Don't crash into ambulances

If you ever use the blogroll listing on this blog, you might have noticed by now that I link to two ambulance blogs and a couple of police blogs. I particularly like Random Acts of Reality and Inspector Gadget, both for their views, but mainly for the interesting stories that they tell about the viscitudes of their jobs.

I almost became one of those viscitudes yesterday. I was driving down Burns Bay Rd on the north shore, which is a steep and twisty road, when I spotted an ambulance with flashing lights coming up fast behind the traffic. Burns Bay Rd is two lanes each way, but it is twisty and nasty enough to have a concrete barrier down the middle of it to stop cars coming down the hill from crossing over and smashing into cars coming up the hill. I managed to get out of the way of the ambulance in a jiffy, which was not easy by the way - as it got really close, I realised it was also on sirens, but I didn't hear them until it was only about 50 yards away. I didn't have the radio blaring at all - I was listening to a talk on Radio National of all things (more about that some other time). Modern cars as so well insulated, you just can't hear sirens anymore if all the windows are up.

So I gets outa da way by getting into the left lane and slowing to about 30 to let it past. There was a bit of traffic, but it was all ahead of me, so once the ambulance was past, I just ambled down the hill behind it.

OK, here's the picture. It's raining lightly (as opposed to now, when it is pouring down), and the road is slightly slippery. The speed limit is 60, and anyone with an ounce of sense keeps to that on this road, and slows down a bit for the really nasty corners. If your tyres are good and the suspension is in good working order, any vehicle should have no concerns keeping a grip on the wet tarmac at that speed.

So I am in the left lane, doing about 40, and the ambulance is in the right lane, doing about the same. I had expected it to speed up to 60, thinking that it was on its way to a hospital somewhere, but it just stuck to about that speed, so it didn't get away from me. It simply stayed off my right beam a few lengths ahead, with both of us doing the same speed.

Then we came around a corner, and the ambulance swerved into my lane and came to an abrupt halt right in front of me. Now that was a surprise, and I managed to avoid plowing into the back of it by a quick application of the brakes. There, on the side of the road, was a small black car (like a Barina) that was entirely off the road (in the trees) and facing the wrong way. It was not badly smashed up by any means - it looked like it had gone for a spin and collected a small tree, resulting in some panel damage but not much else. From my 1 second glance as I went past, I reckon I would have driven it away if it was me behind the wheel.

But who knows what happened to the driver (and passenger?), and what the other side of the car looked like. There could have been a star picket stuck through the driver's door for all I know, impaling the driver.

Anyway, I got around the ambulance and continued on my merry way.

Now, here are the interesting points.

The car was just sitting there, with no one around. I have been in a few prangs, have witnessed a few prangs, and have turned up moments after a prang, and there have always been people around. Someone gets posted at either end of the road to warn traffic and flag down the emergency services when they arrive (I have an orange reflective vest in the back of the car, which I nicked from another job, just for this purpose, and a torch for night time prangs). Someone is usually leaning over the car door, comforting the driver or passenger if they are hurt or shaken up etc. Cars are parked on the side of the road with their hazard lights on. If someone has been thrown out of the car, people will be clustered around that person, and there will be blankets (again, got one of them in the back as well, along with the first aid kit). There might be a tarp covering something if it is raining (got one of them too).

But in this case, there was nothing. It was like a neutron bomb car crash. There was just the black car, and no people. Not even an open car door. No one had stopped. I had at least expected to find someone standing there in the drizzle on the side of the road, waving a mobile phone at the ambulance. But there wasn't.

I wondered afterwards if this car had been driven by an idiot who had decided to zoom-zoom down this winding, slippery road, and had come to grief as a result of their own stupidity. If they had been driving like an arsehole, the drivers that had been putting up with their antics might have gone, "Ha ha ha, you deserved that, now I am going to go home and laugh about it with my friends and family".

I certainly did.

In other words, was it a Darwin Award type of crash? I could see no other reason for losing control on that stretch apart from incompetence or stupidity.

More on hootchies

Thanks to the movie "Platoon", every man and his dog seems to know the term "hootch" or "hootchie" - although in the movie, it referred to the original meaning of house or village, as in "Burn down all the hootches".

Armies love adopting words from foreign campaigns. Dixie, which I think comes from India, and presumably means "pot". Gook, from Korea, which is a bastardisation of the word for person. There is a whole vocabulary that the military uses which would be completely foreign to anyone that has not been inducted into it. Anyway, hootchie is one of those terms.

Unlike a grass hut, the military hootchie is not much good at keeping the rain out. A hootchie is made up of two "shelter-halves" that are put together with press studs along one edge. Every soldier is issued with a single shelter-half, and they then buddy up with someone else and together they build a hootchie.

You start by finding a spot between two trees, assuming you are not digging in at a spot without trees. With luck, one of you will have managed to snavel some comms cord from somewhere - that is essentially army issue green string that is very strong. It had 1000 uses, but is always in short supply. You use a few lengths of that to attach the hootchie to the trees.

You then either bang in the plastic tent pegs (that you bought yourself in a camping store), or you hunt for some sticks that can be used as tent pegs - the army would never do something as sensible as issue tent pegs to go with a "tent".

A hootchie however is not a tent. A tent is a wonderful piece of kit that has an integrated floor and walls, a door that zips up to keep out the weather and the bugs and a window and vents to let the farts out. It's usually quite warm and dry, and if put up properly, rarely blows over.

A hootchie on the other hand is just two bits of plastic stuck together and erected any old how without benefit of poles. Rain leaks through the seam at the top. There is no floor. There are no walls. There is no door. Wind blows in from four directions, bringing rain if that happens to be falling. If you are on a slight slope, you might find that a stream of water is soon running underneath your sleeping place. Bugs use it as a place of shelter and food.

You often don't get to spend much time sleeping under it anyway (night patrols, radio duty and guard duty take care of that), so it can be much easier to forget about erecting a hootch and to simply wrap yourself up in the shelter-half like a coccoon. Living under one is a miserable experience. Once it starts raining, the only way to avoid utter misery is to huddle in the middle of the hootchie with the mate that you are sharing it with.

If you are cold and wet and shivering and wearing every stitch of clothing that you own (that is, one pair of trousers over the top of the other, one shirt over another), then you huddle together to keep warm. Call it cuddling if you like - I call it surviving. The best hootchie mate I had later came out of the closet - at least he wasn't worried about being close to another bloke in order to share warmth. It's why I am totally unfussed about gays in the military. So long as he didn't want anything more than a cuddle, I was happy.

The big advantage of the shelter half of course is that it weighs close to nothing and folds up into a mess of plastic the size of your fist. You can carry it in your pocket if need be, which guarantees that soldiers will carry it. If someone issued me with a tent, it would be the first thing to be dumped, which would mean no shelter at all. The hootchie, whilst providing crap shelter, provides some shelter rather than none at all.

Hollowmen and the child obesity episoide

If you haven't been watching Hollowmen on the ABC, then I suggest you find the back episodes and get into it. This post is meaningless unless you've seen it, and I am not going to waste time at the keyboard trying to explain it.

One of the early episodes skewered a "war on childhood obesity", and now parts of what they talked about have become real.

We're only getting weasel words on junk food ads.

Those of you who have seen that episode may recall these terms:

• Code of conduct
• Awareness campaign

After this weeks episode, the Veteran's Affairs Minister must be closely checking through his investment portfolio to see if he owns any index funds.

A dog pen would be a nice place to spend the night

One thing the infantry taught me is that it doesn't matter where you are in the world, it's likely that you will spend at least a few nights being wet, cold and miserable. It's the nature of the places where you operate, the jobs that the infantry has to do and the way the infantry has to operate.

To start with, whilst it was very common in Napoleonic times for the army to accomodate itself in private houses (a practice very much in use during WWII), it doesn't seem to happen much these days. A small unit (such as a squad or a section) might run an OP (observation post) from a private dwelling, but they are only in that dwelling for the purpose of observation, or to use it as a fighting position. They are not using it as a place to cook, wash, eat and sleep.

The most luxurious accommodation I ever had during an exercise was a school hall, which meant that I got to sleep on concrete covered in a very thin layer of the cheapest carpet that the education department could buy. Which of course was then worn to a crisp by years of abuse by thousands of kids.

But it had a roof, which kept the rain off, and walls which stopped the wind whistling in. It had a floor, which whilst hard, was not made up of lumpy rocks and sticks mixed in with mud, and it lacked the creeping and crawling insects and other things that usually found their way into my sleeping bag during the night.

That's because we generally spent the entire exercise living out in the open. We had a few 10x10 tents, but they were not for sleeping in. One of two would be occupied by headquarters and the signallers, another by the RAP (Regimental Aid Post, which housed the medics) and another two by the Q store (quartermaster) and transport (the truckies). If we had some engineers or mechanics, they might rate another tent as well.

The reason those groups had tents is because they had stuff that had to be kept out of the weather, and that stuff was not people. Radios work better when dry. Paperwork is easier to do at night when you have light to work with (and that requires working in a tent that keeps the light in). Stores are less likely to be nicked if they can be held in an enclosed tent. Even though the CO had a tent to work in, he slept like we did - under a hootchie, or in warmer weather, maybe on the ground wrapped in a large plastic garbage bag.

We were light infantry, which meant we walked everywhere, and everything we owned was carried on our backs. We carried as much as possible, but as little of everything as possible. Toothbrush handles were cut down to save weight. A two week exercise would be done wearing one set of clothes, with a spare set in the rucksack. The spares might only be worn at night (because it is more comfortable to sleep in clean clothes), or when the regular set got wet and muddy. When we were issued with rat packs (rations), we'd go through them before packing them away and strip out anything nonessential to save weight.

This of course meant no luxuries, because luxuries meant weight, and too much weight could kill. It meant spending your own money on a good, lightweight sleeping bag, because the army issue ones were bulky and heavy. It meant buying your own lightweight self inflating ground mat, because the army issued inflatable mattresses were a joke. In summer, a sleeping bag might be dispensed with entirely, with the rougher types simply using a few Glad garbage bags as insulation, because garbage bags are lighter to carry than even an expensive lightweight sleeping bag.

Can you imagine going out into your backyard tonight and sleeping in your garden, wrapped only in two garbage bags? You put your legs into one, and cut a hole in the bottom of the other, put your head through the hole and use that to cover your torso. And I don't mean sleeping on your nice soft lawn - I mean sleeping in amongst the plants, in the dirt. Perhaps on the bark or woodchips that you use to keep the weeds down. Your pillow will be the bumpack or waterbottle on your webbing. And don't even think about taking your boots off. If the ground is not too hard, you can dig a small hole for your hip, making lying on your side more comfortable. But you'll be rolling over constantly, because bits of your body will fall asleep as the rough ground cuts off circulation to one part or another.

If it's really cold, you'll be wearing both your clean uniform and your dirty uniform to provide two layers of warmth. You might even have your rifle in your sleeping bag in order to keep it warm and dry. Ever slept with 5 kilos of metal and wood with all sorts of protruding edges? Ever slept for two weeks with your boots on every night? You get to rotate your socks every few days, but you're sleeping with boots over socks that have been worn on and off for two weeks with maybe the odd rinse here and there.

Depending on where you are, there might be clouds of mosquitoes. They army issues you with an incredibly nasty insect repellant, which can also be used as a gun lubricant in a pinch, but it never seems to keep the little biting bastards away. Sleeping with a balaklava pulled right over the head can help to keep them away, but then they just bite you on your eyelids and lips.

If it rains, it's just tough. Gun piquet still has to be done, even if the temperature is just above freezing and the rain is pouring down. We never had time to really dig in properly, so our fighting positions never had overhead cover to keep the rain out. If we were in one place for a few days, we might manage to dig a U-shaped gun pit that was deep enough to stand in and fight from. If we were really lucky, and were supplied with corrugated iron and star pickets and fencing wire, we might get to line the walls with tin (to stop the dirt from caving in) and to put some overhead protection on the arms of the U (ie, a roof to keep out shrapnel from mortars and the like). But the bit where we stood and fought from was never covered due to a lack of time, so we simply stood in the rain like drenched sentinels, willing our two hour stag to be over.

I spent quite a few nights on gun piquet with my upper body draped in empty sandbags, because the hessian cover was reasonably good at keeping the water out and the body heat in. The sandbags had all been filled with sand at some point, so although they kept most of the water out, it meant that I finished the two hour stag covered in a fine layer of mud if it was raining. And of course the bottom of the gun pit would have a few inches of water or mud in it, which would mean absolute misery if your boots leaked.

In short, life in the light infantry could be tough and miserable and cold and nasty. It was not a life for the faint hearted or the weak. I have slept in a shallow trench, wrapped in nothing but sandbags and lying in a couple of inches of cold mud with the rain falling on my face. I have had the misfortune to bed down in a slight hollow for the night and discovered in the morning that it was a kangaroo nest, meaning that it was full of kangaroo ticks, which meant I spent an hour with a mate burning ticks out of my skin. I've slept on the ground in places crawling with leeches, and had to salt them off my skin in the morning. I watched our section commander gently remove one from the end of his cock one morning, much to the amusement of everyone around him.

My experiences of sleeping rough in the bush have conditioned me to sleep just about anywhere. I have slept on a pile of rucksacks in the back of a truck bumping along rough bush tracks. I have slept on the bare metal of a tray ute under a tornau cover (in order to stay out of the rain). I have slept on hay bales in shearing sheds. I can sleep happily on just about any form of couch in anyone's loungeroom. A mattress to crash on in a mate's living room floor is luxury. In my youth, I have made it halfway home from the pub after a few too many drinks and slept the night in the odd garden, happily wrapped in newspapers gathered from neighbouring lawns. I have cuddled dogs for comfort. I have made it home from the pub as a batchelor, only to be greeted by an unmade bed and the sheets in the washing machine, and slept on the bare mattress under a pile of dirty laundry.

Which is why I viewed the whole "dog pen" story with such disdain. If that wanker Bob Brown had actually spent some time serving his country in any of the combat arms, he'd know what it can be like at the pointy end of military service. The infantry do it tough, so their prisoners have to do it tough too, because there is no comfortable place for anyone to spend the night. A patrol base is not a 5 star B&B. Even the homeless bums stumbling drunkenly around Sydney can find a better place to sleep tonight than some of our servicemen in Afghanistan.

That's not because of pennypinching or bastardry on the part of the army - it's because that's what operational conditions dictate, and it's because a good infantryman will sleep anywhere at anytime. I'd rather sleep in a dog pen, which is warm and dry and offers some protection from rockets and mortars, than in a location which is cold and wet and exposed to fire. Any sane person would. Only softcocks who have never spent weeks sleeping rough would fail to understand that.

More reasons to hate the SMH

There are mornings when I wake up and want to club someone at the SMH. This morning was another of them.

Here is the first paragrap of this story, titled "Nine Diggers hurt in ambush" by their defence correspondent:

AN ambush of Australian troops in Afghanistan has left nine special forces soldiers injured - including one fighting for his life - in a battle that resulted in more casualties than any encounter since the Vietnam War.

Note that this "defence correspondent" used two words that soldiers would never use to describe being shot in battle - injured and hurt. The proper term is "wounded". You get hurt when you cut your finger when slicing carrots for dinner. You get injured when you are riding your bike and get hit by a car. But when you get blatted by the enemy, you are wounded. That's why we have terms like WIA, which stand for Wounded In Action. We don't have acronyms of IIA and HIA to describe Injured In Action and Hurt In Action.

What on earth did Jonathan Pearlman do before getting this gig? Was he a restaurant critic perhaps?

At least he got the term "casualties" right.

I don't know how the SMH can think that it is a serious paper when it gets simple things like this so very, very wrong. Like calling an APC a tank, or an AK47 a machine gun. Or calling an F16 a "warplane". If a figher aircraft is a warplane, what is an Airbus 340? A peaceplane?

Getting back to nature

Some years ago, I visited Kakadu and had a look at rock paintings that had been there since Adam was a boy. There were quite a few tourists walking around, oggling the pictures of fish and kangaroos and crocodiles and birds. Many photographs were taken, and much was said about the beauty of the artworks.

The paintings that we looked at were on top of an island of rock in the middle of a plain. A river flowed through the plain, with small lakes appearing here and there in its course. The rock formation stuck up enough so that from our vantage point, you could see right across the plain in all directions.

It struck me that what we were looking at was not art. It was a combination between a menu and a map to the ancient version of the supermarket. That was so obvious, I couldn't understand why all the tourists around me thought that what we were viewing was painted for aesthetic reasons. It wasn't. It was painted to stop people from starving, or just as importantly, to avoid being eaten by a croc whilst out fishing.

I'd love to send some greenies out with some proper blackfellas for a while for a tour of the local fauna and flora. I imagine the conversation would go something like this:

Bob Brown: "That's a fine looking turtle you've got there. What do you call it?"

Blackfella: "Mirabong".

Bob: "What's that mean?"

Blackfella: "Waxy turtle. This other fella here, he mirapilli. That mean floury turtle. One good for roasting, the other stewing".

Bob: "But aren't turtles a sacred part of your dreaming? Aren't they part of how you connect with nature?"

Blackfella: "Sure, we tell whiteys that they're sacred - means there's more for us. As for connecting with nature, I connect via this stick I have over here."

Bob: "Is that one of your mystical totems?"

Blackfella: "Nah, this is a spit. You stick it up the arse of the turtle and then roast him over hot coals. You have to connect the turtle real good, or he falls off and gets charred."

Bob: "What about this plant over here - what do you call that?"

Blackfella: "We call that the 'black sky grass'".

Bob: "Why do you call it that? Is it because the sky weeps for the suffering of your people?"

Blackfella: "Nah, when we get lost, we set fire to it. Whole sky goes black with smoke. Then chopper know where to find us."

Bob: "Chopa? Is that an ancestral spirit that will guide you home?"

Blackfella: "No mate, it's the Parks and Wildlife Service. They got Bell choppers and a nice Huey. Real useful when the GPS goes flat."

Bob: "And is true that you can connect with your kinfolk at a great distance?"

Blackfella: "We used to be able to do it over huge distances, and then analogue died."

Bob: "Anna Log? Was she one of your elders who kept the secret mysteries of your tribe?"

Blackfella: "No - analogue. As in when Telstra turned off the analogue network and forced us to go digital. Reception out here is shit. Jimmy over there, he use Blackberry. I tried an iPhone, but the signal strength out here is too flakey for it to work properly."

Bob: "What can you tell me about wallabies?"

Blackfella: "They go well with rosemary."

Bob: "And lizards?"

Blackfella: "Saute them in butter and lots of garlic."

Bob: "What about crows?"

Blackfella: "I hate them almost as bad as Collingwood."

Bob: "No, no - crows. The annoying black things that fly."

Blackfella: "You mean like Mick Dodson and all his mates? Yeah, they fly everywhere at our expense. I'm surprised that bastard doesn't own a Gulfstream by now."

Bob: "No, no - the birds. Like that one over there."

Blackfella: "Them? They taste like shit. Wouldn't waste a bullet on one."

Bob: "How about crocodile?"

Blackfella: "Ah, crocodile. We found one last week that was a lancruisa crocodile."

Bob: "Lancruisa? Is that a term that you use in one of your ceremonies, or in a dance?"

Blackfella: "No - a lancruisa crocodile, as in a big, fuck-off crocodile. You need Toyota Lancruisa to get the bastard home. You know Toyota? Made by slanty-eyed little Chinese rice munching fucks."

Bob: "Um, the Japanese make them, and we don't normally refer to them that way."

Blackfella: "Japanman, Chinaman - who can tell them apart? My great grandpa, he called Chinaman 'long pig', and thought them awful tasty. Nice and fat. But he hated Japanman - he got a few shotdown pilots during the war and said they were stringy and tough. But they all the same, hey? Got tiny little dicks."

Bob: "I think I need to go home now."

SMH tries to smear Palin as well

The SMH runs a story entitled "Is Sarah Palin's baby really hers?", and then starts it with the line:

Prospective Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin said today that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant.

Note that the story was published at 5:56am, long after lefties in the US started backtracking on the story that the baby belonged to her eldest daughter.

Why headline a story like that? Almost the entire story is about the fact that she is about to become a grandmother, with only one sentance addressing the rumours that Trig was not hers.

Talk about twisting the facts.

Geek rating

Via the Devil's Kitchen, I have completed a geek test.


77% Geek

Created by OnePlusYou -

I am pleased to note that I am even geekier than the Devil. I think what might have upped my score is my age - I was old enough to be able to afford video games in 1986.

I managed to make it to 83% geek on my second attempt, but I consider that cheating, so 77% geek will have to do.

Riding to Disneyland

A perhaps uncommon view of Sydney. There are many places around the harbour to take a photo of the city, but most of the ones that you see published all the time seem to be taken from the same few spots. This one was taken from a ferry wharf in somewhere or another around Drummoyne (navigation is not one of my strong points).


The houses around this area all sell for multiples of millions of dollars, all thanks to the view. The houses themselves are nothing to look at. Check out this place - I bet he asked his architect to build him a castle. I wonder if he keeps a pot of boiling oil on the balcony to repel Mormons.


Here we have Santa's grotto. You wouldn't want to come out of the garage a bit too quickly.

Tran and Nkomo go to lunch

I popped in on Tim Blair today and tried to do this:


And got this:



Same story over at Bolt's den of iniquity.

I used to have to deal with this sort of crap all the time, and it always seemed to occur on a Sunday when I was at the SCG watching the footy, or having a nap, or having a crap, or sitting in a nice restaurant about to start dinner, or whatever. It never happened when I was sitting around with nothing better to do than troubleshoot some infernal problem on a server on the other side of town.

The result of a few hundred of these sorts of things is that I now loathe mobile phones. I hate the blackberry even more. I hate them because to me, they were always the harbinger of bad news, like the priest turning up at the door is a messenger of death. A phone to me is a boat anchor that only transmits messages of doom.

People usually get sick of doing the 3am calls after a few years, so they outsource the management of their equipment. I went through that 4 times. When we managed our own kit (insourced), I had a simple $700 software application sitting on an old PC in the corner of an office which monitored about $20 million worth of stuff. Whenever something went down, the clunky old PC despatched an SMS to the person that owned whatever it was that had ceased to be. If it failed to come back on the air after a certain amount of time, it would send a message to their boss, and so on until someone fixed the flipping thing; whereupon we got another SMS to say that all was ok with the world, and you could go back to having sex with your significant other.

Then we outsourced, and that burden was supposedly lifted from our shoulders. We could have sex whenever we wanted, without worrying about the phone ringing a few seconds off the vinegar stroke.

What happened of course is that I'd be sitting at the footy, and my phone would vibrate, and there would be a message saying that some critical site halfway to Broken Hill was off the air. I'd look at it, smile (knowing that the outsourcer would fix it), and go back to watching the footy.

By about the 3rd term, I'd be getting worried as the "all is right in the world" message had not come through, so I'd ring the outsourcer and say, "What are you doing about critical site X?", to which they would usually respond with a, "Huh? We know nothing about that."

Although we were paying these boneheads millions of dollars per year, they had no monitoring system, and even if they did, they usually had no idea to fix the machine that was sitting halfway to Broken Hill now no longer doing what it was supposed to do. That meant of course that 5 minutes after I rang them to tell them that a critical service died an hour ago, I'd get a phone call from them asking how to fix it. Often as not, I'd have to go into the office and fix it myself.

Consequently, I have an even lower opinion of outsourcers than I do of mobile phones, and I have used 3 of the big international outsourcers and one of the bigger local players. They're worse than consultants, who borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then charge you for it.

But I hope that Tran and Nkomo are having a nice lunch somewhere, and not having to deal with this mysteriously dead server which is keeping Blairdom awfully quiet today. And I am so glad I am out of that game. My phone has not rung in the middle of the night for a few years now, and I am almost at the point where I can pick it up without first putting on a pair of gloves.

--------------

PS - I am sure this is all a conspiracy to stop Tim blogging about scorched. Cameron Daddo is probably running denial of service attacks from home, backed up by Georgie Parker marshalling zombiebots to flood Tim's links.

Did anyone actually manage to sit through Wild Hogs?

I tried watching it the other night - had one of those nights where I was awake at 2am and wanted something to keep me vaguely entertained until I conked out.

I gave Wild Hogs a go for all of about 10 minutes before turning it off. Has anyone made it any further into the movie? Is it worth sitting through any more of it in the hope that it might turn good in the 2nd act?

Or is it really a bucket of tripe from start to finish?

Nokia's crap new interface

After 4 days of messing around, I have at last configured my new Nokia N95 to look the way I want it to look - almost. Jeez, what a pain in the arse. Nokia have gone from having the simplest, most intuitive interface on the market to having something that feels like it was designed by Eskimos on smack. I have never, ever read the instruction booklet or help files that come with any phone - until now. It's a sad day for Nokia when one is reduced to reading the manual, which also reads like it was translated from Finnish to English by a German. Who didn't understand either language, but was fluent in Swahili.

I have fiddled with an awful lot of software in my time, and I have generally been able to work out how to use most programs within a few minutes. But the Nokia defeated me. Hell, I've even figured out how to use a Mac (after not touching one for 20 years) and been able to do some passable work on Linux based machines.

But not the Nokia. For crying out loud, I have even configured printers via telnet, or by fiddling with a few buttons and pressing them in a certain order. I'm also old enough to remember when modems had to be manually triggered to dial by typing in things like "atdt" and then a string of commands. If I go back far enough, I can even remember what a Telex machine looks like.

All I wanted to do with the new phone was change the shortcuts on the main interface. The ones it came with sucked. I wanted a shortcut to the camera, another to writing an SMS message, and one to the music function. It took me 4 days to figure that out. Four days. That's like 8,000 years in mobile phone years. Nokia probably released 19 new models onto the market in the time it took me to reconfigure mine. And the logic of their interfaces probably sucks dead dog's balls as well.

When this thing breaks, it's an iPhone for me. That was one very easy decision to make. I had to be burnt by Nokia's stupidity in order to make the switch.

And if someone mentions that getting a 12 year old to configure it for me might have been faster, I will turn it into a rectangular supository.

How gay was Rene?

The rumours are flying around now that Rene Rivkin and Gordon Wood were lovers.

Hmmm, have to delve into the memories of my halcyon youth to think about that.

When I first arrived in Sin City from the Wild West, I was taken under the wing by a group of friends who were almost all plugged into Rene in one form or another. I don't know why they took me in - they had wit and charm and threw wonderful parties, whilst I was crass and loud and better at throwing up than throwing a party. We had sunny picnics in the grass by the Hawkesbury River, arrived at nightclubs by Rolls Royce, and generally lived a Brideshead Revisited style of life, even down to the teddy bears that one of the girls collected.

They were the perfect dinner party crowd - lively, witty, chatty, cultured, learned, well-off, absolutely hilarious to be around and overflowing with gossip. The food was good, the wine was good and the conversation sparkled. Two of them had worked for Rene, and were still very close to him, and everyone else in the group caught up with him from time to time.

By complete accident, I even ended up living across the street from him at one point, although I never met the guy. However, he was all we heard about on some days, because the boys just worshipped the ground he walked on.

Here's the rub - the guys in the group all thought the world of Rene. You might almost say that they loved him (they were not what I would call the most robust of men - they loved testosterone pursuits, like drunkenly crashing Rene's speedboat onto some rocks - but they were not in the same league as the uggboot wearing, roo-shootin', ute driving, flannel shirt wearing, footy-playing beer scullers that I was used to. When I put on my tux, it was to go to a B&S, get filthy drunk on Bundy and Coke and perhaps to roll around in the mud on the side of a dam at 3am - if I lasted that long. When they put on a tux, it was to attend a ball at the University and Schools Club, followed by brandy and cigars.

The long and the short of it was that me and a few of the girls were absolutely sure that Rene was doing at least one of the boys on the side. We'd meet for dinner at someone's house and the first few G&T's would be drunk listening to a regurgitation of the wit and wisdom of Rene. Rene had said this, Rene had said that, Rene was buying something or other - so they did to.

Rene ended up buying one of them a Harley Davidson for his birthday. At that point, me and the girls looked at each other and said, "That has to be the final straw - he must be taking it up the bum to get a Harley from Rene."

We were furiously shouted down by two of the other boys in the group, but they were always a bit suss. Neither had a girlfriend, or showed any interest in women, for all the time that I knew them. They took holidays together to Europe, coming back with bags full of Versace. They never set the gaydar off, but years later, I ran into one of the girls, and she told me that they eventually came out of the closet as lovers, so their protests that the Harley-recipient was also not a semen-recipient ring a bit hollow. I have seen the odd photo of Rene and his boys published in the paper, and have noted some familiar faces in a few of them.

From what I can tell, Rene loved to entertain. He loved the company of other people - except that those other people were almost always men. The group I hung with were 50/50 male and female, and they were as tight a group as you'd get, given that they all went to the right schools, grew up in the right suburbs, went to Uni together etc etc etc - but whilst the men were invited to hang with Rene a lot, the women never were. They'd certainly met him quite a few times, but women were not part of his circle.

So what can I say, except that back at that time, I was sure he batted for the other team on a regular basis, and that he was doing a few of the boys in our group. We even used to rag one of them, calling him a toyboy and the like, and he took it pretty well. He might have even be proud of the term. The only evidence I have is circumstantial, but it was just so suss, it wasn't funny.

Ron Brunton was so right about the ABC lying to him

I read this post over at Bolta about Ron Brunton and his "interesting" time on the ABC board, and when I read it, I thought - "Yep, been there and seen that".

I used to work in the IT department of a large government organisation. I was in what I guess might be termed the middle level of middle management. Senior enough to see and contribute to a few board papers, technical enough to still mix it with the frontline Dilberts.

We had a complete network catastrophe at one point, thanks to a worm that flooded every network link with traffic. The disaster was so bad, some distant country sites were off the air for over a week. Everyone in IT had to work stupidly long hours to clean it up, and even major sites like head office were down for a few days. Thankfully, it didn't get into what I would call our "operational" network - if it had, Sydneysiders would have had a rough week.

This story might take a while to tell, but in the end, you'll understand what Ron Brunton was on about.

The company in question had offices and sites all over the place, and we also had many server rooms scattered around the country. I was working back a bit one night - kind of the last one there - when the phone rang. It was the Network Manager. His monitoring system had picked up a spike in traffic from the site that I was at, and he was ringing in the hope that a Dilbert was still there and could look at it for him.

Well, a Dilbert was there - me. At this point, it was maybe 6.30pm. He asked me to look at a few servers, which I did, and I couldn't see anything obviously wrong. The network traffic buildup was getting worse, so he hot-footed it over from the site that he was at to my site. We spent about 10 minutes poking around and throwing possible theories about the cause at each other, but none of them panned out when we ran a few tests.

I finally suggested that we might have been hit by the blaster worm. That was a longshot, as the worm had been around for a while at that point, it was well known, and we had been told in one management meeting after another by a certain window licker that every system had been patched to protect us against this worm. Our boss had raised patchaing against worms as an issue in meeting after meeting since the initial devastating release onto the internet of the slammer work, and we had been reassured time and time again that the patch had been applied. We'd been hit by the slammer worm earlier in the year, so patching our systems was top priority.

At that time, there was no anti-virus protection against the worm. The anti-virus software companies were working flat out on a solution, and until they released one, having the latest anti-virus software with up to date virus definitions was no good. The only way to keep it out was to apply the patches from Microsoft.

Now my timeline might get a little tangled here, as it was 5 years ago, and I went through that period with very little sleep. But essentially it started in that server room with me and the other manager trying to figure out what the hell was going on. We'd had yet another management meeting that morning, where the window licker had assured us that all systems were patched, and stupidly, we had all believed him without checking for ourselves (he had a history of being economical with the facts).

So we rang him on his mobile, and got yet another assurance that everything - and I mean everything - had been patched. We had a system for automatically pushing out patches, and he told us that it had been merrily pushing it out since the patch was released. After that, I am pretty sure we then rang our boss to let him know that we had a problem. When we suggested a worm, he poo-poo'd it as we had been repeatedly told that the patch had been pushed out, so it just wasn't possible. That discussion went on for a while as the network manager tried to get approval to apply a meat cleaver to the network to isolate the problem - that was a drastic measure, and not one taking lightly.

Me, be the curious type, decided to test the assertion that we were fully patched. It's quite easy to check a computer to see what patches have been applied. I started at one end of the server room, and checked the servers one by one. The other manager started at the other end of the room. After 5 minutes, we came to the depressing conclusion that not one had been patched.

Not one.

So we rang fuckwit back, and asked him to clarify. We had a whole bunch of server rooms - let's call them A through G - and we were in room C. We asked if he meant had he patched perhaps only all the servers in room A, which was the biggest. No, he responded, all were done. He was quite adamant about that. He had a system for pushing out the patches, and he said it had done its job (although he never provided the reports that we asked for in meetings showing what percentage of systems had been patched - which the system could provide).

That's when my rather fiery colleague exploded and told him that of the 70 servers in room C, none had been done. The worm was in our network, and spreading fast. By the time that call concluded, network links were becoming so congested, we were unable to remotely access other sites (the worm blasted out a huge amount of traffic, which meant that a few infected machines could quickly choke the network).

In short, we were fucked. One way to stop the infection spreading was to take sites off the air, but that meant getting into the network equipment remotely to shut the links down - and by then, the links were too choked to get into them remotely. We couldn't quarantine the uninfected sites. It was too late. If dickhead had told us at the start that he hadn't done any patching, we might have realised straight away what the problem was, giving the network team time to quarantine the infected sites and prevent a disaster from breaking out. As it was, his continual lying screwed us royally.

Afterwards, I figured that I should have known he hadn't done a damned thing. We had a monitoring system for our servers that detected when they were down, and installing the patch required a reboot. That would register on the monitoring system, and it had not picked up a reboot since the patch came out. He hadn't done anything because the reboots could only be done out of hours, and he was not the sort of guy to stay back until 11pm patching and rebooting servers, or to come in on Saturday and do it. I usually worked on Saturday, and I had never seen him in the office on a weekend. The penny should have dropped much earlier.

The other thing about applying patches back then is that on some occasions, they screwed the server you were patching. Any server administrator was stuck between the rock of getting wormed and the hard place of having angry users abusing you because one of the servers you patched just died and refused to restart. I don't know if he was too chicken to face an occasional dead server, or whether he was just plain lazy, but whatever his problem was, he lied to his fellow managers, and he lied to our boss. And he lied about this again and again and again.

But we were too busy to rip his head off - we had a network to clean up. The first thing we had to do was patch, by hand, every bloody server. Because every network link was choked, we couldn't download the patch from a central server like we normally did. We had to copy the patch onto a floppy or CD and go from server to server, applying it like we did back in the stone age.

The desktop staff had to visit every single PC in the company and do the same - there were over 5000 of them, scattered over more than 200 sites right across the country. Blokes got in their cars the next morning, packed enough clothes to last them the week, plus a CD with the patch, and simply started driving. One went north, another south and the last went west. They got home over a week later, utterly knackered, after visiting every two-bit outpost in our far-flung empire. They were less than impressed. Their users, many of whom were off the air for a week, were also less than impressed. We normally had a big backlog of work - that was now even bigger because we'd lost over a week, and were so exhausted, a few days off were required before normal operations could start again.

Fuckwit tried to be nice to everyone, but he got the cold shoulder. I think someone told him to lie low for a while.

But here is the kicker, and for my comparison with the ABC.

When it was all over, my boss had to write a report explaining what had happened. I thought it was pretty simple - fuckwit had failed to do his job and lied about it in our weekly meetings, then he'd lied about it when the infection broke out, and he continued to lie about it until we laid out the evidence of his slackness in front of our mutual boss. The only way to convince our boss was to take a screen dump from an unpatched system and stick it in front of him, and then tell him that was typical of all our servers.

Our boss tore fuckwit to shreds, and he finally admitted that maybe he meant he had only patched the servers that sat under his desk!

Our boss was a very loyal bloke - perhaps too loyal - for he proceeded to write a report that whilst technically feasible, failed to mention any of the above. It talked about many other organisations being hit, like banks and so on, and the fact that no antivirus protection existed at the time (antivirus fixes were released a day or two into the outbreak, but we couldn't push them out due to the network links being choked, and you still had to patch the server or PC before the fix was effective) etc etc etc. It talked about all the hard work our staff did to clean it up. But essentially, it was a crock.

I read the report and exploded. I put my feelings on the record by sending our boss an email saying that I could accept a lot of things that fuckwit had done, but I could never accept blatant lying. How could he expect me to work with someone that I could no longer trust? For that reason alone, I wanted the bastard sacked. He'd lied to us, he'd lied to our boss - that could not be tolerated.

My boss quietly ignored my rant, plus the rants from my other angry managers and our furious staff (who all knew the truth), and submitted a report that pretty much whitewashed the whole affair. For all I know, that report made it all the way to the Premier, since our organisation was an "essential services" one. It was really sensitive stuff.

How "sanitised" was the report?

There is a scene in Buffalo Soldiers where a tank crew shoot up heroin, and then go on a wasted rampage through a town before finally destroying a petrol station. The tank drives over the petrol pumps, crushing them, which results in petrol spraying everywhere before igniting in a huge fireball. The tank drives off, with the crew being none the wiser.

Imagine writing a report that said that the petrol station was destroyed by a "stray spark", whilst ignoring the fact that a heroin-addled crew drove a tank through the station in the first place. The report was truthful, so far as leaving out the bit about the tank and the heroin gave you the full and complete picture about what actually happened.

Why did no one speak out?

I have no idea. Many of our users knew the truth - they'd ask the guys who came to fix their PC what was going on, and they didn't hold back from telling them the facts. Pretty much the entire company soon knew that fuckwit had fucked up, and many knew that he'd lied about it. Many that I spoke to just shrugged their shoulders when I mentioned fuckwit, since they'd had dealings with him, and they knew what he was like. This was simply added to the catalogue of "misfortunes" that he had inflicted on the company and those he worked with.

So, what happened in the end?

Fuckwit didn't get sacked - he got a pay rise.

Most of us involved in that fiasco later left the company. Fuckwit was retained. As far as I know, he is still there.

Ron Brunton doesn't know half of what goes on down in the engine room, and the crap that management spins from time to time.

Window lickers and their phones

I was forced to move into the 21st century yesterday. I broke the latest incarnation of my venerable Nokia 6210 - a phone that was discontinued around the time of the Sydney Olympics (I think). My first one was a work issued phone, and I liked it so much, I stuck to the model through thick and thin. The company I worked for bought hundreds of them, and people were always returning used (but serviceable) models as they retired, resigned, died etc. If I broke my handset, I simply went and saw the phone guy and he would pull one out of his bottom drawer for me.

The other thing that saw me stick to it was that I have a car kit installed for that model, and Nokia, being bastards, changed the fittings on newer phones so that a handset made after about 2003 won't fit into it. Yes, you can buy adaptors and things to help with the changeover, but I couldn't be bothered going to all that trouble to move away from something that met my needs perfectly well.

I view a phone like a hammer - it is a strictly utilitarian device used to perform a few simple functions. I even used my old handset to bang in the odd nail, so you can't accuse me of being a luddite when it comes to using technology in new ways.

It all came to an end yesterday when I broke handset number 7. I won't go into the "how", but I snapped the power button off the motherboard, and that was the end of that. I could have bought another replacement on e-bay, but it would take a week to arrive. On top of that, the pins in the car kit are shot - the phone gave up recognising the car kit about a month ago. That car kit has seen an awful lot of use.

And to cap it all off, handset 7 of 7 went through power like a desalination plant in a drought. I'd get barely a day out of a battery, when that same battery would last 6 of 7 for a week. Something was wrong with its innards. I decided that there would be no more reconditioned phones for me.

So I bought a Nokia N95. A fancy phone. One that has a camera, can play videos, has a radio, an MP3 player, a GPS and all sorts of other stuff that I will probably hardly ever use. I got it home, stuck the SIM card into it and then went to perform a very simple, but vital function. I had to send a text message to a work colleague.

Do you think I could work out how to send a simple SMS message? Nooooooooo. I managed to take some photos, view a bit of video, backup the memory card to my PC, find my location with the GPS and upload a few hundred songs to it; but I could not send or recieve an SMS.

Now I only used my old phone for a few things - storing phone numbers in the address book; talking to people and sending and recieving the odd text message. (Actually, since I used to be connected to an automated alarm system, I used the phone to read thousands of text messages that basically told me to get out of bed at 3am and fix something that was busted at work. That gave me a very good reason to hate mobile phones with a passion).

What use is a phone that won't do SMS? I'll tell you - no use at all. It might as well be a $500 brick.

In the end, I had to reload the firmware in order to get the entire messaging function to work (which includes mobile email and other useless fruit that I'll probably never bother with). That finished about midnight. So the urgent text message that I had to send at 2pm got send at 7am this morning.

The amazing thing is that with phones 1 of 7 through to 7 of 7, I just pulled them out of the box (or the bottom drawer), turned them on and started using them. It was like buying a car, inserting keys in the ignition and driving away. This bloody N95 - using it was more like assembling and launching a space shuttle. What a frigging rigmarole.

I was going to talk about window lickers, wasn't I?

When we first got the 6210 at work, it was a very fancy model. About 10 of us in the office got them on the same day, and we all got them with a plain, silver cover. Except for Fuckwit - he had to be different. He insisted on getting the next model up, which had bluetooth, and I suspect the real reason he wanted it was because it had a very cool, dark green and bronze cover. He never used the bluetooth feature in all the time he had the phone, but he talked about it an awful lot.

What a window licker. I'm so glad I don't work with him anymore.

Airlines shooting old ladies?

It's a sad day when a major paper can't tell the difference between shoot and chute.

It's not like they've used the word "shoot" only once as well.

It's in the title.

It's in the text.

It's also in the link:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/unusual-tales/elderly-woman-goes-down-baggage-shoot-at-airport/2008/08/28/1219516605708.html

Looks like fairfax has made a bunch of 40 year olds who can spell redundant, and employed a cheaper bunch of high school dropouts. Then again, given the state of education these days, the goose that passed this probably has a PhD in English Lit.


Correction - they've also used it on the link on the front page as well.

How to be robbed by Gypsies

The time was 1991. The Big T and I were traipsing around Europe, dashing in and out of cities in a day in a whirlwind of museums, drinking and train journeys into the unknown. We'd frozen in Edinburgh, slummed it in amazingly disgusting French "hotels", slept in the corridor of a TGV, consumed much cheap French plonk (sold in 2 litre plastic bottles like Coke), and managed to persuade an Italian pizza restaurant to make us a Hawiian pizza.

It had been an amazing, fun filled journey, but after 5 weeks, we had to part as the Big T had to go back to somewhere in the middle of nowhere to bang rocks together. He was flying home from Rome, so we were to say our farewells at the train station where he would catch a train to the airport.

We'd spent a couple of weeks in Italy, going through Venice, Genoa, Naples and lots of other cities, looking at art galleries, statues of nude men and leaning towers and all that sort of thing, and in that time, we'd seen a lot of gypsy kids robbing tourists. We'd also experienced the fun of overnight train travel, where you essentially had to superglue your valuable possessions to your body so that you wouldn't be robbed during a bit of shuteye.

The worst place for the gypsy kids was the Spanish Steps in Rome. We watched a van load of plod turn up as we were buying ice cream. They jumped out of the van, pointed submachine guns at the kids and had them turn their pockets inside out. Of course the kids were wise to this, and the one with the stolen wallet had already done a runner (the police were accompanied by an irate looking American tourist - we could work out what had happened even with our bad Italian language skills). By that stage, we had stayed in a lot of youth hostels and spoken to an awful lot of travellers that we had met along the road. All passed on stories of being robbed, or nearly robbed by these bands of rapacious thieves.

We had made it through the trip with only one robbery - we went out for dinner when we were in France, Big T left his camera in our room and we came back to find it gone. Luckily, Big T spotted the miscreant making off with it, and he was collared and the camera handed back. I call Big T the Big T because we had rowed together, he was a ferocious rugby player and he's the sort of farmer's son that you'd see walking across a field with a sheep under each arm. The Big T probably only weighed 100 kilos at that point, but he was so broad, he had trouble walking up some of the narrow staircases in those ancient French pensions that we stayed in (don't even think of asking about the horror of the beds). The French thief was lucky to have not sailed off the roof of that pension.

Anyway, there we were, in Rome, with the main train station on the other side of a fairly major road. All we had to do was cross 6 lanes of traffic (never a simple thing to do in Italy), get into the train station, shake hands and go our separate ways. I think I was heading for Naples, and then Greece, Turkey and so on.

We get partway across the road when we are accosted by a band of Gypsy women. Don't ask how I knew they were gypsies - spend a month on the road in Europe, and you'll pick up the knowledge. They got in really close to us, and one of them pressed a baby up against the chest of Big T. All the time, their hands were out and they were wailing and begging for money.

The baby was a new trick. We'd heard of gypsy pickpockets sticking a newspaper into the chest of a Mark so that they couldn't see the hands underneath the paper emptying their pockets. But the idea of the baby was the same - distract the Mark, pick their pockets.

Given that the Big T was flying out in a few hours, and that his pockets contained his ticket, passport and wallet, that might have been slightly disastrous. Luckily, he felt a hand in his pocket, and he reacted. Remember, this guy was about 100 kilos and had played a lot of rugby. But even he had an enormous amount of trouble fending off this little woman with the baby - she was so intent on getting his wallet, she was attached like a limpet.

In the end, he swung and connected and flattened her in the middle of this 6 lane road (with mad Italian traffic roaring past in both directions). At that point, the gypsies gave up and split. When we got into the safety of the station, Big T pulled out his wallet and showed it to me - it was leather, but her fingernail had taken a huge gouge out of the leather. She had been really intent on robbing him.

I forget what happened next, but they got away, the Big T safely boarded his plane and went home to bang rocks together and I went on to a boozy week on Corfu, followed by another month or more of travelling.

But no one ever reproached the Big T for absolutely flattening this woman with the baby in the middle of a major road. The Italians had seen it all before, and were thoroughly sick of it. Some witnesses might have even shaken his hand.

If the Italians ever decide to rebuild the Colloseum, the first sport they could put on would be gypsies vs lions. I'd pay good money to see that.

How to ruin a succesful education outcome

From the Australian this morning comes a story on the WA Libs election launch.

I notice it was held in the Octagon Lecture Theatre at UWA. That's where I used to fall asleep during Economics 100 classes, alternated with making hundreds of paper planes to throw at the lecturer. I even managed to get one to skid across the plate of the overhead projector at one point.

Education? I know all about education.

Mr Barnett said Labor had mismanaged energy, education and justice. He said his top priority if elected on September 6 would be education.

"Look at Labor's record," he said. "There are now 14,000 less students in our government school system than there were in 2001. For the first time in our state's history, our government schools system has actually declined. We will restore confidence in government education in this state - and we will start with our teachers." Mr Barnett promised to boost the Government's pay offer to teachers by $120 million, regardless of the outcome of a teachers' ballot.

He pledged $300 million for 14new schools and $50 million for school upgrades.

If you ask me, a smaller state education system is a better system. I still can't figure out why the state is as involved in education as it is. How about this for an idea - the state stops trying to compete with the private sector by hurling useless battalions of bureaucrats at schools, hamstrung by the Teachers Union and a million petty policies and rules, and instead concentrates on things like setting the curriculum (and then leaving it alone), inspecting schools for quality and funneling cash to schools (preferably via vouchers).

The worst thing that the state can do is to run around building more schools and employing more teachers, because teachers and schools only bring grief. It's like they're saying, "I want a bigger hammer to hit myself in the forehead with". Education is one of those areas where a government can never win, so it is best off divesting itself of as much of it as possible.

It seems Labor was smarter here - if the number of kids being educated falls, less teachers need to be hired by the state system, so the power of the teachers union is at least checked, if not reduced.

Personally, I'd be happy if the state was reduced to running about 10% of the schools that it does now, with the rest being run along the Swedish model. That 10% would represent the most difficult and intractible schools, which might get some focus for once in a much reduced system.

Why a government wants to employ lots of teachers is beyond me. It's like the government wanting to build cars. You want to know how effective state education is? Think British Leyland and the P76.

Rodd Island

This post may only be of passing interest if you are keen on death to rabbits.

Rodd Island was originally used as a research station for studying the use of chicken cholera to kill rabbits. I ride past it everytime I go around the Bay, and I finally stopped this week to read a plaque on the foreshore that tells you some useless information that can be trotted out at dinner parties.


I'm not sure how deep the water is out there. You could probably walk halfway to it at low tide.

What is a scientist?

Thanks to global warming, we hear a lot about scientists.

We hear that a majority think this, or the majority think that, or that such-and-such has signed a something-or-other.

Today, the SMH even made mention of an "emminent scientist", but that had something to do with turning "Colin" the whale into sushi - "colin in my colon", so to speak.

That got me thinking - what is a scientist, and even more curiously, what is an "emminent" scientist? How do you become a scientist?

The accepted wisdom seems to be that a scientist was someone that had completed a science degree. But that is a very modern condition. I am not going to bother researching this (too little sleep last night), but I presume that great scientists like Franklin, Archimedes, Edison, Pasteur, Curie and Newton didn't exactly follow that route. A degree is only thought of as a necessary condition in these times of educational achievement inflation. It used to be that a member of the aristocracy or the upper classes could develop say an interest in rocks, send away for a few books on the subject, have dinner with a local expert once a month and then build a collection from their estate in the conservatory. Next thing you know, this upper-crust twit with a taste for Oxford cloth and plus-fours has developed a new theory on plate techtonics or something like that (I made all that up - simply as an insight into how "amateur" scientists actually did a lot of the work until our degree factories started turning out white coated lab technicians without a spark of insight in their newly mortar-boarded skulls).

What about being published? Is that a necessary condition? I write quite a bit of stuff (mostly crap), have been published from time to time in various newspapers and magazines (I even made it into Penthouse once) - but I would never call myself a "writer", let alone an "author". Many "scientists" only want to get published in order to secure a job, or to help their application for their next research grant. The volume of publications that a scientist gets into is more a sign of their desperation for tenure or cash than an indicator of their achievements in advancing the field of human knowledge.

I went to uni with a bloke who was completely brilliant, and he became what I would call a scientist. He was the smartest guy in the state, as judged by the statewide final year exams at school. He walked away with the University Medal, which goes to the student with the highest marks. He went on to study at Oxford, where his lab was showered with cash from some patent or another so that he could poke the AIDS virus with machines that went "ping". From there, he moved on to UCLA and a nice lab in San Francisco that was awash with even more money for AIDS research. I figured that this guy was so bright, if someone discovers the cure for AIDS, it will be him. (He is also insanely hard working).

Anyway, about 10 years ago, Chris and I did a little round the world sojourn and dropped in on him in San Fran for a couple of nights of beer and catching up. Chris had a big advantage over me, in that he had 4 years of Ag Science under his belt, so he was able to tell one end of a sheep from the other. Believe me, that helps when discussing breakthroughs in AIDS research over a few dozen beers.

We got to talking, and we popped the big question after touring the lab and looking at lots of machines that went "ping", examining hordes of rats and seeing legions of white coated researchers scurrying this way and that. The question was this:

"JC, what exactly is it that you do?"

His answer was quite simple. And remember, this is the smartest, best educated, hardest working individual you are ever likely to meet.

"I spend my days writing applications for grant money".

Us: "OK, and after that? Do you poke around the insides of cell DNA with an electron microscope? Have a video conference with the smart cookies at MIT? Peer into test tubes?"

JC: "No, that's my day. I just write grant applications. And occasionally go to meetings."

Us: "And what do you discuss at these meetings? New methods for deciphering how the virus works? Ways to prevent transmission? New analysis methods?"

JC: "No, we generally talk about how our grant applications are going. And if we've been succesful, we fight over how many graduate students each lab gets."

Us: "Ummmmmmmmmmmm....... where can we get some proper American style ribs?"

So that's how the biggest brains on the planet spend their days.

JC did relent after a while and took us back to the rat lab to show us his favourite rats. He had lots of rats. He explained how many millions of dollars a year he spent on buying, feeding and housing rats. It was a lot of money. You could feed half of Ethiopia on the money that he spent on rats.

Us: "So what do you do with your rats?"

JC: (Stroking a fine looking specimen) "We inject them with stuff, then we kill them, chop their tails off, put the tails in a blender, and then test samples of the tail soup."

Us: "And how often does that happen around here?"

JC: "About every 5 minutes".

That is still the best explanation that I can give anyone as to how research labs work. A cure for AIDS will be delivered on the tails of a million expensive, well fed rats. In a blender.

JC did come through with the great American ribs. Trouble is, he directed us to a place that was deep in a suburb that had never seen white men before. It was a pretty cool sort of joint - I guess the owner had played basketball at one point, for photos of black basketballers adorned almost every surface of the interior. We ordered, acted like Martians from another planet (ie, sat around and were completely oggled by about two dozen locals who could not believe the temerity of one honky, let alone two, walking into their turf.

We collected our ribs and split. The next day, we mentioned to someone we met that we'd been to wherever it was. The expression on their face would be like if you walked into Faluja a few years back with a herd of pigs and a sign saying, "If you're sick of rooting goats, try a pig for once".

Anyway, I have a slightly jaundiced view now of scientific research, and people purporting to be scientists.

This is my view of a real scientist.

When we were at uni, we went on a road trip one weekend to JC's farm. Or his parent's farm, to be more specific. We spent Saturday night making petrol bombs and trying to set a recently fallen and rather wet tree on fire. The tree had to go, so we were performing a valuable service for this parents.

The petrol bombs were made from empty beer bottles, and the empty beers bottles were made by drinking the beer that they contained. The more we felt like burning things, the more bottles we required, so the faster we drank them, so the faster we got drunk.

JC, having an enquiring mind, wondered whether a mix of diesel and petrol would do better service as the oil in the diesel would stick to the tree and burn longer. That progressed to mixing up a mild form of napalm, which we set off by perching molotov cocktails with a burning wick on the tree and then shooting at them with various rifles. JC then progressed by trying to evaluate the probability of one or all of us ending up in Casualty before the night was over... and calculating whether we would run out of beer before we all passed out, or ended up with 3rd degree burns.
I have no idea how the night finished up, and I think JC's note book became indecipherable about the point where we ran out of beer and start on VO Invalid port.

But the next morning, we had one scorched tree and a herd of rather frightened cows.

So we blew up the tree with dynamite and went home.

Now that's science.

Scorched.TV is a crock of crap

http://www.scorched.tv/

What a pile of badly put together crap.

On the advice of Tim Blair, I decided to shoot a short clip of the rain falling in our backyard, and the water puddling on the lawn and turning it into an impassable swamp.

I tried to upload my clip to scorched. No matter what link I clicked on anywhere in the website (like the one below that says UPLOAD VIDEO), up pops.... guess what?



A stupid pop-up box inviting you to send an email. How are you supposed to upload a fucking video clip using an email box that does not allow you to attach an attachment?


As a fucking idiot put it some time ago, these people are cretans.

PS - the sand pit is now a mud pit. It looks like I won't get to have my daily ride today because it is just too WET and fucking DAMP and NOT DRY out there for it to be pleasant.

To the Harbour Bridge - and beyond!

I'm trying to ride 100 miles a week. To stave off boredom, I try to head for a different point of the compass every day. Yesterday was North Sydney day.

Here's a panoramic shot from the Sydney Observatory, looking west. Click for bigger view. This is where all the fitness fanatics hang out at lunch time - there must have been 50 trim people running around, doing situps, boxing etc etc.


Here is the view looking east. Not so attractive. But when I see all those RTA breakdown trucks parked there, it makes me wonder how many idiots run out of petrol on the bridge. Must be a lot. Is it getting worse with higher petrol prices - ie, people running their tank emptier and emptier as their wallets get lighter and lighter?


Here is the observatory itself (this one's for you, Ross). If I had bothered to take my bike lock, I might have popped in for a decko.


Clover Moore is spending big on building bike lanes, which I like. But the construction work is a bit hard to get around - here is a lane under construction near the Slip Inn (don't ask me about street names in Sydney - I navigate from pub to pub). This is a bastard of a hill to get up with two lanes missing, being squashed into traffic and having agro drivers behind you fuming at the road works.


Another bastard of a hill - you have to ride up this to get onto the bike lane on the bridge. When people walk down this hill, they hang onto the rail and lean back about 20 degrees.


There and back was almost 2 hours exactly on the road (including stops to take photos). Not a bad bit of exercise.

Memories of cars ancient

I was reading this fascinating story over at Flight Level 390 about a brake failure when it reminded me of a beast I used to own - a Rover 3500 like the one shown below.

How did I make the connection?

Fi-fi (the plane) had a broken skid sensor wire in the brake system. Fi-fi is some sort of new-fangled Airbus, the model of which I am always forgetting, but it was the bit about the sensor that triggered a memory.

This Rover, from 1969 (or thereabouts) had a brake pad wear sensor for the front pads. It was a very simple arrangement - the pad had a wire embedded in it so that when the pad wore down to that point, it made contact with the brake disk, completed a circuit and triggered a warning light on the dash. From memory, it was the same light as the handbrake - if you disengaged the handbrake and the light stayed red, it was time to replace the pads.

Those old Rovers also had a really simple method of telling you when an indicator bulb had blown - the indicators would fail to "blink" on that side on the dashboard. If you indicated to go left and the little green arrow light came on and stayed on, it meant either the forward or rear bulb had blown. I guess it just took a bit of forward thinking in the design of the electrical wiring to make that work.

I don't know why they had the brake wear sensor - perhaps pads wore faster in those days (although since they were probably full of asbestos, they might have lasted longer than a modern set). Maybe pads weren't checked at the regular service, or so many people did their servicing themselves at home that they generally forgot to check the pads.... who knows. But I thought it was a great bit of engineering, and an interesting safety feature.

Given the number of cars that I see driving around these days with no working tail lights, you'd think some sort of blown globe warning system would be engineered into every car on the road. If they could do it in 1969, I'm sure it could be done today.

My only stipulation would be that they didn't use a British wiring harness. I never drove my old Rovers anywhere without a can of WD-40 handy. Or two. I used it a lot.

Little fuckers

Found another franger in the street today - an ansell ultra thin number.

I am going to have fun with these fuckers if I ever catch them at it.

Your choice - feed them or shoot them

There's a nice little story over at Bolta's about feral dogs eating a dead bloke.

I blogged a while back about a mate of mine who was a cop in WA back in the late 1980's/early 1990's and what he had to go through when dealing with our indigenous brethren.

One of his postings was to Kalgoorlie. He told me how they used to drive around at night in a paddy wagon shooting feral dogs with their Police issue pistols (using privately bought sub-sonic ammo, which makes less noise). He thought it was great target practice, and by the sound of it, he shot an awful lot of dogs.

Collecting the dogs was easy. They'd pick up a drunken blackfella to start with, put him in the back of the wagon, and tell him to get out and collect the carcases after they'd shot each one. They'd then drive to the tip, and have him offload all the dead dogs and cover them up with garbage.

They'd then give him a lift to wherever it was he wanted to go - back to his dossing spot, or the pub, or a fast food outlet.

What they were doing was so totally illegal in so many ways, it's not funny. But it helped to keep a really serious problem under control - a problem so bad, him and other Police risked their careers to do it. I'm sure he also had a lot of fun shooting the dogs, but that wasn't the motivating factor. He was more worried about all the people who were being treated for dog bites, especially young kids.

If I was him, I would have done the same. I hope there are still coppers out there that would do the same today.

Who gave this bonehead a car?

Yesterday must have been the annual "Death on the road day", but I guess I missed the announcements for it. Check out this bonehead at the eastern approach to the ANZAC Bridge, turning across several lanes of traffic after he realises "Oops, I don't want to go to the land of bogans".



It's not clear in this video, but you should have seen the shocked look on his face when he realised I was filming him - that's when J and I start laughing.

You, sunshine, are an utter bonehead.

I say that it must have been the annual "Death on the roads day" as I went for a ride in the afternoon and was nearly cleaned up at two separate roundabouts. The worst time to go for a ride is around the time when school finishes for the day - by far, the worst drivers on the roads are distracted parents picking up their kids. I have been guilty of leaning back and searching around on the floor for a dropped Buzz Lightyear, but only at red lights and things like that. Many parents seem to think that it's fine to turn around and feed their offspring as they hurtle down a packed freeway at 100km/h.

Anyway, I was not on a packed freeway. I was cruising the backstreets of bogan land, checking out real estate. Mainly real estate that I can't afford to buy, but a bike is a great way to look at houses. You can pull over really quickly, park anywhere, travel quickly enough to see a lot of them in a short time, yet slowly enough to have a good look at what you are passing without holding up the traffic behind you.

Both miscreants were driving small, 3 door hatchbacks. The first was a woman who was deep in conversation with her friend in the passenger seat. I saw her coming down the road towards me (I was turning right through the roundabout) and at no point did her eyes flick left or right to look for traffic coming from anywhere in the known universe - she just zoomed through the roundabout like she was wrapped in some sort of God-like protective bubble. I thought about chasing her and yelling in her ear, but got over it.

I minute later, a Boxster went past a mite too close, and I did chase him and caught him a few hundred yards up the road. I was about to bollock him very loudly from six inches away, when I noticed that he had one of those WWI waxed fighter pilot moustaches (he was about 50 I'd say), and I was so impressed, I just said, "You got a bit close back there", which I had to repeat once, but I think he got the message.

About 5 minutes after that, another little sub-$12,000 piece of Korean shit just about took me out at another roundabout - and even though I had the right of way, the guy beeped at me! He beeped at me!

He must have seen the look on my face, which was KILL KILL KILL, for he pulled alongside, wound down the passenger window and apologised profusely for beeping, and even more so for trying to kill me. That calmed me down in an instant - so much so, that I said sorry as well and wondered for a moment if he in fact had the right of way. No, I had the right of way, and was well in front of him in the roundabout - so much so that if he hadn't stopped, he would have hit me from behind. He had simply approached the roundabout too fast and with no intention of looking to his right for entering traffic.

I notice that the abuse that 4WD's used to cop in the media has subsided. Good. 98% of the grief that I cop as a cyclist comes from the following vehicles:

• small hatchbacks
• tradesmen in utes
• vans, especially couriers
• taxis
• any form of fuckwit in something like a WRX

Yesterday, I could have added a 2.5 tonne truck as well. The idiot tradesman driving it overtook me with about 2 inches to spare. The traffic built up, I overtook him, then a few minutes later, he did it again. He did it four times in the end - I was getting ready to reach into his tray and throw his toolbox onto the road when he turned right and got out of my life. (Before throwing his toolbox out, I had a good look at him and found that he was really fat, so if he tried to chase me on foot, he would have no chance).

I think the trick to throwing a toolbox onto the road from a truck is to make sure they are really stuck in stalled traffic, find an escape route and then do it. Never do it where they have a chance to catch you.

Anyway, from now on, I am going to avoid the 2.30pm to 4.00pm timeslot like the plague.

And in case you are wondering, most of my riding yesterday was on roads with marked and separate bike lanes, so it's not like I was getting in the way of any cars.

Header photo

Loonies who frequent this site might have noticed the absence of my usual photo at the top of the page. I've taken it down until I find something interesting to put up.

How pissed would you need to be to not notice you are on fire?

The wierd and wacky world of pubs and their patrons.

Is improving policing really this simple?

I'm going to copy the entire text of this article from the Daily Telegraph, just in case it gets archived into the bowels of their site where even Google can't find it:

----------------

Muggings and robberies drop as police ordered from desks

By Gemma Jones

August 18, 2008 12:00am

A DRAMATIC change in the approach to crime-fighting in central Sydney has slashed muggings in half and reduced the incidence of other serious crimes.

Police have been ordered out from behind their desks and less important tasks have been shelved to get as many as 30 more officers into the CBD to target criminals.

Detective Inspector Jenny Hayes said the fundamental shift, which began three months ago, was already reaping dramatic rewards.

Muggings have fallen from a monthly average of 38 to 19 in July, and robberies have dropped by as many as 100 a month.

In July last year, there were 229 thefts from vehicles in the city. Last month, there were 126.

"Policing operations have changed in the city. It's very different from three months ago in that a lot of police are on the street," Insp Hayes said.

"It's a complete change: that is, flood the city with visible police and target offenders or suspects.

"We have different priorities. We redeploy police now, we use more drug dogs to show a lot of high visibility, we take police from less important tasks."

Instead of being ordered into the street in a show of force, officers - many of them plainclothes detectives - are targeting specific crimes.

Police released further figures on Friday showing an almost 400 per cent increase in drug searches compared with the corresponding three months last year.

Officers have doubled the number of regular searches, and "move-on" orders to potential troublemakers have increased by 23 per cent.

Break, enter and steal offences have plummeted by more than a third compared with this time last year.

Officers are working with licensed premises to fight alcohol-related crime, but it is too early to tell if voluntary lockdowns and the introduction of plastic glasses are reducing assaults.

Insp Hayes hoped there would be a marked reduction in assaults during the next six months.

"We're trying different sorts of policing strategies; you really want to see a difference," she said.

Sydney Chamber of Commerce executive director Patricia Forsythe said the reduction in crime was being noticed by business owners on the notorious George St cinema strip.

"There were previously a few hot spots. There was a period when we were seeing regular high-profile crimes along that George St area," she said.

Ms Forsythe said the benefits of the police change were evident.

"It seems to be having some positive effect," she said.

"Police on the beat and street lighting are two of the most simple, but most effective, strategies you can employ."

------------

Well, who would have thunk it.

I'm sure Inspector Hayes will shortly be moved on to other things - punishment for being too effective.