Twin Parrots

Or ... How could the principles and technologies of Web 2.0 change our parliament and government and democracy?

2008-11-07T06:06:00.001+10:00

Olympics and medal tallies

2008-08-26T19:56:00.002+10:00

The other thing I will do when I take control of the Olympics is to ban any publication of medal tallies by nation (regardless of whether won sitting or standing).

It seems to me to be an irrelevant statistic. Yet people seem to see it as important to know if China "medalled" more than USA. Why? Does it prove that communism is better than capitalism? Or that eating a lot of rice is good for sport?

National success at the Olympics seems to relate to:

* the size of the population -- a big population will have more "natural talent" than a small one
* having the sport so popular in your country so that potential champions are likely to be identified while young (e.g. Australians can easily find their talented swimmers and Norwegians their skiiers but not vice versa)
* the amount of money spent on the training of potential champions and the purchase/development of high tech equipment
* having lots of different events in sports that your country is good at (gymnastics with a ribbon/ball/etc, different weight divisions in weight lifting, all the different strokes in swimming) rather than having just one or two events (why not have 50kg men's soccer, 60kg men's soccer, 7-aside soccer, etc)

Reviving some historic sports for the Olympics

2008-08-25T00:20:00.002+10:00

Having discussed at some length all the sports I would throw out of the Olympics, it's worth considering if anything should be added back in.

Having considered the list of dropped Olympic sports, I think a couple are worthy to come back.

I think golf could come back. It's very similar to archery. It tests your ability to get an object to a target using a piece of equipment.

I think tug-a-war (provided it's one-on-one and not a team sport) could come back. It is a test of strength similar to weight lifting.

We could also look at inventing some new sports. If we are happy to lift and pull weights, why not push them? International weight pushing? Think of all those trolley boys in training in the supermarkets of the world!

What about running up stairs? Swimming upstream (we've got the whitewater kayaking course available for the event)?

Olympics - a celebration of the extent of human ability?

2008-08-24T23:14:00.003+10:00

I think Jim is heading in the right direction with his views on what is and isn't a "sport" in terms of inclusion in the Olympics Games. I agree entirely that sports that are judged on "style" should not be there. Out go gymnastics, diving, synchronised swimming, etc.

However, I would go further. I would argue that the Olympics is really a test and celebration of what the human body is capable of. How fast can we run? How high can we jump etc?

So on that basis, the following sports will be the fundamentals at my Olympics: running, jumping, throwing, weight lifting, etc. All the sports that test how "good" can a human body do something.

However, while swimming fits this category (how fast can a human travel through water), a lot of its events will have to go. The only events I will permit are "freestyle" (in the original meaning of "any style"). I don't think it is quite so interesting to find out how fast the human body can travel through the water while restricting the movements to conform to the rules of breaststroke, etc. Backstroke goes until someone can persuade me that running backwards would make a great Olympic sport too.

Similarly walking will be right out. It's one thing to run, but quite another to not quite run in a very silly way! Why not have hopping as an Olympic sport? Or the 800m cartwheeling?

Then we come to the category of "how fast/high/etc can the human body go with the aid of some equipment?". This brings in things like the pole vault, cycling, rowing, archery, shooting. The problem with these sports is twofold. Firstly we have to argue about what restrictions apply to the equipment: size, design, etc, which may advantage one competitor over another. Secondly the risk is that the competition becomes about the technology for the equipment and not the abilities of the competitor. But then arguably, unless we return to the classical Olympics where they competed naked, we also should worry about the clothing and footwear used in many of the athletic sports and swimming as having the same problems as equipment. Since I like watching cycling, I think I will allow the "equipment sports" into the Olympics, provided the equipment is solely powered by the competitor. The kerin will have to go from the cycling (no following a motorbike). Archery is in, but shooting is out (gunpowder provides the power). If we have shooting, we'd really have to open up the Olympics to the use of machine guns and tanks.

Then we come to "team" sports. I am not sure that team sports really have a place in the Olympics, they are really more "games" than tests of human ability. Out goes football, handball, basketball, softball, baseball, hockey, volleyball.

What about team events in things like running, swimming, cycling, rowing, sailing? Hmm, they tend to measure a composite human ability rather than individual ability. I am a bit undecided about them, but I think they should go in favour of individual events. The catch with rowing is that you need two people (one oar for each side), but then there is sculling and canoeing and kayaking which can all be done with one person so rowing bites the dust under this policy.

Having disposed of team events/sports, what about the one-on-one sports? Table tennis, taekwondo, etc. My feeling is that the ball games are just that: games, so out go tennis, table tennis and badminton. Boxing, wrestling, fencing, taekwondo and judo are measuring the human ability to kill another person, but in these civilised times, we seem to worry about the competitors being killed and so we create a lot of complicated rules for how you can sort-of-pretend-to-kill another person, which gives rise to the various beat-em-up sports. For example, TKD invites you to kick people's heads but not punch their heads. Really they have to go. Or if they stay, lets introduce a new event freestyle killing (no rules and to the death).

So, I think I have considerably reduced the number of events in the Olympics to those which satisfy the intrinsic requirement: that they measure and celebrate the ability of the human body to do something measurably better than anyone has done them before. I have probably eliminated everybody's favourite sport, including a few of my own, but they can run their own international competitions.

Now all I have to do is get onto an Olympic committee or two and implement my masterplan.

Loan $25 to change lives through Kiva

2008-08-08T19:19:00.004+10:00

I've signed up and made some loans through Kiva. It's a programme of lending into the "third world" on a "hand up, not a hand out" principle. Basically you contribute US$25 (or multiples) towards a loan to help a farmer or market stall or ... to expand their activities. Most of the loans are around US$1000, but when you look at the Gross National Product (or other economic indicators) for those countries, you see that what is a relatively small sum of money to us represents a number of years of income in those countries.

There is no interest payable on these loans, and no guarantee that they will be repaid (although statically most are repaid). So this is not an "investment" in any financial sense. It's investment in a better world.

kittens - so much joy

2008-08-04T21:32:00.007+10:00

Our two kittens Sunny and Cloudy fill me with joy. Watching these two balls of fur travel at high speed around the house, destroying the furniture, the wallpaper and random pieces of paper is pure bliss. Bad news for the house, but good news for my heart.

Cadel Evans didn't win the Tour de France

2008-08-04T21:32:00.002+10:00

Well, as a good Aussie, I suppose I should be sad that Cadel Evans didn't win le Tour.

But frankly he rode such a defensive race, I don't think he really deserved to win. Every day we got told that Cadel's strategy would be to ensure that none of the other GC contenders gained a time advantage over him. Never did anyone say "today's the kind of course in which Cadel should try to win the stage". That just didn't seem to be the strategy. I don't know if this strategy was Cadel's or the team management's, but it just didn't seem the strategy of a man wanting to win. It seemed the strategy of a man who would prefer to come second.

In constrast Carlos Sastre rode like a man who wanted to win. He took the yellow jersey after a great stage win and he hung onto it like glue, even to riding the "time trail of his life" after every commentator had pretty much said that he was a lousy time trialist and Cadel Evans would overtake him in the GC standings for sure in the time trial. Sastre deserved his overall win.

Correction, he deserves the win so long as he doesn't turn out to be yet-another-drug-cheat, which has tainted some past Tour results. Lets hope it was a clean win.

Official Sandwich of Trent

2008-08-04T21:23:00.003+10:00

I notice that all around Brisbane billboards have appeared advertising Subway with the slogan "Official Sandwich of Trent" (or insert other given name of choice).

All I can say is "huh?".

Is it supposed to drive people called Trent into their stores? Is it supposed to drive all people not called Trent away? If the latter, it worked for me.

Medicare surcharge threshold and discrimation

2008-05-18T11:26:00.002+10:00

Prior to last week's federal budget, the threshold for the Medicare surcharge was $50K for singles and $100K for couples. Now it is $100K for singles and $150K for couples. Isn't this discriminatory against couples?

A fair and simple tax system

2008-05-11T20:02:00.003+10:00

I see the Treasurer Wayne Swan is announcing a review of the tax system. He is quoted as saying today:

"A modern tax system needs to be efficient, it needs to be internationally competitive. It certainly also needs to be fair, it needs to ensure that everybody pays their fair share, and it needs to be simpler."

Now maybe it's just me, but I find it a bit worrying that our federal treasurer believes that the tax system can be fair and simple (or at least simpler). Round up a group of people to define what we mean by "fair" and a "fair share" and you will pretty quickly see why it can't be simple.

"Fair" might be a simple word, but it's not a simple concept. Any tax system that seeks to be "fair" and most tax systems (believe it or not) do seek to be "fair" is doomed to be complicated. Whereas a simple system (e.g. flat tax) could be implemented, but it would probably not be widely considered to be fair.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, for most people, a fair tax system is one in which they pay nothing (or better still get something) and someone else pays. Unfortunately it's not a scalable solution.

Now I would have hoped that you didn't get to be Federal Treasurer without knowing that fair and simple tax systems is probably unachievable. But still, a simple and fair tax system would be a Good Thing, so 20 out of 10 if he can do it!

ebay moving to Paypal only

2008-04-12T18:40:00.002+10:00

Ebay Australia have announced that they are going to restrict most forms of payment for transactions, with sellers being allowed to offer only Paypal (or cash-on-delivery).

So, as a seller, we will pay eBay fees to eBay and then we will pay our Paypal fees to Paypal, which, in one of those not-so-curious coincidences, happens to be owned by eBay. So, while eBay say it is all about safety, it seems this safety will also increase eBay's opportunities to take a larger chunk of the transaction costs for itself. Nice work if you can get it!

I have to wonder if the buyers are actually clamouring for it. Although I'm a minnow in the world of Lego sales, I have sold on both bricklink and ebay over a few years and I have always offered other Aussies a wide variety of payment methods including Paypal, direct bank deposit, cheque, cash in the post, money order, etc. Now I don't levy any kind of direct or hidden fee for using Paypal so for the buyer the cost to them of using Paypal or direct deposit is the same. Yet almost every Aussie buyer chooses to pay by direct bank deposit with only a couple paying with Paypal. So, this tells me that Paypal is not the preference of Aussie buyers.

And looking at feedback, I have often noticed that most of my Aussie buyers have feedback only from other Aussie sellers. This suggests to me that many Aussie buyers do not wish to engage in international transactions. This suggests to me that they probably don't have Paypal, since the compelling reason for most of us get Paypal is to make international transactions.

So, while ebay buyers and sellers who deal internationally probably do have Paypal (out of necessity), I rather suspect the buyers and sellers who only deal within Australia almost certainly don't. So, all of those people now have a choice:

1) get Paypal -- which is clearly what eBay want them to do

2) stop using eBay

As international transactions do have greater risk, one presumes that the Aussie-only buyers and sellers are more likely to be risk-adverse than the international buyers and sellers. Given that most studies show significant numbers of Australian are still concerned about doing financial transactions on the WWW, I wonder how many of those risk-adverse Aussie-only buyers and sellers will be willing to walk away from eBay due to their reluctance to use Paypal.

I am thinking about a former colleague who used to buy a lot of clothes and accessories from ebay. She used to send cheques through the post as she never did any financial transaction online and didn't even have a credit card (her husband did have one but only for emergencies). I find it hard to imagine that this lady will suddenly embrace PayPal. It will be interesting to see if any of the other Aussie auction sites will see an increase in activity if people walk away from eBay.

Of course, eBay's success depends on the critical mass effect. The sellers come to eBay because there are so many buyers and the buyers come because there are so many sellers. So if some portion of the buyers/sellers walk away, the critical mass effect is weakened, although probably not to the extent of destroying eBay, but it may provide a window of opportunity for a rival site to achieve a critical mass it currently lacks.

Actually what I suspect will really happen is that the other forms of payment will continue but "under the counter". That is, I suspect bidders will email the seller to ask if they will accept other forms on payment and only bid if the seller is willing. I can't honestly see how eBay could police that. So I suspect that a seller offering "cash on delivery" may become a signal for "I accept other forms of payment, please ask me for details". Now I suspect that eBay probably realise that other forms of payment will continue, but from eBay's perspective, if anything goes wrong with these other forms of payment, then the buyer can't blame eBay. That is, I think this move is more about eBay's safety and its profits than about buyer safety.

My prediction is a drop-off of eBay sellers when the May deadline for offering PayPal is introduced, followed by a drop-off in eBay buyers when the June deadline for payment options as Paypal and COD are introduced. I think most of the drop-outs will not move to other auction sites, but will simply delay buying/selling for a while to see how the situation shakes out (i.e. hoping eBay will change its mind). After a while, the drop-outs will be forced to make the decision to either get Paypal, forget eBay (going to other sites in some cases or nowhere in other cases), or get wind of the fact that private payment arrangements can still be made and resume with eBay on that basis.

Frequent ebay users will get Paypal; their need to transact (for whatever motivation) will drive them to overcome any resistance to Paypal. Younger people are more likely to get Paypal (as they are more generally comfortable with online payments). It is the older and occasional buyers and sellers that are more likely to walk away (their need to use eBay isn't desperate and they are too uncomfortable about using Paypal and probably not well-enough connected to discover that under-the-counter payments are still possible).

There are a lot of older people using eBay, so it will be very interesting to see what that group do. Generally for that group of people to move to online payments, they generally have to be coaxed into it by someone they trust who will hold their hand through the process. So if they have a relative or friend who says "but you'll miss using ebay so much, let me show you how my Paypal account works, and I'll help you set it up", it may happen. Without that "word-of-mouth" recommendation, I think they will not touch Paypal with a bargepole.

Since I have Paypal myself, it's obviously not going to stop me buying on eBay if I feel the urge, but I guess I will be suspecting that sellers will be doing more gouging on "shipping and handling" in order to cover the seller's Paypal fees (shipping rip-offs are already rife on eBay and this will only make them worse). As a seller, I will definitely be holding off for a while because of the fear that if the number of buyers are reduced, it must push prices down (basic supply-and-demand theory). Being an occasional buyer/seller on ebay, I think I fit my theory of "delay for a while to see how the situation shakes out", even though I am a Paypal user.

So I shall watch on from the sidelines with interest. I wonder how crowded those sidelines will be :-)

Who has private health insurance?

2008-03-15T11:57:00.002+10:00

Every now and again, one discovers some completely counter-intuitive information that changes the way you think about a situation.

Today I learned some fascinating facts about private health insurance and who buys it. Now, until today, I had pretty much thought that those with private health insurance would generally be older and sicker than those without it. Now there are various "carrots and sticks" to enourage people to take up private health insurance (the Medicare surcharge for high income earners, the rebates, and the surcharges for people who join after age 30), but still at the end of the day, you would think the people with private health insurance would still be somewhat older and sicker than those without, because some people will always say "I am young/healthy; I don't think I'll get sick, therefore I am financially better off to not take out private health insurance".

Well, the facts about private health insurance aren't what you might intuitively expect. The people who take out private health insurance *are* indeed older than those without, but only by a small amount (the average age of the privately insured is about 1 year older than the average age of the not-insured). But more counter-intuitively, the private insured are healthier (or perhaps more to the point "get sick less") than the non-insured.

And when you look at specific demographic groups, you discover that the "old sick" people who you might imagine would be in private insurance in fact are not. People aged over 65 are in fact under-represented in private health insurance. It is the middle-aged who are over-represented in private health insurance statistics.

Now when you think about these facts, the reasons become pretty clear. The older and sicker members of our community can't generally afford private health insurance. So when thinking about private health insurance, there are 3 groups:

1) those who can't afford private insurance
2) those who can and think their health risk warrants it
3) those who can and think their health risk doesn't warrant it

So all the effort that goes into trying to get group 3) to join group 2) isn't about cross-subsiding group 2)'s costs, but rather about removing group 3 from the public system so the public system only has to focus on group 1). Of course the more group 3) subsides group 2)'s costs, the lower the premiums for private insurance become. By lowering premiums, then further members of group 3) will think it economically worthwhile to join group 2) and also some members of group 1) will now be able to afford private insurance and join group 2).

Or to put it the other way, the larger group 3) gets, the higher the premiums paid by group 2), forcing some members of group 2) into group 1), increasing the size of group 1.

Fascinating? Well, maybe not. But I still learned something.

Peter Garrett soon to lose the plastic bag portfolio

2008-01-11T19:46:00.000+10:00

I think Peter Garrett should have stuck to singing. Everyone allows rock stars to have all sorts of opinions because nobody takes them seriously. However, Peter Garrett evidently wanted to be taken seriously so he's now our Federal Minister for the Environment. Or rather Minister for the Environment Minus Water Minus Climate Change, because even the Rudd Labour government realises you can't take the opinions of a rock star seriously.

So, Peter Garrett decided to get serious about one of the few things left in his portfolio, plastic bags. He's going to phase them out and get people to use canvas bags instead or perhaps buckets. I presume that the"canvas bags" Peter is talking are are in fact the reusable non-woven polypropylene bags (byproducts of the oil industry incidentally), but lets not get picky about the precise materials here. His point is to use reusable bags, or maybe buckets.

Actually, reusable bags are very popular at my local Coles. It's a frequent sight to see people leap out of their cars, unloading their boot of a dozen or so of these reusable bags. They do take up a bit of space, but that's OK because most of the cars are on the large size (4WDs, people movers etc) so they can fit them in. I don't see a lot of them carrying buckets, but clearly they could probably fit in a few buckets as well if Peter were to legislate that way. So you can see that the motorists in my area are really a very environmentally-conscious crowd.

In contrast, the people I don't see coming into the supermarket with an armload of reusable bags and buckets are the people on the bus. People hopping off the bus on their way home who stop for a bit of shopping strangely don't come with an armload of plastic bags, or buckets. Yep, it's those tree-hugging public-transport users that aren't doing their bit for the environment by dragging an armload of reusable bags and a few buckets to work on the bus in the morning so they can carry them home in the bus again in the afternoon in order to pick up some groceries. Maybe people who can show a current bus ticket should be allowed to have a plastic bag in the supermarket? And of course Heaven forbid that anyone might have an unplanned or inconvenient need for groceries and discover they didn't have an armful of reusable bags (not to mention buckets) handy. Maybe we should have some kind of stat dec at the cigarette counter to say you were having an unplanned shopping moment in order to gain exemption from the ban on plastic bags.

Of course, Peter has his finger on the pulse of the latest research when it comes to plastic bags. Well, perhaps apart from the Productivity Commission's report on Waste Management which says that his proposed legislation would have little benefit as the major issue with plastic bags is littering and that strategies against littering would be more effective.

Still, even though I have my doubts about the logic of the ban on plastic bags, I know Peter's heart is in the right place, being such a committed environmentalist. And I guess the reason he might not have had time to report the Productivity Commission's report was because the great environmentalist was rushing to catch a plane to the Antarctic, one of the world's great unspoilt wildernesses. Like the local 4WDs, a 737 has plenty of luggage space for reusable bags (and a enormous number of buckets) and I am sure Peter took along quite a lot of them with him in order to ensure that his flight was completely carbon neutral. It's rare for politicians to be so willing to provide resources for Antarctic scientists, so it is nice to see that so many of them are rushing to fly to Antartica to see the fantastic research our scientists are doing there on global warming.

And no doubt when he returns to Australia and discovers he is now the Minister for the Environment Minus Water Minus Climate Change And Minus Plastic Bags, he will explain that he never really meant to ban plastic bags and that what we heard was just a short and jocular conversation. Whereupon he'll settle down and get into some environmental legislation that is about substance rather than symbols.

Christmas gifts and relationships

2007-12-24T08:27:00.000+10:00

Here on Christmas Eve, that great day of consumer spending, the Courier-Mail has some practical advice for us all.

Apparently it's terribly important to select Christmas gifts carefully if you are in a relationship, especially a new one. Should your gift be vastly different in quality and price to the one you receive, the relationship may be doomed. Even worse, one of you might buy a gift for the other but not vice versa. The wrong gift or no gift at all could spell instant disaster for the relationship.

Do I live on the same planet as these people?

Surely if the wrong gift kills a relationship, then that relationship was not meant to be. Sure, the wrong gift might be the straw that broke the camel's back but it must be symptomatic of larger problems. It must be a pretty fragile or shallow relationship that is killed solely by the wrong Christmas gift.

If your relationship can't survive the wrong Christmas gift, how are you going to cope together through the rest of life's trial and tribulations? It's not for nothing that the traditional marriage vows talk about "for worse", "for poorer", and "in sickness".

Maybe they need to update the wedding vows. "Will you love him, honour him and keep him even if he buys your Christmas gift from the Crazy Clark discount bin?"

Alternatively, maybe I should stop reading the Courier-Mail and its quality journalism.

Yahoo Answers - the good, the bad and the ugly

2007-12-20T07:16:00.000+10:00

I've been pondering Yahoo Answers lately. I like the concept that, despite the entire WWW of information, there are still questions that cannot be easily answered except by individuals who possess some relatively unique or specialised knowledge.

The downside of Yahoo Answers is the fact that any clueless twit can, and sadly does, use it.

The questions that genuinely belong in Yahoo Answers are drowned in a sea of questions that aren't appropriate (both in my opinion and Yahoo's own guidelines).

It perplexes me why people would bother asking Yahoo Questions for matters that could be resolved with any trivial WWW search, "What's the postcode for Alice Springs?". Similarly I wonder about the people who ask questions that are so unconstrained as to be effectively unanswerable, "Where should I go on holidays this year?" from a person whose home location, budget and interests are completely unknown. And of course there are the school assignment questions (and often the asker even admits they are a school assignment). And finally there are the sex and toilet questions that one assumes are being asked by children still at the fart joke stage of intellectual development "Where should I go in Sydney to see couples make out?" (real question!). And there are some questions so incoherent that one has no idea what is being asked.

What doubly perplexes me is why people bother to answer most of the above. There will often be half a dozen replies with the same answer regarding the postcode for Alice Springs (you would think one would suffice, although I guess concurrency could explain more than 1 answer but not when they are spread over days). And people will suggest that you rent a cabin by Lake NeverHeardOfIt because the fishing is really good there.

But those are what I might deem the "rational answers". There are of course the people whose answer is "I don't know" or something incoherent or just plain old spam. There are also answers that are so obviously factually erroneous that you wonder if the answerers are complete idiots or just malicious.

Indeed my favourite to date was the question about the time difference between California and Sydney. Now that's a pretty factual question, the answer to which is complicated in practice by the use of daylight savings at different times of year, but still capable of being answered relative to any date or by explaining the daylight saving issue. Alas, the answers ranged from about 6 to 19 hours. Some answers said that Sydney was a day behind California (I guess America must be first at everything!). The most priceless part of it all is that the asker annointed the answer of "12 hours" as being "the best answer" explaining it was in the middle of the range of answers provided. Clearly the asker thought time difference was not a matter of fact but a matter of popular opinion, so I guess they got the answer they deserved.

Yahoo have introduced a complicated system of reportings and levels and points which is intended to somewhat constrain the activities of the rampant idiot or malicious user, but it really weeds out only the most persistent or most malicious or most idiotic users. What destroys Yahoo Answers is the vast army of people whose occasional idiotic question or dumb answer creates a morass of trash in which the genuine question and answers remain lost to view.

This is the same problem that has destroyed Usenet groups and diminishes the worth of just about every public forum on the Internet; they are too open to the public. Of course this is what the traditional custodians of knowledge (the editors, librarians and curators) have been saying for years about the Internet and they are right. But equally they are wrong in thinking/hoping the world is going to return to a state in which they are the providers, custodians and therefore the bottlenecks for information.

The challenge is to find the middle ground, the ways and means to scalably and democratically regulate "public" discussion. I envisage some kind of meritocracy-based group post-hoc moderation, perhaps along the lines of the Slashdot system (but hopefully less complicated -- the Slashdot system was invented by geeks for geeks and can't be explained to anyone even assuming you understand it yourself!). But some days I'd settle for plain old moderator-dictatorship in the interim!

Indeed, I am always impressed that Wikipedia survives the onslaught of public idiocy and malice. I guess the need to be able to edit Wiki is an intellectual barrier to the participation of many of the idiots out there and the readily available "roll back" of Wikipedia is an easy antidote to the malicious. But the price of accuracy on Wiki is the eternal vigilence of its users and its change patrol (even if they do behave like online vigilantes at times).

Share markets and rollercoasters

2007-12-18T18:29:00.000+10:00

Yesterday the share market took a fall. Usual media hysteria followed. Why? Share markets are like rollercoasters, they rise steadily over time and then do a sudden drop. Then they rise steadily and do a sudden drop. There is years of data to show this pattern. It's been studied to death and is explained by a number of factors that are now pretty well understood. Why do we get so excited every time it happens? And more importantly why do people rush to sell when it happens? "Oooh, here's a chance to lose money -- I must take it!".

There is something completely counter-intuitive about the way people sell shares. If the house prices fall, people tend to stay put. When prices rise, they sell their house. But it's the other way with the stock market. The less someone offers for the shares, the more willing people seem to be to sell. It seems pretty crazy to me.

Still, we can profit by this crazy behaviour. Falls in the stock market are great buying opportunities. This morning I bought XYZ (not their real name!) shares for 81.5c. I'd been thinking of buying them last week when they were around 90c but didn't get around to doing it. Last night they closed at 84c and I offered to buy them at that price (thinking that was a pretty good deal), but so enthuasiastic were the sellers to offload them that when the market opened, they were offering them at 81.5c. So I get to buy shares at 81.5c when I was perfectly willing to pay 84c last night and 90c last week. But it gets better, in the middle of the day, I could have bought them for about 76c (pity I had to go to work), but by the end of the day they were back to 81.5c again.

So we have a share that fluctuated 8c in a day or around 10% of the share price or about 20% in less than a week. Now what happened to that company in that day or week to cause this variation? Nothing at all. It's not particularly exposed to the "subprime crisis" which supposedly underpinned the "crash" yesterday, a point the company announced to the market yesterday presumably in response to the falling share price. Indeed, I suspect that announcement caused the price to start bouncing back.

To me, these falls are just buying opportunities. Find a stock that lost a lot of ground for no apparent reason and buy it. Wait a month or so for the price to return to previous levels and you can pocket 5-20% for your trouble. Beats putting your spare cash in the bank! Of course, I have no guarantee that this is what XYZ will do, but clearly it's what I'm hoping it will do.

NB I didn't name the share, not to be secretive, but simply because I didn't want to appear to be spruiking it on a public blog. If you are interested, feel free to email me.

Newspapers and Christmas

2007-12-18T07:48:00.000+10:00

As I picked up the newspaper from my front yard this morning, I noticed how skinny it is. Is it because there is less news in the week before Christmas or is it because the journalists are all on holidays?

One of the perennial (in the sense of it occurs annually) mysteries of my life is why there is no newspaper on Christmas Day (or Good Friday), which are ironically two days in which I have plenty of time to read and enjoy a newspaper.

The "obvious" reason is that the staff of the newspaper want to have those days off to attend to their family celebrations and religious devotions etc. But my problem is this. The newspaper is written and printed the night before and it's delivered in the early hours of the morning to my front yard. How does any of that interfere with the traditional celebration of Christmas or Good Friday? And since newspapers are published the morning after Christmas and Good Friday, when were the staff working? Presumably on Christmas Day and Good Friday. It makes no sense to me at all.

Maybe the real issue that is nobody wants to read a newspaper on those days so they won't buy one? Or maybe nobody wants to advertise on those days because the shops are closed?

I dunno, but every year it makes me wonder ...

Interest rates - why is going up a bad thing?

2007-10-26T07:21:00.000+10:00

The newspaper headlines are running with the possibility of an interest rate rise in Australia. The tone of the articles is that an interest rate rise is "bad news".

For whom is it bad news? Well, it's bad news if you are borrowing money.
But equally it's good news if you have savings as you earn more interest.

In particular, it is good news for many older people who are getting more income from their retirement savings.

So while the newly mortgaged Gen-Whatevers may have to cut back on their purchases of plasma TVs, iPods and personal videoplayers in the back seats of their cars, their grandparents may get to eat steak instead of sausages, or maybe even sausages instead of dog food. Maybe they might be able to afford a mobile phone to call the doctor or the ambulance. Is that such a bad thing?

I look forward to the headline "Interest rates rise!" accompanied by the photo of Darby & Joan clinking their tea cups with the caption: "Darby: this is great news! We'll be be able to run our heater this winter & Joan is looking forward to those new dentures!"

In loving memory of Zambezi (Zammi)

2007-10-20T16:27:00.000+10:00

In loving memory of Zambezi (aka Zammi)
1-1-1991 - 20-10-2007 aged 16 years

Our beloved cat Zammi died peacefully and painlessly today (Saturday) on our back verandah, assisted by our vet. His cancer had progressed to a point where euthanasia was the only option.

We would like to thank everyone for your kind words, patience and support over the past several weeks, as we nursed him through this final illness. It has been an emotionally wretched time for us, and your support has been truly appreciated.

He will be cremated and we will scatter his ashes around the bottlebrush tree in our front garden, which he loved to climb and get up onto the roof.

Zammi had so much personality and was such an integral part of our lives that we will miss him terribly.

Libertarianism - try reading Heinlein

2007-10-17T07:15:00.000+10:00

Following from Jim's post and Ricky's post and various comments to their posts ...

I would comment that it is precisely the "nannying state" that Ricky objects to that has produced such fine upstanding citizens as Jim and Ricky themselves. I am sure Ricky will not drive at ridiculous speeds with his baby in the back seat. Yes, the nannying state seeks to protect, but ask a child if they need protection, and they often say no, yet as adults (the nannies) we know children do.

Would a libertarians state have anti-discrimination laws? Or would we all be free to discriminate against women, coloured folk, Muslims, gays etc as employers, landlords, etc? If so, where would that leave most of us in this conversation? My guess is that most of us wouldn't have got more than a minimal education so we could wash dishes and even if we did, would we have jobs? I am old enough to remember when job adverts were listed separately under "Men & Boys" and "Women & Girls" and when it was OK to write "Women need not apply" and "No blacks". Sorry, but the nanny state gave me rights, and I am not turning back that clock.

Obviously when we legislate to protect, we have to draw some lines in the sand as to where that boundary should be. Is 60 kph a reasonable speed limit for a major road, or should it be 55 kph or 70 kph? Should the permitted blood alcohol be 0.05 or higher or lower? Obviously there are individual circumstances where the legislation is too permissive and where the legislation is too restrictive. Libertarian supporters tend to point to the individual circumstances in which it is too restrictive, and I don't disagree with some of those examples. But for everyone who says "60kph is too low" or "there's too much red tape for employers", there's also the family that lost a loved one in a speed-related car crash or who is caring for a person permanently disabled in an industrial accident. The legislation of the nanny state is invariably created in response to what people believe were "avoidable" tragedies. Should the state not seek to protect its citizens?

Also when we look at the principles of libertarianism, we see them in the context of a society long-founded in the nanny state. What we cannot easily see is what a "true libertarian" state would be like. If anyone is interested in that speculation, I recommend you read science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, especially his book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Heinlein was very much a libertarian in his views and his science fiction is often very thought-provoking reading. But despite being a long time fan of Heinlein's writing (and think The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of his great books), I have never been truly persuaded to share Heinlein's libertarian views.

Sorry, Jim, you don't get my vote!

2007-10-15T19:57:00.000+10:00

Jim toys with standing for the Liberty & Democracy party in Ryan: Plus Perdu: election announced

Well, Jim, as a Ryan voter, you won't be getting my vote. I can see why they call themselves the Liberty party as they are definitely libertarian (the individual should decide where they should smoke, what risky behaviours they engage in, how fast they drive, and how many guns they tote) but I don't get the Democracy part of their platform, as in when when does the majority get to decide that it isn't such a great idea for the individual to do most of those things because of the harm they can do to others.

How fast should you drive? Well, we've seen idiots pulled over for 3x the speed limit and with their baby strapped in the back. I presume the driver thought it was a safe speed and that he could handle the car at such speed. Pity anyone else driving on that road, pity anyone walking across the street or cycling through the intersection, pity the child in the back seat. Now I agree that we can't necessarily stop these people doing these things, but I am not wanting a society that says "hey, that's cool, it was his libertarian right to decide that was a safe way to drive".

For that matter, why should the government decide which side of the road we drive on? Goddamnit, I wanna drive on the other side. Isn't that my right? So I end up crippled, thank heavens for the L&D's welfare policy. I mean it was a victimless crime if the only person I injure is myself, so that's cool in the L&D policy.

But still, thanks, Jim for contributing to the political debate and politial conscience raising. We all need to have our axioms challenged. But frankly, it's just reading about the L&D party that sends me screaming back to the mainstream political parties. I'm sorry John & Kevin, forgive me for doubting your ability to deliver something that approximates my social and economic needs, whatever your differences (if any).

I am guilty of declaring myself as being Apathetic about politics on Facebook. I think I need to revise that to be anti-libertarian!

The painting comes home

2007-08-19T17:14:00.000+10:00

As you already know, I bought a painting at the Ekka this year. And today I got to bring it home.

You can see it here.

It is called "Country Blues" and is by Debbie Sutcliffe from Morayfield north of Brisbane. It was the eyes particularly that attracted me to the painting.

I did a little google search on the artist and it seems she won a prize at an art show at Redcliffe and she sells original paintings on ebay, although the 2 paintings she is selling on ebay at the moment are very different in style to the portrait I bought.

I bought a painting

2007-08-16T19:17:00.000+10:00

I went to the Ekka on Wednesday. Having read the Courier-Mail in the morning where it pleaded with all right-minded people to go and boost the numbers regardless of the deadly circulating influenzas, I felt it was my patriotic duty to do so. They also serve who only go to the Show! :-) Of course, the fact that I wanted to go anyway may have influenced matters somewhat.

David being hauled into work for some deadline left me alone and nipping into my car (my new Ford Territory) and off to the Ekka. The alert reader will observe how I completely ignored the advice to use public transport. Given that it is quicker, cheaper, and more convenient to drive and park than use public transport, it's a bit of a no-brainer really and if the Powers That Be think telling me that public transport is the better option without bothering to actually make it better in any way think this will fool me, well, it won't. Indeed they actually charge a surcharge to use the Ekka railway station which they hope most people (who aren't regular public transport users) won't notice. Let me get this right: public transport is better so we'll add a rip-off. Hmm!

But I disgress. Having arrived at the Ekka, I made straight for the food pavilion to inspect the exciting varieties of new cheeses, chutneys and other local delicacies being showcased. Kingaroy Cheese had a rather nice brie.

After that I waltzed over to the fine art pavilion. I wandered past the first row of paintings, which were portraits (except for one which was of a piano -- no I can't explain that) when I saw a portrait that I was instantly drawn to, a portrait of an older man, he seemed like a country man with bright blue eyes with a little bloodshot in them. I liked it, I wanted it, my eyes glanced down and noted that it was for sale for $350 and there was no little "sold" tag. It could be mine!

All my Scottish ancestors then spoke to me, warning me against impulsive purchases, pointing out that there were many many more paintings to see and many of them might be far nicer, better value, etc. Heeding their advice, I wandered on through the exhibits. I saw good paintings, bad paintings, I saw ones not for sale, I saw ones that were already sold, I saw ones that nobody in their right mind would surely buy, I saw ones too expensive for me to even contemplate. But I still wanted that portrait of the old man. And maybe someone was buying it as I wandered past these other paintings.

So I went back and looked at my painting again (I was already calling it "my" painting). I still wanted it. I went towards the counter to buy it. Then the ancestors spoke again and I went and looked at more paintings. Then I glanced back and there was a small crowd gathering around my painting. Oh no, they might be going to buy it. I rushed back to look at it again, and noticed the small crowd was in fact looking at a different painting. So I went to the counter. Oh no, two people ahead of me, they were going to buy my painting, perhaps it was already sold and they just hadn't had time to put the "sold" tag on. Eventually after agonising delay, neither of the people ahead of me bought my painting (one wanted directions, the other a catalogue) and I was at the head of the queue. There was an agonising pause as the women looked up the catalogue and then, bliss and joy, it was indeed unsold and I flashed my plastic (how did people live without credit cards) and it was mine!

Well, it was mine except for the fact it has to stay on display for the rest of the Ekka. I get to pick it up on Sunday. I would have taken a photo of it to share with y'all but there was a big sign right beside my painting saying "No photography" and a mean pair of security dudes nearby.

So I will just have to wait until Sunday to collect it, photograph it and share it with you all. Hopefully I will still like it! Next I need to think where I shall display it. Details like that ...

Movie review: Hot Fuzz

2007-04-06T19:54:00.000+10:00

I scored two free tickets to Hoyts cinema (or Australian Multiplex in Qld) for being one of Quickflix's favourite customers. Or so they said. I am at a loss to understand why I might be one of the their favourite customers; I am subscribed on the cheapest plan. Maybe they sent them to everyone. I presume there must be some corporate connection between Quickflix and Hoyts, but I can't see what it is.

Being of a suspicious mind, I inspected these free tickets carefully for the catch, but other than being unusable on Saturday nights, it all seemed genuine. Since there are no AMC cinemas on our side of town, we headed off to the Sunnybank cinema to see Hot Fuzz which sounded the best film on offer.

Indeed, it was pretty good. It's a spoof on the genre of America urban cop with lots of shooting and violence. It's a UK film and the storyline is that a tough London cop is sent to a Gloucestershire village, where a bunch of local yokel cops lead a quiet life in a town where little happens. But, of course, still waters run deep, and below the surface, evil is afoot and people are dying. And our hero realises the deaths are murder but fails to convince his colleagues who believe they are accidents.

It's MA15+ presumably for the violence and horror themes (people die in some grisly ways) but because it is so obviously a comedy, it rather diminishes the impact of the violence and horror (similar to cartoons).

The plot changes direction a few times and ultimately doesn't really make a lot of sense, but you are not here for the plot but for the comedy, both verbal and physical.

Anyhow I'll not spoil it with more details. An excellent film at the price I paid :-) but really it was worth spending the money if you are thinking of going.

Book review: The Undercover Economist -- by Tim Harford

2007-02-19T22:14:00.000+10:00

Book review: The Undercover Economist -- by Tim Harford

This is my speed review for the busy blog reader!

This is a good book to give a simple introduction to economics in everyday action. You don't need to read the whole thing to get the gist as it seems to get a big repetitive (this is my comment on just about every non-fiction book these days).

Also to be honest, I couldn't be entirely comfortable about the argument towards the end of the book that third world sweatshops are good because economics tells us so. This is all based on the theory of comparative advantage. This is all very well, but what happens if one country has no comparative advantage, that there is nothing they can do better than anyone else.

Book review: Maelstrom - by Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Scarborough

2007-02-19T21:58:00.000+10:00

Maelstrom - by Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Scarborough

Don't bother. Just don't bother. It is the Nth book in the Twins of Petaybee series and I have no regrets about not having read any of the earlier ones. Did Anne McCaffrey really have any hand in this dross?

I wondered throughout the book if it was in fact intended as a children's book. It certainly lacked any kind of sophistication in its characterisation, storyline, etc. However, Brisbane City Council had it listed as adult fiction, and Amazon reviewers gave it 5 stars (out of 5). Generally I have found Amazon reviews pretty useful assessments, but in this case they praised the book and I thought it was just awful.

Of course, I have long held that any work of fiction written by Foo & Bar is bound to be a disaster. Now this opinion is based on statistical observation that I rarely like novels written by two (or more) people. Logically I cannot rationalise why novels written by multiple authors should be bad. After all people collaborate to make TV and movies and music, and that seems to work, but put two people in front of a typewriter and it seems to spell disaster.

more on research groups

2007-02-19T21:54:00.000+10:00

Following email exchange, it would seem that Ricky and I are in violent agreement on research teams. We are resolved (I think) that:

* lone academics counting angels on the heads of pins are Bad
* researchers voluntarily working collaboratively to solve significant problems is Good
* researchers forced to work collaboratively for reasons of politics etc is Bad

Wikipedia - yeah, it works

2007-02-10T12:56:00.000+10:00

The death of Anna Nicole Smith and its reporting on Wikipedia lead to many acts of cyber-vandalism on the page. Some people seem to see this as proof that a everyone-free-to-edit environment like Wikipedia is doomed to failure.

On the contrary, it is incidents like this that prove that Wikipedia works. It is resiliant to shocks. Yeah, a few people got about 15 seconds of fame while their tasteless remarks sat on the wikipedia page, but by the time they had emailed or instant-messaged their mates to say "look at what I did", those remarks would have been removed and responsible Wikipedia users would have been taking steps to get the page locked down. If you want to see the vandalism, it's perpetuated by the sites commenting on the vandalism rather than on Wikipedia itself (ironic, really).

Like all human activity, we come up with rules and processes to control undesirable outcomes, like driving on the same side of the road (well, on a country-by-country basis at least), putting the bad dudes in prison, and locking down Wikipedia pages that are subject to vandalism. If new undesirable outcomes start happening, we change our rules and processes. Wikipedia over the course of its existance has evolved to cope with these incidents.

Vandalism on Wikipedia certainly happens and indeed is nearly impossible to prevent, but it recovers quickly from it. While Wikipedia's recent change patrol (those self-appointed bastions of "what's right on Wikipedia") can be a bunch of over-officious zealots a lot of the time, still they do perform the important social function of ensuring that vandalism is quickly removed (having an underlying verson control system makes it easy to roll back changes -- hurray for IT).

Wikipedia is sustainable precisely because enough people get enough benefit out of it to think they should put something back into it to keep it thriving. People contribute in different ways, whether it be by providing new content or being an editor of existing content or being in the recent change patrol or even donating cash. It's when people stop making their various contributions that the vandals come in, destroy it all and it loses all credibility. Much like urban neighbourhoods and graffitti and why "zero tolerance" policies actually work.

in praise of research collaboration

2007-02-10T12:12:00.000+10:00

Ricky argues against research collaboration. Well, he doesn't exactly say that but read it for yourselves.

My counter-argument to his claim that it is mostly individuals who make the breakthroughs is that we tend to remember and idolise those individuals (the cult of the celebrity, as today's headlines on Anna Nicole Smith demonstrate), whereas it is not practical to enumerate the vast armies of people who collaborated on other advances. Who invented the CD-ROM or space shuttle or GPS or ...? Was there an individual? Was there a collaboration? What about the computer? Turing? Babbage? That's a heck of a long way from the laptop on your desk today.

Ricky mentions DNA. Sure, people think of Crick and Watson as the individuals who cracked DNA. Yet there were many other people in that story, including the controversy over their use of Rosalind Franklin's data. Even the wikipedia story mentions many other people who contributed. Now Ricky will argue that the informal collaborations of academics produced the desired results. Yes, but would not a formal collaboration of the correct range of skills in the one lab with a common goal have found it sooner?

The danger of the sole academic left to their own devices is the "angels on the head of a pin" phenomenom where they refine their expertise in a matter of no practical use to anyone. In the case of IT research in which we tend to build things, there is infinite scope to build infinitely many things of no interest to anyone but their builder. I am no fan of the sole academic. I'd rather see teams harnessed towards a specific useful purpose, but with a bit of slack for skunk works for those occasional flashes of individual brilliance.

And finally playing the man not the ball, where has Ricky received his research funding from lately? Being a sole academic or being part of a research team? As Hilaire Belloc says in his poem about Jim who ran away from a nurse and was eaten by a lion, "always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse!"

meta-cemetery-photographing vs cemetery-photographing

2007-01-31T19:56:00.000+10:00

Thank you, my tireless readers, for pointing out that I just posted my story of our weekend at Dalby to Twin Parrots. Yes, I know that! It was not a cemetery-photography posting (which should indeed be reserved for Dead Centre of Queensland) but a meta-cemetery-photography posting (which belongs still in Twin Parrots).

The responsible and mature blogger at Dead Centre would not slag off the fine town of Jandowae just because they found it very hot in the middle of the day in summer there (indeed, what would any mature and responsible person have expected the weather to be?). However, the immature and irresponsible Twin Parrots blogger is free to take irrational dislike to Jandowae for failing to provide suitable weather.

Wambo Shire and its cemeteries

2007-01-30T22:20:00.000+10:00

Well about a week ago, I'd never heard of Wambo Shire and now we've photographed four of its cemeteries: Bell, Jimbour Station, Jandowae and Warra. For the benefit of the equally-geographically-challenged, it's the area around Dalby which is west of Toowoomba.

Since last weekend was the Australia Day long weekend, we decided somewhat spontaneously to go up to Dalby and photograph some cemeteries. Although I've visited Dalby once a year or so for some years, I had never actually known what the shire was called.

Aside, according to the Lonely Planet, Dalby can claim the world's only monument to an insect (the cactoblastis), but the local tourist office doesn't seem to go overboard in promoting this unique attraction.

As it turned out, it was not a great weekend to visit Dalby. We started out at Warra Cemetery, west of Dalby. While we were there, the sky became progressively darker with low threatening clouds, which were a rather curious denim blue colour. We thought the storm might come before we finished the cemetery so we worked very quickly, but we finished before the storm came. Indeed as we were driving from Warra back toward Dalby, we could see the storm off to the south rather than on the road ahead to the east. We noticed the way dust was being pulled up by the storm and had a long discussion about why we don't get tornedos in Australia like the American mid-west.

Of course then the storm hit us and it was almost impossible to see through the driving rain so eventually we pulled off the road (not a lot of opportunities on this road) to wait out the storm. Anyhow eventually we get back to Dalby to find branches down everywhere, trees uprooted, etc. It turned out the town was hit by a "mini-tornedo", so much for our theory they didn't happen. And of course the power lines were down all over the place and the town had no power. So we checked into our motel and sat waiting for the power to come back on.

It was well and truly dinner time with no sign of the power being restored that we ventured out to drive around town in the hope of finding a meal in a town without power. Having established that there wasn't any premises with lighting in the main shopping street, we decided that driving down the highway to Oakey might be our only option. By chance we drove past the Dalby RSL on our way back to the highway and found it a blaze of light and full of hungry townsfolk, so we joined them. There were a lot of queues to order meals and drinks, but the staff were doing their best and eventually everyone got dinner.

Now I don't know if the Dalby RSL had its own generator (if so, it was a quiet one), but it was a curious coincidence that they were across the street from the Ergon building (the local electricity supplier). The Ergon building was also a blaze of light, but this was not so surprising as 1) they had a very noisy generator in their backyard and 2) it makes sense for an electricity company to be busy when the power is out. Was there a long extension lead from the Ergon generator to the RSL? Anyhow, eventually we returned to our motel to sit on the balcony in the moonlight until the power came back on around 10pm. However, power wasn't fully restored to the whole town until the next day.

Next day we were out looking for cemeteries. It wasn't realistic to photograph the Dalby cemeteries -- way too big for two people so we went looking for smaller ones. Now smaller towns generally have smaller cemeteries, so we aim for the smaller towns.

We had an easy start with Jimbour Station "historic" cemetery, small and recently restored so an easy exercise to photograph. However, we got a bit caught out at our next stop with Jandowae. Never having visited Jandowae, our extensive research prior to our trip extended to my remembering that Jandowae was (in)famous for its $1 land sale intended to reverse the declining population. (Never let it be said that our cemetery activities are entirely well-planned; we have our organised trips and our more spontaneous expeditions). Anyhow, the $1 land sale made us think it was a very small place, but it turned out to be a bit bigger than we expected in terms of size of the town and also the size of the cemetery. And of course we arrive at the cemetery in the middle of one of the hottest days and we fry in the cemetery photographing all those headstones. I was undecided if I was going to faint first or explode with spontaneous combustion. At least it was well-maintained and we didn't have to fight our way through the undergrowth and prickles.

Also in the category of curious coincidences, I was photographing a plaque about the planting of a tree in honour of the early pioneers of Jandowae when I noticed the date on the plaque. It was that very day -- I guess they did it early in the morning before we arrived.

Alas, we were not completely spared the undergrowth and prickles which abounded at Bell cemetery later that afternoon, when it was still frying conditions out in the sun. It is fair to say that, even at $1, you couldn't tempt me to move to Jandowae or Bell. Of course, they may be delightful places to live, but frankly I had a miserable time at both and have no desire to return. I have never appreciated my car airconditioning so much.

Supposedly there were cemeteries at Macalister, Kaimkillenbun, and Maclagan but we never found them. Admittedly in all cases, it was late in the day and maybe we weren't heart-broken not to find another weed-and-pest-infested cemetery so we didn't inquire too deeply. Maybe we will do a bit more research before going back (be organised).

Dead Centre of Queensland

2007-01-30T21:53:00.000+10:00

Since splitting one's blog into multiple blogs is all the rage in the ex-DSTC community, I feel the need to maintain my credibility as a digital native by doing the same. So today I am pleased to launch my new blog Dead Centre of Queensland which will focus on our cemetery-photographing activities.

This blog (Twin Parrots) will remain as my non-cemetery-photographying blog. I trust my small but select group of readers (quality rather than quantity) will subscribe to both in order to remain abreast of my hectic lifestyle.

Now I realise some of my readers (being intellectuals of the highest order) will be wondering why a blog with as few posts as mine really needed to be split, apart from maintaining my street cred as a digital native. So the real reason is that I wanted to have a separate cemetery blog so I can publicise in the family history community, which might not be so interested in my book reviews and random thoughts on ticket scalping and the like. Also I think I have to project a mature and responsible image in the family history community (who after all have mums and dads etc buried in the cemeteries we might be photographing). So this way I can keep my more irresponsible and immature thoughts here on Twin Parrots.

BTW, do you like the name Dead Centre of Queensland? Obviously I did or I wouldn't have called it that. Anyhow, pop over there and take a look at my first post and add it to your blog aggregrator or whatever you use to subscribe with.

Thunderstruck - my movie of the year

2007-01-02T20:14:00.000+10:00

Generally at New Year's Eve, I have a sort-of tradition of re-watching (and showing others) the best movie I saw all year (not necessarily a movie released in that year). This year's was Thunderstruck, a 2004 Australian film.

It's a comedy road movie about 5 AC-DC fans who pledge as teenagers to be buried alongside Bon Scott (dead lead singer of AC-DC). 10 years later, one of them dies and the other 4 (who are basically a bunch of losers) come together to keep that promise by driving his ashes from Sydney to Fremantle, contrary to his family's wishes. It's a very Australian movie, and one that might not translate too well for an overseas audience. It's also a very AC-DC movie, so knowing something about AC-DC is probably important -- certainly you won't understand the band of bagpipers at the end of the movie otherwise.

Now the amusing thing is that life does imitate art. As AC-DC was part of our teenage years, having watched the movie and being a bit interested in cemeteries, we decided that when we get around to the West Australian holiday we occasionally talk about, we would include a visit to Bon Scott's grave in Fremantle cemetery. Then I read in the newspaper recently that one of the new "tourist attractions" of Fremantle is ... you guessed it, Bon Scott's grave. The tourist information people couldn't understand why everyone had suddenly started asking about it, until someone figured out the movie connection. So, clearly we aren't the only Whacko Jackos to be inspired by the movie to visit the cemetery.

I notice that Thunderstruck didn't get much of a rating on IMDB, but it is a somewhat niche movie, and I guess I am right in that niche because I loved it and it's my movie of the year. So there!

Book review: "Renegades of Pern" but really musing on the Pern series a whole

2007-01-02T18:45:00.001+10:00

I have just finished reading "Renegades of Pern" by Anne McCaffrey, one of the dragon series. Some months ago, I decided to re-read the entire series. Although I owned a number of the books, as usual, I could not find them, either lost in the clutter of the house or lent to people and never returned. But fortunately Brisbane City Council library has all of the series except one of the later books, so I have been mostly reading the library's books.

Of course, reading the Pern series has interesting sequencing issues, as the series hops back and forward in time somewhat. Does one read the books in the order they were written or in the chronology of Pern itself? I opted for the order in which the books were written, although towards the end of the series, I read a few out of order because I'd stopped caring.

Without a doubt, the Pern series starts well with Dragonflight and Dragonquest introducing the world of Pern, the Thread that threatens life on the planet, and the dragons that fight thread and the society that has evolved in that context. I'd call it good science fiction, but I know many people prefer to call it fantasy. Whatever.

The series then gets a bit too interested in minor characters IMHO (such as Menolly and the harpers) and the introduction of fire lizards seems a bit of a distraction to the main storyline. I find the abilities of fire lizards somewhat confusing, they seem to be able to do or not do useful things, based more on what is convenient for the plot rather than any consistent set of abilities. In fact, it's really Robinton the Masterharper and Piemur the apprentice, rather than Menolly who are the significant characters later in the series. Menolly floats in and out throughout the series, as if Anne McCaffrey was a bit embarrassed to have introduced her as a major character and then felt she couldn't drop the character, but really Menolly seems to be pregnant in the later books and doesn't contribute much at all. Anne McCaffrey has a lot of strong female characters, but Menolly seems to fade away compared with some of the others.

I initially thought the White Dragon was another "minor character" book, but later in the series Jaxom and Ruth the White Dragon turn out to be more major characters.

Then the series branches off into all different points of Pern's history. Moreta Dragonlady of Pern is quite a good free-standing story, but doesn't contribute anything much to the overall development of the series.

The series gets going again with Dragonsdawn, the story of the founding of Pern by a high-technology society and the events (Thread and earthquakes) that lead to the society's decay into a more low-tech society that we know from the start of the series. Again, from a sci-fi perspective, the evolution of the society in response to events is very good. Anne McCaffrey is back on form.

Then one is again lost in a tangle of novels and short stories about many of the minor characters at all points of Pern's history, sometimes re-telling the same events from their point of view. While it all adds colour, these stories don't tend to contribute much to the overall events of the story line.

Then we get All the Weyrs of Pern which despite its name is primarily focussed on the rediscovery of the Ancient's artifical intelligence system that begins to guide the people of Pern out of their feudal/medieval world back toward high technology. It's all a bit too easy with such a super-intelligent AI system telling them what to do. One has to be impressed that the AI system survived that length of time and one has to wonder why the ancients never bothered to seek its advice to aid them in their times of troubles -- it certainly has the answers for all problems from the re-invention of paper to the destruction of the Red Star.

Finally, having blown up the Red Star, you might think it was game over for the series, but that is not the case. There are a number of books, some co-authored with others, and frankly this is when I had to confess that I had stopped caring about what happened on Pern to a vast cast of minor characters. Renegades of Pern is one of these many stories, following various major and minor characters, re-telling events from their point of view. All a bit of a yawn.

So, the dragon/Pern series is well worth reading but you can stick to the main backbone novels that tell the end-to-end story and give a lot of the other stories that add a lot of largely irrelevant detail a miss, if you can't be bothered.

Helidon general cemetery, west of Gatton

2007-01-02T18:45:00.000+10:00

Happy New Year!

Again, a lovely day to spend in the pool, but no, instead we go and photograph Helidon General Cemetery - 400 or so graves, mostly monumental but with some recent lawn beam graves. There was no columbarium which seemed a bit strange to me, as there is a crematorium at Laidley, which isn't that far away.

Helidon Cemetery has quite a nice position on the side of a hill with good views including the new Gatton bypass highway. The graves mostly face east (as is common in most cemeteries) except for a few that mysteriously face south. Perhaps those families had a different compass (and thought everyone else had got it wrong) or perhaps they belonged to some strange sect that liked being buried facing the south. Or maybe they were just mavericks who thought it would give people something to ponder on in the future (if so, it worked).

The cemetery is well-maintained (I think by the local shire council) and has good grass cover sprigged with little pink flowers, all rather pretty. There are some small trees and large shrubs which give it a pleasant ambience and provide a bit of shade, but it's still relatively open and therefore hot in summer when photographing. It has boundary fencing. On the driveway down from the road (Cemetery Road -- good name) down to the cemetery itself, there are a lot of tall gums, so at least you can park in the shade. There is a little waiting room shed-like structure with a few bench seats inside. Of course, being in Gatton Shire, it featured large ants which as always found my sandalled feet irresistable, despite generous dousing of said feet with Aerogard.

I think we can given Helidon cemetery a 3-star rating. More shade trees in the cemetery itself would have got it 4 stars and I am saving 5 stars for the first cemetery that comes with a coffee shop.

Culture & Camel Racing

2007-01-01T10:59:00.000+10:00

Country Queensland never ceases to amaze me.

Yet again, a place I had never previously heard of, Tara Shire (to be precise), on the western Darling Downs with a population of 4000 people spread over 11000 square kilometres has confounded my expectations. Did you know it is famous for its annual Festival of Culture & Camel Racing? The next one will be held 4-5 Aug 2007.

It's not clear to me if there were originally two separate events, the Festival of Culture and the Camel Racing that merged, or whether Culture and Camel Racing are indistinguishable concepts in Tara. As evidence to support the second hypothesis, I note that another town in the shire boasts the Hannaford Gymkhana & Music Festival. Indeed the shire of Tara is awash with events.

I guess it shows that when you are about 300 km from any other form of entertainment, making your own seems a really good idea and presumably it builds community in the way we have lost in the cities.

Milbong Lutheran cemetery, near Boonah

2006-12-30T16:37:00.000+10:00

Well, what do you do on a hot summer's day? Stay home and lounge in the pool. No, off to photograph Milbong St Luke's Lutheran cemetery about 10 kms from Boonah.

I need to create a ratings system for cemeteries, just so I can give Milbong Lutheran 1 star out of 5. No shade, lots of prickly weeds around the graves, and abundant insect life. Remind me not to be buried there. Indeed, there aren't a lot of recent graves there. My guess is that it would only appeal to someone with family already buried in the cemetery. It's not very picturesque or pleasant otherwise.

Now one of the things I have learnt from our everquest for little old cemeteries is to look at fences and gates. A paddock with a fence or gate that is fancier than you'd need to keep the cows inside is a prime candidate for an abandoned cemetery and well worth a walk around to see what's there. Now this is were Milbong Lutheran is a bit mysterious. Across the road from the cemetery is a house that looks like a converted church, which I had presumed was St Luke's (many of these country churches having been closed and sold off). However, I noticed today that the cemetery has a slightly fancy wooden front fence (admittedly largely in disrepair now) which extends beyond the cemetery and across the front of an adjacent paddock, suggesting that the site was once larger and may perhaps have had a church next door. OK, not a big mystery and probably not one to be a storyline for CSI, but one for me to solve ... where was St Luke's?

Aside from the condition of the cemetery, the headstones were the usual Lutheran mixture with a few older ones in German, a couple of eroded sandstone ones and a few impossible-to-read granite ones. Please put in your will that you want a white marble headstone -- it is far and away the best choice for long-term legibility. While nobody would use sandstone any more, granite is still a popular choice because it looks really good when new but doesn't wear well. Granite also attracts lichens (no idea why, but trust me, I've seen plenty of lichen-covered granite headstones).

Anyhow, to restore ourselves afterwards, we had lunch and coffee at the Art & Soul Cafe (and Art Gallery) in Boonah.

Book review: "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson

2006-12-26T20:33:00.002+10:00

I just finished reading "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson. As is so often the case with these kinds of books, the idea is interesting (compelling even) but frankly you don't need to read all 200+ pages to get the message.

The point is that once upon a time, there were lots of bottlenecks between producers and consumers due to:

* the effort for the producer to produce something
* the effort to make the consumers aware that the product might meet their needs
* the effort of distributing the product to the customer

all of which combine to create a small set of products which each get a large marketshare ("hits")

but with the power of computers and the internet, we can now:

* lower the production costs of making something
* provide more effective tools for consumers to be aware of products that meet their individualistic needs
* lower the cost of inventory and distribution

all of which combine to allow a far larger set of products, many of which will only get a small marketshare but enough to be profitable to the producer and the consumer gets a more "right for me" product.

And because there are more "niche" products often with small revenues, the producers are now not just the "professional" producers but now there is scope for the more "amateur" producer.

Examples (illustrating these points to varying degrees) are Amazon, Netfliks, Ebay, iTunes, etc.

Anyway, the idea is good and every modern person should understand it and think about how they might apply this new way of looking at business to their own endeavours. Personally I think having my Lego parts shop ABStralia is pretty much proof that I've grasped the idea. My little shop may not rival K-Mart say in the sale of Lego and it won't ever make me rich, but it helps me offload surplus parts for a few dollars and makes some other person happy because now they have more of those parts they so desired and couldn't get from Lego.

Interestingly, Lego is mentioned in the book as being innovative in a Long Tail way. As someone in the adult Lego community, I would have to say "umm, yes, but only because their adult market yelled and screamed until they company heard them, ignored them, heard them, ignored them and then finally experimented a little". To begin with, Lego didn't even believe that they had an adult market whose demands for more specialised sets and parts were not compatible with their traditional mass market of children. It was the adult community that established the Long Tail business model for Lego. You only have to look at the 1000s of ebay auctions and bricklink sales that take place every day to see that the traditional Lego retail business wasn't meeting a lot of people's needs. Yes, Lego have moved to online distribution of more niche products for the adult market, they have finally moved a little way down the long tail, but frankly the level of ebay/bricklink activity hasn't diminished so I think Lego have still got a long way to go. You would think that, as the only people who can actually produce the product, the Lego company would be able to market and distribute their products in a way that must ultimately drive every other reseller out of business, but so far they don't seem to have achieved it!

Anyhow the book "The Long Tail" is worth reading and it's not hard reading, but don't worry if you are too busy to finish it.

CRC success!

2006-12-26T20:33:00.001+10:00

After the sad demise of DSTC in 2005 following the failure of our Cooperative Research Centre bid in 2004, I am very pleased to report that we had success with 2 CRCs bids in this 2006 round:

* Smart Services CRC (a rebid of Smart Internet CRC)
* Spatial Information CRC extension bid

Of course, I am not so naive to think this means either the resurrection of DSTC (as a specific organisation) nor of an organisation like DSTC. Alas, the model of research funding for universities laid down by DEST makes it virtually impossible to have such an organisational model for a new CRC. The funding must flow through the universities and the staff be employed by the universities, which brings with it various advantages and disadvantages. But whatever the structure I am still very pleased to be able to say ...

Game on!

scalping - why do we care?

2006-12-26T20:33:00.000+10:00

Lately there has been a lot of fuss about scalpers selling tickets to things like the cricket and Big Day Out on ebay. The promoters are trying to declare that tickets sold through ebay are invalid etc.

Now, maybe I'm missing something, but what is all the fuss about?

As I see it, an event has N tickets being sold at $M each. If the event is sold out, then the promoter gets $N*M from the ticket sales and N fans of whatever it is attend the event and scream their lungs out with happiness. So, if some of those N tickets get sold for more than $M by scalpers, so what? The promoter hasn't lost a dollar and there are still N fans turning up to the event. Indeed, one might argue that someone prepared to pay a lot more than $M to buy a ticket from a scalper is more of a fan than someone prepared to pay $M. So in fact, these purchasers are not just fans, but uber-fans. Who better to attend?

So who gets harmed by scalping? Well, I guess the uber-fans paying the mega-dollars are harmed because they are paying more than they "should", but since they freely and willingly purchase the tickets at those prices, it's hard to see them as victims here.

Who else? Well, the person who missed out on a ticket from the normal ticket sales because "their" ticket was snapped up by the scalper has been harmed. But of course the number of people who actually missed out in this way is quite small (exactly equal to the number of scalped tickets). But of course there is a difference between perception and reality. Everyone who missed out on a ticket may think they missed out on a ticket because of scalpers, when of course most of them actually missed out because supply was less than demand. Even in the absence of scalpers, lots of people miss out on tickets to a sold-out event. So I think a lot of people think they are harmed by scalpers when statistically speaking they probably weren't.

When all is said and done, if there are N tickets available, then there will be N happy people with tickets and everyone else who wanted tickets is unhappy, regardless of scalpers. So, it really comes down to how those N people are chosen from the pool of potential attendees.

Current methods of selling tickets are pretty much first-come first-served, so it is the first N people that get the tickets. Is that fair? Well, if you are someone who can camp out overnight in the queue or spend all morning on the phone or WWW trying to get the tickets, you have the advantage over those who aren't free to do so, so it probably sounds fair to you. But what if you are the ambulance driver who spent the 2 hours in which the tickets sold out getting someone out of a car wreck? First come first served doesn't sound very fair to the ambulance driver. Indeed FCFS could be argued to favour the idle and the drones of our society over those making productive contribution. Surely that's not very fair?

So if our ambulance driver spends the extra bucks to buy a ticket from a scalper, taking the place at the event of one of those idle drones who might otherwise have got the ticket, isn't this a better outcome? Maybe we should allocate the tickets in the first place according to "contribution to society", but that's a bit hard to implement, at least until we achieve a reputation-based economy (see Cory Doctorow "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom").

Why not just auction off all the tickets to begin with? Then if they sell for more than $M, then the event gets the extra cash. After all, if they put on a good event, don't they deserve to get more cash? Oh, it's not fair to the poor you say? True, but we auction houses all the time. Surely poor people should have the same right to live in riverside mansions as rich people? No? So why should tickets to Big Day Out be any different? We deal with supply-and-demand problems all the time by letting the rich have the rare things while the poor miss out.

Should we do it by lottery like the Olympic tickets and Commonwealth Games tickets? That sounds fair. Well, a lot of athlete's parents and spouses missed out on tickets in those lotteries and didn't get to see their child/spouse win their gold medal or whatever. What about the person who has supported their team in every competition all season? Don't some people have more right to attend than some random lucky ticket winner?

I guess the point I am making is that someone is always going to miss out and sometimes it won't be fair (by whatever definition you give to it), so why not accept it and move on? Maybe the people buying the scalper's tickets are the ambulance drivers and the athlete's parents? All the scalper is doing is changing the basis for choosing some of the lucky N people. So what if they make a few bucks from doing so? They are supplying a service that is clearly in demand. They take the risk of buying the tickets in the hope of reselling them. What makes them any different to a retail store or any other middleman?

So while I continue to have a vague unease about scalping, whenever I think about it, I find it hard to justify my concern. Maybe by blogging about it, I will be able to accept it as simply as a niche economic phenomenon and move on.

Book review: "Call of the Mall: How We Shop"

2006-07-08T23:44:00.000+10:00

Having not blogged much for months, now I do a few in a few minutes. There is no logic in these things.

Having enjoyed Paco Underhill's "Why we buy: the Science of Shopping" -- you will never walk through a store again without noticing things he points out -- I embarked with pleasurable anticipation on his follow-up "Call of the Mall: How we Shop" (which seems to be also titled "Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping" in the US Amazon's catalog but I am pretty sure they are the same book).

However, as is so often the case, the sequel disappoints. Having packed so much into his first book Why We Buy, there isn't as much left that is new and interesting in Call of the Mall.

There is a different focus to the two books. Why We Buy looks at customer behaviour in retail stores in order to relate it to the sales that do or don't result from it, and what the retailer can do to encourage the customer into the behaviours likely to lead to more ringing of cash registers. Call of the Mall looks more at the mall as a collection of stores rather than behaviours in particular stores. He also explores the role of the mall in modern (American) society.

However, where Why We Buy was more evidence-based (his company spends days observing customer behaviours), Call of the Mall is more opinionated (albeit expert opinionated) and of course draws on topics covered in Why We Buy, making it a bit "same old, same old" for me.

Probably the most interesting observation I found in Call of the Mall was that the mall is a private space which means it can exclude precisely the people whose civil liberties we defend to occupy the public spaces.

Book review: Screw it, lets do it!

2006-07-08T23:34:00.000+10:00

I just finished reading "Screw it, let's do it : lessons in life" by Richard Branson. Well, I read half of it.

Having previously enjoyed Richard Branson's warts-and-all autobiography "Losing my Virginity", I was attracted to Screw-It both because of its author and because of its title (with which I feel a certain resonance).

However, as it turned out that the two reasons I had for reading Screw-It were precisely the two reasons I didn't really enjoy it and didn't bother to finish it.

Firstly, the content of the book can be pretty much summarised by its title. It basically tells you to pursue your dreams, don't fear failure, ignore the nay-sayers and the usual self-motivational stuff. It's right up there with "Feel the Fear But Do It Anyway" (my previous favourite example of a book that is completely summarised by its title).

And as Richard Branson illustrates Screw-it with various personal stories, it's rather dull if you've already read those stories in his autobiography.

If you've never read a self-motivational book, then by all means start with Screw-It.

But for a more entertaining read about Richard Branson, go for Losing My Virginity.

finally a "permanent" office

2006-07-08T23:32:00.000+10:00

After 7 month in a temporary office (originally to be only a few weeks) in S-block at Gardens Point, a long series of cascading office moves has finally delivered me into a "permanent" office, Room 304, 126 Margaret Street.

This is Good News because it means I have a lot more space and I can finally bring in my collection of books and journals and miscellaneous memorabilia.

no news is, well, no news

2006-05-04T00:06:00.000+10:00

I notice I've been a slack blogger recently, but really there hasn't been much to say.

I've been busy working at QUT, but nothing really earth-shattering to report there. I am still in my "temporary" office in S-block nearly 5 months after starting there.

I've been busy studying part-time for my financial planning diploma, but nothing really earth-shattering to report yet there either.

We "hit the ton" on our cemetery WWW site recently. We now have over one hundred cemeteries photographed. I was bitten by a lot of big mean ants in a number of Gatton Shire cemeteries over Easter, including Ma Ma Creek Anglican.

Advertising: cradle to grave?

2005-12-12T18:30:00.000+10:00

Well, I am not sure about whether we have advertising from the cradle, but last weekend at Kalbar General Cemetery, I discovered you can have advertising from the grave.

It's totally unclear to me whether the dear departed had any affiliation with these businesses or whether those he left behind decided to find a novel way to cover the costs of the funeral by adding a bit of advertising on the headstone.

Perhaps I should phone Maccas and ask them how much they'd pay to have the Golden Arches on my headstone :-)

Mad Maxtor strikes! Or more seasoned wisdom on backups.

2005-11-08T18:17:00.000+10:00

Congratulations Tim on your new Maxtor hard drive. I got mine for my birthday last January and it's been a little rip snorter until about 3 weeks ago when my laptop started saying things like "This drive is unformatted. Do you want to format it?" and then I'd click No and then decide to investigate the problem ... but maybe later.

Now this behaviour occurred once some months back, and a simple concurrent power cycling of laptop and drive lead to a resynchronisation of their mutual existence and all was well, so I really wasn't too concerned this time. I was just putting off doing a bit of wriggling about down behind my workstation to find the right wires to unplug things (a far more reliable way of really turning things Off these days than using the Off button which usually only turns off the power light and nothing more).

So yesterday I finally did the wriggling about and discovered that power cycling wasn't solving the problem. I did all the usual google searches for a solution, which mostly documented my problem accurately followed by replies like "you can reformat the disk but you've lost your data" together with some unsavoury words about the manufacturer, their mother, and so forth. So that's where I'm at. One reformatted disk, all lost data, and the one-touch backup still isn't working, although I can invoke it OK from the software.

Now fortunately the loss of my backups isn't tragic as my laptop is alive and well so it isn't as if I am trying to recover anything. But I did keep copies of a lot of data CDs on my external hard drive and I am now trying to find that "safe place" I put those CDs after I loaded them on so I can reload them. They must be somewhere in this house ... but where ...

The Maxtor WWW site attempted a guilt trip on me by suggesting that the most likely cause of such a problem was failing to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" function before disconnecting the drive. Would I (a professional IT person) have ever done such a stupid thing? Hmm, yeah, well, I do it all the time actually. That's the problem with laptops, you like to move them about and so disconnecting them from all those printers, external drives, USB hubs at the workstation is a common task, and who wants to be bothered with the Safely Remove Hardware thingy every time?

So, there's probably a moral to this story and I'll be more diligent with the Safely Remove Hardware thingy in the future I guess.

The other moral of the story is that maybe I should not have neglected making more permanent backups than doing hard drive duplicates onto an external hard drive. Indeed, it would appear that I have not bothered to burn a CD for backup purposes since I got my Maxtor external drive. But the problem is that burning CDs for backup purposes is time consuming as it needs a few CDs to hold the most valuable data (and I don't usually bother with the less valuable data).

So I am now out shopping for an external DVD burner. My problem is that my laptop only has USB1 not USB2 so I need a DVD burner which can use my FireWire connection instead which is a limiting factor. But I think a LaCie DVD burner I saw today at Harris Technology looks like it might be the go, 8.4G per DVD using the double layer burning.

It also has this LightScribe ability to use the laser to burn a greyscale image on the reverse of the DVD to serve as a label (instead of writing on it with a pen like I normally do or sticking on a printed label). Admittedly I don't really need to have impressive labels for backup DVDs, but it sounds pretty neat and, if it works as well as they say, it will be Fun To Show Off With, which is probably even more important than being a mature IT professional who knows how to have a good backup strategy like Dr Mansfield.

Like Cindi Lauper says, when the working day is done, grrrrls just want to have fun!

Lights on the Hill

2005-10-25T14:54:00.000+10:00

Last Sunday we went out to Mt Beppo to photograph all those headstones in their cemeteries. Mt Beppo with a mere handful of houses boasts three cemeteries, two churches and a hall; somehow the numbers just don't add up. It was not a pleasant experience as it turned out; it was very hot and the sun was catching the headstones in a way that made their polished surfaces reflect so it was hard to take good photos. And, the flies! The flies were terrible, in our eyes, nose and mouth despite the vast quantities of Aerogard we sprayed on every inch of our bodies and clothing. Yuk yuk yuk! Maybe that is why everyone left town!

However, to try to finish off the day on a more positive note, we decided to use our newly acquired hand-drawn street directory of shires west of Brisbane (published by a man who proudly announces in the foreward that he does not have an email address nor a WWW site) to find a back road to Helidon (the place where a lot of the sandstone in Brisbane comes from) and Gatton, so that we might assess the cemeteries there for age, size and other criteria relevant to our project.

Anyhow as we are tootling up the road to the Gatton cemetery, we saw something shining brightly ahead of us, as the setting sun reflected off some gilt work. At first we thought it was a war memorial, but on closer inspection it turned out to a very recently constructed monument to truck and coach drivers, entitled Lights on the Hill (a phrase that apparently comes from a Slim Dusty song -- excuse my ignorance of country music here) with about 150-200 plaques commemorating specific deceased truck and coach drivers. The whole thing is designed to look like the front grill of a large truck.

Anyhow you can visit the project's WWW site or read what the ABC had to say about it. There are some photos of the opening ceremony (a few weeks ago).

There is space to commemorate more deceased truck and coach drivers if you have any among your family and friends (incidentally my grandfather who died in 1935 was a truck driver). See here for forms.

Queensland never ceases to surprise me with the remarkable things you find in small towns.

How not to setup a car park!

2005-10-25T12:26:00.000+10:00

I have had reason to visit QUT a few times recently and have been stunned at the bizarre setup of their short-term car park under the SE Freeway. It operates on a pay-and-display system; you park and then go to the machine and buy some number of hours and then put the ticket on your dashboard.

So, what's wrong with that, you say? Well, nothing is wrong with that system in general, but it doesn't work very well given the unique structure of the QUT car park.

Being under the freeway, the car park is very long and thin with a single narrow one-way road running down the middle with the parking areas to the left and right, broken in sections because of the supports for the freeway overhead. So when you enter it, you can see what car parks are available in the first couple of sections, but beyond that your view is obscured and you cannot tell if empty spaces lie beyond.

Since it is a one-way road inside, you cannot reverse back, so therefore you will prefer to take one of the available spaces that you can see near the entrance instead of taking the chance of driving further into the car park (as you can't reverse if you don't find a space). As a consequence, all the spaces visible from the entrance are normally full.

So, you enter the car park, see all the visible spaces are full. What do you do? Well, it depends. If there are empty spaces further on, then clearly driving on and finding them is the obvious thing to do. But if there are no empty spaces further on (and this car park is often full), then clearly remaining at the entrance is the thing to do as then any exiting car will be visible to you on the road ahead and then you can nip up and take their space. If the car park is full and you start driving along the road inside, the first space to become available might be behind you and it's a one-way road so you can't go back.

But when you are at the entrance, you cannot tell if the car park as a whole is full or not. All you can tell is whether the area near the entrance is full or not (and as explained above, it will tend to fill first). So, what many people do is drive in, see that the area near the entrance is full, assume (or fear) this means the whole car park is full, and so wait at the entrance until they see a car beyond pull out and exit. Since it is one lane road, all the other cars waiting to enter are stuck behind this first car in a long queue mostly outside the car park. And because they are waiting queuing outside, these other cars naturally assume that the problem is that the car park is full and each car coming in must wait for a car to leave in order to get a park. Now the car at the entrance can see the huge queue building up behind them, so they decide that they won't take a chance on driving through the car park looking for a space because if there isn't one, they will be forced to exit and then drive back and join the long queue.

So, the result of all this that the car park will be often be fully parked up near the entrance but with lots of empty spaces further in, but because of the one-way system, each driver fears it is full and waits for a car to leave, banking up more cars behind, reinforcing the message that the car park is full. So, you have lots of empty parks inside while cars are queuing outside. And even if a driver in the queue believes there are empty spaces in the far end of the car park, they can't trust their judgement and drive through because they are stuck behind the drivers who fear the carpark is full. Frankly, this seems to be an excellent lesson in how NOT to run a car park.

Oh, and just for bonus points, the cars in the queue outside are unable to decide to give up waiting because traffic islands and garden beds prevent them from leaving the queue and driving off elsewhere.

So, it's an interesting example of how unique factors (the physical structure of the car park) completely messes up a simple solution.

Presumably the solution lies in counting the cars in and out of the car gate (e.g. with boom gates) so that the driver entering can be told if the car park as a whole is full (and so wait at the entrance for an exiting car) or not full (so drive on into the car park and take the first space).

The other solution is to catch public transport or ride a bike.

Daylight Saving E-Petition (Queensland)

2005-10-22T09:50:00.000+10:00

If you are a Queensland resident and think that daylight saving would be a Good Thing (as I do), then there is an e-petition for you to sign at the Qld Parliament site ...

http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/EPetitions_QLD/cgi-bin/Petitions.cgi?PetNum=553&PetType=1

I honestly have no idea whether participating in these e-petititions has any significant impact, but it takes very little of your time to "sign" it (provide your name and address details) and surely must be more useful than doing nothing at all.

The Tale of Two CRCs

2005-09-30T11:20:00.000+10:00

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,"

In the opening lines of The Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens sums up pretty well the life and times of DSTC and of its two CRCs: the CRC for Distributed Systems Technology and the CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems.

Today is my last day at DSTC, bringing to an end my part in The Tale of Two CRCs. However, I can still be found at:

kerry.raymond@gmail.com (email)
http://twinparrots.blogspot.com/ (blog)
http://www.chapelhill.homeip.net/ (our home WWW site)
chat.world on ticker

We've had a lot of farewells recently and we've all said so many things, in public and in private, to individuals and to groups, that I have pretty much said all I have to say. But nonetheless, I'd like to say a couple of final special thank you's.

Firstly, to Rob Cook, who had the vision and the tenacity to create DSTC. Without him, there would have been no DSTC.

Secondly, to all of those people in the Architecture Unit and then projects Pegamento and Elemental, for whom our everyday working lives together was a constant joy and a constant inspiration for me.

The last chapter of DSTC is still yet to be written. I cannot say what will become of DSTC, its spin-offs, and the many people who were part of its story. But to finish off the Tale of Two CRCs, I can think of no better closing lines than those of Max Ehrmann's Desiderata:

"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."

Capt Calico Jenny Flint, at your service!

2005-09-20T15:05:00.000+10:00

Thanks to Anna, I have discovered my true pirate identity:

Calico Jenny Flint

Often indecisive, you can't even choose a favorite color. You're apt to follow wherever the wind blows you, just like Calico Jack Rackham, your namesake. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

In loving memory of Greystoke (1 Jan 1988 - 15 Sept 2005)

2005-09-15T14:43:00.000+10:00

Our 17 year old cat Greystoke was diagnosed with bone cancer about 2 weeks ago. Since then, her quality of life deteriorated rapidly and we had to make the heart-breaking decision to euthanase her. Fortunately our vet (Indooroopilly Vet Clinic) are very understanding and they came to our home this morning. Greystoke died peacefully and painlessly on our verandah, the place where she basked in the sun most mornings of her life. She will be cremated and her ashes scattered in our garden.

Although we know we acted in Greystoke's best interests, it does not in any way diminish our grief.

Too many INTJs, or simply not enough

2005-09-14T19:36:00.000+10:00

Well, Michael, Anna and I are all INTJs. Is 3 INTJs in a project too many or simply not enough?

Inquiring minds (or at least INTJs) want to know!

As for Tinni being an ENFP, well suddenly all becomes clear. "ENFPs often have strong, if unconvential, convictions on various issues related to their Cosmic View. They usually try to use their social skills and contacts to persuade people gently of the rightness of these views". So at last we have an explanation for all those emails about the sandwich toaster.

2005-09-12T14:56:00.000+10:00

Following Anna's lead I too took the Meyer Briggs personality test

As I'd done them before, I was not at all surprised to find that I too am an INTJ.
To be precise, I am:

moderately expressed introvert
distinctively expressed intuitive personality
distinctively expressed thinking personality
moderately expressed judging personality

I think I must be mellowing in my old age; I think I was more "judging" last time I did one of these tests.

And, probably consistent with the personality type, I am very pleased to be an INTJ; it seems a very fine thing to be! I would be embarrassed to have discovered I was a "Where's the party?" ESFP, for whom "the mastery of logic, analysis and abstraction is usually difficult and wearying, and not very much fun". Frankly, what use is it having people like that at a party? What kind of useful contribution could they possibly make to a conversation about (say) meta-modelling at a party? I bet all they would want to talk about is Australian Idol; not only would they know who won, they would probably care! Not of course that I am in any way judgemental :-)

A great sadness overcomes our house

2005-09-07T10:25:00.000+10:00

We've just found out that our 17 year old cat, Greystoke, has bone cancer in one of her shoulders. There isn't anything much the vet can do about it, so it's just a case of keeping her comfortable and happy for as long as that is possible (probably a couple of months).

Poor little cat!

New Orleans and flooding and looting

2005-09-02T14:57:00.000+10:00

I gotta agree with Ricky

http://ttl.rickyrobinson.id.au/2005/09/02/hurricane-madness/

that it seems hard to believe that the looting and violence in New Orleans would have occurred in Australia.

Here's some more interesting commentary on the social side of this natural disaster:

http://www.iht.com/protected/articles/2005/09/01/opinion/edbrooks.php

St Stephens Girls School

2005-08-29T16:13:00.000+10:00

Has anyone ever heard of St Stephens Girls School in the Brisbane CBD? Despite my interest in Brisbane's history, this school has never come to my attention.

But if you walk down Charlotte Street (the street behind St Stephens Catholic Cathedral), you will see an old building on the cathedral grounds facing Charlotte Street which is currently being restored. And high on the front wall are the words "St Stephens Girls School".

So I have to wonder if the words were revealed as a consequence of the restoration or whether they were always there and I just never noticed them before.

Google was no help whatsoever in learning more about this school. Given the name and the proximity to the cathedral, there are no bonus marks for guessing it was a catholic girl's school, but when did it operate? Was there a corresponding boy's school? Enquiring minds want to know.

Google Earth and cemetery photographs

2005-08-29T13:54:00.000+10:00

When I first saw Google Earth, I thought "hey, that's neat" but after a preliminary play with it, lost interest as I didn't see what ongoing use it was to me. How many times can you zoom from your house to your office after all?

But now we've found a use for it. By locating the cemeteries we photograph on Google Earth, we can create a Google Earth Placemaker and put it onto our WWW pages. Here's an example (click on the link on the 2nd bottom line -- assumes you have already installed Google Earth). So our users can now find out exactly where on earth each cemetery is. Well, at least our broadband users can, I think Google Earth might not be a great experience on dial-up.

And since the placemarker file has a free text area, it can contain a URL to our photo pages. So I can upload the placemarker onto the keyhole BBS (with the embedded URL) where it is accessible to others. I presume that Google will index the keyhole BBS entries, thus enabling people to use Google to find placemarkers of interest to them. I've been adding them to the People and Cultures topic as that seemed the most appropriate place for cemeteries.

We've now added Google Earth placemarker to about half our cemeteries. In a few cases, the resolution for the area is so poor that it's simply not possible to accurately locate the cemetery. But where the resolution is good, you can usually identify structures like churches, pavilions, lychgates and so forth. And the graves themselves appear as a regular grid of white spots. Once you become aware of what a cemetery looks like from space, they become quite easy to spot.

I presume soon anyone putting a physical address onto the WWW will include a Google Earth placemarker.

What I am wondering is when we will be able to put the placemarkers (which are XML files when all is said and done) into the comment field of a JPEG photo and thus provide "streetscape" views to complement the eye-in-the-sky view of Google Earth.

DSTC FarewellSymposium

2005-08-25T16:48:00.000+10:00

DSTC-Farewell-Symposium
Originally uploaded by Kerry Raymond.

Who is the mystery man in th back row between Jenny Mackay and Rob McArthur?

Brisbane Ekka - gotta love it!

2005-08-16T10:26:00.000+10:00

As usual, the newspapers are no doubt publishing their annual story on "how a family of 23 can't go to the Ekka for less than the national debt" illustrated with a photo of a family struggling to carry 5000 show bags each.

But frankly for $20 admission (adults), I get my money's worth every year. Just the woodchop alone is worth it.

Every 10 minutes you can get to see the most unathletic-looking men (wiry old blokes, weedy young blokes, had-way-too-many-pies-and-beer blokes) chop into logs as if they were made of butter.

This is a sport where the veteran class is 60 years and over and most of them are still competing in open class.

This is a sport where you can see a man bouncing on pole shoved into the side of a simulated tree metres above the ground swinging an axe wildly at the top of the "tree"; you don't see a sense of balance like that very often.

This is a sport where handicapping is done to the finest of arts with almost all competitors finishing within seconds of one another, with many events going to a photo finish.

This is a sport where everyone wishes each other good luck (and seems to mean it) and nobody argues with the umpire.

This is a sport where the Dunlop Volley still seems to be the athletic footwear of choice. Nary a Nike to be seen.

This is a sport where there are no tarted-up sheilas presenting the winners with a bunch of flowers (a la Tour de France), but middle-aged men presenting a sash (which appear to be identical to those used in the horse events and the fruit cake cooking championships) with a manly handshake.

This is the sport where you get to spend your lifetime cheering for the Dingles, a Queensland family which has spawned (or perhaps hewned) one generation of woodchop champions after another. They certainly breed them tough in the Queensland bush.

And despite my many years of attendance at the Ekka and the wood chop, you learn a new thing every time. Did you know that competitive woodchoppers don't use ordinary axes, but special "racing axes"?

I notice that Sports Memorabilia stores never seem to have any woodchop memorabilia. I'd rather have a framed Qld maroon woodchop singlet over a pair of red-rubbed cricket pants any day.

why don't the defence forces like given names?

2005-08-05T19:02:00.000+10:00

Our defence forces seem quite keen to provide plaques for their deceased comrades, but why do they record only the initials of the deceased and not their full given names? Here's a typical example:

http://www.chapelhill.homeip.net/FamilyHistory/Photos/Marburg_Trinity_Lutheran/index.php?image=182_8210.JPG

Is it just me that thinks it odd that we are not told B.J.'s name, but we are told the name of his wife, the name of his children, his rank and his service number etc?

Mt Beppo -- a good place to die?

2005-07-30T08:58:00.000+10:00

Maybe I just blinked at the wrong moment and missed something, but the town of Mt Beppo (in Esk Shire) seems to have about 6 houses and about 600 headstones. This seems somewhat out of proportion to me.

DSTC Farewell Symposium

2005-07-30T08:25:00.000+10:00

Well, the DSTC Farewell Symposium has been and gone. It was good, it was sad, many of us ended up hungover. Check out what a good-looking bunch we are (before the hangovers):

http://staff.dstc.edu.au/kerry/DSTC-Farewell-Symposium.JPG

The popularity of blogs

2005-07-30T07:20:00.000+10:00

I think I have finally figured out the real truth that underpins the popularity of blogs. My blog doesn't have to endure the signal-to-noise ratio problems that pervade most other internet forums. My blog is a perfectly moderated stream of quality opinion, closed to the rabble that inhabits the rest of the Internet. Nobody gets to tell me that I can't say "damn" or that I should have used American spelling.

Now it might be argued that since hardly anybody reads my blog, what's the point. But frankly I think it's a case of preferring quality to quantity.

Of course, I need to turn comments off on my blog to make absolutely certain of that. Excuse me while I pop off and do that.

Kerry, whose daily threshold for morons-I-encounter-on-the-Internet has just been reached

NCIS - slightly more subtle than usual

2005-07-15T07:13:00.000+10:00

Normally I regard NCIS as a JAG-meets-CSI spin-off in which a Navy person meets with a grisly death and our heroes solve it, in between bickering about their love lives, shooting terrorists and sleeping in coffins. It's pretty much an on-the-surface kinda show, what you see is what it is.

So I was taken aback by a rare moment of subtle humour in the episode "Meat Puzzle" (remember what I said about grisly deaths!).

Anyhow, at one point, Ducky (played by David McCallum) says to Kate something about wishing she had known him as a young man. In response, Kate asks what did Ducky look like as a young man, so which Gibbs replies "Illya Kuryakin".

Given that the show here is on Channel Ten which aims at the under-35 demographic, I wonder if most of the audience got the joke. Well, I thought it was funny anyway.

high winds no impediment to the intrepid cemetery photographers

2005-07-11T10:24:00.000+10:00

Despite the strong westerly winds on Sunday, we set out for a day of photographing cemeteries in the Brisbane Valley.

We began by fortifying ourselves at the award-winning Alvon Sundowner Pies on the Warrego Highway (between Haigslea and Marburg, turn off onto the service road when you see the waterslide to your left). The pies might be award-winning, but just don't expect a fine dining experience, as they operate from a demountable shed with some picnic tables out front. However, the pies are indeed baked on premises and very good to eat.

Full of pie, we headed off into the icy winds to photograph 4 cemeteries. First, there was Lowood Trinity Lutheran (St Mark's section) which is different to Lowood Trinity Luteran (Bethel section) but it is not at all clear to me why. Were there once two separate churches now amalgamated? As usual, the children were buried all in one row.

Second was the Apostolic church at Brightview. This is a pretty little church with probably the best maintained cemetery I have ever seen. It was also our first Apostolic cemetery, but, other than its excellent condition, Apostolic cemeteries don't seem particularly different to any others.

Third was Tarampa Baptist cemetery, for which there is no Tarampa Baptist church (it is now closed). According to the Baptist church, these Qld church cemeteries are now closed, but there appears to have been relatively recent burials at Tarampa Baptist cemetery.

Fourth was Glamorganvale Cemetery. It is not at all clear who runs this cemetery. The only signage indicates that the cemetery was established on land gifted by the Dwyer family, but it is not explained to whom it was gifted. It appears to be an active cemetery.

We also scoped out a couple of other cemeteries on the way home. First was the cemetery at St John's Evangelical Lutheran Church at Minden, which is not all that far from the church (and cemetery) of the Zion Lutheran Church at Minden. Does the presence of these two churches represent either a very large local Lutheran population or is there some difference between Evangelican Lutherans and Zion Lutherans?

The other cemetery we scoped was Tallegalla Cemetery, high on the hill. Although originally associated with a church (denomination unknown to me), it is now run by Ipswich City Council. At first glance from a distance, it appears to be a relatively small cemetery based on the number of headstones, but on closer inspection, it has a very large number of modern lawn graves which makes it a far larger project than we had anticipated. Ipswich City Council seems to be actively encouraging the addition of lawn graves to these older historic cemeteries. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this; on the one hand, I don't like aesthetically the close juxtaposition of the headstones and lawn graves, but on the other hand, the presence of new graves probably means the cemetery will be properly maintained which helps protect the older graves.

Finally, to cap off a fine day's cemetery touring, we passed by a War Memorial at Amberley and added it to our photo collection of War Memorials. It is rather weird driving through the town of Amberley, as the Air Force decided to close the town and then removed or demolished the buildings, so you drive along these streets with driveways and gardens but with no buildings.

children in Lutheran cemeteries?

2005-06-30T18:39:00.000+10:00

Why is it that children always seem to be buried in one area of a Lutheran cemetery, often apart from family groups of adults buried elsewhere?

I have seen this in a number of Lutheran cemeteries, but would love to know why?

Cathedral in Hatton Vale

2005-06-22T11:51:00.000+10:00

On Sunday with the rain pouring down, it seemed (somehow) that the best way to spend the day was to go searching for cemeteries in the Ipswich - Toowoomba corridor, so we headed west on the Warrego Highway and proceeded to search for cemeteries. We are rewarded with quite a few (maybe 10), almost all of which are small enough for our online cemetery project.

www.chapelhill.homeip.net/FamilyHistory/Photos/

But an unexpected bonus (well, surprise) was discovering a Cathedral in Hatton Vale. Now most people will probably not even know where Hatton Vale is, and this is frankly not surprising. We never managed to find anything resembling a "town centre"; Hatton Vale seems to be a name for a geographic region with some farms and houses sprinkled randomly across it. And one of those buildings just happens to be a cathedral. To be precise, a cathedral for the Apostolic Church of Queensland, which came as another surprise to me having never heard of it either.

Given that many of the original settlers between Ipswich and Toowoomba were Germans, there are lots of Lutheran churches in the area. So my initial theory was that the Apostolic Church was somehow affiliated with Lutheran Church. However, Google believes that it is "From the Germanic/Prussian wing of the Catholic Apostolic renewal". Why Google thinks this is a mystery to me as the Church does not say this on its own WWW site.

http://www.apostolicchurchqld.org.au/

Anyhow, it seems that the Apostolic Church of Queensland was established in 1886 and would appear to be going strong with congregations in various parts of Queensland, notably areas where there were a lot of pioneer German immigrants.

The Apostolic Church of Queensland seems not to be affiliated with the Apostolic Church of Australia

http://www.apostolic.org.au/

but is affiliated with the United Apostolic Church of Europe.

http://www.united-apostolic.org/

So, it just goes to show what you can learn by going for a drive down a major highway on a wet day.

Photos and the WWW

2005-03-02T11:12:00.000+10:00

I've frustrated for a while by the lack of an easy way to put my digital photos on the WWW. There seem to be an abundance of tools (free and commercial) that claim to do that sort of thing, but none of them ever seemed to do what I wanted. So I did nothing ...

Then I discovered Photo Frame and EdJPGcom (both free!) and it's now easy ...

http://photoframe.sourceforge.net/

http://home.cfl.rr.com/maderik/edjpgcom/

With PhotoFrame, you just dump a copy of a file "index.php" into a Web-accessible directory full of JPGs (and some other image types -- dunno the details, I have JPGs) and magic happens. There are some parameters you can tweak (e.g. auto resizing) and it all happens by magic.

And if you want to do some more serious fiddling, the source is there and you can do what you like with it. Anyhow, take a look at my first effort:

http://www.chapelhill.homeip.net/FamilyHistory/Photos/Nundah-cemetery-Brisbane/

and see for yourself. If I have a criticism, it is the fact that the slideshow option only appears after you click on one of the thumbnails. I'd like it to display immediately on visiting the page.

EdJPGcom is a Windows tool that you can "plug-in" so that it applies to all JPG files and allows you to easily caption them by inserting the caption into the JPG file (in the comment area), which is where (by default) PhotoFrame looks for the caption (but it supports other options). This is great because the caption then remains with the file for eternity. Most album tools seem to delight in storing the captions in some other mysterious database and the moment you migrate to some other tool, poof, your captions are gone!

Before I go bezerk here with my new-found enthuasiasm, I should stress that these tools don't help you organise Albums, but so long as you (or your tool) are using the paradigm of one directory/folder of files per Album, then integrating your current arrangements with Photo Frame should be quite straightforward.

Probably the biggest barrier to the use of PhotoFrame is the availability of PHP and one of a selection of image tools it uses for tasks like making thumbnails (e.g. gd or imagemagik) in your WWW server. In our case, our Apache server came out of the box (Linux Redhat, Fedora?) with PHP and gd installed, so it was very easy. But for most people, WWW-hosting is done by a third party like your ISP and you are limited by their choices in this regard.

Anna discovers EndNote

2005-02-17T09:55:00.000+10:00

Good grief! Anna has only left the building for a matter of days and already she has gone over to the Dark Side!

http://anna.gerber.id.au/2005/02/16#EndNote

While she might be busily redefining emacs macros, I can see it is only a matter of time before she'll be a covert to Notepad as her text editor of choice.

UQ library strikes again

2005-02-17T09:46:00.000+10:00

Despite the years of promises to fix the problem, the UQ library yet again stuffs up DSTC staff. Even though they know that they provide library services to a larger community than UQ students and UQ staff members, they persist with this assumption in their database and thus DSTC staff (and doubtless others) get unceremoniously dumped by the library system every year.

I can understand why the problem happens, but what I can't stomach is the continual promises that it will be fixed next year when evidently they have no intention of doing so.

Kerry

Predicting the future of computing

2005-02-10T10:32:00.000+10:00

Laurie Tratt has a meta-discussion about predicting the future of computing and grand visions etc:

http://tratt.net/laurie/bliki/entries/predicting_the_future_of_computing

However, in analysing why he can't predict the future, I think he inadvertantly stumbles on what I might consider a Grand Vision for computing.

Something that can read natural language to cope with the information overload and give me the digested version when I need it (the just-in-time knowledge problem). People seem to be able to be able to do it, why not computers?

Well, some people seem to be able to do it anyway.

Kerry

Nundah Cemetery - a walk on the wild side

2005-01-27T15:04:00.000+10:00

We decided that the way to celebrate Australia Day (26 Jan) this year that we would visit Nundah Cemetery, where some of Brisbane's earliest free settlers are buried, some of whom are related to my husband (the Bridges family, just for the record).

It is a relatively small cemetery, but a very densely populated one. There is a ring road through the cemetery, effectively dividing it into an inner island and the outer ring. I don't think there are many (any?) unused plots in this cemetery. The graves are very close together with only a narrow path between every 2 rows, except, of course, for where the graves don't seem to be in rows at all, and some graves are at strange angles, which makes me think that perhaps there were paths but they were later used as grave sites as well. The inner island is almost impossible to walk through towards the back of the cemetery, as it is almost solid graves and in no particular organised layout, so one is leaping about to try to move through without walking on the graves themselves.

To add to the walking problem, there were other obstacles such as trees and bushes that seem to be able to push their way up between cheek-to-jowl gravesites. In particular there were a lot of weeping bottlebrushes, which meant you can to get under the foliage in order to read the headstones. I don't think these are a good tree to plant in a cemetery -- you want a tall non-weeping tree that provides shade without obscuring the graves! It was also a bit wet and boggy in the lower areas by the creek, but fortunately I had learned from past experience and was wearing wellies. However, they did not save me from the cobblers pegs, and my clothes were covered in hundreds of them as I had to push through a number of weed patches to get close enough to read the headstones.

What was also somewhat unusual was the very high density of headstones. There seemed to be more surviving headstones that you might expect for a cemetery of that era. Admittedly there were a few modern headstones on otherwise old graves that were presumably put there by modern descendants to replace a wornout or missing headstone. What many people today do not appreciate is that in the past poorer people used a wooden cross or similar to mark a grave and these often don't survive the years. A carved headstone was a more expensive choice, but these do survive the years better. Today, cremation is cheaper than burial, hence a modern burial almost always has a stone or metal marker, as cost is not the primary consideration. Anyhow, I don't really know why there are so many surviving and legible headstones in the Nundah Cemetery, but there is a local group that seeks to preserve the cemetery so perhaps their efforts have minimised the impacts of weathering and vandalism compared with other cemeteries. Full marks to them if this is so.

The names on many gravestones are familiar, as the names of the earlier pioneer families are reflected in suburb names, streets names etc throughout this part of Brisbane. If you had ever wondered why there is a Rode Road, etc, this cemetery has the answer. For those who enjoy this kind of trivia, the area known today as Nundah was originally known as German Station, as the earliest free settlers in Brisbane were German, and this is reflected in a very high density of German names in the cemetery. Indeed, some headstones are inscribed fully or partially in German.

For the cemetery tourist, there is ample parking outside the gate. The road inside is too narrow to park and still let another car get past. On the other hand, the cemetery is not so busy that you couldn't get away with a short parking stop, if you had someone with walking difficulties. There are some seats around the edges of the cemetery, mostly near the entrance. There is a rotunda with seats and a broken water fountain just inside the cemetery (where you will find a niche wall for ashes). There were toilets but they appeared to be locked. There are plenty of shade trees at the edge of the cemetery but not too many in the middle (just those annoying weeping bottlebushes) so it's a bit hot and exposed for summer visits. There are no cafes or shops nearby, so bring your own catering. The cemetery is close to the bikeway to Toombul Shopping Centre, so you can cycle there easily.

For those of you looking for a particular grave, the best place to start is the Brisbane City Council's Grave Location Search engine:

http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/BCC:STANDARD::pp=PC_897,pc=PC_899

which is a database that amalgamates all of Brisbane's cemeteries' burial registers. While this is a generally excellent service (thanks BCC!), many of the early burial registers were not well-maintained and this is a limitation in locating many of the earlier burials in this cemetery based on personal experience. You may well find headstones for people in Nundah Cemetery that do not appear in the on-line burial register. So, if you believe someone was buried in Nundah and the online database says otherwise, it is well worth a visit to check the headstones. In an ideal world, the on-line service would be based on both the burial registers and the monumental inscriptions, and also allow people to input information obtained from other sources like death certificates and funeral notices.

Unfortunately, there is no map at the cemetery to identify the various sections and portions, but if you used the BCC database, you should have an aerial map and marker to guide you to the right general area. The cemetery is small enough that you can walk around and inspect every headstone if all else fails (but note my earlier remarks on the joys of walking through some parts of this cemetery). There is no longer a sexton at the cemetery (it is now a closed cemetery), but I believe Pinnaroo Cemetery sexton handles enquires for Nundah Cemetery.

abstract and inherited associations in MOF/UML

2005-01-12T16:13:00.001+10:00

One of the best things to come out of the V2 of MOF/UML is abstract and inherited associations.

As a concrete example, lets consider the classes Driver and License. Now it's easy to imagine that these classes might be linked by an association Holds (as in Driver Holds License).

Now, we might have a number of subclasses of Driver, such as CarDriver, TruckDriver, etc. And some corresponding subclasses such as CarLicense, TruckLicense, etc. Now the intention here is that CarDrivers Hold CarLicences and that TruckDrivers Hold TruckLicenses.

Back in the bad old days of MOF/UML v1, there was no easy way to express this intention. The association was between Driver and Licence and hence it was perfectly OK for CarDrivers to hold any kind of License. The only way to prevent it was to introduce an explicit Constraint which enumerated all the allowable combinations.

The alternative was to introduce a number of separate associations between CarDriver and CarLicense (call it CarHolds) , and TruckDriver and TruckLicense (call it TruckHolds), and so on. But the drawback here is that the general concept of drivers holding licenses is lost in the fallout. The only way to recover it is to introduce a derived assocation between Driver and License and define it to be the union of the CarHolds and TruckHolds and so on.

Fast forward to having abstract and inherited associations. Now, we can make the Hold association between Driver and License abstract, and then we can have an inherited concrete association between CarDriver and CarLicense, and another one between TruckDriver and TruckLicense and so on. This implicitly restricts CarDrivers to holding CarLicenses, but still also us to talk about holding a license in a general sense.

Admittedly you still have to define all of these associations, but because of the inheritance relationship, the model as a whole becomes a lot more scaleable. It becomes possible to define the model just consisting of high-level classes and high-level associations and then refine parts of the model progressively. This helps the documentation of the model, particularly if you are using graphical representations of your model.

You will find using abstract/inherited associations does alter your modelling style, and that it does involve a bit of a paradigm shift when you are modelling. But try it and see, I think your models will be more readable and more modular.

Root elements in models

2005-01-12T16:13:00.000+10:00

One of the best pieces of advice that I can offer the novice modeller is this:

Always have a "root" class that every other class in your model inherits from.

Often this class will be abstract, and often it will not have any properties or any associations. This may make you ask, why bother? My answer is this. It represents that the thing is within the universe of discourse of the model.

There seems to be a tradition of naming this class "XyzElement" where Xyz is the name of your model, but feel free to do as you please in this regard.

One of the main uses for this root class is to work with your model as the subject matter of some other model. For example, you might want to implement some kind of versioning system. In which case, you might like to link the versioning information onto your root class for inheritance into all your other classes. Or you might wish to have some association that relates things in your model to things in someone else model.

When I have ignored this golden rule, sooner or later I find myself going back and creating this root element, so save yourself the grief and do it from the outset.

paypal - now in AUD

2005-01-12T11:29:00.000+10:00

I have to say that Paypal constantly improves its service. Within the last few months, they have allowed fee-free transfers (for amounts over $150) to Australian bank accounts, and now they are offering Australian dollar payments as well.

This is a stark contrast with the average Australian bank which increase their fees and charges with monotonous regularity.

Of course, Paypal doesn't pay you any interest, but then I would challenge you to find an Australian bank that will let you accept international and credit card payments with no up-front cost and the low transaction cost that Paypal offers.

I know there are WWW sites out there with some horror stories to tell w.r.t. Paypal, but my experiences as a user for the past few years have been very positive. Admittedly, I would not ever leave vast sums of money lying around in a Paypal account, as I think you have to be realistic -- if anything goes wrong, you are kissing your money goodbye most likely. So with the fee-free transfer of A$150, there is no reason to keep more than A$150 in my Paypal account, so therefore I can control my risk to be between $0 and $150 (average risk $75) which seems a pretty fair deal for the convenience of Paypal.

Admittedly, reading the horror stories, I do have some doubts about how genuine some of the complaints are. A lot of the complaints do seem to relate to Paypal closing or suspending accounts of people who violate their terms of service (having multiple accounts beyond the basic one personal, one business rule) etc, which one assumes was motivated to try to avoid fees and so forth. So, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who tried to rip off Paypal and then found Paypal didn't like them any more!

However, there does seem to be a more legitimate class of complaint relating to people whose paypal accounts are frozen when paypal suspects some kind of fraudulent activity, which includes payments being made using a stolen credit card. Understandably, the account holder who has the misfortune of receiving a payment from someone using a stolen credit card can legitimately feel aggreived that paypal treats them like a suspect and freezes their account. But paypal's concern is that people who steal credit cards apparently do set up paypal accounts in order to launder stolen funds via paypal, and so they are suspicious of any account holder receiving funds in this way. So, having your account frozen because you are a victim of a payment made with a stolen card seems to be one of the risks you just have to accept with Paypal -- hence the importance I guess of not leaving vast sums in your account.

There are some competitors to paypal but they all seem to offer less and cost more than paypal. I notice bidpay will no longer accept Mastercard -- no idea why, but that's surely a pretty dumb move on their part given the number of Mastercard users out here. And if all those Mastercard buyers move away, so will the sellers.

MDA Compliance and QVT

2004-08-19T17:03:00.000+10:00

While the MDA story is very much about transformations and targetting multiple platforms, I don't believe that the use of transformations that conform to OMG's transformation standard-in-the-making (Query/View/Transformation) is a requirement for MDA Compliance for any individual tool.

QVT is clearly very important for people who wish to write their own MDA transformations. It is very important to the OMG (or anyone else) who needs a way to standardise a transformation. However, I don't believe that every MDA tool must be constructed using QVT or to expose the transformation being undertaken. Many MDA users will want to get their transformations off-the-shelf and be quite happy for them to be black boxes, so long as it is known what to expect in terms of I/O. Similarly vendors whose intellectual property is embedded in their transformation are unlikely to want to expose it to their customers or to their competitors, so they too will be interested in black box MDA tools. And if the tool is a black box, then whether it is internally implemented using QVT or anything else becomes somewhat irrelevant.

Obviously if a tool is built on the QVT standard, it makes sense to have some conformance statement about how faithfully it implements the QVT standard, but this can be in addition to any claims about MDA conformance.

Compliance to the Model-Driven Architecture

2004-08-19T16:48:00.000+10:00

The hot topic on the OMG mailing lists at the moment is what is required to brand a product as "MDA". The good news I guess is that the market are taking sufficient interest in MDA that vendors are desirous of branding their products accordingly. The bad news is that I suspect many of those vendors aren't really interested in MDA, simply in the rights to brand their products.

However, the issue of what makes a product "MDA" is a hot one with very little concensus. Here's my take.

I think the minimum requirement for a tool to be branded MDA would be its ability to participate in arbitrary MDA tool chains. This means that we must know what models are used as the input and output of the tool (or the sources and targets if you prefer) so you know if the tool can be meaningfully connected to other tools. And at the syntactic level, the input and outputs corresponding to those models must be interchangeable between the tools, mandating that XMI import/export (as applicable) must be available.

This does not imply that the only means of I/O is via XMI, simply that it is an option. There are many popular concrete syntaxes (e.g. SQL, IDL, UML diagrams etc) that are obvious candidates for alternative I/O forms. Indeed, having multiple forms of I/O is more or less essential for tools that anticipate interworking with existing non-MDA tools. For example your average Java compiler expects its input in Java syntax and not as XMI for the Java model.

Welcome to my blog

2004-07-15T16:01:00.000+10:00

I have little to say and less time to say it, and if I could see twin parrots, it would distract me further.