The Undignified Cactus

Please Try to Pay Attention

2012-01-18T05:55:00.000-08:00

This post is not about SOPA. I am against it but as a non-American all I can do is be angry. What this post is about is the people complaining about SOPA. My twitter feed, RSS reader and regular news sites have been full to breaking point with blackouts and rallying cries from gaming press, tech blogs and general internet types trying to get everyone to kick up enough of a stink to get the bill quashed. This is political activism and democracy at its finest, the common man making his voice heard to change public policy.

Only it's not, is it? It's the common man making his voice heard to prevent a change to public policy that no one in the public seems to want. Which leads us to ask why the change is being made. If no individual thinks that the specific measures or even general principles of the bill are a good idea, how did somebody get the idea to draft it in the first place and then garner enough support that there is some chance of it passing? That's easy: big corporate groups like the RIAA have spent a pile of cash that would make small countries envious on buying enough politicians to get their bill introduced. There is maybe, maybe one guy in the senate or congress who knows about the extent of online piracy and thinks that a bill like SOPA is the best solution available. Everybody else took the money they were offered by lobbyists and promised to vote accordingly. For some reason this isn't called bribery, it's called the political process. I'm only passingly familiar with the Jack Abramoff case, but what's truly scandalous about it (to someone outside of America at least) is not the illegal things he did but all the unethical and corrupt things he did that were legal. Things that are still legal.

And now all the people who blank out when they hear people shouting and complaining about the role of lobbyists and the disproportionate voice money has are suddenly political activists. People who shrugged and said "yeah, that's politics" if someone mentioned Super PACs or Supreme Court decisions are outraged that their favourite sites might get shut down. Maybe, just maybe, the time to pay attention was when somebody was carefully changing the system so that buying votes became not only standard procedure but also somehow regarded as the way things should be.

SOPA is not some rogue piece of legislation in a system that otherwise work tirelessly for the betterment of society, it is just the first piece of exploitative, corrupt, cynical legislation to impact people who didn't think they needed to care about how the country they live in is being run. I can understand if your attitude to the political system is if it ain't broke don't fix it; on the other hand you should probably have checked occasionally to see if someone was trying to break it, because now it's going to be a right bastard to fix. And I don't think a dubstep remix of The Macarena is going to get the job done.

Every Shade of Stubble

2011-08-05T05:06:00.000-07:00

The next chapter in the gender stereotyping in games argument is finally here, this time over Mass Effect 3. BioWare decided to put up a series of options for the female marketing version of Commander Shepard and let fans vote on which one would make the cut. The winning entry was FemShep 5.

Cue people complaining about the typical barbie doll representation of women in games, and how the industry will never move forward while developers and their fans have such blinkered view of gender and something, something, something. For the record, here's male Commander Shepard.

As you can see, he has stubble and dark hair and is therefore not a bland male stereotype, just like the short-dark-hair-and-stubble-bedecked Kayden on the left, and the non-stereotypical characters from Shadows of the Damned, Heavy Rain, GTA 3, Uncharted, and Alan Wake.

And Gears of War, Serious Sam, Max Payne, Splinter Cell, Dead Rising, Just Cause 2, Space Marine, and Vice City.

I do understand that there is a problem with the treatment of female characters in games, I really do. I just get angry at the implicit assumption that the lack of depth is somehow in contrast to a wide diversity of well written and nuanced male protagonists.

I'm Not Your Pal, Buddy

2011-06-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

I woke up in a hotel room a week or so ago to find out that three transactions totaling $1000 had been made from my PayPal account to random individuals. I have no idea how it happened, it's not like I've been opening dodgy websites or responding to emails from Nigerian princes, but happen it did. As near as I can tell the transactions were all to buy MMO related equipment/accounts/whatever, which is a particularly petty thing to have money stolen for. I raised the transactions as disputes with PayPal and then spent a long morning logging into every account I could remember and changing the passwords to be unique and stronger. I expect this to come back and bite me next time I visit said sites, but at the time it seemed a reasonable response.

I could still log into my account, which was nice, and PayPal were very quick to limit my account and reverse the transactions. Afterwards they asked for my feedback on their response, which I duly gave. Then they sent me a survey asking, among other things, whether I'd recommend PayPal to a friend. No. No I would not. I couldn't have asked for a better response, but at the same time I did have $1000 stolen.

This morning I received an email from one of the recipients of these fraudulent transactions who was mildly displeased, to say the least, that I had reversed the transaction. As far as he was concerned I had reneged on a deal and behaved reprehensibly. He then proceeded to threaten to lodge a dispute with PayPal, etc, etc. Most interesting was that he said he had email and chat logs of the transaction (hopefully that's not an indication that my email account has been compromised because that would be an incredible inconvenience). Getting involved in an email conversation with someone who thought I was a con artist/thief didn't seem like a good idea, so I told him I thought lodging the dispute was a good idea so we could deal through PayPal, and expressed my regret that he was unfortunate enough to get involved in a situation where he was not to blame.

Getting my money stolen was a little disturbing and quite annoying, and it certainly makes me consider what I'm going to do with my PayPal account in the future, but the most frustrating thing about the whole situation is that somebody out there thinks I'm a thief.

Looooong Weekend

2011-06-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

It was a simple plan. Go to Perth to visit my brother over the long weekend, catch a game of football while there, go home. Hell, it's barely even a plan. I plan catching up with friends for lunch with more precision. But like any plan, it did not survive first contact with the enemy, the enemy in this case played by prevailing atmospheric conditions.

We sat through the football, every last excruciating, disappointing, I-flew-four-thousand-kilometres-for-this-crap second of it, went and ate some Turkish food, and went back to the hotel.

His shirt was more fun than the game

There plans were made, of which I was not fully informed, to drive the next day some two hours through orange country to a Benedictine monastery. An orange grove is quite a pretty thing, rows of dark glossy foliage and bright orange fruit on a backdrop of red sienna dirt and flawless blue skies. Five hundred orange groves is the same but really, really boring. The monastery was closed to visitors when we got there, but they let us look at the outside. It was brick.

See? Brick

No sooner had this road trip to end all underwhelming road trips been mapped out than Puyehue Volcano happened. Long dormant, it erupted and filled the sky with ash. I know when a similar thing happened in Iceland with the Great Unpronounceable Volcano, European travel was brought to a grinding halt, but that's Europe. It's tiny and Iceland is in its back yard. An over-zealous barbecuer could most likely create a big enough smoke screen to black out Europe. I was in Perth when Puyehue started, little bits of burning Chilean spite sent halfway around the world to inconvenience me just because I made a joke in poor taste about the miners. I don't remember making one, but it's just the kind of asshole thing I would do. Our flight to Melbourne was in question, but by Tuesday things were looking all right to leave Perth, but Tasmania was shut down. So off to Melbourne to lounge about in a hotel at the airline's expense for a day or two. Or seven, in fact. But then it was five. Oh, how they toyed with us, forcing us to choose flights but always teasing that if we rang back later something earlier might open up.

Weekend in Melbourne. What to do, what to do?

In the end there was time to see another football game, so we did. Every last excruciating, disappointing, I-flew-four-thousand-kilometres-then-turned-around-and-flew-another-three-thousand-five-hundred-kilometres-to-see-this-crap second of it. Then up before dawn, or at least before weekend dawn which is well established to be 10am, to fly back to Hobart. But of course there was the dog, left in the capable care of my sister. Who lives 200km from Hobart. So of we drove through the midlands fog that never lifts into the rain of the north and fetched the dog. Finally, after a trip to get a small dog that took longer than the flight to Perth, we were home.

I actually had a pretty good time.

Code And Prejudice

2011-06-07T06:43:00.000-07:00

Let's take some work from Ms Austen.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

It's a classic opening sentence to a classic novel, and one with a clear meaning. Imagine that for some reason you wanted to take this rule and apply it to, for example, everybody in a neighbourhood. You hire a crack team of programmers to write the software so that you can plug in the personal details of your neighbours. Quite why you would do this I don't know, but work with me here. Let's see what misunderstandings could crop up.

In possession of a good fortune. Ambiguities are the seeds of defects and arguments about scope or intent. Obviously this needs to be clarified: what constitutes a good fortune? Is there a different threshold if discussing net worth compared to salary? Would different neighbourhoods have different ideas of what constitutes a "good fortune"? Is a fortune just a monetary value? Questions easily answered, but questions which must be answered nonetheless.

It is a truth universally acknowledged. One of the problems that occurs quite often is that the specifications contain outright mistakes, mistakes which are outside the developer's ability to recognise as such and which the client believe to be true. What if this rule is taken to a culture where a man can have many wives, or spouses are matched as children before a good fortune can be amassed, or the wife's family have to pay a dowry? Absolutes are great in specifications, but only if they're true.

A single man in possession of a good fortune. More subtle than ambiguities of definition are ambiguities of language. Although you might think it's pretty clear that the phrase means 'an unmarried man', other interpretations could be made. Maybe it's differentiating a good fortune possessed by one man from a good fortune possessed in common with several other men (say a business partnership). If the developer thinks that the alternative definition is pretty clear, then the first you'll know about it is when married men are being classified as in want of a wife.

Must be in want of a wife. Implied meaning can cause all sorts of problems when a requirement is broken down into its components. If the developer working on this part knows that earlier specifications refer to a single man, he is likely to correctly assume that a single man wants a single woman who will become his wife. Of course, marriage is entirely implied, as is the fact the woman in question is not a wife but rather is supposed to become one. In this more literal interpretation the man is looking for an already married woman.

So, in the worst possible case of interpreting this classic sentence you could end up with somebody who thinks that Jane Austen believes the following:

In every place in the world it is agreed by all people that a man (of any relationship status) who has a predetermined level of wealth which he doesn't hold in common with anybody else must be in want of a married woman for undefined reasons.

Now imagine what happens when you apply this to to a three hundred page design document written by people who have never even worked in the same building as a developer before.

It's Soothing Rays

2011-05-25T05:15:00.000-07:00

Luigi Calling

2011-05-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

I saw a girl in town the other day who was maybe fifteen wearing a t-shirt featuring the pixelated green 1-up mushroom. My thoughts in order were:

Nice to see some geeking out in the streets
Wait, when did the last 2D Mario game come out? 1990?
She wouldn't have been alive when it came out
She's probably never even played a 2D Mario game
What does SNES era Mario art mean to someone to who has never experienced the games?
Are old games the new Clash London Calling t-shirts?
Good Lord I'm getting old

The Crane Transposition

2011-05-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

I used to get annoyed back in the day when people would describe Frasier as intelligent or highbrow comedy. Frasier was a mainstream sitcom where the setting was highbrow; the jokes themselves were the same setups and punchlines you could find in Cheers, Friends, Bewitched, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air or a hundred other network sitcoms, but with a degree from Harvard. For example, consider the following scene.

Marty: Oh, hey, while you're there, could you pick me up a bottle of something fancy for my friend's retirement party?
Frasier: I think you mean sophisticated. Fancy is a contraction of fantasy, in the sense of desire and whimsy, hardly something one would expect or want to find at an all night liquor store.
Marty: Roz, could you pick me up a bottle of something fancy for my friend's retirement party?
Roz: Sure, what does he like?
Marty: I don't know. He's a retiring cop, just pick out anything that'll get him drunk.
Frasier: Just pick out anything!? Well maybe at the same time we can pick out a new suit for him without knowing his size, or, or pick out a condo in Florida without knowing his finances, or pick out a new car without knowing his driving habits. (Pause) Or his feelings about cup holders.
Marty (looks past Frasier at Roz): Wine. Get him red wine.
Frasier: Pinot noir? Cabernet sauvignon? Malbec? Shiraz? Sangiovese?
Marty (in desperation): Roz?
Roz: You know this can go on all night, why don't you just come with us?
Marty: ugh, that's what I was trying to avoid.
(All head to the elevator)Frasier: Oooh, I forgot merlot.

Fairly standard Frasier shtick. The salt of the earth old man gets frustrated with his over educated son and appeals to the slightly more normal producer to try and avoid the pedantry. Laughs ensue. However the scene is not actually from an episode of Frasier but rather from The Big Bang Theory episode "The Hofstader Isotope", which in its original form reads as follows.

Penny: Oh hey, while you're there, could you pick me up a few comics for my nephew's birthday?
Sheldon: I think you mean comic books. Comics are feeble attempts at humour featuring talking babies and anthropomorphised pets, found traditionally in the optimistically named 'funny pages'
Penny: Leonard, could you pick me up a few comics for my nephew's birthday?
Leonard: Sure, what does he like?
Penny: I don't know. He's thirteen, just pick out anything
Sheldon: Just pick out anything!? Well maybe at the same time we can pick out a new suit for him without knowing his size, or, or, pick out his career for him without knowing his aptitude, or pick out a new breakfast cereal without knowing his fiber requirements. (Pause) Or his feelings about little marshmallows.
Penny (looks past Sheldon at Leonard): Spiderman. Get him Spiderman.
Sheldon: Amazing Spiderman? Ultimate Spiderman? Spectacular Spiderman? The Marvellous Adventures of Spiderman? Spiderman 2099?
Penny (in desperation): Leonard?
Leonard: You know this can go on all night, why don't you just come with us?
Penny: Ugh, that's what I was trying to avoid.
(All head down stairs)Sheldon: Oooh, I forgot Sensational Spiderman.

The Big Bang Theory has jokes with geeky words in it spoken by people dressed like geeks (occasionally guest starring actual geeks), but that doesn't make it geek humour. Just saying.

Or They Have a Kindle

2011-05-03T04:31:00.000-07:00

No device works better as an abridged introduction to a person than the bookshelf. That awkward gap while the host makes tea can be comfortably filled with a perusal of the shelves. A copy of Anna Karenina sits nestled in a clump of the distinctive orange and white striped Penguin Classics, but the receipt poking up from the middle of its bulk betrays the difference between the intention to read and the reality of daily life. Lord Of The Rings and the complete Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy don't necessarily indicate a geek, they're classics of their respective genres, but a shelf dedicated to the works of Feist is harder to fob off. Whole collections of one author, but the only Orson Scott Card book is Ender's Game? Not good enough to bother with the rest of the series it would seem. Lonely Planet Nepal looks like it got dropped in one too many mountain streams while a mint condition Lonely Planet Argentina is patiently waiting for funds to match dreams. The literary credibility of A Farewell To Arms and On The Road is left in tatters thanks to their shelf mate, a dog-eared edition of The Da Vinci Code. Hopefully it was just a loan to see what all the fuss was about. Down on the bottom shelf are a few of the coffee table books that won't fit on the actual coffee table, a copy of Watchmen, and a few weathered young adult mainstays with the sticker adorned spines that betray them as library books that never made it back to high school. The last part of the wait is spent reading the blurb of a Man Booker Prize winning novel that neither host nor visitor has any intention of ever reading.

I forget what my original point was.

Titans of Industry

2011-03-08T01:50:00.000-08:00

I received my CafePress annual statement a few days ago. Annual takings were approximately equal to half the cost of one year's subscription. With entrepreneurial success like that, it might be time to find out where I can buy an island.

Meticulous Minute Taking

2011-02-20T04:44:00.000-08:00

Looking through my work notebook (the paper kind) I found the images below scrawled under the date for a meeting. I have no notes to go with them, so I have no idea what the meeting was about. At first I would say I was just bored.

Then I may have become somewhat disconsolate

Clearly angry about something.

And finally engulfed in blackest depression, unsurprising given the date was a Monday. Nobody likes meetings on a Monday.

I think it's fair to say that I didn't get a lot out of that meeting, except that I should use a laptop to take notes, not a notebook.

Expressing the Unique

2011-02-01T03:04:00.000-08:00

From my Chrome 'most visited' mosaic:

I feel bad for web designers these days, limited as they are to the straitjacket of only a couple of hundred shades of blue and a single white. Hopefully one day the standards authorities and engineers can unlock the full blue spectrum, so that these startling, original visions can be more fully expressed.

Not Being Angry About Flights

2011-01-20T03:15:00.000-08:00

It took a long time for my flight(s) home from Dallas to make it to Hobart, there were delays and re-routings and unhelpful counter staff and lost luggage. At the end of it all I was face-smashingly angry and even thinking about it makes me kind of mad. But I'm not going to rant about it, I'm going to go to my travel happy place instead.

I appreciate the vast distances planes can cover and the speed they do it at, especially as an Australian, but after 37 hours of continual aggravation I looked back with immense fondness at travelling about on trains when I was in Europe. Ignoring the general enjoyability of watching passing countryside and the less extortionate price gouging if you want to book a ticket late, the three advantages of the train I enjoyed most were:

No hassles. You can arrive at a train station five minutes before the train leaves, or ten seconds before if you like to live on the edge. Nobody wants to pat you down, rifle through your luggage, or even check your ticket.
No nerves. I'm not a nervous flyer, or I don't think I am, but their is a noticeable change in the atmosphere of a plane as it takes off and lands. People close their books or grip their arm rests a little tighter. During a flight when you hit turbulence other passengers shift their eyes around, trying to figure out whether or not it's enough to worry about. On a train you can relax completely and do whatever you want, whether it's sleep, read, work or just stare out at the landscape. The only moment of concern you're likely to have is searching through your pockets for the ticket when the inspector comes around.
Better destinations. Airports are mostly in the middle of fields where there's room for runways and giant noisy planes to takeoff and land all day. When you pull into Berlin Hauptbahnhof and step onto the platform you just feel as though you have arrived in Berlin. When you fly into London Heathrow, the first thought is what you have to do next to get to London. The feeling that your journey is almost over after a 10+ hour flight is deflating to say the least.

In addition to these points your luggage will never get lost because you carry it yourself the whole time, and if you want room to stretch your legs, the sleeper and first class upgrades are in the magnitude of a night at a cheap hotel, not the week with a high class hooker airlines charge.

So, in summary, yay trains.

Land of the Automobile

2011-01-13T03:11:00.000-08:00

I spent last week in Dallas. The first question many people asked when I mentioned this before going was "what are you going to do in Dallas?" which seems a bit unfair to poor ~~old~~ ~~little~~ Dallas. The answer was that I went to geek out with friends who I see rarely who were all there by an unlikely series of coincidences. And geek out we did. Pizza was eaten, dice were rolled, cards were tapped (unnecessarily considering the game in question, but they were tapped nonetheless). That we didn't play any video games is frankly remarkable.

But the disproportionate excitement as one face of a plastic cube (or tetrahedron or dodecahedron) came up instead of another is a tale for another time, a more distant blog. Today I want to discuss how damn alien Dallas felt as a city.

When Dallas was planned, it wasn't designed with pedestrians as a secondary consideration, or even an afterthought; it was designed by someone who believed that the basic unit of humanity is the car. Getting from place to place by car in Dallas is easy, easier than the inner city of Paris or London must be, so if you assume there are only noble car drivers and worthless hobos not worthy of your consideration then the city planning is a success. However if you assume one day a person might want to get from point A to point B on foot, the large stretches of road with no footpaths at all and the seemingly random placement of businesses looks less inspired.

I'm not sure if it is a corollary of the fact that nobody is ever moving slowly enough to appreciate the outside of a building before pulling into the car park, but the buildings in the non-residential areas of Dallas are an ungracious, grudging concession that perhaps the malls, eateries and light industry should be housed in something. The standard seems to be a gravelly pink-brown oblong shape with maybe some narrow windows near the top of the building. On foot, outside these buildings, it feels as though the city is saying "what are you doing outside? Don't you know that people belong inside buildings, where there's air conditioning? At least get in a car where you can watch a movie in the back of the seat in front of you." Even the pubs and restaurants, which have the same level of uniqueness and atmosphere you'd expect in any other city, have great chunks of their personality sucked into the utterly unremarkable buildings in which they are placed.

I am a pedestrian. Don't drive, can't drive. Dallas is the first place I've been under the impression that not being able to drive is an embarrassing pathology rather than a handy skill I should get some day.

Stretching the Analogy to Breaking Point

2010-09-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

Imagine as a kid you loved Batman. In 1989 the film came out and it was pretty darn good. You could lord it over the other kids, the fools who liked X-Men or Spiderman or some other stupid character. The next movie came out and it was okay, but you were a little less vocal in your Batman support. The downward spiral began in earnest, and by the time the other kids got to see their heroes in movies, Batman was a joke. You couldn't argue about whether X-Men was better than the 1989 Batman, because the only thing anyone remembers is Batman and Robin. Clooney's making jokes about killing Batman, your childhood hero.

By the time there's news about a new Batman movie, every comic book hero under the sun has a movie, and as bad as some of them are, none are as bad as Batman and Robin. You manage to psyche yourself up for the opening, and convince some of your Spiderman friends to come along, but you can see their poorly hidden smirks, and you think if ever so briefly that maybe Spiderman's not that bad after all.

Two hours later you walk out grinning like an idiot. Not only Batman Begins it a good superhero movie, it's just flat out a good movie. Like 'Best Cinematography' good. Nobody's even going to be able to argue about it any more. Batman wins.

That's what it felt like for me when they announced James Hird had been appointed head coach of Essendon yesterday; Batman's back and he's good again.

Me vs The Pope

2010-09-17T03:21:00.000-07:00

The Pope's touring the UK. Time for me to talk about religion. To be fair, he started it by calling me a Nazi.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

- Pope Benedict XVI, Holyroodhouse Address

So the Pope is suggesting I'm a Nazi? Maybe not, but he is putting me in the same basket, and explicitly saying that to remove religion from the public life will lead inevitably to the degradation and diminution of humanity. I decided to look up the reference to his own writings on freedom of religion and atheism, and found the following:

29. There is another aspect of modern life that is very closely connected to development: the denial of the right to religious freedom. I am not referring simply to the struggles and conflicts that continue to be fought in the world for religious motives, even if at times the religious motive is merely a cover for other reasons, such as the desire for domination and wealth
...
it should be added that, as well as religious fanaticism that in some contexts impedes the exercise of the right to religious freedom, so too the deliberate promotion of religious indifference or practical atheism on the part of many countries obstructs the requirements for the development of peoples, depriving them of spiritual and human resources.
...
When the State promotes, teaches, or actually imposes forms of practical atheism, it deprives its citizens of the moral and spiritual strength that is indispensable for attaining integral human development and it impedes them from moving forward with renewed dynamism as they strive to offer a more generous human response to divine love. In the context of cultural, commercial or political relations, it also sometimes happens that economically developed or emerging countries export this reductive vision of the person and his destiny to poor countries. This is the damage that “superdevelopment” causes to authentic development when it is accompanied by “moral underdevelopment”.
- Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate

Freedom of religion, by its nature, requires that the laws of the State be created using atheist approaches. If the legislators have no religion, or make the conscious choice to exclude religious consideration from the decision making process, then clearly the laws are built on atheist foundations. If, however, legislators permit personal religious belief to affect their decision making (which they should as part of the expression of their religion) then it has to be accepted that law will be made based on a compromise reached between a wide variety of differing religious views. Any such synthesis of religious views is fundamentally atheist as it treats all religions as having equal moral weight, a viewpoint which is does not fit with some, if not all, religions. In this case, the development of law is a form of "practical atheism" imposed by the State while the laws themselves embody atheistic principles which are both taught and promoted by the State.

The Pope's argument does not stop at deriding the value of atheism, which is somewhat expected of a religious leader, but goes on to say that:

Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms;

- Pope Benedict XVI, Holyroodhouse Address

As the UK is built on a Christian foundation, presumably the "traditional values and cultural expressions" that the Pope is referring are traditional Christian values. Considering several hundred years ago the Pope was not permitted on English soil, I'm not sure what era of traditional values he is referring to. "Traditional values" are not an immutable standard which the State should adhere too, they are the norms of the society which exists within the State, influenced by the beliefs and attitudes of all of its individuals. The traditional values of the UK have changed over history to be more accepting of different types of Christianity and entirely different religions. If there is a rising tide of opinion that these values are no longer indicative of the values of wider society, then there needs to be a dialogue between the opposing viewpoints, not a reactionary retreat into some perceived inviolate tradition.

The further a society moves towards freedom of religion, the further its State imposed principles will drift from the tenets of any single specific religion and towards a permissiveness that the religious may find morally reprehensible. It is not my contention that religious belief is harmful to the development of society, and in fact there are benefits to including faith in political discussion, but to have a State in which there is true freedom of religion and not merely freedom of Christianity, those of religious conviction must appreciate the crucial role that secularism plays in the creation and development of a society in which all religions have freedom.

A Poster Post

2010-08-02T07:24:00.000-07:00

You may have seen these rather awesome movie posters floating around on the internet lately. I thought I'd try my hand at a few in the same vein. The results are below:

I Don't Care That You're On A Boat

2010-07-21T03:36:00.000-07:00

I am sick of hearing about the boat people, illegal immigrants, unauthorised people movements, or whatever they've decided to call it today, and I am sick of it for two reasons.

Firstly, both major parties have taken a stance which I find at best an overreaction to a minor problem and at worst a reflection of worringly racist world view. I didn't like it when they started putting asylum seekers (a phrase people have started using as a single word to mean filthy foreigner who are probably terrorists if they're not here to take our jobs, rather than people who are seeking asylum) into detention centres while they were being processed, I didn't like it when they decided even having them on our national soil was too much and excised Christmas Island from Australia's migration zone, and I could scarcely believe it when we started paying other countries to hold refugees in detention for us. Now with an election imminent, the only point of contention between the parties is which country we should house them in, with the Liberals preferring a country that isn't a signatory of the UNHCR Refugee Convention.

Secondly, it's not a big issue. There are serious problems that politicians should be discussing this election and instead the focus for the last month has been pandering to people whose major concern seems to be a handful of refugees with brown skin showing up in a boat. It's petty, it's ugly, and it's a disservice to the Australian electorate.

Tangential Note: I have always felt that using the term "intellectual elite" as a pejorative was a bit misplaced, but the current slur "the articulate Left" might be the most complimentary insult I've ever heard.

Nothing Unusual, Nothing's Changed

2010-06-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

Just a little older, that's all.

Snippet

2010-05-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

When I was young my dad thought I would grow up to be either a mathematician or a poet. I'm a software developer, so I guess he was right. Except maybe about growing up.

It Still Doesn't Make Ten Goals Acceptable

2010-04-27T03:32:00.000-07:00

Jason had the gall to ask me on Monday why I keep supporting a team when they have been consistently bad for a number of years. It's a fair question, kind of, and one with two possible interpretations. First is why I don't support a different more successful team, second is why I keep watching football if it's only going to bring disappointment. If you would like to read an enjoyable treatise on the topic, I recommend Fever Pitch. If not, read on.

The first interpretation can be answered with a simple "Eff you buddy, that's why. Bombers rule!" then hoping there's a fellow fan around to chest bump. The second one is a bit more interesting. I could just not watch the games and avoid the inevitable disappointment. But I don't and here's one of the reasons why: closure.

When you go to primary school you are working towards the end of each year and ultimately the end of grade six. After that it's each year of high school until grade twelve, then each subject at university, then your graduation ceremony. Every year or less you get a nice portion of your life closed off nicely, often with a certificate, score or holiday to celebrate the fact. This feeling of closure entitlement is reinforced by every book you read, every movie you watch, it's something that people generally take great comfort in.

Work doesn't happen like that. Sure, the project gets delivered but it's not finished. There's those outstanding defects, the support contract, all those change request documents to make sure you get paid for the work you've already done. Even if you get moved onto a different project the new guy will need to know how something works or it's just easier for you to deal with something than explain it to the support team. It's only when you change jobs that you get any true sense of closure, and unless you have a regimented career plan you don't know when you're going to leave a job until quite close to your final day.

A sports league is custom built to provide you with regular doses of closure. To start with there's the season story that you get to follow afresh at every year with a promise that 22 to 26 weeks later it will be over with a result, even if you have to accept that your team's result was to fail dismally. Then every week you get to see a match unfold, a little drama that is not going to have loose threads and unfinished business at the end of it. You can analyse it and complain about it safe in the knowledge that there is no 'one more little thing', no 'could you find that email?' waiting to come out and bite you. Just a simple, undeniable finish and the six number epilogue.

COL 18.12.120 def. ESS 8.7.55

Damn. Maybe next week.

Pew Pews and Distractor Mice

2010-04-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

I was talking to Jonathan the other day about distractions. Not originally, but that's how it turned out. I guess we both had work to do. Anyway two main forms came up: pew pew moments (my term) and distractor mouse mode (Edit: a term coined by Havi Brooks).

Pew pew moments are my most common form of distraction. You get back from lunch or a meeting and sit down in front of your computer with a specific task to do. Okay, you tell yourself it's time to focus and get this done. Focus. Like a laser. Man, lasers are cool. Each thought takes longer to arrive and is separated by a period of absolute mental tranquility.

"Pew! Pew!" You are startled from your reverie by some idiot making laser sound effects. A stern look left and right soon reveals that you are in fact the culprit, and it's been five minutes since you last touched the keyboard. Another look around, this one guilty, and you stare at your keyboard trying to remember what you were focused on. Focused. Like a laser. Man, lasers are cool.

Distractor mouse mode is a much more frantic means to the same confused end. Consider the process (taken verbatim from Jonathan's introduction to the whole conversation):

I've just finished an important task. I wonder what I have to do next?
I should look at my todo lists, they are pretty thorough
But they are on my laptop, I should really have a way of getting them onto my mac usefully too
I should use Remember the Milk, then I could get it onto my phone
But my phone doesn't support RTM. I should really get an Android phone
Hmm, Nexus One or HTC Desire read read read
I should wait until I get paid again before I buy a new phone
I've been waiting for that Kanex XD thing for a while, I wonder if it's still shipping in April
Hmm, I see they've stopped saying April on their web page. Hmm.
Maybe there's some gossip on twitter
Ahh, no! #qanda trending. Run away
What am I supposed to be doing?

In distractor mouse mode the cursor darts about the screen clicking on interesting links on its own, a potent force of distraction over which you exert no control. It jams extra trolleys on your train of thought and makes sure each one is fully explored.

Pew pew moments tend to come more from upcoming tasks which are simple but boring where the main barrier is summoning the motivation to get it done. Distractor mouse mode kicks in when there are an overwhelming number of upcoming tasks and your brain starts jumping at every little thing like it is time critical. Both are forms of subconscious procrastination, unlike the conscious "I'll do that in the next ad break" forms, and are all the more dangerous for not being deliberate. With conscious procrastination you can refuse to listen to your own excuses and just do the task, with subconscious procrastination extended periods of time can pass before you even realise that you're not doing what you should be, let alone do anything about it.

I have no advice on how to avoid these pitfalls, otherwise I wouldn't spend so much time imitating an X-Wing at work. There must be methods for recognising when you have fallen into one of these traps and getting back on track, but if I look for the answer on Wikipedia I will still be there in two hours reading up on how Gilgamesh discovered a technique for using black body radiation to measure the specific gravity of pangolins.

Impurity of Purpose

2010-04-15T03:40:00.001-07:00

I've spent the last week working out at the Technopark, which is basically an IT oriented industrial park out in Goodwood. It has, when you walk around between the buildings, the same feel as airports, the deep suburbs and holiday resorts. It might seem like a strange group to bring together but they all share one common theme: they exist to cater to a single aspect of life, contrary to the massively parallel way most people actually live.

While an office building in the city exists for a single purpose, on the same block are cafes, camera shops and boutiques, so when you step out of the office building you are surrounded by people who are doing a thousand different things. I find it comforting to be able to see people doing different things, especially when I need a break. I spent a week in a holiday resort when I was in Singapore and by the end of the week I spent half an hour wandering around the business district in Singapore just to be around people who weren't trying desperately to have fun on the beach. The monoculture of leisure was as draining as the perpetual atmosphere of nervous impatience that permeates the world's airports.

There is something about creating an isolated environment focused on a single facet of daily life that seems to rob it of it reality. Everything that acts otherwise to that purpose, such as a cafe in an industrial part or the book shop at an airport, is bled of the genuine atmosphere that normally makes such places pleasant to visit (Filling airport bookshops with Dan Brown books probably doesn't help either). Whenever you do something contrary to the reason the place was built it feels like some sort of damp rebellion, a feeling that should never be encountered while eating a ham sandwich.

Maybe I just don't have enough focus, but I'd much rather have my places of work, sleep and fun all jumbled up with each other so I can do things without planning ahead and have a break when I need one.

On Disney Yoghurt

2010-04-10T07:47:00.000-07:00

I was at the supermarket earlier today and in the dairy section was a six pack of Disney Princesses strawberry yoghurt.

Aside from the obvious "Disney Princess yoghurt? What the hell?" reaction, another thought struck me. I think it was mostly the Belle, what with the coquettish off the shoulder look, but it in general the poses of the princesses are a little bit less fairytale princess and a little bit more men's magazine than Disney would maybe hope for from their snack food tie-ins. A few minutes on Google images, and then a few more minutes with some different search terms and safe search enabled and...

Obviously the amount of clothing makes a difference, but it does make me wonder exactly where the artists who designed the cover art for this six pack of dairy goodness went for their inspiration.

It's Been A While Between Posts

2010-03-30T02:31:00.000-07:00

Sorry about that.