A university in the United States compiles what they call the Banished Words List, updated each New Year’s Day. Folks around the world submit suggestions for words or phrases that they believe deserve to be banished from the English language, due to overuse, misuse, or general uselessness. Over the years, the list has accumulated such gems as ‘metrosexual’, ‘thinking outside the box’, and the practice of expressing distaste by calling something ‘gay’. I’ve got a suggestion for a new addition that is already somewhat overdue.

“emo”

The noun-adjective emo has been around for years, and it has been fairly innocuous in that time, mostly found in the context of describing bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and whatever fans they had that had managed to stay alive. Lately it has been co-opted by troubled, introverted LiveJournal types and it makes me frown.

“i don’t want to sound emo, but here’s an essay on how emo my life is at the mo”
“so she calls me emo and i’m like whatever, you don’t know me”
“my mum still shops for me so I guess being emo was the natural choice”
“haha, man these emo chicks are easy!”

The example is a little contrived perhaps, but you know what I mean. Word used to mean one thing; taken, reclaimed, and bastardised into meaning something entirely different; now, with all its lexical potency sucked dry, it must go, so that the rest of the language may live.

I’m removing a link from my Other Sites section for the time being. Daz has taken his site offline after being frustrated at all the comment spam he has been getting from online casinos and such.

It’s unfortunate that those who have caused millions of people to retreat from using e-mail entirely, or at least forced them to keep their e-mail address a closely guarded secret, are now crippling the blogosphere as well.

The ideal solution is, of course, a device that allows us to stab these people in the face over the Internet. Until that arrives, here are a few handy hints for keeping your journal free from spam and doing your part for making moron spammers go away:

1. Unless you really need comments, turn them off. A newspaper does not simply allow every Tom, Dick, and Harry to contribute a column, and by the same token, neither does my site. At any rate, I’m already on IRC, so my chat requirements are covered.
2. Activate the comment moderation feature. You get to say ‘no’ to the comment ever making it onto your page in the first place. This creates a bit of extra work, though, and you still see the spam, but the offender doesn’t get the link that he wants.
3. Don’t allow people to put links in their comments. Remember that online casinos, etc., want to get as many links to their site as possible. If they don’t get the link, they will not bother anymore.
4. Have a registration scheme, and allow only registered users to comment. This should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances, because in most cases, people aren’t gonna take the time to register on every web journal they come across.
5. Refrain from posting harsh remonstrations aimed at no-one in particular, in the vein of “no-one cares about your opinion, or reads your stupid blog,” to your own stupid blog.
6. I know the last point had nothing to do with comment spam, I just think it’s profoundly stupid.
7. You could try allowing only users in (for example) Australian IP address ranges to post comments. Sure, the occasional casino rubbish might get through, but think about it. If you have a site that only Australian people tend to visit, then the majority of your users will still be able to post, whilst the spammers—the vast majority of whom do not hail from our fair shores—will not.
8. <James> what i have been trying to do about comment spam
   <James> is make a forced field
   <James> that they also have to enter
   <Insom> that would protect against automated bot ones, I suppose
9. If your web journal separates content from comments, write a robots.txt file instructing Google not to index comments. This won’t stop your site going down like a honeymooner’s trousers, but at least the spammer won’t get a ranking boost.

I have just been reading an article in this month’s issue of Wired, about renowned spelunker and inventor, Bill Stone—and let me tell you, it has really put my life’s achievements thus far into perspective:

Bill Stone has invented diving gear and roving robots to explore the deepest—and deadliest—caves on earth. In the icy water 4,500 feet below Mexico he had to figure out how to bring his dead friend home.

… With a doctorate in structural engineering and 11 patents to his credit, Stone is the archetypal modern-day explorer, a multidisciplinary maverick constantly inventing tools in the name of discovery lust. Any PhD’s résumé will feature a few—maybe even a few dozen—peer-reviewed articles. Stone has published more than 220 papers on topics ranging from seismic resistance to spacecraft development.

… Over the past 33 years, he has spent 353 days below 1,500 feet. He’s invented breathing regulators, diver propulsion devices, and 3-D mapping tools. When it became clear that lugging dozens of scuba tanks into the depths was hindering his ability to plumb farther, he designed a closed-circuit rebreather to eliminate the tank farms.

Ouch. And here I am, finishing off my IT degree and writing software for a living, without even one lousy patent to my name.

No, I don’t have a clue where Daniel Morcombe is.

The election has come and gone, and the new House of Reps and Senate have taken shape. I am appalled to see the immediate aftermath of federal Labor whimpering about the election loss, with reports of the vultures already circling Mark Latham’s leadership.

At first, I entertained the possibility that this was just the media trying it on, but it’s a bit hard to exaggerate a mass exodus from the front bench. Please, get it together Labor, because no-one—even those who voted against you—likes to see a weak opposition in Parliament. We have one of those here in Queensland, and it has lead to a fairly average government getting an obscene amount of votes.

A more aggressive campaign would have won it for Labor. What they failed to realise, is that many people see the Liberal Party and think, ‘economy, eh… what else ya got’. This is quickly forgotten, however, when both sides tacitly acknowledge the economy as the only significant election issue. Here are some other issues upon which it would be nice to get some productive discussion in the coming 2½–3 years:

Non-traditional families
Same-sex marriage is of increasing significance around the world. A large number of same-sex couples, and their supporters, wish the traditional scope of marriage to be widened to include them, and a number of governments—mostly in Canada, it would seem—have changed the relevant laws to allow same-sex couples to get married.

The argument is that marriage will lead to social acceptance of their love. I tend to disagree, not for any real moral reason, but because the specific institution we call marriage is a traditional recipe that loses its flavour if the ingredients are changed.

Marriage reform so far has been an issue of church-state separation. The law already accords many rights (and responsibilities) to long-term couples that choose not to wed. It is not much of a stretch to accord those rights to a broad category of ‘permanent relationships’. Marriage would be defined as a specific kind of permanent relationship, to which no legal status would be accorded directly.

The republic
The current heir apparent to the prime ministership, Peter Costello, is a republican, under whose leadership we might see renewed debate on the republic question. For the time being, it seems that the conservative nutbag, Tony Abbott, will have to wait his turn.

That aside, John Howard knows deep down inside that the republic referendum of 1999 was defeated because the majority of Australian adults simply do not want to get rid of the monarchy. The Labor leadership, on the other hand, feels that the wrong kind of republic was on offer, and that the majority of Australians want a republic.

We should have another referendum, identical to 1999, in about ten years’ time when the majority of the Queen’s fanclub will have died. This new referendum will succeed. It is the perfect system because it recognises that our existing political system works well. No direct election or other wrongheaded nonsense.

Reconciliation
When are we going to get this apology business over and done with? I’m not sure that anyone expects John Howard to apologise personally to the aborigines anymore. However, an argument could be made that the Australian Government—as a permanent corporate entity, as opposed to the individuals who currently make up Cabinet—is responsible for past injustices to aborigines.

An apology will clear the way for actual reconciliation, which will require radical, and perhaps unpopular, action to address the squalor and poverty in today’s aboriginal communities.

Assimilation as a Government policy was not an entirely bad idea, insofar as it was a plan to take actual, tangible steps to improve the circumstance of indigenous people, according to the social standards of the time. Thankfully, social standards have evolved, and we don’t steal kids from their parents anymore. But the current hands-off policy, throwing money at incompetent indigenous bodies, is so ineffective that hardly anyone can still recall what it was ever meant to achieve. Is this really the best we can do?

Kyoto
This government does not ratify the Kyoto Protocol for the reduction of emissions, saying that it would put this country at a competitive disadvantage to the United States unless they ratify it as well.

The protocol doesn’t even require Australia to reduce its emissions; in fact, there is a permitted increase of 8% over 1990 levels. Why do we need more than an eight per cent increase, John? Just where have all these new factories been popping up?

I’m not mad, though. In truth, I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference which party is in power, but I was hoping for a leader with a bit more arm-breaking style than the current one. Let’s not give up on it yet!

A couple of months back, there was a highly-publicised federal police operation, named Operation Auxin, in which hundreds of men from all over the country were busted for child porn; mostly for possession, but some for distribution and production. Many arrests and confiscations of property have been made; upon that measure, it has been a very successful operation.

(Several of the charged men have subsequently killed themselves, and upon that measure also, it has been a very successful operation. To put it mildly, convicted paedophiles are at the very bottom of the pecking order in a correctional facility.)

This has whipped up somewhat of a media panic about the child pornography epidemic, and whenever there is a media panic on some issue, nutters are given a television audience for their wrong-headed ideas.

Prof. Bill Caelli, from that mecca of computer science, QUT, was on the news advocating the mandatory installation of filtering software on all Internet users’ computers:

“What I’m proposing is brakes for the Internet.”

The internet service provider would be required to prevent access to people who do not have the software installed, and to furnish the software with a continuously updated list of addresses the user is not allowed to visit. It is supposedly a tamper-proof system, one which we have the technology to build, and only needs the regulatory motivation to be put into force.

Other ‘family’ groups agreed, basically saying outright that the civil libertarians could suffer in their jocks, as the privacy concern was far outweighed by the benefit to society of inhibiting unlawful and obscene material. This state’s government was said to be considering it.

Yesterday, Communications Senator Helen Coonan effectively shot down a similar idea, that of a national proxy to weed out child porn coming into the country over the Internet:

“… Mandatory filtering would be highly problematic. It would have the potential to simply choke the Internet and drive up costs unacceptably for consumers and small businesses without necessarily solving the problems of offensive content. …

“… Simple filters are easily outsmarted by merchants of offensive content … the kind of complex technologies needed to analyse every single item being downloaded were not considered feasible in our review. The review also estimated that the cost of this sort of filtering would be $45 million a year to begin with, falling to more than $33 million a year on an ongoing basis.

“The biggest issue—it is not so much the money—is that such an expensive scheme would not necessarily solve the problem and small to medium ISPs would simply be driven out of business for little or no benefit. What does work is greater information and parental supervision, and those are the kind of programs that the government is promoting with the $30 million initiative.”

This is a very sensible policy from the Government. Those who demand that some sort of mandatory national filtering scheme be set-up are usually woefully misinformed about the limitations of the technology at our disposal.

The ideal system would be a magical program that sits on the border of all incoming Net connections, scanning the traffic for unlawful downloads. It would be a very intelligent program. It would have to, for example, discern a picture of child porn from a picture of some trees. Think about how one would go about writing such a program.

It would have to, for example, discern a picture containing child porn from just a picture of a child. Think about how one would go about writing such a program.

It would have to, for example, discern a picture containing child porn from a picture containing lawful pornography. Think about how you would code that.

The reason no such program exists, is because it takes a human being to make this kind of decision. We have the natural ability to be able to do things like categorise pictures, because our brains have the ability to learn and adapt. But writing a computer program to do it requires sitting down and figuring out exactly what it is that the brain does in order to make the decision.

Without sufficient technology extant to teach a computer what child porn is, and how to spot it on a massive internet link on the scale of the ones coming into this country—without slowing the link to a crawl—you have to settle for an expensive and ponderous system of traffic analysis heuristics that is unlikely to catch an acceptable amount of illegal content, and is trivial to circumvent for those who want to avoid getting caught. It’s one thing for a spy agency, with so much computing power that it is measured in acres, to be able to store and analyse telephone traffic for suspicious conversations; it is quite another thing to have such a system enforcing criminal law.

I am, therefore, hopeful that common sense will prevail on the State level as well as the federal one, and we continue to encourage parents to do their job, as well as attacking the child porn problem at its source.

IN

• Having one’s own .com domain name
• Web journals themed upon the fact that the author is female
• Uni results good enough to not keep hidden from people
• Dr Octopus and a whole heap of other kick arse local bands
• Stealing ideas from kryz
• Aphrodite—voted out of the house far too early, obviously the voting demographic can’t handle a real woman

OUT

• That band whose lead singer goes out of his way to constantly look like a dickhead
• Cruft
• Being SHOCKED
• Having too many options
• People my age who still think it’s rad to get drunk and act like a spastic

Bill Cosby, the man who once telephoned Eddie Murphy to chastise him for using naughty words on stage, has recently been at it again—this time the rebuke is aimed at black people in general.

As the most senior of black comedians still able to string a sentence together, Bill can hardly be expected to keep up with the young, astute comedians of today. Comedy has come a long way since Bill was at his peak; the ability to use the ‘F’ word as a noun, verb, adjective—indeed, every word in the sentence—is a relatively recent breakthrough.

To attain such a high level of skill with swear words requires practice from an early age, perhaps due to some region of the brain that atrophies if you don’t use it.

However, due to his celebrated TV career, and books on fatherhood, Bill is a fairly plausible father figure in America. He’s the family man, and his respected position has ensured that his latest sermon about constancy and prudissitude did not fall on deaf ears:

“Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s cursing and calling each other n—— as they’re walking up and down the street.”

This is an interesting one. I’m sure Bill is fully aware of the versatility of the ‘N’ word when used amongst black people. Depending on the context, it can either be used as a term of endearment, or to describe someone as ignorant. In general, though, I would think that a group reclaiming a word previously used to persecute them can only be an empowering thing.

Indeed, it has been reclaimed with a vengeance, as anyone who isn’t black using the word is likely to get the bejesus beaten out of them. cf. ‘fag’ and ‘dyke’ amongst homosexuals, ‘wog’ amongst Europeans, and so on.

“I can’t even talk the way these people talk, ‘why you ain’t', ‘where you is’—and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.”

The Queen’s English it is not. But our language is a living language, imparted by British imperialism and American salesmanship to all four corners of the globe, and we can only count ourselves lucky that most dialects of English are still mutually intelligible. Just the other day, a Nigerian dignitary emailed me seeking my help to transfer a large sum of money, and I was able to understand every word. What an age we live in!

The dialect Bill talks about here has diverged from standard English, due to this chaos which guarantees that the best efforts to standardise a living language are futile. It exists, and is spoken by a huge number of people. Therefore, it deserves more analysis than simply cleaving it in twain with a copy of The Elements of Style.

Linguistic experts call it African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and study has shown that although it appears to be a hopeless mess of poorly conjugated verbs and double negatives when compared to standard English, it does in fact have a sound grammar in its own right.

Furthermore, most speakers of AAVE are fully able to do a context switch and converse with Whitey in his own language with no problems.

Bill then went on to criticise men who beat their women, and those in prison who blame their incarceration on their skin colour instead of their having broken the law. It’s a true message and there are few more entitled to deliver it, and there is no doubt that he had to deliver it forcefully in order to make an impact. I just think the man would be able to have more of an impact if he tried to empathise with young people instead of just criticising them.

Recently, some people have been proposing some really dopey solutions to the problem of spam. Probably the most prominent suggestion at the moment is Bill Gates’s postage stamp idea, floated at this year’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

When Bill Gates ‘suggests’ something in a speech, it means he has had a crack team of 100 computer geniuses working on the problem for several months, and is ready to unleash the idea on an unsuspecting world, killing many, many people.

The idea is to have a sort of postage stamp for email, which, as a tax on something that is free, might sound like a waste of money. More likely, though, it would involve wasting the sender’s time. The recipient would give the sender’s computer some difficult math problem requiring several seconds to solve, thereby proving that the e-mail has been sent in good faith. This would not augur well for spammers, because e-mails would suddenly take a lot longer to send.

Spammers must be reading about this and laughing. The majority of spam is not sent from legitimate ‘direct marketing’ companies, otherwise it would be a relatively simple matter to block the addresses of those companies and have a pleasant afternoon.

Rather, the offending messages are most often bounced through the computers of people who have been infected by viruses and don’t know it. It is obvious that spammers and virus writers have a symbiotic relationship, as parasites often do; a German computing magazine recently uncovered one such relationship which involved cash. Someone has been arrested in Britain—that someone will be going to prison.

And let’s not forget those countries that, God bless ‘em, just don’t feel like doing anything about spam.

Therefore, the spammers can continue to operate scot-free, safe in the knowledge that your grandma’s computer is the one that will be doing all the number-crunching.

Microsoft can talk tough on spam all it likes, but the reality is that its own insecure operating systems are the biggest reason why spam is such a problem today. The only realistic solution to this scourge is through:

• Good computer security practices
• Education, so that people know a virulent e-mail when they see it
• Legislation (remember, politicians get spam too!)
• Getting the taco-benders to start pulling their weight.

Recently, there has been a controversy that involves school students around Brisbane posting racy photographs of their schoolmates on the Web. These sites will often contain the name of the school, and even school colours and logos.

The photographs vary from party snaps to surreptitious swimwear shots. The sites often give names of the girls, whether they have a boyfriend or not, and other vital statistics.

Principals who don’t google for their school’s name at least occasionally are finding out about these websites from enraged parents instead.

By comparison, when I was at school, the Web was a relatively new thing, but it still seemed that the school had its nose in every little thing I did online.

First of all there was my project entitled World War 3, a pyromania-themed site that some friends and I were building. It was a pretty harmless idea, basically a few pictures of us burning some random shit, combined with some articles and recipes of how to make incendiary substances such as homemade napalm.

However, it seemed I’d neglected to remove my school email address from the draft version. Before we’d even had a chance to publish actual content on the site, a mining engineer from Gladstone found the email address, rang up my school and expressed his alarm over my page. It appeared to him that I’d intended to publish instructions for making explosives, which is illegal.

Of course, what one does outside of school is normally none of their concern, but since I had associated my site with the school, I had little choice but to delete WW3. It was considered so serious that I didn’t even get punished for it; instead, my parents were summoned for crisis talks with faculty and computing staff.

The other project was a much sillier idea. … Community was a website with my school’s name, colours and logo on it, with links to the homepages of individual students. Great idea, I thought.

The problem was that the Web is an ever changing place. Free web hosting services often have street-themed addresses, so that if someone ‘moves out’ of their Web site, it can be allocated to someone else. One student had moved out of his address, and someone with a penchant for colourful language had moved in.

Thus, I had linked the school to some dude’s page full of profanity and little else. Boy, did I cop it for that one. All of this happened back when the web was not well-known; imagine how fast they would act today.

The point of all this, is that schools who don’t keep an eye on this sort of thing are not doing themselves any good. Furthermore, they are letting everyone down. Have a look at what some of these guys are doing. If I had done the same, publishing revealing photographs of classmates on my site, I would have been taken to the fucking cleaners. And I would have deserved it.

To the boys who are making these sites, you are young and ignorant now, but I hope that in time you will realise what idiots you have been. Talking with your mates about how “hot” certain females are is one thing, and even tasteful (and consensual) pictures of them don’t hurt anyone. But putting their names, pictures, and the name of their school on the Web for all to see, is playing with fire. Please, stop this nonsense now.

According to an article in the Daily Telegraph, Bundaberg Rum’s polar bear may be an irresponsible choice of mascot for the distiller. So says the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC).

As the logic goes, children like talking animals, and the blokey Bundy bear may influence the kiddlywinks to put down their Pokemons and Britney Spears CDs and have a go at Mum and Dad’s liquor cabinet instead.

The polar bear (Ursus Maritimus) is the largest land carnivore. The males grow to over 2.5 metres in length, and have been known to weigh more than a small car. This makes them roughly 20 times heavier than your average child, and twice as long.

Polar bears love to eat. This includes meals, snacks, high teas, luncheons; anything to put on weight for hibernation. Although they prefer seafood, they are probably quite open-minded to the possibility of human meat as well. They can smell you from miles away, and can run and swim faster than man.

The idea of a child cuddling one is absurd, as merely approaching the beast would be provocation.

No doubt, the NDARC is an important body, with intelligent people genuinely trying to make a difference. But I feel that the Bear is a victim of political correctness. Meanwhile, something far more insidious, featured in practically all alcohol advertising in this country, threatens to corrupt our children: bogans.

If you believe television, you’d probably think every adult male who drinks alcohol is a bogan. Or an emasculated urban bloke who has to make an excuse to the wife whenever he wants to have a drink with his chums, who are all likewise emasculated. With role models like these, kids don’t have a lot of hope.

Therefore, I propose to the NDARC to stop slandering poor Bundy, and take action on the real issue that is the bogan.

The final instalment in the “Websites that became Kewn’s World and then ceased to be Kewn’s World anymore” series of websites, has now arrived. So, go on—take the Splunge. I told him you would, don’t make me look like a liar.

Kewn makes a valid point about Web standards. Let’s face it, validating your pages is about as fun as a holiday in a Turkish prison. And when it’s all done, most readers don’t even notice, because your page looks exactly the same as it did before! So, you take that “Valid!” sticker, the one that doesn’t at all match the colour scheme of your site, and you shove it right in your reader’s stupid face.

I like to think of accessibility as designing one’s pages to be ‘pliable’. Good page design will bend to meet a whole range of needs. It should make sense without pictures. It should be readable using text-to-speech software for the vision impaired. It should print well.

Above all: if you do a good job, people will think you did nothing at all. Not all of your readers are going to be computer programmers. If you get the urge to tell them all about the scripting language your site uses, the database server, the operating system kernel version, et cetera, in the first paragraph of your site, right after the title¹—cut that shit out, right now. Yes, web sites run on computers, we get it. I’ve seen too many site authors run their mouths on technical jargon and then forget to put any actual content there. Take that boring shit to a separate page for people who are interested.

So, say it loud, say it proud: I’m valid! While I object conscientiously to showing the buttons myself, I salute those brave men and women who put their pages on the front line!

¹   In case I didn’t make it obvious enough, none of this is aimed at Kewn—his site actually has content.

Recently, a story about Michael Abney-Hastings, a farmer from Jerilderie, New South Wales, being the rightful heir to the British throne has been doing the rounds. The story has been picked up and passed around by every news program you can imagine. I especially enjoyed the Fox News interviewee‘s observation that the incumbent royal family is “inbred to within one chromosome of insanity” and that the hale and hearty Aussie would be a refreshing alternative.

The story is as follows. For a long time, it has been the rule that those of illegitimate birth are unfit to claim the throne of England. There were persistent rumours that Edward IV (reign 1461–1483) was in fact the product of a tryst between his mother and a French archer while Dad was out of town. Unsurprisingly, no one really found any convincing evidence during the king’s lifetime.

Historians now reckon that they have found this evidence, and affirm Edward IV’s illegitimacy. This means that, technically, Edward’s issue, including Elizabeth II, have been in power for over five hundred years without being entitled to it. Take George, Edward’s younger—and one would assume, legitimate—brother, follow the standard rules of succession, and voila: a forklift operator from rural Australia.

It is a fascinating story, and I for one would like to congratulate the historians for doing such a bang-up job. Never mind that the present-day rules of succession are determined by the Act of Settlement (1701), which states that only Protestant descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover (1630–1714), who have not married a Catholic, may reign. Because that would just take the fun out of the whole story. I say, let’s give the Windsors a couple of weeks to move out, and then give them the royal arse!

Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, in the Southern Hemisphere. Conversely, it is the Winter Solstice for the northies.

The mercury reached 35°C in Brisbane today, and the longest day of the year isn’t even the hottest. That comes later on. I’m positive that there is some irony to be found, the extra sun hours being rendered unpleasant by the excessive heat that comes with them. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

Mayfly Project 2003 — describe your year in twenty words or less:

Three houses. Study, buddies, music, memories. Skiing and Z-ing. Red web site. Orange traffic cone. Concise descriptions of time periods.

To my readers if there are any, a reminder that this site isn’t a live journal. Honest.

A site I visit frequently, Everything2 has taken about a month to relocate its servers to another provider. During this time, all that has remained is a message promising the noding community the site’s speedy return. The wait has been far too long, and I’ve descended to editing Wikipedia to waste time instead. Recently the site has started showing signs of life again, and may soon come out of its comatose state. Come back, e2, wherever you are; all is forgiven!

Don’t ever leave me, e2
I couldn’t stand to see you go
My heart would simply snap, e2
If you walk on out that do’

I promise I’ll be good to you
And keep you warm at night
e2, e2, e2, why don’t we just
Shut off the light

In all seriousness, I’ve always been a very capable individual, with an almost arrogant approach to study, and an ever changing idea of what I want to do. Ultimately, this ambivalence led to poor performance at uni, which very nearly got me kicked out.

Few things are more depressing than failing subjects; uni drop-out is not an ideal thing to have on one’s resume.

That is all in the past now, and I’m back on track to graduate soon. But, I could always use some more motivation, and here it is, in the form of a new higher education package.

Naturally, as a ‘sandstone’ university student, I’ll be working extra hard to finish before 2005, lest the increased fees punish me for wasting time. Also, I’ll be breaking with family tradition by obtaining only one degree, thereby making this one count more, and giving my career some extra ‘zing’!

I knew there was a reason I voted Liberal.

This web hacking challenge was being discussed on an IRC channel I frequent. You might know the sort of thing I’m talking about: the aim is to defeat some kind of flawed security on a series of web pages, each one slightly more complicated than the last.

So it is with the Independent Starfleet Academy Training Center for Internet Security (ISATCIS).

There are 16 levels to clear. I think the author ran out of ideas for all those levels, because a couple of them can only be described as riddles, having no security aspect at all. However, all in all, it is still a nice way to kill a couple of hours.

Rating: *** three asterisks.

According to a recent “news” article, the actress who plays the T-X in the movie Terminator 3 enjoys kissing women and has in fact done so on more than one occasion.

I used to think news.com.au had some credibility, due to its association with The Australian, and I was even prepared to overlook its offers of “Dating” and “Horoscopes”, and its tendency to group morbid or black humour articles into their own category.

However, I can’t help but cringe whenever the page offers me another non-fact about some one-dimensional celebrity, such as the one above. I mean, come on. This is the 21st century—girls kissing girls is so old, the candles don’t fit on the birthday cake.

The trouble, of course, with news.com.au is that it is a mixture of all the newspapers News Corporation owns. A lot of these newspapers aren’t very good. So, I think I’ll stop going there and just go to The Australian. I’ll suggest James does the same, if he can manage.

As far as mainstream news sources go, I recommend Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, CNN.com, Google News, and Ananova.

I’m well aware of the irony of talking about this un-newsworthy article and spreading it further by doing so.

我喜欢中国人民

1. The hyphen ( - ) is to be used in compound words only. The em dash ( — ) is used where two clauses are joined mid-sentence, where a clarification occurs, or where the speaker has changed the subject abruptly. The en dash ( – ) is used to denote a numerical range, or to adjective a pair of nouns (“I caught the Christchurch–Auckland flight at 1:30pm”).
2. It is generally accepted that em dashes are not to have spaces on either side where they are used. However there are narrower spaces, such as the hair space, which may be used to surround em dashes. Should it be necessary to enclose the dash in normal spaces for some reason, or as a matter of preference, the en dash should be used instead.
3. Writing “One, two, and three” is more desirable than writing “One, two and three”. This convention is commonly known as the Oxford comma.
4. When quoting multiple paragraphs, opening quotes go before each paragraph; closing quotes go after the last paragraph only.
5. The ellipsis ( … ) is used to indicate a pause, or where the speaker trails off. This may occur at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop. The ellipsis is also used to indicate some missing words in quoted speech. In this case, if the ellipsis replaces the last words of sentence, the ellipsis is followed by a full stop. However, if several sentences are being omitted, then the full stop must come before the ellipsis.
6. Where one is citing another’s writing, rather than speech, any ellipses added to indicate gaps in the citation should be enclosed in brackets ( [ … ] ) to clarify that the ellipsis is not part of the original author’s text.
7. The ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ characters ( < > ) provided by the keyboard are not technically angle brackets. Angle brackets are used in scientific formulae and the like, and are much larger. There are smaller angle bracket–style marks ( « » ) used in French as we use quotation marks in English; these are called guillemets.
8. It is good practise to use a space instead of a comma to separate positive powers of a thousand in numbers ( “Give me 1 000 potatoes” ). Some languages use the comma as a decimal place. If you were to request 1,000 pommes de terre in Paris, you would receive one.
9. The colon ( : ) is used to introduce a clause which directly clarifies the previous one. The semicolon ( ; ) is used to indicate a casual relation between two clauses which could otherwise stand on their own as complete sentences. Furthermore, it is used instead of the comma where the use of a comma would introduce ambiguity to the sentence: for example, to separate a list of items which contain commas already.
   And finally…
10. The possessive singular of a noun is created by adding “’s” to the end of it; this holds true for words ending in ‘s’ as well. There are a very small number of exceptions where we can form the possessive by adding an apostrophe only; for more information see page 1 of The Elements of Style .