3 year lockin deal. Just today we saw a full size truck driving along carrying nothing other than a huge sign for the lockin deal.

What gives?

UPDATE (20070404): Apparently their latest tactic is to doorknock offering 1 month free if you lockin with them for 2 years.

Work can be a joy or a drain. Finding the right balance at work can help shift it towards the former.

One thing to beware is being too helpful at work. While this may sound for many like a way of life and only a positive act, it can have negative side effects.

Those you overly help can become accustomed to such help, and can turn to you more often for more trivial help. If they thought about it they would realise that they could easily find the answer themselves, however with you there as a security blanket they don’t need to use their own initiative as much.

In turn this can lead to a decline in your own performance as you are interrupted (with apologies, or course) often enough to ensure you never get the mental “run up” needed to conquer challenging and complex tasks towards your own lines of death, or that you cannot keep all facets of your task in mind.

There has long been criticism of the lack of parking in and around Newcastle CBD and the costs of metered parking.

Let’s consider some recent initiatives of Newcastle City Council:

• They are actually adding more parking to the streets of the CBD, by narrowing the roads and introducing 45 degree parking


• All this new parking is metered, with a maximum prepayent period of 2 hours (excepting motorcycle parking, which is free)


• While the old parking meters allowed users to pay before the metered period started (before 9am), the new ones don’t (meaning you either queue around the meter machine for 9am, or risk a fine to return after 9am)

Hmmm…

Interesting…

Work recently purchased some Fujitsu laptops and in the software pack that came with it was … Norman Antivirus.

I can imagine certain other “sounds like” AntiVirus vendors aren’t too happy about this.

References:
Norman Antivirus/Firewall

A blogger I occasionally read (which means more often than most others), All About Linux, refers to an article on 25 Shortcomings of Vista.

While most of these are fairly high level complaints, a few did strike me as ones that would irritate me or make my life more difficult at work.

“3. Antivirus
Vista does not bundle an antivirus application, and most third party antivirus applications are not yet compatible with Vista.”

This would be a major faux pas on Microsoft’s part, though I rather suspect they intend to pull an AV offering out of their hat just prior to (or perhaps strategically after) Vista launch. Or they may just be ballsy/id10tic enough to claim Vista’s so secure it doesn’t need AV.

“24. Some Protocols Eliminated
Vista does not include support for IPX, Gopher, WebDAV, NetDDE and AppleTalk.”

We use WebDAV at work, and while it’s use is limited and not critical, it would still be irritating to design a workaround.

“25. WordPad
Ability to open .doc files has been removed.”

Well this just plain sucks for home use, as my computer is barely high enough horsepower to open current versions of Word.
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Ahh well, we’ll just wait and see when it officially comes out.

Hmm, so this is Flock. I must say, so far I'm impressed.

It's like Firefox (duh) with a nice veneer of useful doodads. It's got built-in blogging support (even for my blog engine of choice, TextPattern), a news/RSS reader, tie-ins to Flickr, and so on.

I've yet to find built-in IM support, however given Flock is built up from Firefox, there's bound to be an extension out there.

Blogged with Flock