you don't get me i'm part of the union

A couple of things struck me as I read this article.

First, evidently it's OK to refer to the The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers (APESMA) as a "union". Valuing consistency as I do, I expect the ABC to also use the "union" word when it next refers to the Australian Medical Association. I mean, they are both associations of professionals, are they not? Somehow, I don't like my chances.

Second, and for a moment disregarding who said what to whom but accepting that somewhere in the murky midst there is a skerrick of truth to the article that design responsibilities will be sent offshore at some indeterminate future point, where does that leave Australian industry policy?

For those who have more interesting things in which to dabble, I should point out that "industry policy" as she has been practised in these parts for some decades has been that low value-added ("metal bashing") has gone offshore while Australia retains the vital higher value, more knowledge-intensive work.

Hah. Do we train as many engineers as China and India, even on a per capita basis?

So, what's the new policy? Well, once wages and costs in the "developing" countries get high enough, they'll need to outsource their low value added manufacturing.

At that time I suspect Lee Kuan Yew's comment about "poor white trash of Asia" might start to look fairly applicable.

unfinsihed sympony

derarm deodorant or something. And then it hung completely and so I ahve gone back to the old interface and I like don;t care anmd all and they can do what they want. I don't even care about typos and like I can't be boteherd running spellcheck becaue it's just anoytjer way they try to mcircomanage you and all.

So therte.

Mr Denmore, I posted a comment about how "leadership" is the 'in' word for this year but no-one knows what it actually means in practical terms in any given circumstance, but everybody knows how to say it. Also, I spellchecked this bit out of deference to your insightful and erudite blog.

unfinished symphony

Bluuudddy blogggger, I just wanted to post a comment at Mr Denmore's blog but my gooooogle account doesn't have the privilege or the right code or un

i've been everywhere

If I am getting these annoying hyperlinks telling me about a Brisbane 'mom' (sic) on virtually every website - including Aunty as you can see - have I got a virus? Or are they indeed everywhere?

Have screenshot, can't upload it.

who's going to drive you home tonight?

In lieu of several thousand words (ha! as if that was in any way likely...) here are some pictures. They appeal to me for all sorts of reasons.

Today was a day out.

even shorter answer

No.

you can't do that

What I can't do is cut or copy 'n paste. Still. I google the problem and get 367 gazillion hits, all of which may as well be written in Korean for the sense I can make of them.

What I wanted to copy 'n paste was the comment by bro2uncle about how the video "co-insides" with the lyrics. I cannot but agree. I note I can copy 'n paste the URL. But not the words.

And I am fed up to the back teeth with things being "rolled out". Can we possibly just occasionally implement or introduce? Because they're, like, words too? Like, English words with meaning?

no she's not there

I'm pretty sure I authorised the comments but they're not in the folder and we don't have an e-mail management program any more but just the telstra bigpond deepwell of non-conformity and even though I'd ticked to stay signed in to blogger I had to sign in again and it's not there, and because bloody gooooogelll has bought blogger and every bloody thing under the sun is integrated you can't do this without them already having authorised you to do that.

I don't like it, I don't like it at all.

And that explains everything.

the zombies(#)

If you watch too much computer generated graphics - and if you watch any blockbuster films at all, (*) you will be watching far too much - then here is why you feel uneasy. They're calling it the "uncanny valley" because it's far more popular to coin a mindless rhyme than something that makes sense. Think 'Adam and Steve' for a similar effect.

But it's an interesting insight into how computers may be changing the way we operate. For a Fairfax insight into the same issue, see here.



Computers are certainly changing the way we operate at VVBSea. 'Cos some weeks, which feels like months, ago the pooter hung its bootstraps and refused to function no more, no more no more no more etc. We found a local bloke hwo promised to make it right but because it's a Dell, a new motherboard has to handmade by a Dell-accredited elf in a cave somewhere, so we still don't have it back. So we bought Mrs VVB a new laptop and it's all different, hence I've been at this post for seems like aeons. And I've lost all my bookmarks.

Whinge over.

(*) We don't watch any round these parts.

(#) She's not there is one of my all time favourite songs. The keyboard solo by Rod Argent was little short of magical for that genre at the time - and probably even moreso now, when computer generated crap dominates the airwaves.

karma chyaleon

why does it paste to aone program but not to asnother.

this is shi9t man I don't liek ti .

I hate news stsufff.

I mean it's just a development of one of the thousands of earlier microsoft programs and all of a suddent it doesn't do stuff. Man this sucks.
And this stupid keybaord ahs keys in different places and and I can't see whwere thyey arwe.
\
It'srap man.

iggy pop

I will take a short break from banging my head on the table to bring you news from the 2010 Ignoble Prizes. My favourites?

Engineering

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

I'd have to look at the abstract to determine whether the researchers even considered those preceding questions which automatically suggest themselves. These include, of course, why does anybody want to collect whale snot, closely followed by (b), what do you do with it once you've got it? And then, presumably, how much do you get in a typical collection...er, raid?

Peace

Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.REFERENCE: "Swearing as a Response to Pain," Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston, Neuroreport, vol. 20 , no.
12, 2009, pp. 1056-60.

If they need another control group to add weight to the hypothesis, I suggest they call around to my office during one the regular beating head on table episodes.

Economics

The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

Emphasis added, probably superfluously.

Biology (allegedly, this seems too good to be true...)

Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of
Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.

Words fail me. The only good news is that if China is eventually going to take over the world, the means are going to be stupendously different to customary explanations such as shooting the Dalai Lama, artificially holding down the exchange rate or getting everybody hooked on Hainanese chicken rice.

I feel better now.

suede

I think that what we're seeing now is music in it's purest, rawest form, by actual musicians that aren't sueded or influenced by the potential to make millions.

Presumably musicians get sueded when you put tanning lotion on them?

Anyway it's another chapter in the ongoing discussion/argument/war over the impact of free downloads on the viability of - all parts of - the music industry.

For my part I still buy CDs because I spend a lot of time in the car and the e-cheapo model versions we buy for work don't have mp3 inputs. Yet, I guess. I also buy CDs because, while I have an mp3 player, I only use it for its voice recording function. I don't jog or do other activities that people seem to do when they are listening to mp3s and while I love music, I can get by perfectly well going to the supermarket without needing earphones in.

And while you may or may not agree with Brian Stoner's comment, from which the first extract above was taken, it doesn't warrant calling him a fag as a later commenter does. What is it with people who do that?

baby don't speak no evil

Extract from an article in a journal I was reading yesterday:

Cloud computing is made possible by new technologies for virtualising
applications from hardware so they can scale, by architecting applications as standardised multi-tenant web services, by engineering for massive scale and by simplifying the way users access applications using the internet.

I was relieved to see that Blogger's spell check, which I usually find pretty useless (for example, it doesn't give me anything useable at my usual mistyping of 'start' as 'strat'), at least found itself flummoxed by 'virtualising' and (oh yes) 'architecting.' That said, I was somewhat surprised to see that spell check did not recognise 'internet', although, given that this is a blogging tool, maybe it was looking for 'intertubez.'

No, it doesn't like that either.

Anyway, back to the article. I imagine that a time-honoured way for the IT profession to gouge fees, where there aren't fees to be gouged, is to write their proposals, reports and recommendations in something approaching Klingon in the hope that management will be impressed. Or, more likely, that no-one in management will have the fortitude to admit that they don't understand what is being put to them.

Well, that's my theory (my other one is about dinosaurs).

Disclosure

(Whispers) Actually, it's not mine at all.

(Tee hee.)

(*)

Oh, and go here and here to read some interesting comments threads. The UK will be the place to watch this year. I've commented previously that the Brit papers (mainly) do comments better than here, although the stab 'em and throw away the key brigade can be found out in force elsewhere, and parodied to within an inch of their lives at speek yer brrrranes.

But the UK election will put the Rudd/Abbott megacagefightshowdown ofthedecade (that's provided the decade has actually started, of course) in the shade, I reckon.

* I promise never to write 'tee hee' in a post ever again, at all.

people get ready

Things about America that you're unlikely to read in a Murdoch owned newspaper.

And a bit more, but this one includes a sliver of hope about what happens when people take charge.

Must be a very strange country.

Via bookyforum as always.

art of noise

It's not absolutely necessary, but every once in a while it's fun to get a reminder that organised religion really is a blight on humankind.

I was like.....like....what's the answer, Jesus dude?....

Britain is a nation of heretics and nothing can change the fact until your nation reverts back to Roman Catholicism.

(That comments thread is by turns quite, quite hilarious and deeply disturbing).

I looked for some other interesting stuff to link but there's nothing interesting anywhere. Everywhere I look, it's not interesting.

We bought Mrs VVB an iPhOnE today in what must have been one of the most deeply unsatisfying exercises in consumerism (ie buying something you want) in which I have ever been involved. Even being ripped off by second-hand car salesmen when I was younger was better than this.

For reasons that needn't be gone into here, we were happy to stay with the existing carrier (service? plan provider? some other blinkingly inane metaphor for supplier?). Also Mrs VVB had decided she wanted an IpHoNE and nothing else would do. So, a straight-up walk-in sale, "I'll have one of those over there please and don't spare the horses."

Given this you would think that the young salesperson, of the type the old man usually typified as a "popsy," could have negotiated her arduous assignment without pissing us off, but we were pissed off within the first 30 seconds with a series of demands for personal information that any passing Stasi recruiter would have applauded and stuck straight into the training manual. By about minute 3 I was asking her would she mind appending her snapped directions to us with the occasional "please." It didn't seem too much to ask, but she snapped that she had said please already. Must have been in Braille because I certainly missed it.

Well it took us about 15 minutes so it could have been worse. We eventually decided that popsy must have been either suffering from commission payment deficit or was so wired on something that it was a wonder her eyes didn't shoot across the shop and into the crowd.

Ah yes, the crowd. We left the shop clutching our IpHOOOne and what was left of our dignity and patience and slammed into....the NOISE! The PEOPLE, the NOISE, it was just horrific. No wonder salespersons are so stressed with (a) nowhere to sit and (b) all that NOISE just outside.

And people go to shopping malls voluntarily? As a form of recreation?

It's a wonder there aren't more murders.

remote control

If I was a betting man my money would have been on the Cats, my heart was definitely with the Saints. I have kind of associations with both sides, if you draw a really long bow. But long bows are de rigeur when identifying associations that compel - or authorise, perhaps more accurately - one to support a particular sporing team. Bummer for the Saints, but.

Now for something completely different: the application of neo-classical economic theory to how you get to be king (too lazy to insert mandatory link for Python fans, just run the script in your head, I can hear you now, matter of fact):

Why is there only one Royal Family? In this age when the market solves all our problems, what we obviously need is choice and opportunity. The market for Royal Families should be open to anyone who wants to enter, and the public should choose who it wants to be Head of State at regular intervals, having considered what the various candidates offer. This would not quite be the current hereditary system, so we might call it something else; "republic" sounds about right.

And....whatever the other thing was that I was going to write about...and do you know, just by starting the sentence it came to me.

This.

Pretty weird, eh?

Anyway I hope that they find some countervailing evidence or a methodological mistake or something, because I lose a lot of sleep. Thanks, work.

No, actually I lose a lot of sleep thinking about how I wish we lived in an age when you only had buttons for 'on' and 'off'.

Actually no, it's the work.

apple scruffs

Oh look, there's going to be a new Apple product! And people are getting all thing.

I get all thing, too. I got a e-mail from a friend today. I know e-mails are old fashioned, we do have Skype but don't you have to message someone to see if they're there before you talk? In any case, we never seem to use it, and I'm not inclined to sit in the room where the computer ius all day waiting for a Skype call. And I don't have any instant messaging software. So in this e-mail my friend mentioned a band whose new album is on iTtunes so I think, don't you need a Mac product to use iTunes? I'm not sure what an iPod does anyway, isn't it just some sort of MP3 player? Anyway, we have no Mac products.

More to the point, I just luuuurved some of the comments, as always:

And in the meantime, the rest of the world's tech users who haven't been suckered in by the RDF will just keep on their own merry way and give any new Apple product launch nothing more than a passing nod.

Um, what's an RDF? That's a TLA I've not run across previously. (NB: I googled it, it could be a
Resource Description Framework or perhaps a Refuse Disposal Facility. I am none the wiser).

The touchscreen keyboard sucks balls though, really, the idea that a touch screen "will very tactile" (I assume 'be' is missing there) is crap. It's keys that are tactile and anybody who's tried a Blackberry over an iPhone knows that it's the sensation of the keys that enables you to type fast.

Type fast on a Blackberry? Only if you're an alien. I find it takes me about 5 minutes to do a simple 2 or 3 line e-mail.

@trevster:
it'll probably be like all other apple stuff. very 'user friendly' ie easy to use for fucking idiots but infuriating and annoying for anyone who knows how to operate electronics. If you have difficulty using any Apple product, I wouldn't call you someone who knows how to operate electronics. I'd rate you somewhat below the fucking idiots you mention.
Good luck. And cheer up.

Like I said, people getting all thing.

A touch sensitive tablet would allow one to use both hands to move pictures and
movies around, scroll and generally use our fingers in the way God intended.

Move pictures and movies around? In words which now form part of our national consciousness, "please explain?" If I had a movie, where would I want to move it to? The drive-in, perhaps? I'm sorry, no idea.

801

We couldn't let post number 801 go by without a tribute....could we? Unfortunately there's bugger all live 801 on youtube (or anywhere as far as I can tell).



See post 800. Wtf is this? What does it do?

I don't have a Mac: just as well, wtf is this?

Why are all these sites designed to be only intelligible to aliens?

Gaaaargh!

short memory

Bloody short term memory. What I originally wanted to write about in the last post was bloody Optus. Having forced us onto paying on-line (bloody technology again, although we have been using BPay for yonks) by charging for paper bills, after three months I discover that we still get the paper bills and the bloody charge.

You'd think if you registered for on-line payment, that would automatically discontinue your paper bills? Wouldn't you? Well? They're a technology company, surely their bloody on line systems would have done that?

Tomorrow, we change suppliers. And also because Optus sponsors Twatbasket Sandilands and his plastic sheila offsider. And and and also because Mrs VVB deserves a new phone.

This kind of sums up a lot. I think. With respect and mad props to xkcd.com

Also, this is post 800. Wheee!

marshall's portable music machine

Aaah, Friday. I've said to a couple of long time friends or acquaintances recently that I never expected to be working this hard or long at this stage of life. On reflection, of course, I never really thought about it when I was younger. I assumed I would be working until I was 65 and I grew up in a household where the breadwinner worked moderately hard but work was a four letter word. So I assumed I'd just be doing work. The likelihood of assuming the level of managerial responsibility I now "enjoy" just never occurred to me.

Some years ago I was having a conversation with a work colleague - younger, better qualified, and now far senior to me. He said he started doing what he does because he wanted to change the world. That got me thinking: as a young person I never even remotely considered that a particular job or line of work could change the world, let alone how that might come about. Certainly, not having gone to uni at the usual time meant I never mixed with people who always knew they wanted to change the world - if uni at that age is a factor.

Talk about just accepting what life throws at you. Regrets, on this basis I should have them by the pallet load.

Anyway I am indeed pretty damn busy and if it weren't for the office laptop's NextG connection having been inoperative for the last 3 weeks, I'd be working on that right now, trying to recapture all things I need to do arising from today's various doings in particular. But it is, and I'm not. Although I could pick up a pen and paper I suppose, instead of going "aaah Friday." Have to switch off at some time, I guess.

Speaking of NextG connections not working, and also trying to learn how to use a Blackberry, I've just read this article and comments on changes in consuming the music experience. Apart from a brief (about 18 month) infatuation with Napster back when it was the thing, my music experiences are still enjoyed through CDs. I've heard of Spotify but I even seem to have difficulty streaming ABC radio, let alone all this other black magic.

It's really extremely frustrating, finding yourself increasingly in the dark about technology. I'm a person of little patience at the best of times, but what I really need to do is take a week off and just work away at digital things. Other people learn to use these damn things, it must be possible. The longer you spend away from innovation, the further behind you fall.

I read the digital gadget page of the AFR on Fridays, they review cameras and MP3 players and all these other digital things whose purpose is never quite clear and most of it just goes whizzing straight by. So I inevitably turn to the car test, at least I can understand that - although looking at pictures of Maserati Gran Turismos doesn't aid my mood much, because I can't have one.

Back to the Crikey article, I certainly agree with the commenters about the car being the best place to listen to music. I shouted myself some nice new Monitor Audio speakers and a Denon receiver (for the AV capability) for Christmas last year, but I only get to use it on odd Saturday or Sunday mornings when Mrs VVB might decide to go for a stroll (because I like to listen to loud music). So it's mainly in the car when I'm listening - given my high level of highway miles covered - and the work car is an absolute bottom of the range Camry with an amplifier apparently powered by a centipede on a bicycle dynamo and speakers made of creme brulee.

Some time just before I started writing this, I had an idea for the subject matter but that's long gone. Probably just having a whinge, I've certainly done that.

Over and out.