Category: Consciousness

Posts you might have missed

Too many posts to handle? Here’s a quick list of the posts you might have missed this week:
  • Adventures in TV
    Posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 in Media
    We caught Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure last night on the ABC (post Gruen Transfer). It made me laugh until I cried. It’s Safranesque – and produced by the Chaser team. If you missed it you can watch it here thanks to the magic of iView. Very funny. I’ll never be able to pick up a copy of the Queensland Presbyterian newspaper, New Directions, again without catching subliminal messages. One of my favourite bits was when his mum told him what he was doing (trying to track down the object of his grade 3 affections) was creepy.
  • An ode to one
    Posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 in Media
    Channel Ten is launching a new. Free. 24 hour dedicated digital sports channel today. That’s pretty exciting. I’ve been waiting for this for a while – and Craig kindly reminded me with his post.But. It seems we may not be immediately getting it in the regions…”Network Ten broadcasts ONE in our markets of Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. For viewers outside those areas, our programs are carried by local affiliates.We understand our affiliates are progressing well towards carrying ONE in their markets but for further information please contact: – If your station is a Southern Cross station, please call Southern Cross TV on (02) 6242 2400 – If not, please contact WIN’s head office on (02) 4223 4199.
  • Can K-Rudd hear me
    Posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 in Media
    Some time ago I posted a link to one man’s audacious bid to be heard by google. Can Google Hear Me won the hearts and minds of millions. Including Google – who were interested enough to take this man’s journey to the next level.And now – following news that the Federal Government will now trawl critical blogs I ask the question. Can Kevin Rudd hear me?It hasn’t taken long for people to make a connection between trawling blogs for criticism and the clean feed/blacklist campaign – particularly because the Government’s own media release listed Whirlpool.net.au’s criticism of the blacklist as one of the examples the Government’s beady eyes were watching.
  • Convenience store convergence
    Posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 in Oddities
    This week I’m all about convergence devices – toasters printing weather forecasts and the like. One day there’ll be a gadget that does just about everything. Oh wait. That’s an iPhone. Apparently I’m getting my work one soon – fingers crossed…Anyway. I give you. The Trolley Bike. And instructions on how to make one yourself. Thanks to instructables…
  • Important news
    Posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 in Life
    Threadless has extended the $5 sale until the end of March. Three posts ago I hit 1,000 posts. I’ll do some sort of best of those 1,000 posts to celebrate in the next day or so. To me, every one of them is like a wicket for Glenn McGrath – I remember them all. Maybe. Speaking of Cricket. Australia has an all rounder. A bowling all rounder. Mitchell Johnson. He’s from Townsville you know. Here’s Roebuck’s view on Johnson’s all round credentials:”Several of the batsman had fallen foul of Harris’s Disease, the name nowadays given to batsmen who suddenly play boneheaded shots against apparently innocuous spinners.
  • Irregular Expressions
    Posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 in Church
    Dan has started blogging much more frequently – perhaps turning his clever blog name into a misnomer. This can only be a good thing. He’s done a little series recently on this Hillsong bus ad.Which is worth a read.
  • Is google like God
    Posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 in Church
    I’m trying to decided whether using google as an analogy for God is appropriate or not. There are certain similarities that would help make God more accessible to geeks.First I considered the possibility of using an open source analogy… it all started when I was trying to explain that it’s not inconsistent for an omnipotent God to change his system of doing things…”The logic is perfectly consistent. The OT is a precursor to the NT – and certain things from the Old system are replaced in the new.
  • Jensenisms
    Posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 in Church
    While I’m holding out against the young evangelical male norm and not signing up as a Driscoll fanboy – I’m unabashedly a fan of Phillip Jensen. His well balanced article on the abortion debate got a run on the SMH website today (thanks to Findo for pointing it out) – and I assume in the printed version. It’s nice to have a fairly moderate Christian voice in the debate.I linked to this when he put it up on his site a couple of weeks ago – but if you didn’t read it then, read it now.
  • Mr DEEDs
    Posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 in Politics
    The Bligh Government has just released its new public service structure. They’re “streamlining” 23 departments. One super department is the Department of Employment and Economic Development. Which will no doubt become DEED. Andrew Fraser as minister for that department will from now on, in these here parts, be referred to as Mr DEEDs. That is all.
  • Our daily Fred: Ice is nice
    Posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 in Oddities
    Some ice is nicer. Like ice made in these – click the image for the link.
  • Our daily Fred: Nice udders… I mean jugs
    Posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 in Oddities
    It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other really. But either way – this is an udderly cool idea from Fred and Friends – and they’ll moove like crazy.
  • Parenting with teeth
    Posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 in Oddities
    I’m no parent. But I do like to give random parenting advice to those who are. Purely on the basis of having once been a child. Dear parents. Please smack your children, keep them disciplined, train them to respond to a series of whistles (no joke – Robyn’s uncle has done this, it’s fantastic), think they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, drive them from one extra-curricular activity to the next, feed them good stuff, feed them bad stuff, breast feed them until they can walk, talk or run.
  • Pen(t) up aggression
    Posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 in Oddities
    Sick of people stealing your pen? Me too. I hate it. My pens go missing from my desk at an alarming rate. The worst bit is when you see the aforementioned writing device in someone else’s mouth. get the pen back complete with fresh teeth marks. Your troubles will be a distant memory if you invest the $US1.69 to purchase this pen. Found here. I can’t believe someone made this – and worse, I can’t believe I posted it.
  • Sanity prevails… maybe
    Posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 in Politics
    iiNet has pulled themselves out of the cleanfeed trial citing an inability “to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship.”Their decision came after wikileaks was blocked last week for publishing the ACMA blacklist. Which was meant to be a top secret “for government eyes only” document…”It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as ‘unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes.
  • Shirt of the Day Redux: The pick of the bunch
    Posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 in Oddities
    I’ve used my morning sorting through the Threadless sale so that you don’t have to. Here are my favourites. Click the image for the link.
  • Shirt of the Day: Interpretive Dance
    Posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 in Church
    Threadless is having a $5 sale – that’s $US5. Chief amongst the awesome cheapies is this one – but my size is gone, and there aren’t many left. And the sale finishes today.It’s a shame I didn’t get onto this earlier – they would have made a great uniform for a dance ministry.
  • The results are in…
    Posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 in Life
    According to this long test I am only 24.76% geek. So there. According to this nerd test I am 40% nerdy. I’m not sure you can compare the two…
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March 30, 2009

The Cable Guy

If you’re anything like me you balk at the idea of paying more than $50 for a cable that cost about $2 to make. It’s ridiculous. All the testing suggests that cheap cables are as effective as “gold plated” cables for carrying your data.

I’ve been looking for a cheap Optical audio cable to go with my cheap HDMI cables picked up via a nice discount online vendor on a special. This cheap online vendor – Oznetics – has cables at reasonable prices all year round – if by reasonable you mean under $20 including delivery. And currently has a great special on HDMI cables to boot.

They also sell a bunch of home automation stuff. Which is what I’d be doing if:

a) I owned my own house, or

b) We weren’t saving all our spare change for college.

Optical audio here we come…

March 29, 2009

The results are in…

According to this long test I am only 24.76% geek. So there.

According to this nerd test I am 40% nerdy. I’m not sure you can compare the two…


I am nerdier than 49% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to take the Nerd Test, get geeky images and jokes, and write on the nerd forum!

March 25, 2009

Important news

Threadless has extended the $5 sale until the end of March.

Three posts ago I hit 1,000 posts. I’ll do some sort of best of those 1,000 posts to celebrate in the next day or so. To me, every one of them is like a wicket for Glenn McGrath – I remember them all. Maybe.

Speaking of Cricket. Australia has an all rounder. A bowling all rounder. Mitchell Johnson. He’s from Townsville you know.

Here’s Roebuck’s view on Johnson’s all round credentials:

“Several of the batsman had fallen foul of Harris’s Disease, the name nowadays given to batsmen who suddenly play boneheaded shots against apparently innocuous spinners. Hereabouts the main topic on spectators’ tongues concerned the tourists’ ability to take the match into a fifth day.

The next hour was startling as the Australian’s launched a two-pronged attack. Johnson’s innings is etched in the memory. After a quite start, he hurried to 50 in 51 balls whereupon he raised the tempo sufficiently to reach three figures in 86 balls. He did not swipe. He did not depend on luck. Instead he produced a stream of swashbuckling strokes all around the wicket, executed with a free and full swing of the bat.

Some of his strokes stirred the cricketing soul. Johnson took the ball on the rise and dispatched it through extra-cover or he stayed still and smote lifters into the 10th row at deep mid-wicket. Without exception his pulls and hooks went forward of square. Some of them dashed past mid-on. Moving in for the kill, the South Africans tossed the ball to Makhaya Ntini and Dale Steyn. Even Jacques Kallis had a crack and he, too, was swiftly swamped.”

March 24, 2009

Posts you might have missed

Too many posts to handle? Here’s a quick list of the posts you might have missed this week:
  • A bunch of links – March 17, 2009
    Posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 in Oddities
    Wedding cake made from 80 Pac-Man cupcakesSelf Destructing Pixel Coffee Table100 matches, carved out of a solid block of woodWaveforms as braceletsI would have blogged this yesterday – but my host was down so you’ll see it today (unless you’re seeing it in Google Reader now).
  • Ahh… It’s a trap
    Posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 in Oddities
    No it’s not. It’s a cheese knife and cutting board set. Shame it’s not actually for sale. I’d totally buy one. They’re available here. I’d love to buy one. And then my wife would totally make me give it to someone as a present.Found here.The guy behind the product design has some other cool ideas.Like this.And this.Update – it turns out a lot of the really cool ideas I’ve linked to before were designed by this guy and the company he works for – worldwidefred.
  • Atheist Hunting
    Posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 in Church
    Occasionally nasty parody site Landover Baptist has a great list of tips for how to spot them atheists that needs some converting (sic)…Here’s a summary of their five tips so that you can dob your local atheist in to police: Five Tips on How to Spot an Atheist1. Usually Atheists are pale of skin.They spend a lot of times indoors, because they are afraid to come outside. They believe the preposterous lie that Christians are trying to kill them, when in fact, all that we really want to do is force a quick conversion or to kindly place them in a maximum security prison for their own protection from devout Christians who may try to kill them.
  • Be my friend
    Posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 in Life
    You can now be my “friend” here via Friend connect (unless you’re a subscriber then you’ll have to actually physically visit my blog) or see if this link works.I only really added this friend connect thing to see if it made a difference when valuing my blog. Largely because Chris’ blog is worth over $5 million and mine’s only worth $500 and I want to figure out what made the difference. Also, it’s made by Google – so it must be good right?
  • Clean feed ship listing due to leaks
    Posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 in Politics
    There’s a lot of debate still raging about the proposed clean feed. We all thought it was dead when Nick Xenophon decided he didn’t like it. But no. It’s alive and kicking. And costing money for anyone who dares link to the leaked blacklist.Obviously there’s a fair bit of support from the Christian side of the fence for anything limiting people’s access to pornography – particularly child exploitation material. But these objections are, in my opinion, misguided.
  • Election day
    Posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 in Church
    The countdown is over. We voted this morning. Robyn told me afterwards that she’d voted for Family First. It was a funny joke. We laughed. Here’s why I don’t vote for Family First… While I appreciate that Family First put the family first and often that means supporting things that are good for Christians and Christianity – I think their very presence dilutes the conservative vote and is counterproductive for Christians looking to vote on their issues.
  • Ethical dilemma
    Posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 in Culture
    Little sister number two asks:How much money are you ok with keeping if you find it on the ground?Discuss.
  • Fruity protest
    Posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 in Church
    Here’s a novel protest against perennial protesters Westboro Baptist (the hateful “God Hates Fags” mob). It’s pretty Biblically sound – but the Bible has a fair bit to say about homosexuality and sin.
  • Geek checklist
    Posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 in Life
    Continuing the vein of discussion about whether I’m a geek or a nerd (and in fact whether the distinction is necessary) – here’s a list of ten habits of a geek spouse from Wired. And here’s how I fare…1. Punning.Guilty as charged. Really, really guilty. I had no idea that this was a geek thing. 1 point.2. Swearing in Klingon.Nope. Not interested. Not really interested in sci-fi – but that doesn’t stop me wearing my Star Wars inspired “Milk I am your Father” shirt.
  • Good water use
    Posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 in Coffee
    Last time I posted something pointing out how awesomely unsustainable the use of water in production of coffee is people jumped up and down screaming and we ended up talking about the plight of battery hens.Here’s another picture from Good (click it for full size) highlighting how coffee is not the worst of the bunch, and suggesting giving up steak as well. Greens arguing for not eating meat… that’s original.
  • Gruen man
    Posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 in Life
    The Gruen Transfer returned to TV tonight. It’s a brilliant show. Tonight’s topic – tourism advertising. A subject close to my heart. Made some interesting observations about how tourism marketing works and the basic formula. A couple of years ago at a marketing workshop with Virgin Blue marketing guru Sean Cummins (from Cummins and Partners) showed two tourism advertisements from different states with the soundtracks switched – and it was almost impossible to tell the difference.
  • Knowledge of all font
    Posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 in Life
    Here’s a list of the 100 best fonts of all time – written in German – Helvetica takes out top spot. UPDATE: Here’s an English version of the 100 best fonts with a bit more info on how the list was compiled. If lists aren’t your thing and you’re more a periodic table type here’s a periodic table of fontness (click it for the full sized version).
  • Pictures and words
    Posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 in Church
    Gordo has issued the challenge to demonstrate how a picture can paint 1000 words. There’s my entry.
  • Plant rant
    Posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 in Church
    There’s a lot of chatter around the Australian evangelical blogosphere (that’s a pretty narrow field really) about a future church planting movement in Australia. Some people are over in the US with Mark Driscoll and other renowned church planters right now. And they’re blogging up a storm. Most of the posts are buzzing with fanboyism. They’re chock full of quotable quotes, photo ops, video interviews and summaries from talks given at conferences. It’s no doubt very exciting for those caught up in the movement.
  • Shirt of the Day: Pacman redux
    Posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 in Oddities
    I posted a Pacman shirt from Glennz.com last week. This one is funnier. And it’s from BustedTeesRunners up in the almost shirt of the day category (which is generally weekly and completely arbitrary)… from the same site include the following.

    This one poses the important questions

    And this one is too rude for me to display – even though I think my mum would approve. And my wife would relate.
  • Stimulus rains on cats and dogs
    Posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 in Politics
    Apparently “literally hundreds” of cats and dogs will be receiving stimulus money inherited from pensioners who’ve died since filing their last returns. If these pensioners bequeathed their estates to their feline or canine companions and a tax return was filed the animals get the one off payment.Joe Hockey is jumping up and down crying fowl (because chickens don’t often get these sorts of rights)… he thinks it’s a waste of money.But really, the stimulus is only effective if the recipients spend the money.
  • The Costa Coffee
    Posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 in Coffee
    A British coffee taster has insured his prime asset for $14 million. His tongue. So he’ll no doubt be steering clear of overly hot coffees from now on. From the ABC.”Gennaro Pelliccia is the chief taster for Costa Coffee and tastes every batch of raw coffee beans the company uses.He says his 18 years of experience in the industry has made his tongue a valuable asset.
  • What’s black, white and read all over
    Posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 in Media
    Yes, the humble newspaper. Thanks Peter Combe. If you want to track down the leading daily (or in fact any other dailies) from the 400 biggest cities in the world – here’s a nice aggregator.
Why not subscribe to the RSS feed so that you don’t miss a beat. Or a post

March 23, 2009

Geek checklist

Continuing the vein of discussion about whether I’m a geek or a nerd (and in fact whether the distinction is necessary) – here’s a list of ten habits of a geek spouse from Wired. And here’s how I fare…
1. Punning.
Guilty as charged. Really, really guilty. I had no idea that this was a geek thing. 1 point.
2. Swearing in Klingon.
Nope. Not interested. Not really interested in sci-fi – but that doesn’t stop me wearing my Star Wars inspired “Milk I am your Father” shirt. 0 points.
3. Weird or over the top ways of celebrating mainstream holidays.
Not that I can think of off the top of my head. I do however celebrate federal budget night with an annual beer and budget celebration featuring only myself (and my wife who is there in presence not spirit). I’ll give myself half a point.
4. Dissecting movies.
I’m not really a movie geek/film buff. In fact I like really stupid movies that would no doubt annoy those who are film geeks. I certainly don’t point out continuity errors or any time a movie breaks natural law. So no points.
5. Wearing obscure geeky t-shirts to “normal places”.
Well yes, I do that. Lots. It shows just how clever you are. If you understand them. It’s like an idiot filter. 1 point.

6. Requiring extra space in the house for geeky things.
Yes. I have a coffee machine that’s more than a metre wide. I have a breadmaker set up on the back patio for roasting coffee, and I have four archaic consoles sitting in our TV unit. 1 point.
7. Geeky toys/decorations can be hard to explain to kids.
Well I don’t have kids. But I can’t imagine explaining why I own a plastic Bob Hawke drink dispenser will be easy. 1 point.
8. Looking up information while a discussion/argument is still in progress.
In the internet age who doesn’t do this? Really? Maybe it is just me. Very, very guilty. Especially when I know I’m right and I’m just doing it to back up my argument. 1 point.
9. Needing to watch certain TV shows ASAP to avoid spoilers.
Well, I actively seek out spoilers at times – just to stay ahead of the curve. But there are times when I guess this could be true. 1/2 a point.
10. Geeky projects that take over the house and whole weekends.
I guess ripping apart a breadmaker to install a switch bypassing the circuit board is pretty geeky. I like little DIY challenges – like the restoration of my coffee machine. 1 point.

Things aren’t looking so good. Lets count up those points. Drum roll.

6 7 out of 10 by my count. I guess that makes me an annoying geek spouse.

March 22, 2009

Weekend roast

I picked up a new breadmaker today from Cash Converters – it solves all my roasting problems by spinning right from the start. I roasted my first batch. I’m very excited. No more stirring by hand or spending ages waiting for a spin cycle to kick into gear. 

I also used the new heat gun I picked up while garage sailing the other week.

I really only wrote this so that I could use that title. It would have been more appropriate had I written it tomorrow.

March 21, 2009

Categorical denial

Today was a busy day for me – what with elections being tomorrow and my job being what it is… you can check out what the candidates have promised North Queensland on our website.

I also played around with my “categories” – culling some, combining some and rearranging them into the following order… you can now also subscribe just to a category. It’s as easy as clicking on the RSS images below.

March 20, 2009

Gruen man

The Gruen Transfer returned to TV tonight. It’s a brilliant show. Tonight’s topic – tourism advertising. A subject close to my heart. Made some interesting observations about how tourism marketing works and the basic formula.

A couple of years ago at a marketing workshop with Virgin Blue marketing guru Sean Cummins (from Cummins and Partners) showed two tourism advertisements from different states with the soundtracks switched – and it was almost impossible to tell the difference.

Tourism ads are by and large formulaic and in the past were too focused on iconic shots of postcard landmarks – and apparently what we’re really into is collecting experiences rather than pictures.

Tourism marketers are limited by government funding and the fact that the tourism industry is a disparate bunch of small businesses who don’t really want to throw much money into advertising a destination rather than their own businesses.

I’m going to make my own tourism ad on their website and figure out how to put it up here.

March 18, 2009

Anniversaries

Monday was my blog’s third birthday.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of my arrival in Townsville.

Friday is the third anniversary of Cyclone and my first day at work.

I was hoping to have my 1000th post done on Friday – and I’ve got about 40 posts to go – so expect a bit of filler.

A lot has happened in my life in that time – so I have much to be thankful for. Particularly my wife.

March 18, 2009

Be my friend

You can now be my “friend” here via Friend connect (unless you’re a subscriber then you’ll have to actually physically visit my blog) or see if this link works.

I only really added this friend connect thing to see if it made a difference when valuing my blog. Largely because Chris’ blog is worth over $5 million and mine’s only worth $500 and I want to figure out what made the difference. Also, it’s made by Google – so it must be good right?

The valuation thing took off after Simone posted it – and most people seem to be worth much more than me, though mine is worth slightly more than hers. It seems to be based on weird factors. I think advertising space is one of them – but I’m not going to sell out with adwords here just to boost my blog’s fictional value.

March 18, 2009

Searching

One of the top ten search keywords that brings people to my blog is “Townsville Strip Clubs”. Not many of them stay. Perhaps I wasn’t what they were looking for.

If you’re here because you searched for that – skip the strip clubs and head to church for a more satisfying experience.

March 18, 2009

Pictures and words

picture-paints-1000-words

Gordo has issued the challenge to demonstrate how a picture can paint 1000 words. There’s my entry.

Also, I’m preaching this weekend and here’s a thousand words painting a picture of what my sermon is all about thanks to Wordle:

1john2-sermon-wordle

March 17, 2009

Metrics Systems

Having spent all weekend worried that my site was dead today I decided to check out how much I would have lost had it been gone forever by having a look at some novel webmetrics platforms (I was also using this first, more serious, option for work related purposes).

Pageboss gives you all the details on your site – link backs, google page rating, when the google bot last scanned your page, number of times your site is linked to or bookmarked in popular platforms, and a host of other useful stuff.

$timator

Stimator calculates the dollar value of your site based on a logarithmic assessment of a number of factors. Lucky I didn’t lose my site, it’s worth about $US550 compared to Googles $US938,550,265 – I can’t even begin to try expressing that as a percentage… here’s the valuation of my site:

valuation

March 16, 2009

Knowledge of all font

Here’s a list of the 100 best fonts of all time – written in German – Helvetica takes out top spot. UPDATE: Here’s an English version of the 100 best fonts with a bit more info on how the list was compiled.

If lists aren’t your thing and you’re more a periodic table type here’s a periodic table of fontness (click it for the full sized version).

http://www.squidspot.com/Periodic_Table_of_Typefaces/Periodic_Table_of_Typefaces_large.jpg

March 16, 2009