an interesting evening
Blooding again! Number 6. An interesting experience- the needle rolled over or something, and the blood flow was really slow. After 11 minutes 50 had elapsed, I had only managed 430ml of the 470ml that they go for. They’ll still be able to use my blood- after 12 minutes they can’t use the platelets so it was best to stop. I’m a bit disappointed though! Haemoglobbin 13.4 (down just a smidge) and BP 117/74 (from memory.) See if you can do a better job- give blood.
Next I went out to get in my car and go to Girls Brigade- only to find that my car was being petulant again. It has had some issues, but has just come out from a service! After a good rev it started again, and I have parked so a roll start can happen tomorrow, if needed.
Then I found out that only one girl had come to Girls Brigade, so I could go home. So instead of driving to church, I drove home, and wrote this. I hope tomorrow is a bit less interesting!
blooding #5
I just got back from giving blood for the fifth time, after a break of over a year (due to travel). It was just about the same as usual, I had to wait a long time in the chair (stuck, elevated and my arm in the blood pressure cuff) while they sorted out my paper work. I didn’t feel faint this time, which is a plus. On to the stats!
- Amount: 470mL
- Blood Pressure: 116/77
- Haemoglobin: 13.9 (down, grr.)
- Time elapsed: 10 minutes 50 seconds.
So why not? Give Blood.
potential visitor increase
Dear Stephen Conroy,
I read today in The Age that you are planning to start monitoring blogs as part of a new “media monitoring strategy”. You particularly mentioned Whirlpool, a site that has been critical of your proposed “Clean Feed Internet Filter” (as I have been.)
As a blogger, I’d love to know that what I write about has a wide audience. If your proposed monitoring does indeed spread its net wide over the internet, (though I would question whether this is effective use of tax payer funds) you may well be visiting this website. This would be a boost to my visitor count, which of course is the goal of most websites. (Isn’t it?). I encourage you to read around- maybe you would be interested in a List of the 13 dwarves in The Hobbit? (one of my more popular articles.) Or perhaps, you could introduce bean bag skills for those rowdy back benchers.
Sincerely yours,
titanium_geek
No, I wasn’t game enough to send this to Minister Conroy directly!
tiredness
I’ve been pretty tired lately. It’s been for a good cause as we have been running a kids afternoon program, and a cafe for the community at our church this week as part of the urban summer program. We have also been doing some community service and mentoring about 25 young people (aged roughly 12 to 18) who have been our team.
Friday night, our last night of cafe, we ran the cafe from 2pm till 10pm, instead of the usual 2pm til 5pm. This is a total of 8 hours and is more than anyone in these kind of things usually runs. To cope, we made sure we took some time out to chill. I took a 20 minute break, and as part of that had a little doze.
As I lay on the floor, I had a conversation with an imaginary spider that had crawled up on my shoulder.
Surreal. But I felt well rested and went on to enjoy being useful for the rest of the evening.
Why I am against the filter
The proposed “clean feed” internet filter:
- will slow down the internet speeds, which:
- damages the internet’s usability, and thus innovation and the economy
- provides an incentive to bypass the filter
- Which is incredibly easy [Google]
- Plus the filter is not very good anyway.
“it’s hard to get around the fact that the filters simply aren’t that great. Five of the six filters degraded network performance by over 20 percent, and two simply hammered the network, dropping throughput by more than 75 percent.
That poor performance came without stellar filtering performance, either. Half the devices let more than five percent of the blacklist sites through anyway, and all devices had measurable percentages of false positives. And all of these problems came simply while trying to filter web traffic; FTP, P2P, and other protocols would all flow through the filters unimpeded.”
([arstechnica], emphasis mine)
- Censorship is against free speech, and putting methods in place that make malevolent censorship easy is a bad idea.
( More on Internet censorship around the world. [wikipedia],
a little about the “Great Firewall of China” [uncensor.com.au]) - This filter will make law enforcement’s job a lot harder by making criminals harder to track [LifeHacker].
After all that, the internet still has the same websites out there, even if it’s a little bit harder for Australians to see them. Resources would be better spent in tracking down the creators of the objectionable content and putting them in jail, and shutting down their websites.
And that is why I am against the proposed Australian Internet Filter.
Further reading:
- Electronic Frontiers Australia
- Sign the Getup Petition
- Information on Whirlpool.net
- Cartoon about the practicality of the filter [Userfriendly.org]
Lobbying for the filter will not protect our society, our children; it will not “clean up the internet”, as much as I would like the internet to be cleaned. The best way to protect children on the internet is to supervise them and give them rules for its use. Put a filter on your own computer, to prevent its users stumbling across unwanted material.
The filter is flawed. People are the real solution.
sigh
So, after working at Eastland all morning, I walked out to my car, in the staff car park, and thought, hmm. something looks funny. The bumper is a bit skew. Some person had hit my car on the curb side and crunched my head light. My guess is that it was done when reversing for a car space.
The damage doesn’t make me too angry, I mean, it will need to be fixed, but it isn’t a brand new car with delicate paint work. (I hope theirs was.) No, what makes me maddest, is the fact that they didn’t leave a note. Nothing! So inconsiderate.
But I feel better now after expressing my anger and letting it go.
on books and reading
I once wrote a paper (an essay for university) that touched on why books are special. I argued that because the most important and most common books in the Middle Ages were sacred ones, that as a culture we have learned to revere all books. Books contain knowledge, messages, and are timeless. I think this is why book-burning is such a powerful and terrible act- the destruction of something special.
I love the hum of a big library- all those books, calling out to be read. I love teaching children how to read and to love books. Cuddling up with a good book is one of life’s pleasures. Reading builds brain-muscle: knowledge and imagination. Reading enhances life.
Of course, there are other kinds of reading that you can do: newspapers, cereal packets, web pages, movie subtitles. These are all exercises in processing the printed letters and words into meaning. However, I find that they don’t quite compare with a book. I wonder why that is? Is it the comparison of screen printed page? Obviously reading street signs and cereal boxes rarely reaches the narrative depth of some Jane Austen or Tolkein or even JK Rowling, but why does the web not have that kind of emotional grab? Is it inherent in the medium or is it simply because I’ve been brought up to love books?
Where does something like Project Gutenberg fit in? It specializes in books on the screen- books distributed in an electronic format. Sure, you can print a book out, but I think the intended/expected use is to read it on some kind of screen. I have tried reading books from a screen, but reading a paper book seems to be a more enjoyable experience.
What makes me sad is that I have not read a real book for enjoyment for a long time. When I was small, I expected to read every book in our school library. This wasn’t a goal, I just expected to be able to do it. It seems pretty silly now, when I have so many things on I don’t have time to read. Or at least I tell myself I don’t have time to read. Something that perhaps stops me from reading is the compulsion to finish a book in one sitting. This, obviously, requires large blocks of time that isn’t helpful when assignments need finished, chores completed and reasonable bed times to be kept. I might as well not pick up the book, if I have to put it down again unfinished, I would think.
I’ve come to the realization that you are never too old (or too young) to read. Maybe, tomorrow, I might go to a library. What about you? Are books something special? Do you enjoy reading the screen as much as you enjoy reading the page? As always, leave a comment in the box- I love reading them.
5 tips for better ipod battery life
![[a battery indicator with green juice half way along it.]](halfBattery.jpg)
You know the feeling- you’re grooving away to your favourite tunes, and happen to notice that your little juice-meter is awfully low. What to do? You decide that prolonging battery life is your priority. Here are some (purely anecdotal) tips that might help.
- Turn it off, put it away. (Did I say these were useful tips?)
- Turn down the screen brightness to as low as you can bear- I hear 0% is brilliant for boosting battery life.
- Similarly, turn down the time the back-light is on to the lowest setting.
- Don’t play the games, watch photos or browse through album art. These are more intensive and thus probably use the battery juice faster.
- Plug it in. This is a fantastic way to boost battery juice.
Now, I know that I have specifically dealt with the Apple Ipod in this article, but I am sure that many of these tips will apply to those MP3 players sold by other Manufacturers also.
This is humour, in case you haven’t picked it up yet…
queen of the republic
In this post, I’m going to spout my opinions on whether Australia should a) become a republic (with president or whatever) or b) still have the Queen as our head of state.
What my opinion boils down to is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and here’s why.
The every day lives of every Australian is not affected whether we have a Queen or not. We can make our own decisions about international policy, without interference from a monarch, as the British can. We are pretty much independent, with the added bonus of being able to romp it in at the Commonwealth Games (unlike the Olympics, which has big countries like China, USA, etc. that usually manage to thump our medal count.)
People seem to want a republic for the simple feeling of freedom. We have freedom already, and changing the head of state will not change that.
In fact, look at the world. There are places where basic freedoms are denied. The freedom to turn on the tap and be able to drink the water, even get water at all. The freedom to eat three meals a day. The freedom to say what we like, talk to who we want to, and the freedom to choose many trivial and non-trivial things.
Comparing our situation to that of other nations makes me ask whether the Australian Republican movement’s efforts couldn’t be devoted to somewhere where it would matter more.
No, I’m not a monarchist, nor a republican. I think the current system works, and there are other problems out there more worthy of our attention.
One of our problems is the rabid republicans and mad monarchists… Come on Australia, choose to leave it alone.
clever tactics, ABC
I watched and enjoyed The Abbey, and Australian made reality/documentary where 5 everyday women from different walks of life go and live with nuns for a month, getting up really early, go to all the church services and adopt Benedictine practices such as silence, humility and hard work. The goal (besides good TV) is for a spiritual experience, whatever that means.
However, this isn’t a post about monastic living, but of clever TV tactics. You see, the ABC (Compass runs the timeslot) screened this program, which was made in late 2006/early 2007, in mid 2007. This is before they screened the “original” British program on five 21st Century men in a monastery (2005), now showing Sunday nights in late November.
The reason this is clever is this: There is funding for Australian made television, also showing a new idea to the local audience will be good for ratings. That is, if they had showed the British version first, some people wouldn’t have bothered watching the second incarnation of the idea.
Well done ABC, this was intelligent.
More info:
The British version (men)
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 of the Australian The Abbey (women)
There is also an American version (both men and women.)