Richard BF

Wanted, a store in Sydney or Canberra which sells black full length woollen coats. Because stuffed if I can find one which does.

I tend to be in an infinite loop at the moment, which is somewhat contradictory, but considering the current state of my head I could probably say anything and think it sounds correct. The loop however is the 3-4 days per week I spend in Canberra picking up cold and flu, then the 3-4 days back in Sydney that I spend recovering, so that I’m just well enough to head back to Canberra again, ad inifinitum.

Anyway, in such frustrating moments, when you feel that you have no weekend, just sick recovery time, you tend to watch a lot of moronic television or DVDs. I watched an elephant dump on a hidden video camera the other night, on some wildlife documentary. Man did I laugh, that’s the level I’ve descended to.

So I happened to catch Ali G The Movie on DVD. His recent series in the U.S. was hysterical, so I assumed the film would be somewhere near as good. Unfortunately not. However it was not the later 86 minutes that annoyed me, it was first minute that really pissed me off.

Not during the DVD load, but only once you select “Play” from the menu, does a 3 minutes mini-doco on piracy appear on the screen, and all the remote controls are disabled, so you have no choice but to watch it before the actual main feature begins. And the commentary over the top of this minute of what looks like a devilish blacksmith, working in the dark trying to heat up then cool down a bunch of branding irons, was this drivel (my highlighting):

The pirates are out to get you. Don’t let them brand you with their mark. Piracy funds organised crime and will destroy our film and video industry. Piracy costs jobs and will destroy our music and publishing industry. Piracy funds terrorism and will destroy our development and your future enjoyment. Don’t touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright. Copyright is a matter of fact. Don’t let the pirates burn a hole in your pocket.

All that this crap incited me to do was take a copy of the rented DVD before I returned it, regardless of my dislike for the film in the first place, and regardless of the glistening Macrovision logo which flashes up after the credits.

So let us analyse this wonderous anti-piracy spiel shall we.

The pirates are out to get you.

Right, first cab off the rank, the pirates are out to get us. Are they really? And how are they supposed to do that? By selling us copies that are cheaper? Boy, that is really going to get me.

Don’t let them brand you with their mark.

Their mark? What mark would that be? A rather feeble attempt at a metaphor for receiving stolen goods perhaps? OK, fair enough.

Piracy funds organised crime and will destroy our film and video industry.

Organised crime? Are we talking about individuals taking a backup copy of a DVD they own? Or the next door neighbours taking a copy of a rental DVD for later use? Or are we talking about the small time DVD ripper down at the local markets selling copied DVDs? Perhaps we’re talking about the chain DVD rental stores like Blockbuster, who lock their franchisees into long 3 year contracts and then tell them what five or six DVDs they’re allowed to rent out, which is ultimately dictated by the deals they’ve struck with the motion picture companies. Or maybe we’re talking about the large publishing houses, who over the last 50 years have retroactively diluted the right to copy into a million dollar industry based on a flawed interpretation of rights.

Piracy costs jobs and will destroy our music and publishing industry.

Well, that depends upon the business model that these industries choose to base themselves upon. The flawed copyright exploitation model invented by them 50 years ago, in which case of course I can understand their concern, if I had such a gravy train, I’d never want to give it up either.

Piracy funds terrorism

Funnier even than the film itself, here it is again for comedic impact:

Piracy funds terrorism

What a crock of condescending rubbish. Although, the last time I saw Osama Bin Laden, he was down at the local Glebe markets, trying to sell me a copy of Mike Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Don’t touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright.

Gee, the marketers have been working overtime on this one. What better way to make copyright sound cool and hip.

Don’t let the pirates burn a hole in your pocket.

Nice contradiction. Piracy lowers prices, both of pirated goods and the real thing. This is what has happened in the music industry, and will happen in the film industry. This won’t dilute the pot of cash being spent and won’t send the studios broke. In much the same way as technology has facilitated the piracy of films, likewise technology has lowered the cost of film production, it just isn’t being passed on to the consumers. And as for the high salaries garnered by actors and technical people alike, time to get back to reality.

So, Universal Pictures, ironically started by actors almost 80 years ago, and sponsors of this ridiculous anti-piracy message, get with the times, and get a better marketing firm, because the one you’re using now is pretty clueless.

Yep, I pay everything I can online, who wouldn’t if they could? Each month I pay several bills with BPay through my bank. It’s easy, and to quote the BPay site:

making life easier_

Not sure if the underscore is a qualifier at all, but there you go, making life easier_.

With Internet banking, you’d like to have a BPay account set up and configured already, so that when a bill comes in, all you need to do is click on it and type in the dollar amount.

Of course it isn’t this easy, because the intelligent boffins at companies such as Telstra, decide to use a different 20 digit biller number for each new bill, even if it is the same account. In fact, successive Telstra bills have successive page numbers, meaning I can put all my printed bills together and have a 62 page book of Telstra bills. Not particularly useful reading material, but amusing and handy for looking for missing pages at tax time.

So even though you’ve set up an account to click on, you still need to enter the 20 digit reference number for each bill. The account, by the way, consists of a 4 digit biller number, and that’s it. Compared to 20 digits, it’s almost a waste defining the account in the first place.

However, there are companies who have done it right, so it is not like Telstra are limited by the BPay technology. My mobile phone carrier, for example, uses the same biller reference number for every bill, so I don’t need to type anything in except the dollar amount. Now that’s making life easier_.

Telstra? Well, maybe we should just sell them off, and see how long it takes them to go bankrupt. I guess they could always sell off all the copper to BHP!

Bit of a telco week so far. Firstly, my ISP calls me to say that my ADSL connection is finally up after my house move. Great! Although I already knew that a week ago, when I accidentally tripped over a power board and powered up my gateway machine.

Secondly, Telstra bills me for $59 for connecting my new phone line. Of course disconnecting the old one is free, which begs the question, how come their processes are so stuffed that it costs them $59 plus mark up to connect a line, but takes nothing to disconnect it? Whatever happened to penalising people for leaving a contract? Surely the same guy who pulled out my line at the exchange could simply plug it back in the new hole? This really shits me, either connection should also be free, or I should be charged for connection and disconnection!

When I went off and did a little research on this one, my first point of call was accidentally Kristy Kreme, which is a little unfortunate for Krispy Kreme considering I’ve now linked to her and raised her profile within the new untapped doughnut pr0n industry. Although if you look through the results, you’ll see that the mistake is fairly common, with several schools even accidentally using her for fundraising in their school newsletter.

Strange that the Krispies haven’t taken any legal action, considering they’ve been in business in the U.S. since 1937, and certainly Kristy isn’t looking anything like she’s been a pr0n star since before then. The benefits of special sugar coating, emphasised by both sites, seems to be the only thing they share, outside the name of course.

So, in business since 1937, the first store outside the U.S. in 2001, which was in Canada which probably doesn’t count, and the first outside North America is right here in Sydney, opened earlier this year.

So here I was walking past the new Krispy Kreme store in the city, and the queue is out the door and around the corner. What? It’s a bloody doughnut shop! We already have doughnut outlets in Sydney, you may be surprised to know, and somehow I doubt there’s anything overly special or innovative about a U.S. based fast food franchise suddenly appearing in our fine city, aside of course from whatever marketing crap all the U.S. fawning and U.S. sitcom watching blinkered ignoramouses lining up outside their store today are willing to believe.

Coincidentally, the SMH had two recent articles about obesity in schools and Krispy Kreme’s involvement in fundraisers. The ploy of course is that fundraising in many peoples’ minds is synonymous with charity work, which it isn’t. A private school raising money by flogging doughnuts so they can buy a third indoor swimming pool, isn’t actually charity work.

Another thing from the Krispy Kreme web site, is:

We’ve developed our own coffee roasting and introduced our new Hot Doughnut Machine technology, which will allow us to bring the hot doughnut experience to more people.

Yeah, pretty ground breaking. You’d be a bit of an idiot if you opened a doughnut shop without a doughnut machine. Although 7.5 million doughnuts per day world wide is a pretty amazing statistic if you ever needed reasons why we’re becoming a planet full of fat fuckers.

But if they have anything going for them, at least they spell doughnut correctly!

I wish I had a dollar for every time I was asked that question today. Well, I wish I had a lot of dollars for every time, because it couldn’t have been any more than half a dozen, but still, that’s a lot, especially when I can think of quite a lot of more interesting opening lines. “Here’s 40 cents, call someone who cares.” for example.

Anyway, I have no idea how cold it was here in Canberra today, but it was certainly many degrees below both comfortable and tolerable.

Of course, being an old hand at predictable opening lines and come backs, today’s conversations typically went like this:

Canberran: What’s it like outside?

Richard BF: Cold — Damn cold — Fucking cold [depending on audience]

Canberran: Yeah, it was pretty cold this morning.

So let me get this right, we’re in Canberra, in the middle of winter, where it is currently 3 degrees, and everyone is walking around rugged up like they’re about to get on the next boat to Antarctica, yet for some reason they’re expecting it to suddenly be warm? These people are nuts, but I admire their optimism and tolerance for the pain and suffering of anything less than a moderatley crisp 23 degrees.

Excuse the partial reference to a Young Ones joke, but today I learned a new phrase. I like to think that I’m still a kid in a lot of ways and am up on current street lingo, but much like the time I was caught unwares by that great American word “cool”, I’ve now discovered “tool around”.

Back in about 1991, I heard the word “cool” used by some friends, yet refused to use it, images of Happy Days, and U.S. English once again intruding upon the Australian vernacular. Of course six months later, due to the risk of sounding old and uncool, I of course was calling everything cool as well. How cool is that? The point is however, that I missed the coming of cool, which taught me a valuable lesson in ageing, which was pretty uncool.

So today I heard “tool around”, as in “What will we do for the web site demo?” “Well, we’ll probably just tool around a bit.”

And to my surprise, tool around actually has an unofficial definition.

Verb 1. tool around – ride in a car with no particular goal and just for the pleasure of it; “We tooled down the street”

Well, I guess I could have worked that out, and may have just heard it once or twice in that context, but it was interesting to hear it in common use none the less.

So, it is cool to tool around. Not exactly the definition I thought of when I first heard it, believe me.

W3C’s (X)HTML validation service as an RSS feed. Sweet. (via MENTALIZED.NET)

Oh deary me. Recent news stories are talking up the threat of al-Qaeda terrorist attacks during the U.S. elections, such as this story (US warns of ‘large-scale’ terror attack) in the SMH.

Of course many are suggesting that this is yet another ploy by G.W. et al for election glory, as what better time to want Big Boy Bush in charge of the U.S. military. When you think about it, you’ve got to wonder why al-Qaeda would want to disrupt an election which is looking more and more likely to dump G.W. and pull the U.S. out of the middle east. al-Qaeda’s whole point is that the U.S. is run by nationalistic interventionist infidels.

If G.W. is expecting the U.S. citizenry to believe that one, then… well… yeah…

More amusing however is a quick search on Google News shows about 10 nations, including our very own SMH reporting the fact in their local media before any of the mainstream U.S. media outlets.

However the stupidity doesn’t end overseas, as the Australian government has just signed a $530 million deal to purchase 59 “refurbished and updated” M1A1 Abrams tanks. I’m assuming they’ll go quite nicely with our airforce of 3.5 FA18s or how ever many we own now.

These tanks will be of great use for invading other countries protecting our borders from land based threats from other nations. One wonders if we’re about to be invaded by submersible tanks from New Zealand. Excellently thought through Senator Hill. Periscope up!

One interesting thing about moving house and then falling sick, is the 7 day black hole caused by not having Internet access, or even a computer to play on. And while my email backlog calmly waited until I was back online, my feed aggregator did not. I say did not, but the problem of course is that RSS and Atom feeds do not give the user any ability to read items from a specific date, meaning that the last 10 to 20 items don’t cover anywhere near the 7 days that I’d like to catch up on.

So now I have a 5 day or so gap in my knowledge about what happened in the blogosphere and the Internet/I.T. world. Through CNet, SMH and other sites I can find out a little about some news that I’ve missed, but this gives no additional information such as context, social effects or any more detailed research. And for the same reason that I use an aggregator, I’m not about to visit each of the 200+ sites I read each day to find out what happened.

Every few days I stumble across an issue being referred to in a blog, which I don’t completely understand, until I follow the trackbacks to find out it was a story which broke during my gap. In many ways I feel like I ceased to exist for a week, and that’s very disconcerting, especially considering it is part of my job to be up to date, and there’s nothing I can really do about.

So when I see posts about how great RSS is for keeping people informed, I grumble and bitch to myself about how people still just don’t get it. Well, slightly more than I usually do anyway.

(Originally posted to Synop weblog)