The new WordPress 1.5 is out, featuring more bells and whistles than the Mardi Gras. WordPress is maturing as a web journalling tool and starting to sneak in some content management system-y features as well.

So read up on that if you are interested.

Point is, I have upgraded to 1.5 and the monthly archives and permalinks are suddenly not working, and will not work until either:

• the bug is fixed by the WordPress people, or
• it turns out that it is my fault, and I fix it.

So if you are looking for monthly archives or permalinks, sit tight. If, however, you are simply waiting for me to update this journal, then this counts as an update.

Peace.

Neil Young once said “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Today, Mark Latham has decided to burn out, taking the unprecedented step of resigning not only from the Labor Party leadership, and not only as a frontbencher, but as a bencher of any kind.

The powerbrokers are no doubt relieved to put away the dagger without having to plunge it into the man’s back, perhaps uncertain of being able to aim it away from the pancreas.

The question in everyone’s mind is, who on Earth is everyone in the ALP going to agree upon for a replacement leader? With Kim Beazley immediately putting his hand up, and Kevin Rudd sure to challenge even if just to provide a choice, it’s shaping up to be an interesting race.

Beazley

Garrett

Gillard

Kim Beazley (Member for Brand)
Bee’s Knees is basing his candidacy on experience and stability. He has 24 years of parliamentary experience—five years as Defence Minister, one as Deputy Prime Minister, and five as Opposition Leader—and he has quite stably presided over two election defeats. However, with Labor’s system of factions, Kim appears to be the only candidate with blend of charisma and political acumen that a statistically significant amount of the caucus can agree upon.

Kevin Rudd (Member for Griffith)
Despite receiving encouragement from some, Kevin decided to stay out of the last leadership ballot and vote for Kim instead, regretting only that he only had one vote to give for his erstwhile leader. It would now seem that he has another vote to give, and whilst Kevin is in Indonesia on tsunami business, he cannot be drawn on any leadership aspirations he may have. However, it has become apparent that, as shadow minister for foreign affairs, he is a hearty, well-tempered young diplomat, and it would be fantastic to see a Nambour boy in the Lodge.

Prime Ministers by State of origin

NSW

Barton, Page, Chifley, Holt, McMahon, Keating, Howard

Vic

Deakin, Bruce, Scullin, Menzies, Curtin, McEwen, Gorton, Whitlam, Fraser

Tas

Lyons

Q’ld

Fadden, Forde

SA

Hawke

Overseas

Watson, Reid, Fisher, Cook, Hughes

Two Queenslanders, and not even any good ones. Time for another!

Penny Wong (Senator for South Australia)
Hailed as one of the up-and-coming young women of Australian politics. She might look like a diminutive Chinese woman but she speaks with a strong, authoritative—and yes, Australian accented—voice. I could see her appealing to a broad range of voters, not just women and ethnics, but folks who would normally vote Liberal as well. What a pity she’s a senator.

Peter Garrett (Member for Kingsford Smith)
Sure, he may look like an eccentric bald weirdo, but he also has the distinction of having fronted Midnight Oil, and there is no doubt Australians love their Oils. Garrett is well-known for the conservationist message in his music, and as leader of a party determined to win government eventually, he would be in a prime position to do so, pun intended. He’s only been an MP for a month, but how much training do you need to be Opposition Leader anyway? The man has a huge team around him to guide everything he does and every decision he makes. Any smo could do it.

Julia Gillard (Member for Lalor)
There has been a lot of hype surrounding Gillard lately, and it is said that her supporters are having a sticky-beak around, seeing if she would have the numbers for a viable challenge. While it would be nice to have a (attractive) woman as the leader of a major political party and alternative prime minister, I tend to think that she is not quite politically mature enough yet. Her spinster status may also be an obstacle to her becoming leader, and for the time being at least, a closed-minded Australian electorate will probably feel the same way.

In sum, although it looks like a walkover for Beazley next Friday, there’s a veritable salad bar of talent and, knowing the Labor Party, there’ll be plenty of second helpings in the near future.

The big man goes for a medical check-up with a few buds

In the aftermath of the recent Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, with the death toll in the six figures and millions left homeless, not once did I think, “Gee, I wish Mark Latham would chime in with yet another pointless, vacuous, and redundant statement from a public figure.” So his absence, although certainly surprising, has been somewhat refreshing.

It did occur to me briefly that in a situation like this, the leader of the opposition would usually express his party’s condolences and magnanimously agree with everything the government is doing, but it seemed like shadow cabinet was already handling that quite well.

The reason why Latham has not made any comment, it has since been revealed, is that he is suffering from acute pancreatitis, and is on strict doctor’s orders to take a rest. Now, bored right-wing troublemakers at The Australian say that he has blown it, and have invented a story that he is under immense pressure to resign.

Firstly, the title of the article, Latham should ‘do right thing and go’, places words in quotation marks that are not part of a quotation, thereby falsely representing an editorial opinion as something someone said.

[...] Many hope the increasingly isolated Labor leader will “do the right thing for the party and his family”.

Is that right? In that case, I’m sure the authors will provide us with some examples of who the “many” are, and attribute the quotation to someone. Oh wait.

Big fella, til you get back to health, you can rest as long as you want, and wherever you want. Shame on you journalism students for kicking the man while he’s down.

Another new year, another Banished Words List from Lake State. A pretty safe listing, influenced by the wars and the recent presidential election. A timely addition is the -izzle speak, popularised by rapper Snoop Dogg, and now seen in everything from superannuation ads to breakfast cereals.

“It was clever for about five minutes, or should I say five ‘minizzles?’”
– R. Glover, Waterford, Michigan, USA

Perhaps more satisfying was the banishment of blog. Having banished it already myself, it’s good to see the pioneers of linguistic arrogance are on board as well.

Guy Sebastian enjoying himself with Larry, Mel, and Kochy.

As I watched last night’s simulcast—three television networks showing the World Vision tsunami benefit concert and telethon—I contemplated how much of a donation I would have to pledge to get it taken off the air. A ton of Australian television identities had been enlisted to man the phones; despite hanging up on Shannon Noll and about 150 others, I never did manage to get through to Aphrodite from Big Brother 4.

Meanwhilst, Tim Costello explained that he was overturning World Vision’s normal policy—the one about not accepting money from the sale of arms, alcohol, gambling, or pornography—because the urgency of this particular humanitarian need trumps any moral unease on the source of the money. I felt Costello’s old-school prejudices start to melt away as a donor offered $10,000 to see Rove and Bert Newton lock lips, and I reckoned it was only a matter of time before someone ponied up the dough for Sandra Sully and Izzy from Neighbours to do likewise.

Which leads me to ask—where does World Vision draw the line? For instance, World Vision is well-known for its work in Africa. Tony Blair remarked last week that Africa has “the equivalent of a man-made, preventable tsunami every week”. On that continent, war, and its attendant poverty and disease, continue to rub out human life at an enormous pace.

Howard pledges one billion dollars.

However, the question has to be asked of the rest of us, too. A single three-hour telethon raised over $15 million; the Australian government will be helping out Indonesia to the tune of $1 billion. Why do we care so much about this disaster, whilst largely ignoring the ongoing disaster in Africa?

Firstly, sympathy fatigue. European and other rich nations have a duty to assist Africa, because a lot of the current problems result from European powers’ colonising the heck out of the place, and leaving incompetent dictators in charge upon departure. Actually, in the case of Belgian Congo, pretty much no-one was left in charge. The ensuing power vacuum caused untold war and death in the following decades up to this point in time.

So, for as long as I can remember, Western nations have provided a steady stream of reparations to their ex-colonies, Live Aid–style benefits have appealed to the yuppie conscience, and NGOs appeal to the rest of us with footage of starving kids from wherever. Meanwhile, indistinct ethnic groups and belligerent warlords continue to spoil the party and keep Africa poor in both money and livelihood.

Point is, the West is tired of waiting for Africa to stop fighting itself and get its shit together. We will certainly continue giving them a hand, but at least Asia, notwithstanding the insurgencies in Sumatra and Sri Lanka, is somewhat stable.

Things like strife and poverty just aren’t spectacular as a tidal wave is, meaning kids are less likely to phone Casey Donovan to pledge the contents of their piggy banks. It has been said that the tsunami has attracted more aid because it involved widespread, visible destruction. Images of smashed cities, and the frightening prospect of white people losing their loved ones, have brought out the benevolent best in us all.

Happy new year to anyone who still reads my website.

I would like to say that I spent the new year drinking^* with friends, just as God intended, and trying to play bass, and convincing everyone present that I was competent at doing so, even though it is a fact that you cannot hold it down on the bass when you have been consuming.

It would seem that the Brisbane fireworks were over in something like three minutes, and from where I’m standing, it was something of a disappointment. There is a bit of a trend for Australian cities to give away their New Year fireworks celebration expenses to the victims of the recent tsunami disaster in Asia, but considering that by this stage, the pyrotechnicians’ services have surely already been paid for, it would be a bit stupid. You can’t take money away from people who have already spent it, and you can’t remunerate disaster victims with explosives.

See you at Kewnstock.

If you’ve got girl problems, I’ll be there for you son.
I’ve got 99 problems, and a bitch ain’t one.

Lachlan

^* alcohol

You better watch out,
you better not cry.
You better not hurl,
or you get no pie.

And so it was that the weed delivery guy—hardworking, dedicated, and discreet—saved Christmas in the nick of time.

Disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal.

God bless each of my swollen testicles.

If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

O holy night! the… something something… distant
It is the night with the Christmas trees and pie.
Jesus was born and so I get presents.
Thank you, Jesus for being born.

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.

“Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, 1961–2004, former Pantera guitarist, gunned down whilst performing with his new band, Damageplan, apparently by someone disgruntled about the breakup of Pantera.

Death happens all the time, and bigger atrocities than this one occur daily, but Pantera’s music has been important to me over the years and I have particularly respected Dimebag’s skill as an artist. I saw Pantera perform in Brisbane the last time they were here, at Festival Hall in 2001, at the very top of their game, kicking arse and taking names. Despite the pretty ordinary final album, that is still how I remember them.

Rest in peace, Dime.

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.

So it turned out that Turtlebox had to miss the gig this eve. Apparently one of the band members had an accident and his ribs came off second best.

A pity, since I’ve been looking forward to it all week. Yeah I know, I only found out about it last week. Get well soon, band man.

It still turned out to be an enjoyable eve with m8s, accompanied by the acoustic renditions by Cam and Kieran of what are usually Daisycutters songs. The songs lose a bit of zing in the conversion to the unplugged format, it has to be said.

It’s getting close to exam season, it is too close to even keep worrying about it. The hard work having been done, I make another tentative step closer to being able to leave this institution that has sapped so much energy from my life.

People often ask me, “Lachlan, why don’t you update your site more often?”

Well okay, to be honest no one asks me that. Nonetheless, to silence those people I have changed 2 letters, in the name of this site, so that they can’t tell me I haven’t updated the site.

And so it is that my humble site changes from insom.cx to insom.com. Same site, same look and feel, same exact content for months at a time.

I would like to thank the people of Christmas Island for their support over the years. The old domain will continue working until it expires about this time next year.

In other news, Turtlebox are performing again! I always wanted to see them, but they disappeared off the face of the earth before I really became old enough to go to concerts. Now, many years later it seems they have a reunion gig, at Ric’s on Monday 21st June. If the weather is clement and I’ve kept up with my study commitments, I’ll be all over that like flies on shit.

Turtlebox rule.

Now, bugger off and don’t come back until semester is over. Muhahahaha.

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.