buter's BABY blog

So I'm still hanging around on Facebook and yes it's eating my life. Sad really. But if you know me and know me on FB then you've read my apology and so now you can all stop gloating and instead laugh over D™'s lack of resistance to it.

So anyway one of the time-wasting joys on FB is the "Are you like me" application where you rank 10 items from most true to least true, and see how well your choices match to your friends' choices. Sometimes it's eerie - the number of matches I have with Hiren is just uncanny. But I've just been sent a link to the "Your wildest dreams" quiz and I'm stuck.

If the choices are these:


.. and others in the same vein, then I have no idea. I honestly don't want any of these because each one has a significant downside, in my opinion. So maybe I should rank them in order of least- rather than most- wantedness ... but what really concerns me is that I don't think I have any "wildest dreams" - not that I have identified recently anyway. Have I really become so content with my lot? Or rather, does it just mean that I've lost my imagination and got stuck in the practical realities of day to day life with the peanut? What a sad thought.

I do have some dreams, but I wouldn't call them wild. I don't think FB has a quiz that has these answers, so I might as well blog about them :)

• See Peanut grow into a lovely adult;
• Go back to work and move ahead in my project management career;
• Find some new books to read;
• Have a long and happy life with D™, Peanut, and maybe a sibling for her;
• Travel to France and spend maybe a month there;
• Go skiing in Colorado, no, wait - just go skiing again, anywhere!!

These things aren't all that wild and most of them I have some control over and so I will be able to pretty much achieve them. Does that make me into a more boring person because I don't want to be a sports star or win a million dollars?

Sigh.

Yeah, so you all know by now that I'm hanging around on FaceBook for no good reason that I can think of. I've had fun trawling the lists of groups though, like If You Can't Differentiate Between "Your" and "You're" You Deserve To Die and if 9039230293 people join this group it will still be lame.

But now I can relax, because according to an article in today's SMH,

"Facebook is becoming increasingly trendy ... It's where more of the thought leaders and influentials go."

So that's sorted then. It's good to be reminded that I'm an influential thought leader ... :)

Now, all those other thought leaders out there on Facebook, it's time to unite and take over the world, or something. One lame interest group at a time ...

You may have heard that the Australian Government in all its wisdom, provides a non-means-tested baby bonus payment of about $4000 for a newborn. They even go so far as to ensure 16-year-old mothers get the payment in a form of pension rather than a lump sum to make sure it's spent on the baby and not on booze or drugs or stolen by non-well-meaning relatives. Personally, I think it's a way for the Government to assuage its guilt over not creating better industrial relations provisions for parental leave.

It's a very sad thing that Australia's population growth from birth is so low. A sociologist I heard on the radio once said you can directly correlate the declining population growth with the rise in female education. It makes sense too, as potential mums are spending more time getting educated and starting careers, than starting families. But what's not being acknowledged by the Government is that those potential mothers are sticking to their careers for longer before having children because they need to save up money to be able to raise said kids, because once they leave to have the baby they are suddenly bereft of income. Then the Government wails about cost of childcare, and how they can't provide enough subsidised places for all the kids we're having, but mums have little choice but to go back to work so they can pay for the mortgage and all the bills as well as paying for childcare. It's rotten.

Some more enlightened nations have legislated parental benefits. Like, up to 2 years' paid leave from work - you can have your children, and still cover your mortgage repayments, and what's more you can choose when to go back to work, with the benefit that your child has had the chance to grow up a bit with at least one parent at home all the time, you're not entirely broke, and you can still go back to the same job you had before. Don't get me wrong, some employers here do offer a period of paid parental leave, in fact there are some very good places in that regard, but most only offer the minimum required by law. Which is, 12 months' leave. Unpaid. 12 months in total, that is, so if you happen to have some annual leave available and you choose to take that instead of unpaid leave, you still can't have more than 12 months away from your job. So in our case, I've had 1 month annual leave - before Peanut arrived - and I get 11 months with her before I lose my entitlement to go back to the same job. 11 months with no income, that is. Just to be clear, I wouldn't give up Peanut for anything, and I definitely wouldn't want to be back at work right now with her only 11 weeks old.

Oh, and the baby bonus? That went towards our private medical bills - we avoided the public hospital system for a reason.

So, I finally gave in to peer pressure, or something, and signed myself up to facebook. I mean, what else do you do when the baby's gone to sleep? I'm counting this as my "me" time!

D™ threatened to disown me, but I said I'd take the baby if he did so he desisted for now. I think it's still potential though ... But I must say it's kind of fun trawling through finding people and seeing how they present themselves to the world... I've found most of my high school chums on there (they weren't exactly pressuring me, more like "don't join facebook, it's such a time sucker") and also friends from primary school as well as ex-colleagues and family. So it's kind of fun.

One set of pals started a scrabulous game with me, because I was dissing facebook and online scrabble so much. The starting word was "CURN".


I'm familiar with the word "KERN" as a term used in publishing, something about the spacing between letters, but what on earth is a CURN?

I asked the scrabulous dictionary and here's what I got:


Uh-huh. So it's like, a real word? And on a triple word score and everything!

I guess I shouldn't trust a dictionary written by someone who made up the word "scrabulous", right?

I think it's time to face facts and realise that buter's blog has to refocus. Since the arrival of the peanut (above) I realise I've spent very little time surfing the net for "fun geekery stuff" and loads of time surfing for "fun geeky baby stuff" ... so let this serve as the announcement of buter's baby blog.

The first post should of course set the tone for future stuff, and so you know I'm still the same person, albeit with a slightly different set of priorities now, we'll begin with some social commentary.

Since becoming parents, D™ and I have talked about all the new things we have to worry about. Schooling. Immunisations. Stranger Danger. Childhood Obesity. And not to forget, OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!!1!! ... that is, Netiquette.

We have found ourselves agreeing that DVDs aren't good babysitters, that the ABC is the only TV station that the peanut will need, and that computers don't belong in bedrooms. And we really really don't want to go down the path of censoring the internet. Instead, we agree it's better to educate our offspring in how to think for oneself: make decisions about what to see and what not to look for, based on reasoned decision making rather than because it's been removed from sight for you.

Actually this ties in with our perspective on alcohol as well. We don't think it works to ban all alcohol. Rather, educate the child, if they want to drink, then at home under parental supervision is much better than a Southern Comfort experience at 16.

So hopefully the peanut will grow up to be a healthy well-adjusted technosavvy moderate drinker who finds the internet as amusing as we do !

Ok, more, and probably cooler, baby posts to follow ...

I seem to have run out of words so I'm going to make a habit of just posting funny things I find floating around the internet.

.... sigh.

Some things just gotta be shared. (click on the image)


... found via a comments thread at cute overload.

Ok, I know it's a hoppopitamus rather than a heffalump, but there isn't a baby hippo theme song :) ... and now I'm hoping that you have that tune running through your head ...


For those in the know, the reason for my lack of posts will be self evident, but let the above image serve as a reminder ....

We watched Heroes recently - 23 episodes of fun and drama, highly recommended viewing btw. And since the ending of Season 3 of Veronica Mars and its subsequent cancellation, we are now hanging out for Season 2 of Heroes as well as hunting round for new TV to be interested in, which means I'm watching DVDs of Gilmore Girls and Buffy.

One of the lovely things about being home all day (apart from 24 hour Buffy marathons) is that I can wander around the internet to see what new wonders of interconnectedness are being created every day. And now it appears that Veronica Mars was going to appear on Lost but they lost her to Heroes and so there's even more reason to hang out for the new season. Yay for interconnectedness!!

But now I must pause and consider the possibility that I'm addicted to the internet. Luckily, though, one of my regular reads is Mind Hacks, and they've recently written that there's no such thing as internet addiction.

... so it's warming to find people that think like you don't you reckon? I've just come from the angriest's post about 1980's cartoons - and while I'm sure there are lots of people out there who watched the same ABC cartoons as I did, what with them being the national broadcaster and all, it's just, well - a bit friendly to meet up with one of them :)

Of course after that I contracted an earworm. "It's me Nono, small robot you know, friend of Ulysses" which was annoying enough in itself - except the only reason I know what an earworm is, is because of a comment on the above mentioned blog post, which led me to Wikipedia, which led me to the Maim That Tune site which guarantees to remove earworms by replacing them with hideous midis of even more appallingly earwormy tunes.

... which in turn led me to decide it was worth blogging about (after all, what's the point of a blog?!) and that led me to the Red Dwarf theme tune because even though they were talking about space (which is really big) I think the first verse kind of does for the internet too.

It's cold outside, no kind of atmosphere,
I'm all alone, more or less ...
Let me fly far away from here
Fun, fun, fun, in the sun, sun, sun ....

It's an interesting thing, to think about how you learn something. I'd go so far as to say, the way that you learn influences how you deal with unfamiliar situations. If you're a person who learns best by reading or by listening to someone else talking to you, it's possible that you handle new situations differently from someone who learns by doing. Even more than that, I bet it influences career choices too. If you learn by reading/listening you may be more likely to feel comfortable learning in an academic environment, i.e. university, than a vocational environment, so you're more likely to end up with a desk job than a trade. Maybe?

Anyway Lifehacker posed the question: find out how you learn. So I did the survey and discovered I'm a visual learner, but balanced verbal and non-verbal - I learn best from visual materials whether it's text or images, compared to learning by doing or by listening. Well, I knew that already! Anyone who's tried to give me directions will know that. I basically can't find my way there again if someone else has driven me there, or if they tell me the directions over the phone. If, however, they write them down (or I do) then I'm fine with it - ditto for map reading. That's what they're for after all!!

Since I'm not currently pursuing any academic learning, what does it matter what my learning style is, I hear you ask. Well, it's a funny thing but I think surveys that tell me about myself are more useful for telling me how to deal with other people than anything else. So, if I'm a visual learner and I write someone some instructions, I get frustrated when they don't seem to get it. After all, if it's written down that should be enough shouldn't it? But for many people, I guess it isn't really. So instead, maybe I need to figure out what *their* style is, and present the information accordingly. Or, to be brutally honest, the person receiving the information should know what their style is, and request the information accordingly. As in, I know I learn best by reading, so I ask for written information. Simple, eh?

... on rereading I realise there's some pent up bitterness in that last few sentences, you can tell that I may have had trouble training people in the past. Maybe I'm not such a good teacher as I am a learner :)

I love Ikea instructions. There are no words, so they translate to any language with the same amount of ease. They always start with the things you need, and sometimes the ikea man has a helper - does that mean "You need a friend"? - I wonder if it's a comment on the sort of people who furnish their houses with ikea .... oh wait, that would be us.

So anyway you know how I was ranting about little boxes, well it seems Ikea has taken this to the next logical conclusion: flat-pack housing. It's not new (treehugger talked about it in 2005) but I've only just become aware of it. I wonder how many allen keys you need to assemble them? Arre they bigger than normal size? Do you need a friend too? Do you then have to assemble all the furniture (and is it fixed in place with tippskyd) and what happens if you put in a floor part upside down - does the furniture attach to the roof????

Side note: while researching links for this silly, silly post I've found out why Ikea instructions aren't in words: their word for an allen key is insexnyckel. Tell me that you'd take it seriously.

So you know how Rip Van Winkle slept for 20 years only to return to his village all confuddled and messed about - well after watching the best movie in the world on average 2x per year since it was released, I empathise with ol' Rip after seeing this page (also linked from Cynical-C).

errr, thanks Jarv. This was a bad bad way to wake up ... :/

...

I'm not working at the moment.

I don't realise how little I've done each day until about noon - at which point I have some lunch, and then ponder going out, during another couple of games of solitaire, so sometimes it's about 3pm before I manage to even go outside.

I used to be such an organised, busy person. This time wasting thing is really weird and yet strangely comforting. There's just nothing that needs doing more than sitting here on the lounge with my feet up. Time enough to have things to worry about later.

... and it's back to the game.

As we get better at the refinement we will be able to remove virgin rape from the process.

....errrr ?

Either McDonalds has finally admitted there is something sinister behind the slightly evil-looking clown motif, or the comment above was taken out of context. You can figure it out for yourself, but meanwhile it seems the big D is going to use their own waste cooking oil to drive their trucks. Yep that's right, it's a new take on an old joke.

Q: What has 4 wheels and fries?
A: A Macca's truck driving on biodiesel.

Thankyou, thankyou. I'm here all week - try the veal.

The other day, listening to parent radio, they played a snippet of a song that had the lyric "pour myself a cup of ambition" and I thought, what a great blog post title (and I don't think I'm the only one). But then realising that I was on my way home from my last day of paid employment for a while I figured that I probably wasn't in the best place to be writing about ambitions.

But hey, after a few days bumming around I figure maybe I should use the time constructively and instead actually put some words down about my ambitions. I mean, just coz I'm not being paid right now doesn't mean that I don't have any ambitions, right?

So thinking about it, what kind of thing makes up an "ambition" instead of just a "I wanna do that thing" concept? Is it just that you want to have no regrets? No, because that falls under "I wanna do that" and in my book includes things like bungy jumping and skiing in the Northern Hemisphere. So maybe it's stuff like "I will feel more fulfilled as a person if I do that" .... but then that implies that I'm not satisfied with who I am, and that's not really true either.

Back to the start then, and google for ambition. You get career consultants. articles from TIME, other stuff all pointing to ambition being involved with your paid for employment. Does that mean that those of us who are bumming around at home have no ambition? Is that a bad thing? It seems like it should be a bad thing, seems vaguely negative in connotation.

Merriam-Webster says

1 a : an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power
b : desire to achieve a particular end

Hmm. So maybe it's usually all tied up with corporate or commercial achievements, but doesn't have to be. And it is all tied up with "I wanna do that" after all.

Well, I guess I will keep pondering it for a while.

I was going to call this post "Third time lucky" but found the other title more amusing.

So last night, D™ and I went to see Ocean's Thirteen at the moofies. It was much much much better than Ocean's Twelve (which sucked big time) and done with much the same style and slickness as Ocean's Eleven (which we loved, and watched on DVD, several times).

There's this excellent Mexican interlude where Casey Affleck as "young dumb white guy" is doing something mildly dangerous. His coworker says "Es peligroso". He replies with "Peligroso es mi nombre medio" (which had D™ in stitches in the first place), and translates as Dangerous is my medium name.

Apparently it should have been:
Peligro es mi segundo nombre

But seriously, Ocean's 13 is another sequel to a sequel where the sequel to the sequel is waaaay better than the sequel. It was the same with Pirates of the Caribbean - #2 was kind of boring and awful, seemed to be spending more time setting up for #3 than actually making any kind of story, but #3 was pretty fine.

And how about SpideyThree? Spidey was pretty good, SpideyTwo was average, and SpideyThree? Err... it was ok. Not in the same league as the other 3rd-part films we've seen lately.

Oh well. Next on the movie list - another sequel. I wonder if it follows the same rule.

It's been raining a lot lately. So I've been watching Weeds. No, not the garden kind (though that happens too after rain) but the TV kind - a cute little show from the US about a housewife in one of those suburban communities where all the houses are rammed up next to one another and are all built according to the same set of plans. You know the ones. The theme song has been running through my head for *days* now and it's driving not just me but D™ insane. As he puts it, it's bad enough getting a song stuck in your head. It's so much worse when the song stuck is not the actual song but someone else's (i.e. mine) poor reproduction of it.

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Of course the song was written about American suburban development but as in all things cheap and nasty we Australians have to follow suit. Think fast food - until the American franchises started here we had our own excellent burgers at all the local takeaway shops. Burgers should have salad on them. With beetroot. And fresh minced steak. Not plastic cheese in a sweet bun with a frozen semi-meat patty slapped on.

So I'm (still) really glad that we were able to move somewhere that isn't made of ticky tacky but is all bricky bricky. Even though we haven't got a lot of heating yet and as I write this I can see my breath. Indoors. At 9am. I have lots of warm clothes!

Apparently this is the coldest Sydney winter for 8 years. Combine that with our recent moving house experience (from an air conditioned, carpeted townhouse to a double brick, polished floorboards, no heating, awesomely cute freestanding house) - it's *rooly* hard to get out of bed in the mornings.

AFAIK D™ is still *in* bed. He worked late last night on some photo editing for work and decided that entitles him to a sleep-in.

Sigh.

So, I was just investigating some product purchasing for my company and came across this. I suppose it's a built-in geekometer or something. After all, how many products are out there that remind you on each weekly invoice how geeky you are?



... or is it just me ?

*sigh*

It's a curious thing, that you'll be in a serious meeting or something, and then someone says something which triggers a quote from your childhood. I mean, how often do you say "Miss Jane" in response to someone saying "it's upside down"? Or maybe you say "by the rocket clock" when someone tells you the time .... all these things that just make their way into your subconscious.

So when smh published this story about map reading I couldn't stop thinking about Mr Squiggle. Could it be that the reason he could understand the upside-down squiggles but Miss Jane couldn't, was that Mr Squiggle, being a male, had a better ability to mentally rotate the image than Miss Jane? Was it in fact all a terrible reinforcement of a stereotype (which according to smh has now been discovered to be true)?

I must admit that it's taken me a while to be able to interpret maps without turning them around, but that I stopped doing it because if you turn it once, you have to keep turning it, and that just gets tedious - especially if you're driving! Eeek! But for the men who think it's illogical to turn the map around - I just want to say, you're turning it around in your head anyway, so what difference does it make (apart from less brain work) if you turn the map around physically?

Hey, don't satellite navigation systems turn around depending on your direction anyway? So does that mean they were designed for women or for men? Or does it indicate who they were designed by?

That could be a question for a later time folks.

Back to my rocket clock.

-----Original Message-----
From: butercup
Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2007 10:22 AM
To: My mate


Mate,

So seeing as I've stalled on reading Moby Dick ... maybe I should get it sent to my phone instead ;)

-----Original Message-----
From: Buter's mate
Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2007 10:30 AM
To: butercup

"stalled" eh? that puts you in some good company I expect: it's probably one of the most famous books that no one has ever finished ;) (along with "Ulysses")

At what point does a book become "never finished" as opposed to "still being read, just on the shelf for a while"? I suppose if you discount textbooks, the "never finished" category must be used for books that you don't find appealing or enthralling enough to even want to finish. Now I'm one of those people who will stick with a book for a while to see if it gets better, but even so there's a fair list of books I've never finished .. which I will admit to, for the first time, right here:

• Underworld by Don DeLillo - I got stuck at the decades-long description of the baseball game at the start.
• The Bride Stripped Bare by "anonymous" - hilariously, even the wikipee entry isn't finished.
• The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein - sorry, but I loathed history in high school so why would I want to read more history, even if it is about Middle-Earth ...
• Swann's Way by Proust - oh, I tried so hard. I even went so far as to read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life for encouragement. (yes, I did finish that one!) I've decided Proust changed my life, without having to read the whole book. Phew ..
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - I think I started this 3 or 4 times and just kept giving up. Since it turns out that the one person who kept recommending it to me had almost nothing in common with me I probably should have given up sooner.
• A Song of Stone by Iain Banks - in fact most of Iain Banks' fiction or sci-fi work just turned me off. The only one I remember finishing (and reading again, incidentally) was Against a Dark Background.
• Perfume by Patrick Suskind - just "eeeeew", really.
• The Bible - since I'm being honest, I really tried to read this, I even got a "Read the Bible in a year"guide but it still ended up on the shelf as a "thing to do later". Maybe next year.
  

Ok, that's probably enough reminiscing, after all it's not really all that much fun to think about books that never made it for me .. time to go finish off The Decameron.

Or more specifically, what rhymes with laugh and also ends in - augh?

Girraugh.

Caugh.

Umm.

So, nothing much then.

Maybe a better question is what makes you laugh (and does it end in -augh) ?

Goethe said "Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable." So I wonder what you can infer from my list ...?

Ten things that make buter laugh:

1. I often find funny things when reading other peoples' blogs. If so, they tend to make it onto my bloglines. Like, say, bash.org.


2. Dilbert comics, some of the time. A wry "That's uncomfortably true" kind of laugh.


3. The rhyming scene from The Princess Bride. "No more rhymes now, I mean it!" "Anybody want a peanut?" Every time - gets a giggle or at least a grin. And that's a lot of times.


4. That time when Buffy says "You have but face" in Season 4. Or that time when Willow says "How come the sudden calisthenics, aren't you sort of naturally buff, Buff? Hee - buff, Buff". Or the time when Willow says "I'm Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel" Or .... bugger it. Just about any episode of Buffy has me sniggering, chortling, or holding my sides.


5. When Garion says Push. I know the link is in Finnish or Swedish or something but there is a complete quote in English there. Giggleworthy.


6. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (the book and radio series), for the most part. More like my brain is amused and I'll smile than a real belly laugh but it consistently happens. The only scene in the movie where I laughed was when they all turned to wool and someone barfed. Hey! Baugh! Hee.


7. When people say inconsistent or wrong things and the newspaper prints it as if it was normal. Like when Bazza O'Fazza said that thing about the Easter Bunny, implying that it was the point of Easter.


8. Microfortnights, and other strange units of measurement.


9. In fact in line with that last one, I find lots of word games amusing. Here's another one.


10. And finally ... myself, when I do something silly, especially if D™ starts laughing at me, then I start laughing at me, then I can't stop laughing at me until I collapse with exhaustion and breathlessness. That's a belly grabbing laugh

So. I await your analysis .....

Post inspired by the happiness project .... sometimes it's fun thinking about what makes you happy!

You ever have one of those days where it seems you didn't sleep right, and you end up all fuzzy through the day?

Yeah, I had one of those yesterday.

I've decided therefore, that 5 days weeks are bad, we should have 4 day weeks for the main part, with the bonus that public holidays mean that we get a 3 day week every now and again.

This would solve so many problems!! There's the problem of long weekend traffic on the not-so-common 3-day weekends - Friday night traffic out of the CBD is utterly crapola and so if there was a 3 day weekend every week it wouldn't be so bad, since you wouldn't have 250,000 extra people all driving up to the Central Coast on that one long weekend, instead some of those people would drive up next weekend. Because they can. Of course you could say instead that every weekend the traffic will be utterly crapola, but I think that wouldn't happen. After all, we don't all drive up the coast every weekend already, why would we do it when we have a 3-day weekend every week? I'm sure it's only the specialness of the 3-day weekend that makes the traffic crapola.

Another problem solved would be the midweek hump day, commonly known as Wednesday, when weekends seem so far away in either direction. If you only have a 4-day week, no hump day, since on Tuesday the weekend was only a day or so ago, and on Wednesday, the weekend is only a day or so away! No hump day makes for no boring Wednesday-itis where all your coworkers look depressed because the weekend is so far away in both directions.

And here's a thing - having a 4-day week would help out all those Soccer mums - instead of losing a quarter to half of the weekend ferrying kids to and from school sports on a Saturday morning, and thus having less time to do grocery shopping, household cleaning and all that boring stuff, there would be the option to carry out the sport thing more spread out (no more 7am starts in winter...) or get it over with all on the one day and then *still* have a whole 2 days to do all the family catch-up stuff.

As for economic sense - since it seems most salaried workers in Australia work at least 10 hours a day anyway, but only get paid for 8, why not keep pay rates the same (i.e. paid for 40 hours) even though we're only working 4 days - that way we actually get paid for the hours we work, rather than the hours we are nominally employed for. Doesn't that sound fair? And maybe it would make the workplace more efficient too.

Look, to be fair, I think it would even work if we didn't all take the same 3rd day - some people take Friday and some Monday - the Sat/Sun common days are enough for sport, social events and all that, and meanwhile we all get our extra day.

Hey. I heard the public service can sort-of do this already with flexi time. Why isn't that standard for the rest of us?

now watch me disappear in a puff of ill-humoured smoke ..... grummble rummble grumf ..

There are so many reasons the internet is cool. Forget the fact that D™ and I spent another evening sitting on the lounge next to each other with our separate laptops surfing the web. The thing is just a huge repository of good and useful geeky information.

Take for instance those mistyped URLs in your address bar. Because of the friendly way Firefox remembers your URLs and gives you autocompletion, the broken ones show up in the options list as well. Sometimes, they show up first. But all you have to do is shift+delete the b0rked one and it goes away. Noice, thanks Lifehacker.

Or, how about those times you're typing a long complicated email (or even a short frivolous one) in Outlook and you get all excited and hit *some* combination of keys that somehow just *sends* your email. Just like that. With no warning. After putting up with that for 2 years of using Outlook, I finally g00gled for it and found two things:

1. the mysterious shortcut is Ctrl+Enter. I know you can avoid weird automatic sending if you just don't fill in the address line of the email, but it's likely that your long complicated message is a reply so has a long complicated address line comprising To:, CC:, and BCC: lines so that's not always an option; and

2. There is a regedit to disable it. Ignore the stuff he says about Word unless you use Word as your email editor. Who does that? Seriously?

Yay Google.

I've discovered something today.

Stories published in newspapers are quite likely to only present one side of any given story and in this age of internet debate, the fact that I can't add a comment to any news story that I want to (unlike on a blog, for example) is quite annoying.

Anyway what's got me hot-n-bothered now is the Shlock! Horror! idea that technology is taking kids' time away from their parents. You can go read the whole thing, but here's the key quote:

The research by telco AAPT has revealed that 16 to 20-year-olds spend an average of 3.2 hours a day using technology.

This compares with just two hours of face-to-face communication spent with parents.

Almost half of the 1000 parents surveyed believed two hours was not enough time and would prefer about seven hours of face-to-face time with their children throughout the day.

Ok. But "telco AAPT" didn't ask, or didn't report, whether parents have ever been able to get 7 hours of face-to-face time with their children.

Wouldn't kids be diverting their time to playing outside, hanging out with friends, watching TV, hiding in their rooms, or on the phone, anyway? This is just a new way that they are not spending time with their parents. I'd be surprised if there are many families out there that get 7 hours of face to face time together daily where there is a TV, DVD player, VCR or even separate rooms for goodness' sake.

Jeez, D™ and I don't even get that. Not on weekdays anyway - maybe we get 4 hours a day? Some of which we spend watching TV so make that 3. Some of which is spent separate because of personal hygiene reasons, so make that 2.5. Some of which is spent separate because (for example) one of us is cooking and one is watering the garden. So make that 2. Oh dear. Technology has a lot to answer for doesn't it.

Although it is funny that the other day he said to me, "I read your blog at work because you're not there and it's like having a conversation with you." While being an alarmingly cute thing to say, it does support AAPT's other finding:

Despite this, almost 80 per cent believe technology has dramatically helped their family to stay in contact.

So there you go.

Edit:
D™ and I just spent about 1/2 an hour playing with Cozi. In the same room. With our backs to each other. In order to become more connected. Life's like that.

So, Premmia Iemma has sacked a minister for reasons which might be related to him being a man or might be related to domestic violence against women - "Australia says no" and all that. But Iemma denies the second reason, saying it's solely to replace a woman who left with a woman. (Isn't that positive discrimination anyway???)

The Liberal (and media) stance is that it's all about the domestic violence thing and that the press conference was a farce. Barry O'Farrell's comment though, is pure gold.

The Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, said Mr Iemma's statement that the decision had nothing to do with the violence allegations was "like saying the Easter bunny's got nothing to do with Easter".

I guess Bazza O'Fazza hasn't heard of Jesus? Or maybe he was just emphasising that he actually agrees with ol' Morrie.

Either way, my opinion on the outcome of the last NSW state election is reinforced. It's just too too depressing. I'm in the 126% of people in NSW who don't like either party (from disapproval ratings of 59% for the incumbent and 67% for the opposition).

So, you might have heard at some point that one of my favourite flicks is Clueless, for several reasons, if you know me, you'll know why the film appeals, and if you don't know me or you haven't seen it then there's no point explaining it to you!

It's full of American cultural references that I didn't understand the first time I saw it, but because of clever writing that doesn't really matter - the context makes it obvious. But as I've gone through experiencing life (or at least experiencing the internet) I've come to understand more and more of it. I wouldn't say the references have enriched the movie, but I find it highly amusing that a film I saw in 1995 is the first time I heard some of these terms.

Ok, so rather than bore you any more with the slow slow workings of my mind, here's what I mean.

MEL : Which reminds me, where's your report card?

CHER : It's not ready yet.

MEL : What do you mean, "it's not ready yet?"

CHER : Well, some teachers are trying to low-ball me, Daddy.

For years I thought she said the teachers were trying to lobe on her. No idea what that meant. But once I figured out the bidding thing on EBay, I got it.

And now, thanks to the Goog, I've finally got this line:

CHER : Here's the 411 on Mr. Hall. He's single, he's 47, and he earns minor duckets for a thankless job.

411 !! Information !! I get it !!

I still don't get "duckets" but at least the urban dictionary is always ready to offer a helping hand.

Oh, it's all very sad and ridiculous isn't it. But seriously, surely I'm not the only one out there who just lets things slide if you don't understand them, and if they don't seem that important. I mean, how often (in Australia) do you hear - or use - the term 411 in conversation? Really? So cultural references in film don't always translate, come to think of it, nor do they translate in books particularly well. How many non-Aussies find The Castle incomprehensible, for instance?

And then the other day I heard that the ad man who created the "shrimp on the barbie" campaign to send to America had passed away. But what got me was what the original campaign was about.

AD GUY 1 : How are we gonna advertise Oz to the Yanks?
AD GUY 2 : Guess we could invite them over for a couple of snags on the barbie?
AD GUY 1 : Hmm, good idea, but will they know what a snag is?
AD GUY 2 : Umm - "Banger on the barbie"?
AD GUY 1 : And we want to show that we have access to great seafood rather than just gristle and fat encased in sheep intestines. Might remind them that we're all convicts or something.
AD GUY 2 : Right. "Prawn on the barbie"?
AD GUY 1 : Prawn... prawn... would they know what that is?

And lo and behold, rather than reeducate the masses as to what a prawn is, they all come here wondering where all the shrimp are. No 411 there.

<sigh>

You ever have one of those days when you shoulda just stayed in bed?

My Monday sucked - I agree, most Mondays suck, but especially when your day goes like this:

• got to work, that bit was ok, thought "i'd better put some dollars into my keycard account" so logged in to ANZ, sent the transfer, all seemed hunky dory
• called MBF to upgrade our hospital cover .. well that failed because apparently even though anyone with my mbf card can do it over the internet, I can't do it over the phone .. sheesh
• went to eastgardens at lunch, but started by turning the wrong way out of the driveway..
• finally managed to get there, so went to the ATM to get that cash I shoved into my keycard account, oh it seems I neglected to hit confirm at the new exciting second confirmation page of my internet banking so the extra cash was missing (at this point I should have given up)
• went to Target to try to exchange a funky cardy that I bought on Saturday that D™ reckons was too big, the woman helpfully took it from me at the refunds counter and gave me an exchange note, then I spent 15 minutes getting lost in an unfamiliar Target and then finally walked out cardy-less because not only did they not have the cardy in my size they didn't even have it in the slightly wrong size ... or colour ... or anything ...
• got takeaway for lunch, finally, and didn't really want it but I knew I needed it ...
• nearly lost my car in the carpark, pretty much chose an aisle at random to walk down thinking I had ages to go to get to the car and then discovered it was on the other side of the aisle I'd chosen - purely by chance ...
• got back to the work carpark and someone had taken my space .. had to randomly trawl for a spot in the sunny zone on a different level of the carpark to where I normally park
• got back to the office, sat down and only managed to eat half the takeaway because it was just .. not very exciting ..
• was putting the leftover in the fridge (this was about 1.50pm) when dude walks in looking like he wanted me for something, I said "what you after?" he said "that meeting you scheduled, I'm here" .... me: o_O ".... ? Oh. *That* meeting. Right. Let me just get my notebook ...."
• had a meeting from 2- 3.50 at which point I had to leave in a hurry so I could get to target at Macquarie to try to find my bloody cardy ..
• lost my car *again* as I walked to the wrong part of the carpark because I'd had to park elsewheres ...
• finally on the road, heading the right way this time, I think I ran a red light at broadway ... all the other cars had stopped ... Hmmmm....
• decided to take the bridge and new exciting tunnel, managed to get out before the M2 started (At which point I foolishly thought I'd made it through the day) - got to Mac in plenty of time ..
• and went to target. They didn't have the cardy in either the good size or the slightly too big size. Asked the ladies at the exchange counter to ring around for me, no it's not at Parra or Carlingford, so as far as I'm concerned it's nowhere and I don't even have the too-big one, all I have is a bloody credit note.
• Finally got home (didn't lose my car this time) through stupid "leaving north ryde heading west" traffic at which point it surely *had* to be over ...
• posted the monster laptop sleeve story and then today I heard that the image didn't post properly from picasa and so had to fix it tonight!

I'm so glad that next week due to a religious observance, there is no Monday.

A while ago I read about a place making monster sleeves for laptops, and at the time I thought "cool, kinda cute and quirky" ...

I described the concept to D™ and before you could say "Grr! Arrgh!" we were off to Spotlight to select fuzzy fabrics.

Unfortunately for the monster-in-waiting, you could then say Grr! Arrgh! a great number of times before I actually got connected to a sewing machine to create the fuzzy laptop muncher.

But .. it all came good in the end.



I feel like I have achieved something, if only giving birth to a monster. But that's still something!

Yes, I will take orders. Contact me if you want one and I'll see what I can do for you ;)

... you decide to do one of those internetty quizzes because you saw it on a blog you tend to actually respect now and then just to fill up a blog post.

1. Where is your cell phone? Elsewhere.
2. Describe your boyfriend/girlfriend? Smashing.
3. Your hair? Comfortable.
4. Your mother? Practical.
5. Your father? Kind.
6. Your favourite item? Pendant.
7. Your dream last night? Snored.
8. Your favourite drink? Milk.
9. Your dream car? Silver.
10. The room you are in? Kitchen.
11. Your ex? Dull.
12. Your fear? Ignorance.
13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Older.
14. Who did you hang out with last night? D™
15. What you're not? Infertile.
19. The last thing you did? Dinner.
20. What are you wearing? PJ's
22. Your favourite book? Magician.
23. The last thing you ate? Bread.
24. Your life? Full.
25. Your mood? Calm.
26. Your friends? Gorgeous.
27. What are you thinking about right now? Chocolate.
28. Your car? Maxy.
29. What are you doing at the moment? Wondering.
30. Your summer? Humid.
31. Your relationship status? Married.
32. What is on your tv? Mythbusters.
33. When is the last time you laughed? Now.
34. Last time you cried? Then.
35. School? Private.

Copy.
Paste.
Answer.
Questions.
In.
One.
Word.

The internet is a fabulous place for finding info on the latest tech craze, why it's broken, where to get it fixed, or how to hack it yourself. One of the more popular sites to read about bleeding edge tech is Gizmodo ... not that I'm one of those 1337 h4x0rs what hang out there, but D™ has been known to send me links from it occasionally.

This post from a Gizmodo editor sums up why I don't frequent those sites much:

Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

He goes on to say why "the market" is actually smarter than the early adopters - because "the market" is the mass of people who wait to see if something works before they buy it. Of course it's a bit circular, because without early adopters "the market" would be stuck, and without "the market", there would be nobody for the early adopters to thumb their noses at. (I know that's bad grammar, leave me alone).

Now I'm not much of an early tech adopter but I do read a lot of stuff on the Web - and my friends and family have been known to use my blog recommendations in their own surfing - so when I tell you that I've been following Giveaway Of The Day you will understand that to mean that I've been reading it for a few months now and decided now's the time to share.

A few days ago they offered an audio ripper/ CD maker piece of software. I believe the sell price was around US$20. For ages, I've been sort-of looking for something that will make a proper audio CD that will play in my car, from mp3 source files (from a CD that I promise I own, but have misplaced, and I happen to have the mp3s still hanging around). By sort-of looking I mean that I've not bothered to do any research at all, but since GOTD offered an audio specimen I decided to read about it and check out the feedback. So anyway they had this software, and I read about it and it seemed to do what I wanted it to. Then I read the comments. And this is the best part about GOTD - if you mine through the masses of "I don't want this" inane comments, you get some real gems of information that are actually useful. For this case, there were several mentions of other free softwares that would do the same, then about 3 or 4 (a high percentage, in other words) mentioned that your average CD/DVD software that came native on your average PC, or even Media Player would do this.

Woah. Media Player? Useful? Again? I'd already found that it was easy to create mp3s in Media Player as long as you mess with the default settings, but to reconvert back again? So I tried it. And it worked.

And that is why I added GOTD to my bloglines. Most of the time I don't want the software they are offering, but it's actually good to look through the comment threads if you're at all interested in the type of software on offer.

</advertising>

Recently received in email:

A major flood hit the Campbelltown area on Sunday March 4 with its main disaster point being Queen Street, Campbelltown.

Victims were seen wandering around aimlessly, muttering "Faaackinell".

The flood decimated the area causing approximately $30 worth of damage.

Several priceless collections of mementos from the Macquarie Fields Riots were damaged beyond repair.

Three areas of historic burnt out cars were disturbed. Many locals were woken well before their Centrelink cheques arrived.

The Macarthur Advertiser reported that hundreds of residents were confused and bewildered and were still trying to come to terms with the fact that something interesting had happened in Campbelltown.

One resident - Tracy Sharon Smith, a 17 year-old mother of 5 said "It was such a shock, my little Chardonnay-Mercedes came running into my bedroom crying. My youngest two, Kevin and Jason,slept through it all."

Apparently looting, muggings and car crime were unaffected and carried on as normal.

The Australian Red Cross has so far managed to ship 4,000 crates of Bacardi-Breezers to the area to help the stricken locals.

Rescue workers are still searching through the rubble and have found large quantities of personal belongings, including Health Care Cards, Jewellery from Kmart and Bone China from Big W.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

This appeal is to raise money for food and clothing parcels for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in this disaster.

Clothing is most sought after - items most needed include: baseball caps, tracksuits, singlets (blue & white) white sport socks, reebok boots Any other items usually sold in Go -Lo or The Reject Shop.

Food parcels may be harder to come by, but are needed all the same.

Required foodstuffs urgently needed include:
Microwave meals, Baked beans, Ice cream, Chips, Fizzy drinks.

Donations: $15.00 will be taken to buy a packet of winny blue 25s and a lighter to calm the nerves of those affected.

**Breaking news**
Campbelltown Uniting Church has cancelled their local "Nativity Display" due to their inability to find three wise men or a virgin.

The internet is a funny place ....

So the other day, I was merrily driving off to the stupormarket, or somewhere equally stimulating, when I saw a car for sale by the side of the road....



...

Well, I found it amusing anyway.

Yeah, I did it.

Nice to have a few hours to mess with the template, seeing as I'm home waiting till it's time to go to an appointment.

Reminds me of waiting to go to afternoon exams at uni. You never quite know when to leave, because you don't want to be late, but you don't want to be hanging around at uni for hours until the exam starts.

Oh well. Luckily futzing with my template has killed some time.

If you don't like it, suggest a different free template and I'll follow it up.

I read the news today, oh boy ...
about a lucky man who made the grade
and though the news was about spam
Well I just had to gasp
I really could not grasp ...
John Howard's had a heart attack
He didn't know it but his use has changed
A crowd of newbies got trojans
We'd seen his face before
Nobody is really sure if Norton filters out pollies....*

If you're wondering what that cryptic message is about, well apparently there is a spam floating round in this electioneering year saying that PM John Howard has had a heart attack, and has a link to The Australian's website. Unfortunately for the n00bs out there, the link is actually not to The Australian but to a 404 not found page which attempts to look like the Aust's website, but is in fact a bad place which downloads a trojan to your machine. This then attempts to steal all your money. Kind of like the government, really.

What got me going about this though was the comment in the SMH coverage, "Political and religious emails are not subject to the scrutiny of the Spam Act" ... so ... we can't even complain about emails that we don't want and won't read and that clutter our inboxes if they appear to contain political or religious matters. I can see it now ...

Subject: Jesus saves...
Message: all the money that we Nigerians can send him. Give us your bank details and your Bible bar code so we can spread the largesse.

Subject: John Howard for your PM..
Message: You need a personal masseur don't you, well our hosts are well trained and all named after prominent political figures.

Sheesh.

*apologies to the Beatles ...

I was just perusing my bloglines, as you do, for something to read, and came across photojojo's latest post about making cubular photos. I quite like photojojo for supplying my needs in photography: namely, to have stuff to talk to D™ about over dinner... Like the awesomeness of the GorillaPod (in our house, now known as the drillerpod, for reasons best left unexplored) which ended up being an awesome Christmas present for D™ - up till then I'd had the exciting options of socks, jocks, or a box (of nothing).

Anyway back onto photojojo, they also often post links to other sites - like the runningfromcamera dude. They just make me giggle, which is always a good side benefit of using the InterWeb.

So today they had this story about DIY cubular photos but they linked to a story from 2001 about cubular watermelons. Watermelons. Squared. For ¥10,000 each. That's about $105 aussie. Yikes! I like my watermelon round, if that's the price of cubed! Reminds me of that Donald Duck story about Square Aigs....

Which in turns puts me in mind of one of my dad's favourite jokes. Or is it one of my favourite dad jokes. Anyway.

Q: How do you know how many pies to buy for lunch?

.. wait for it ..

..

..

A: Oh, 2 Π R enough to go around.

Hehe.

Do you remember that Far Side comic that had an individualistic penguin standing up in a crowded rookery singing "I just gotta be me!!!" ?

Ok so maybe it's just me but that's always stuck in my head. Anyway tonight D™ and I are planning to go see Happy Feet, yes, the penguin movie. According to my mum (who does not have English as her first language) they are actually penquins, which is a lot cuter. And she'd know seeing as she and my dad have just returned from the superduper Antarctica boat trip where they saw millyuns and billyuns of penquins eating, sleeping, ice sliding, swimming, regurgitating, basically anything short of flying. (duh).

Penquins seem to be a theme in today's media. There's March of the Pengs, Happy Feetsies, and now the book publisher has started a wiki called amillionpenguins where they have launched the somewhat ambitious project of the world's first web-based collaborative novel.

I don't know whether I feel it will succeed or fail. Maybe a bit of both - after all, wikipedia is the prime example of how web-based collaborative resources that "anyone can edit" can have truly good bits, and truly bad bits.

Oh well, I might read some of it one day so I'll reserve my judgement till then.

So having written such a wimpy post last time, I'm in the utterly unenviable position of having to write a good one to make up for it, which I will feel much better about leaving to rot on the front page of the blog for a few days/weeks/months.

Unfortunately, I *still* don't have much useful to say. I read an article yesterday which talks about why men are funnier than women. The conclusion was that men have all this energy to spend on impressing women (or killing each other) in order to reproduce (which doesn't take much, now, does it) so there's oodles available for being funny, while women have essentially no energy left after saving it all for reproducing, so they don't bother.

Does anyone laugh when they read my blog? Am I funny? I think I might be funny = strange, but not funny = haha, at least not in the way of, say, Girl vs Pig. So I guess it might be true, and especially must be so, because one of my little-known New Year's Revosolutions is that I have decided to live by the statement "I found it on the internet, so it's true". Think about it.

Oh, I know this is technically blogorrhoea, but it won!

I'm so happy, I can hardly contain myself (that's a quote, btw).

I've shamelessly stolen a blog post title from jarv - because it's the internet, and I can - but luckily she doesn't have a copyright statement so I'll never get sued .... (fingers crossed) ...

Anyway in all the foofaraw and hullabaloo of the end of the year and the start of the new one, I've decided it's time for a spring (summer) clean of upstairs, you know the place, the home of memory and thought and repository of all weird electrical connections that make us who we are ...

See what I mean about needing a spring clean?

Other people might call it a new year's resolution, or revolution, or evolution, but I'm going for something that is a bit more thorough while at the same time knowing that it's going to have to be done again.

It's a focus thing. This year I'm going to focus on reading new things, rather than trying to stick to a genre with which I am already comfortable, I'm going to focus on being a calmer person, and I'm going to focus on keeping up with friends. I know I tried to do that last year, and I sort of did ok, but I'm going to try to keep it up! After all just because a new year resolution did ok in year n, doesn't mean you can't dust it off and keep going at it in year n+1 does it?

So to start off with, I've been reading a bunch of books by James Clavell. In my wild teenage years I read a whole bunch of old adventure/thriller books my dad had picked up when someone left his work - Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth, that kind of stuff. I tried reading Clive Cussler when I moved in with D™, but after the first book you kind of know the formula so the second, third and etc books are a bit .. predictable. Since then (about 7 years ago) I've not picked up an adventure book let alone read a saga of them. Enter James Clavell. A dude at work suggested I read Sho-Gun, which is a tome, when I'd mentioned to him that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Musashi a while back.

I finished that over Christmas (at Lorne, the coldest wettest beach to spend an Australian summer, *ever*) and so perused the local (only) secondhand bookshop to find more. I ended up with King Rat and Whirlwind, but I'm still missing Tai-Pan, Noble House and Gai-Jin. I'll get there - these books are *good*. There's action, adventure, drama, all that, there's a whole lot of history, politics, real-world tie-ins, and they're well written into the bargain. So this weekend I'm going to another second hand bookstore to try to fill my James Clavell bookshelf.

After that I thought I might try to read Gormenghast again. I tried for the first time about 10 years ago. Maybe I have matured enough to try again. Or maybe I'll end up spending more time with friends instead. Who knows.


Edit: my horoscope today says:


Hmm.