Cheap Therapy

apparently Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I’m guessing it’s not going to be particularly light and fluffy.

Once again on Wednesday watched the most excellent six-part SBS series “Decadence” with Pria Viswalingam. This week he looked at the demise of democracy, and how it’s being eroded by almost monopolistic media ownership, dodgy campaign funding, and a more time-poor populace who can’t afford the time to stay informed (no mention of the internet as a news source though). Meanwhile they continue to cut funding to the ABC and SBS, and portray university librarians (for example) as members of a cultural elite, whereas say Kerry Packer was just this regular bloke.

Who spends more on advertising, McDonalds, Coles Myer, or the Federal Government? (Yes, the winner is our Federal Government). Keating’s campaign spent $9 million on advertising, advertising for the 1998 election cost $29 million. If you want to check out election spending on advertising the budget returns are available here.

In comparison to Australia, Canada (since 2004 at least) has laws that severely restrict contributions to political parties from big business and unions.

It occurs to me that the amount of comment spam a blog receives is probaby an indication of its popularity (or at least of how widely spread its URL is).

Some observations on daylight saving:

• It’s not fun putting your child to sleep when it’s still light outside.
• My body clock is synced to the sun, not to the clock. Sometimes it’s still vaguely reminiscent of jetlag.
• Gin and tonics are a pleasant accompaniment to the sunset
• There is a (Schweppes Indian) tonic water shortage at my local supermarket (unless you can stomach diet tonic water).
• There are still lots of people Googling for daylight saving patches
• It’s still hot walking to the bus even an hour earlier than normal
• Possibly saving some electricity by turning the lights on later. But as we’re using fluoro globes it’s not likely to be much saving.

Still of the opinion it’s a bad idea.

Since I know some avid readers of this blog have purchased SleepTracker watches to wake up more easily, and there was some discussion of using the iSight built into Power/MacBooks to do the same, I just discovered Dream Recorder on VersionTracker. Not sure how it handles two people in the same bed though, I guess you just have to aim the camera carefully.

Let me know if it works (or broadcasts pictures of your bedroom over the internet

Was looking at a “No through road” sign the other day. (Yes, I do have better things to do with my time

Cul de sac

My smattering of french tells me that roughly translates as “bottom of bag”.

Kind of like “end of bag”.

Sort of like “bag end”.

The first sentences from the first blog post of each month this year:

• January - 1. What did you do in 2005 that you’d never done before?
• February - Just got my Electronic Frontiers Australia e-blurb, which had an interesting link to the list of comments posted about the review of copyright Fair Use rights.
• March - Forgot I was in pay parking.
• April - Spotlight plug-ins for searching Zip archives, tar archives, lots of other things.
• May - So, according to Transperth the correct fare is $2.46 for the bus to/from UWA and the drivers are charging me the wrong amount ($2).
• June - The Australian Communications and Media Authority has software for reporting spammers directly from Windows Outlook or Outlook Express.
• July - Tonight on Enough Rope, a cabby introduced me to “Blind as a welder’s dog”
• August - UWA are hosting a public lecture on Molecular Gastronomy by Professor Peter Barham on Monday night.
• September - >So the Australian Federal Police have told Jack Thomas that he’s not allowed to contact Osama Bin Laden.
• October - For those who missed it on Media Watch, how Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (and indirectly, 2GB’s Alan Jones) use a diabetic cat as ammunition against harm-minimising safe injecting rooms.
• November - Usually I pay some attention to what Google Ads get thrown up on specific pages I visit.
• December - 0/50,000

On SBS this week:

Sunday (Tonight) - Fairy Tales exposed at 7:30pm Sunday followed by the spelling bee documentary Spellbound at 8:30pm.

Cutting Edge are showing a documentary on Spam, 8:35pm Tuesday.

Some very cool latex costumes amongst these photos.

Whilst I hate to plug evil credit card companies, ANZ Visa are offering prepaid gift Visa cards, available in Batman, Superman or Tweety Bird designs (amongst other more generic images). Might be appropriate for someone’s fan-in-their-life.