Kookaburra

Blogger Gans invited to 2020 summit

The new Australian Federal Government (led by "Hi I'm Kevin from Queensland") is kicking off a 2020 summit - inviting many leading thinkers to collaborate on designing our future and feeding that back to the Government.

Among the chosen luminaries is Professor Joshua Gans who runs several blogs (his main one is CoreEcon) and does a great job of bringing economics to the masses.

Well done Joshua - so at least there's one of the 2020 great minds who is wired and connected.

Oh and for a taste of Joshua's writing here's a sample chapter of his forthcoming book - Parentonomics -- an amusing look at travelling with kids and its foibles. I can attest to its accuracy.

Baked Beetroot - Yum

The centre piece for dinner tonight was Baked Beetroot (recipe thanks to ABC) - cooked with our own homegrown beetroot and basil. Very nice. Complimented with some Brown Brothers Cienna and Cabernet (light in alcohol, high in flavour). The wine only travelled 243 kilometres (direct - I am sure it went further due to distribution) so that mimised its environmental footprint. I suspect the minced garlic we used from a jar came all the way from China - must grow my own garlic and avoid the distance and pesticides.

Apple Envy - solved

As a reformed Mac user I have joined the hordes of Windows users with Apple envy :-) I have tricked out my Windows Mobile phone with PointUI - a skin that makes it iPhone like - bigger buttons more functions accessible without using stylus. I was a dedicated Quicksilver user on Mac (an excellent, free application launcher and more) - now experimenting with Enso from Humanized - as of 15 Jan 2008 it too is free (I think partly because the lead developers have been hired into the Mozilla Foundation) - a worthy fast launcher.

New Year and changes to confess

Happy New Year to all. A friend has just pinged for being such a lousy correspondent and minimalist blogger. So here's a least one post for 2008.

Well 2007 brought some changes. I stopped being a regular Mac user - my work gave me a Windows XP/Dell laptop thing which does what I need for work - and I have adjusted to using it for the odd non work use (personal email, web surfing, garden design, iTunes for music management, Picasa for holding my photos). -

Blue Moon in June - June 30

Well it seems I have started blogging so infrequently that it could be said I post only once in a blue moon - not quite true, as we have 'blue moons' approximately every 2.72 years.

This Saturday we do have a blue moon - the moon is the same colour it's just the name used when a second full moon falls in a calendar month. Take the chance of doing some moon gazing (cloud cover permitting).

Something I only learnt in recent years is that on the day of a full moon, the moon rises very close to the time the sun sets, which makes getting photographs easier as there is still some daylight to light the land.

You can discover your moonrise and sunset times using the calendars available at http://www.sunrisesunset.com/

More reading on the Blue Moon is available via The Sydney Observatory blog.

Virtual bedtime stories via LibriVox

On the road soon, well strictly on an aeroplane, as I head off across the world for business. My daughters and I are going to miss our bedtime story (we've been enjoying some Roald Dahl lately). It looks like I have a substitute thanks the free public domain readings of some good books at Librivox.org - I think I will queue up Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for them. Now to find something for my Thomas the Tank Engine fan.

DVD playback on Windows?

OK it's been a while since I muttered anything ... so here's a start. I was rather shocked to discover that Windows XP does not include DVD playback! This has been a standard feature of Macs for as long as I can remember. (It arrived in Mac OS X 10.1 in 2001) Guess I have been taking my Mac for granted.

Realistically if you bought a Windows laptop with a DVD drive in it then I am sure it comes with the DVD codec (well it should).

Just shows how our expectations rise over time.

Memo to Bill G - Be careful what you say - we can all hear you now

On the launch of Vista, Bill Gates was interviewed several times and was quizzed each time in part about how Vista appears to be similar to Mac OS X in many respects (so it seems Apple's positioning as the innovator is working).

I don't particularly care which is better (they're both amazingly advanced from where we were 20 years ago; and at the same time not nearly advanced enough - the file/folder metaphor is archaic - give me deeply integrating tagging and retrieval).

I do care about the truth and business people acting with integrity. Bill Gates was either badly briefed, ill prepared or just prepared to make a bunch of false statements to the media. Here's just one example:

Daring Fireball:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates
Friday, 2 February 2007

In his interview with Bill Gates in Newsweek, Steven Levy pointed out that many of the new features in Windows Vista are similar to features already in Mac OS X. Gates’s response:

I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so
publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new
security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security
guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come
out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.
I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user
interface-wise.


This is fascinating. In Gates’s view, Microsoft came up with these features, Apple copied them, and Apple got them into their shipping product first because Microsoft was spending so much time improving Vista’s security. Uh-huh.

Gates’s claim about Mac OS X security is simply false. Flabbergastingly false.

Calendar cross-publishing concepts

In many ways information sharing has become easier with near ubiquitous email, web and broadband access. Each of which have been reduced in many ways to a commonly understood cohesive experience for most of us. There is potential for so much more but sadly the layers of complexity make it hard to fully embrace Internet 1.0 let alone what more is to come. Jon Udell of Microsoft demonstrates some of that complexity by trying to wire up different calendars together.

Jon Udell on Calendar cross-publishing concepts: A growing number of people will be keeping their work calendars in Microsoft Outlook and their family calendars elsewhere, say on Google. How can they cross-publish their work and family calendars? It's possible, but the conceptual hurdles are formidable. Here's what I found when I did the experiment.

Tangle Tamer -- wonderful product, if you can find it locally

The following device sounds wonderful for untangling long hair (my daughter's hair - my hair is not long, indeed I am perhaps not long for hair). This was just posted on Boing Boing (copied verbatim below).

Now if I lived in the United States of Affluenza I could order it from a squillion folks staring with Amazon. Meanwhile here in Australia there seems be no-one. I have emailed Remington-Products.com.au but it's too early to expect a response.

It will be an interesting experiment to see if, with enough Boing Boing awareness, that they may just import them - I live in hope and would rather avoid the US$34 freight the US based eBayers want to charge for a device that sells for much less than that.

Tangle Tamer -- wonderful product:
Mark Frauenfelder: I have two young daughters with long hair. Combing out the tangles after they've taken a bath has been a painful experience. My three-year-old ran when she saw me coming towards her with a brush and a bottle of spray detangler.

The pain is over since we started using this rechargable electric detangling brush. The motor makes the eight plastic protuberances oscillate at a high frequency. The brush goes through tangled hair like a hot knife through butter. Well, maybe not that quickly, but it is so much better than a comb or brush that there's no comparison.

I learned that a Nokia phone charger recharges the brush, too, which eliminates the need to take along an extra charger on vacations. Link