Cheap Therapy

Visit nocleanfeed.com to get informed as to what you can do to stop Stephen Conroy from crippling Australia’s internet access.

A moment of insignificance to the greater universe, but not to me. Today Puggle put together a 48 piece jigsaw puzzle unaided! And I think Bilby said “star” and pointed to it in the book.

Saturday morning we headed off to The Amazing Race, organised in honour of a friend’s 40th birthday. Complete with initial “Amazing Race” style running to the starting line (apparently on the real show they film it a couple of times to do the closeups!). Then it was digging around in the sandpit, throwing balls into a bucket, and off to the train station and in to the Art Gallery to do some impromptu sculpture, out to Subiaco to find the café for lunch, off to either The Roundhouse or (as we did) catch the Ferry to South Perth to construct either a waist high tower (fortunately Bilby has a low waist :), or a kite (we did both, with a low degree of success :).
After that we caught the ferry back, hunted some statuary and then caught the train back to the car. Along the way we had to collect photos of various objects, and a treasure hunt list of actual objects.
We debriefed and tallied the scores. Apparently a few innocent bystanders had asked “Where are the cameras?”. Then it was time for pizza, birthday cake and three rounds of Dark Zone laser games (for me at least). It’s hard to play with 10kg of child on your arm, especially if she’s sticking her hand over the laser, but she seemed to enjoy it. Then it was time to stagger to the car, barely able to walk.

“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” — Commissioner Pravin Lal

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. -Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help. – Jean Kerr

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Being Poor means sitting on your rooftop while your house is submerged, seeing helicopters rescuing those around you and knowing that you “cannot afford” to be rescued by one. A lady said that in NO two weeks ago, and that made me cry. - blog commenter on John Scalzi’s Being Poor

It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life and wealth and power. -Buddha (c. 563-483 BCE)

I was somewhat amused by the press release about the Bentley Technology Precinct (”It will be Australia’s Silicon Valley - but with soul” - Minister Fran Logan, which wouldn’t be hard, most people in Silicon Valley probably leave the deserted landscaped wasteland or their corporate campus enclaves go to San Francisco for soul :). Given that I’ve previously worked in Bentley Technology Park, I thought I had some observations to make.

“Cafes, bars and restaurants will become boardrooms and central, shared facilities will provide mentoring and support for companies at all stages of commercialisation. Sustainable transport options will be explored and pathways expanded for a pedestrian friendly location.”

Well, when I was there there was one cafe, which served any sort of quiche (or egg-and-bacon pie), and pretty poor coffee (although unsurprisingly faster than UniClub). Pretty much everyone took their internal combustion engine vehicles to Karawara shops or Vic Park for lunch. Sustainable transport options (ie buses) didn’t run when you had to still go to work but Curtin University was on student break. Anyway , we don’t really need to ‘explore’ sustainable transport options, we already know which ones aren’t sustainable (cars with one person in them!).

As far as shared facilities go, when I was working in Tech Park the State Government stopped providing internet access to everyone, so most people wound up getting their own fibre laid (thankyou Amcom).

Mr Logan said numerous ICT companies from around the world were looking to move into the precinct.

The US-based company Interzone, which develops online entertainment products, has already established its game development studio within the precinct.

Cos games companies are cool at the moment and other states have them too so we’d better mention ours

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Edit - I realised the other thing I forgot to mention was the power! For a tech park you’d think they’d have a decent power supply, but it seemed like there were constant interruptions to the mains. Whilst it’s bad for a computer company it’s not insurmountable, but the biotech companies and the pathology labs can’t afford to lose power at all. It wasn’t long before they started installing their own diesel generators.

Check out isitferret’s Swancon 2008 photobucket here. Leece and Rob’s photos from the Heroes and Villain’s Ball are here. Suggested flickr tag swancon2008.

Somewhat old news, but since 2000 the World Bridge Federation drug tests players and will strip them of their medals if they refuse the test.

MMOGChart charts active subscriptions to MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games). Impressive graph of WoW v everthing else here.

As I’ve recently fallen in with the rest of you lot and started playing Scrabulous on Facebook (no doubt sealing its doom at the hands of Mattel, and thence Facebook’s), I thought I’d share some amusing Scrabble videos, namely Triple Word War and the much more risque Scrabble Rousers (love the Louis Armstrong provided soundtrack, “Skokiaan”).