Fade To Black...

More than 500 websites are protesting about the forthcoming (yet to be tabled) Australian internet filtering laws to be introduced by senator Stephen Conroy over the next week by fading to black (see this ABC news story).

This censorship MUST STOP! What are we? This is the 21st century and we Australians don't need to be told what to read about on the internet by middle aged, technology illiterate idiots who are acting like the cardboard politicians they are. Stephen Conroy will disappear into the nowhere land of forgotten politicians soon enough, nobody will remember him for anything except the stupid mess he made (if the law is passed) and they way he lowered Australia to the level of laughing stock amongst the international community. Thanks Mr Stephen Conroy, you will have made this country look stupid and backward in the eyes of the rest of the world (except for maybe China who will be applauding your ideas).

This is typical of the short sighted political style of this country. Granted some 'free world' countries have some form of filtering but that is highly regulated and accurate. The laws that are to be introduced here next year, if passed, are nothing like these. More worryingly, they are open ended and will be amended as 'somebody' sees fit. Perhaps it's time that Australia considered that constitution it never bothered with...

I wonder how long it will be before posts like this will be 'filtered' for the 'good of the population' too? Dissemination of a differing opinion to that of the government could be seen as ban worthy!

More from Google Docs

Let's try this again - a year after the first trial with google docs where no post title appeared when it should have, I have decided to give it abother go and see what happens with the formatting.
Perhaps this will work...

Well it worked to a degree - Google if you ever read this why is there a large space in between the title and the body of the post? How hard can it be? (At least the republish after amending the document works).

Heard of Google Docs? Well I have, and I am currently blogging from it. If you can read this I am no longer logged in to blogger as normal. I have bypassed the sometimes moody and recalcitrant blogger writing software and am writing from a google doc. Amazing what the wonders of modern technology can do these days...

Shame that the title of the post doesn't appear, even though I have checked the 'Include the document title when posting (if supported)' in the settings. Well, modern technology does have its limits I suppose.

Grumpy Old Man Monologue No. 6 - Knuckle Crackers

I am very excited. Tonight on my daily commute home from work on Melbourne’s exemplary train network I encountered my first knuckle cracking commuter. I can’t actually remember the last time I came across one of these rarities whilst on the train, so I think it’s time for another Grumpy Old Man Monologue. What is that makes someone want to crack their knuckles? The traveller in question this evening boarded the train a few minutes after me and took up the seat opposite - the seat having just been vacated by a commuter who had alighted at the station, allowing me to temporarily uncurl my legs from the uncomfortable position in which I had had to put them due to the woefully insufficient leg room in the carriage. This resumption of the uncomfortable leg position immediately increased the level of grumpiness I was experiencing up to about a 7.5 on the grumpometer (believe it or not I just made that word up – I think I’ll try and introduce it into the everyday vernacular, if you hear it from now on remember I coined it). The Knuckle Cracker, sat relatively quietly for a few minutes until the time came for him to begin his sinovial gymnastics. He pulled at each finger in turn on his right hand then followed quickly by performing the same action on his left hand. Everyone of his fingers made a loud cracking noise as he tugged at it. He almost didn’t seem to know he was doing it by the blank look on his face. He stared, mouth slightly open, out of the window as his joints were pulled at and his chunky jewellery rattled around on his wrists. The sound is almost up with finger nails on the blackboard in my opinion.

Anyway, he performed this digital abuse in the same manner in which the majority of the other stereotypes in my growing list of train travelling ‘Types’ perform their own distinctive behaviours – apparently totally oblivious to the fact that there were people closely surrounding him/her who don’t necessarily want to hear their private conversations, nose blowing / throat clearing techniques or the style of music they prefer.

Note: I heard some anecdotal evidence recently that knuckle cracking is bad for you. Apparently someone performed an experiment over a number of years whereby he cracked the knuckles of just his right (it may have been left I don’t remember) hand over a number of years. Eventually he found that the knuckles he had cracked everyday were constantly painful and inflamed. Urban Myth? Maybe, but I’m not giving it a go.

I’ll be publishing my hierarchical list of human annoyance behaviours seen on public transport soon. It will include detailed personal observation and the types will be divided into biological classes based on observable similarities. It ill be called,

‘Relative Behavioural Trait Differentiation between the species Homo Sapiens Commuter and its subspecies, Homo Sapiens Commuter Annoying Git’

Beware the heather sellers - take two

It seems things have changed in Covent Garden. Since my post entitled ‘Beware the heather sellers’ from about this time last year, it appears London Mayor Ken Livingstone (or Sheriff Ken as the locals like to call him) may have done to the heather selling small business people of Romany extraction as he did to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, i.e made them disappear… Now I cannot be sure the lack of ‘cultural colour’ I experienced during my most recent visit Covent Garden last September is Ken’s fault or whether the purveyors of fine hand made goods have simply moved on to pastures new, an inherent part of an nomadic lifestyle of course, so I am not wishing to implicate him in the changed situation, I am just theorizing.

I will just say that this time I didn’t came away from the place without unwanted bunches of overpriced flora.

What year is it again?

So another year dawns. It came round a bit quick in my opinion, wasn’t it just a couple of months ago we were doing this before? It makes me think about all of the other New Years that have come and gone – the memories of which seem to be accumulating at a great rate in the recycling bin in my mind. It won’t be long now until they overflow and bury me in a landslide of old age. I’ll say to myself “What happened to my life?” The older I get the more I dislike the New Years celebration. What good is it but another reminder of your own mortality? Maybe we should just stop right here and go no further – it can remain 2007 indefinitely. This New Years Eve a group of people in Nantes, France held a small protest. They didn’t want to go into 2007 but to stay in 2006. Apparently they chanted: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!" whilst demanding ‘governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.' (according the to the BBC news website).

I think I might have joined them had I been there. As you may have guessed it didn’t work and 2007 arrived relatively unperturbed by this group of hopeful, but ultimately misguided, French.

Oh well, I am sure the next 363 days will soon pass and well be doing it all over again.

A word on airports, part 3

Dubai International Airport, United Arab Emirates. We arrived at Dubai airport about 5.30am, it was still dark, and after clearing another security point (seems the only way into Sheikh Rashid Terminal after leaving an aircraft is through more metal detectors) we headed to the food court for breakfast, carefully stepping over the acres of sleeping people lying on the floor, there were chairs of course but obviously not enough as one false step and you’d be waking someone with your shoe in their leg/head/hand luggage.

The food court is located on the side of the terminal which kind of looks like a giant tube that’s been partially squashed flat. I sat with my coffee and croissant, watching the dawn arrive through the glass walls. The daylight allowed me to see very different world to that I’d left. It was an alien panorama of misty desert and distant sand coloured buildings (excepting of course the ubiquitous taxiing planes and concrete runways in the foreground) very different to the pastural views seen from Melbourne airports windows the previous evening.

After breakfast it was time to head to the departure gate for the third and final seven hour leg of the trip. The airport itself is quite modern although I personally question the need for the life size, fake, palm trees, the trunks of which are made from plastic gold bars, that line the central concourse. A proud symbol of the country’s wealth, or just tacky decor? I couldn’t decide. Well thinking abut it I can – tacky.

Like many airports, it seems overrun with golf buggies ferrying the old, infirm or just plain late people up and down the endless corridors. They airport employees who drive these buggies do so with apparent disregard for those walking in front of them. They don’t seem to be looking where they were driving, and apart form the constant siren/horn/warning signal the buggies emit, they seem to just assume the crowds through which they speed will separate like the parting of the Red Sea. Perhaps this was a reasonable assumption considering the relative proximity of the Red Sea itself, I don’t know. But part the crowds did, usually. I did note though that every now and again some weary traveller seemed not to hear the approaching buggy and failed to jump out of the way like all the others. The buggy would come to an abrupt halt and the driver would stand on his horn until the hapless pedestrian turned around to be confronted by the bizarre scene of a roofless golf buggy laden down with exotic looking (but often elderly) passengers, driven by an exasperated looking official with an evil stare.

The smoking areas were interesting. They looked like they were based on the model I’ve seen used in Frankfurt airport of confining the smokers to small areas located right in the middle of the main thoroughfares just below what appeared to be a small domestic kitchen extractor fan hood. The billowing clouds of cigarette smoke would lazily ignore the extractor’s feeble suction and happily disappear sideways out of the ‘smoking zone’ before curiously investigating the nostrils of the many nonsmokers who coughed and spluttered their way past. Unlike Frankfurt’s design though, which didn’t see the need for any form of enclosure for the smoking areas, Dubai had partially enclosed theirs with clear Perspex about six feet high (apart from a few entrance/exit gaps for the smokers) which gave the whole thing the odd look of a smoke filled goldfish bowl that was so full of smokers who had been deprived of their fix for hours on board a plane, that the walls would almost be groaning against the pressure of bodies within. Now and again the smoke would clear and you could make out the gaunt face of someone, their nose or ear squashed flat against the grubby Perspex, gasping for breath. Of course the cleverer ones simply stood outside the entrances of these zones (probably office workers in their daily lives) whilst half heartedly making an attempt to be inside by ensuring a foot or an elbow was just within the enclosed space.

So that was my experience of Dubai airport. On the whole I liked it, it was interesting, but slightly tacky.