Musings of a morbid mind

Main Reason For Rise of Atheism

2011-12-18T16:30:00.001+11:00

I found this little gem as I was going through my Google+ feed today. The Christians For a Moral America (CFAMA) website has a really “quaint” little pole on their website asking what their loyal readers think is the main reason for the rise of Atheism in America. and the options are as follows.

* Propaganda by Hollywood.

* Flaws in the education system.

* Broken families, divorce.

* Rise in homosexuality

Wow… where do I begin… OK well lets tackle them in order.

1. Propaganda by Hollywood. Hrmmm… that is curious. I personally have not seen any significant shift in the amount of Atheist oriented films recently. Having said that, it’s not surprising that a Christian organisation picks on another for using propaganda. After all, the Christian faith is one of the biggest propaganda machines we have ever seen. Repeating the same messed up dogma until people are so saturated with it, they can’t think for themselves is exactly how fundamentalist faiths pass on their viral memes.

2. Flaws in the education system. Well, I really probably shouldn’t say too much about the American education system as I am an Australian. I’m guessing that the CFAMA’s chief criticism would probably be based around most schools refusing to teach non-science such as “intelligent design theory” along side of science like Evolution. At the end of the day, the true marker of a good education system is that the students learn to think critically, and more importantly think for themselves. Christians like to say that you should always be searching for the “truth”, but it is curious how they react when their children actually seriously seek out truth and start asking first order questions like “What are the true origins of the scriptures”, “How exactly did we arrive at the dogmas we now hold as undeniable truth” and “why do all other fundamentalist religions/ideologies look and smell so similar to ours, just with different names and places”, or God forbid “Does God really exist", or “did we merely create God in our image”? It seems to me that the Christian search for “truth” has to be conducted within the narrow bandwidth of what the church hierarchy deem “safe”. I remember back at high school (when I was a fundamentalist Christian), friends of mine who were also fundamentalists were pulled out of science class when the teacher was scheduled to teach evolution. They obviously did not trust their child (16 years old) would be able to develop the cognitive skills to appropriately discern “truth”, and that the only way to ensure they found truth was to cripple their education. Fortunately my parents were not so blind as to do this, and I spent the year giving my poor science teacher hell and challenging everything about the theory of evolution. It wasn’t ‘til much later that I was able to unravel all of the pre-conditioning that my fundamentalist upbringing gifted me with, and be able to look at the facts with a critical mind. This I feel shows that the Australian education system worked.

3. Broken families and divorce. Ok this is a curious one. Not only because of the fact that the divorce statistics within the Christian church are pretty much the same as outside it, but also because there is NO logical correlation between “Broken families and divorce” and Atheism. Incidentally, it is also a known fact that arranged marriages in cultures like India are far more likely statistically to succeed than marriages in the US. Maybe the Hindus have the “truth”.

and finally saving the best for last.

4. Rise in Homosexuality. This again simply shows a distinct lack of correlation. Homosexuality is simply about being attracted to the same sex. It has no logical connection to choosing to believe in a god or not, and there are plenty of homosexuals who do. Perhaps the rampant victimisation and outright hatred shown towards homosexuals from within the church has given many little choice but to seek other avenues to find a spiritual path, but really the two are mutually exclusive. The CFAMA’s suggestion that this could be linked to the dreaded and feared “rise of Atheism” is just mindless fear mongering designed to keep their adherents from potentially having an open mind.

Of course the CFAMA forgot probably the most important reason that there may be a rise in Atheism, so I’m going to put it here, and hopefully it will get more votes than any of the others (btw vote by leaving a comment or by +1 on Google+), and that is…

* With unprecedented access to information and the free exchange of ideas that the internet provides us with, coupled with many countries focus on providing better education systems, more and more people are being able to employ critical thinking to challenge ancient dogmas that fundamentalist faith based organisations have for centuries dictated to their adherents, and are seeing how flawed some of the thinking really is.

The truth about Santa Clause

2011-11-26T21:26:00.001+11:00

I remember one family at the fundamentalist Christian church I was involved with as a teenager, had taken the whole not telling lies thing to a very interesting extreme. They had decided that teaching their children not to lie, and then spinning them this tale about a Jolly old fellow dressed in Coca-Cola red went around the world at midnight on the 25th of December distributing gifts to all the “nice” children, was kind of hypocritical. At the time, I could see their point, but felt a little sorry for the kids that missed out on some of the magic and mystery of the festive season.

I went into adult hood as a sincere and devout fundamentalist Christian, and this idea started to play on my mind. I began to wonder if when I had children, I would tell them about Santa Clause. I started to come to the conclusion that maybe these parents had the right idea. I did not want my children applying the same logic to God as I forced them to apply to Santa Clause. I told my Mother of this decision, and she simply replied, “well you and your sister didn’t apply the same logic to God as you applied to Santa Clause”. This made me think for a second, but I judged that the risk was too great. I couldn’t bare the thought of my children loosing their faith in God because I had told them a lie about a mythical being in their early childhood.

Many years past, and a few years ago, now as an Atheist, I reconsidered the proposition (not that I am any closer to having children mind you). Looking at the scenario, I decided that, yes I want to tell my children about Santa Clause. About this mythical figure that can do amazing and magical things. A being that can defy the laws of nature that bind the rest of us, and that brings so much happiness in the form of the toys their little hearts most desire. I then want to allow them to come to the realisation that it is just mummy and daddy spinning them an elaborate fairy tale to make the season seem somehow magical.

My ex-partner thought I was just a sadist wanting to be cruel, but cruelness is certainly the last thing on my mind. I think it is a very powerful vehicle to teach two very valuable life lessons.

1. Things that sometimes seem magical, often (if not always) have a very logical and natural explanation. Just because we can’t see that explanation at this very moment, does not imply that we should accept the default and very unlikely explanation of “magic”.

2. Even people who love you sometimes lie to you for varying reasons. If you really want to know the truth, it is up to you to seek it, and be prepared for it. Truth, like life can sometimes be harsh.

In essence, I see it as a sort of panacea against fundamentalists attempting to indoctrinate my children (as they inevitably will, assuming I ever have any), into their faith.

The Slippery Slide

2011-11-13T18:04:00.001+11:00

I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian. Until the age of about 25, I believed the following facts to be immutable.

There is a metaphysical all knowing and perfect being who exists outside of time and space, who for want of a better name is called God.
This God being, created the entire observable universe including a species of cognisant beings in his image who at some point in their "time based" existence started referring to themselves as homo sapiens. These beings were created with a mortal physical presence and an immortal soul.
This God being, spoke to some of these cognisant beings throughout this time based history, that were deemed worthy to accurately record all of his various thoughts and actions over the course of a few thousand years. These writings were then collected by a committee of these cognisant beings around 300 ACE who were doing the will of this God being. This collection of works went by the name "The Holy Bible".
This God being made up some elaborate rules for these cognisant beings to gain this Gods favour and be eligible to co-exist with this God being after there mortal physical presence had expired, in a really nice place. The alternative to this really nice place was a pretty horrible place, and those who didn't follow these elaborate rules would be sent there. These elaborate rules were spelled out in this Holy Bible book. Oh and
This God being has a penis... (A freakin' huge one).

I chose the word "fundamentalist" in my opening sentence very specifically. There is a quintessential difference between someone who believes

The Bible is the written word of God and infallible, and someone who believes that
The Bible is a book of collected works written by humans who were fallible, but had certain insights into the divine at a particular point in history.

There are many aspects in which this distinction plays itself out. One we see commonly, is the biblical literalists insistence on attacking the scientific theory of evolution, and insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. The reason Biblical literalists cannot, and will not accept that the creation story is anything more than a myth for the benefit of an illiterate desert tribe to take solace in, is because they argue that this denial in the literal truth of the opening chapter of the Bible creates a slippery slide that will hold the rest of the Bibles message to critique, and will ultimately invalidate (in their minds) the undeniable truth of the word of God. It has very little to do with the psuedo-science of intelligent design. People who fall into category b however, (those I would refer to as liberal Christians), see no problem with juxtaposing the creation myth as a beautiful and metaphorically elegant story of the supernatural origins of the universe against the scientific theory of evolution. I myself went through a phase of believing that the Bible wasn't meant to be a modern scientific dissertation, but rather in regards to the creation story was meant to provide sufficient information for people in a pre-scientific era to satisfy the ontological question, and move beyond this to more important aspects of how to live a good life. While I was still able to accept the rest of the dogmas of the particular brand of Christianity I was involved with at the time, this event marked my slow progression from fundamentalist Christian to liberal Christian, which eventually culminated in my current position of Atheism. But there was much more to this progression than simply taking the creation story metaphorically.

I've spoken with a number of ex-fundamentalists. Some have, like me, gone to almost the polar opposite of atheism. Others have chosen the less extreme agnostic route. Some have found solace in some form of deism, while others prefer to hold to their theistic understanding of the world but chose a more liberal approach to their Christianity. Many of these people, however, will have some key thought, argument or idea that has eventually broken the continuum of the cyclic logic that is necessary to maintain a fundamentalist belief system. What I wish to do in this essay is to explain what that argument was for me, and how I was finally able to break out of the fundamentalist mind-set. Note to any fundamentalists who might be reading this essay, before you start formulating your killer cyclic argument that will in your mind destroy my "sole" objection to your fundamentalist belief, just be warned that this is not my "sole" objection, but merely the one that I deem responsible for enabling me to jettison my dogmatic and limited world view.

Language

Before I go on, I need to say something about language, and my understanding of it. I have always had an interest in languages. If you haven't figured out by now, English is my native language, and despite attempts at learning a few others, I have to concede that I am not yet bi-lingual, although it remains one of my life goals to become so. In high school I did a few years of Italian, not that I remember much of it now. I have had a number of attempts at learning Spanish, and it is currently the language I am most fluent in aside of English. I can actually hold decent conversations in Spanish, and understand a reasonable amount. I even attempted to learn Greek at one stage. Very early on in my investigation of the concepts of language, and the ways in which languages differ, I started to feel very overwhelmed with the way in which the language we speak, and the way in which we use language can shape our subjective experience and understanding of the world. This can be demonstrated using a very simple example such as the following.

In English we would say

"The red shirt"

The equivalent Spanish translation would be

"La camisa roja"

Even in this very simple 3 word example we notice two very astounding things. Firstly the word ordering is different. In English we have the definite article "the" followed by the adjective "red" and finally the noun "shirt". In Spanish we have the definite article "la" followed immediately by the noun "camisa" and then finally the adjective "roja". The second and even more significant difference is that in Spanish nouns have a gender whereas in English they are gender neutral. The word for shirt in Spanish "camisa" ends in an "a" making this word feminine, and forcing the usage feminine definite article "la" instead of "el"(masculine) as well as the feminine form of the adjective for red "roja" instead of "rojo".

These differences may seem small, and perhaps just an annoying little peculiarity if you are trying to learn a enough of Spanish so that you can order a meal at a restaurant when you go on holidays. However, if you look a little deeper, it raises all sorts of questions around how the world is viewed by the native speakers of these different languages, and how the language you use to think in shapes your subjective reality. The ordering of words is important to the emphasis we place on things, and concepts. Attributing a gender to nouns, or not changes your whole understanding of that concept, and forms different associations in the neural pathways of the brain. Admittedly, in the very simple example I give here, we a reasonably certain that we are talking about the same thing, but this is an extremely simplistic example. It doesn't take too long into trying to explain more detailed concepts that you very quickly see a difference in the ways in which people with different languages understand and perceive the world. This fact is demonstrated quite profoundly by recent scientific research that shows how our concept of languages affects the colours we perceive and how well we perceive them.

Spanish and English aren't even all that far apart in their linguistic origins. Extrapolate these differences between say Hindi or Mandarin and English, and the mind can only begin to imagine how differently these people must perceive the world and relate to it. Added to this, our language is constantly changing (I would normally use the word "evolving", but I didn't want to alienate any creationists that might be reading). Just reading a play by William Shakespeare will demonstrate just how much the English language has changed in the past 400 years. It has changed so much that learned Academics debate furiously about the meaning of certain words and phrases that subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) alter the understood meaning of the plays.

The Holy Book

This brings me to the main intent of this essay. The argument that caused me to break the cyclic logic of fundamentalism, and allowed me the freedom to intellectually assess the evidence for myself and more honestly strive for an understanding of the mysteries of life. Or as a fundamentalist Christian might put, the lie that the devil sold me to win my soul and take me to a hellish eternity.

The bible is a collection of works with many different human authors over a period of a few thousand years. Or again if you’re a fundamentalist Christian, the Bible is a collection of works all authored by God but entrusted to a number of different humans over a period of a few thousand years. Regardless of your position on this, the defining argument for fundamentalists is that "The Bible is the written word of a perfect God and therefore infallible". OK, so let's break this down. I don't even want to get into the debate here about the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible which are well documented. I will instead assume that if you are a biblical literalist, then you will have arguments against these supposed "contradictions", or you are blissfully ignorant of them and don't care, in which case I'm surprised you've read this far.

So from the definitions here, Firstly God is "perfect". This by definition, at least in my mind, means that God when communicating with say the angels or even just thinking aloud to himself, or creating the universe by his "word", would not use an imperfect human language to perform this act of divine communication. So God's native concept of "language" would be drastically different to anything any human actually speaks. OK then, but God wanted to communicate with us his created cognisant beings to explain his plan for our lives, and his elaborate rules for gaining salvation and entering into eternity in the nice place as opposed to the horrible place once our mortal bodies had stopped functioning. This would seem an important thing for such a God to want to do. He decides that the best way to do this is to reveal it to various people over a few thousand years in their native language. Right here is where I have my first problem. Translation is imperfect. It is notoriously easy to translate things incorrectly even between very similar human languages let alone between a perfect divine language and an imperfect human language. There is an old saying "The translator lies". So even in the original Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Aramaic and Ancient Greek that the collection of books we know as the bible was written in, there is one level of translation involved. To get to where we are today though, which is to say to a Bible written in our modern languages, involves at the least one more step of translation from one of these ancient languages which are no longer in normal every day use, and are now more for academic interest, into our modern language. The sheer amount of opportunity for inaccuracy in this step renders the task frightfully problematic. This is evidenced by the sheer number of different versions of the bible that are available in English alone, and the constant debates between different adherents of their favourite translations. At this point my belief that what we call the Bible has any claim to being "the written word of God" crumbled and shattered into pieces.

One might be tempted to argue that even though their are different translations the underlying doctrinal beliefs that come from the Bible still hold true. In response, I would simply point to the number of different denominations and factions in the Christian church today. If God really thought it was that vital to have a core set of doctrines then he's doing an extremely rotten job of communicating it to modern humans.

Life after Biblical Literalism

This was the start of the slippery slide that made me question everything I ever believed about Christianity. It made me realise that the Bible should not be given special treatment and be elevated above the critique given to any other historical document. It gave me the freedom to stop taking everything in the Bible as literal truth and to be able to understand it as a collection of books written in a particular period of time for very specific purposes that the people in those times had a far better chance of understanding than I ever will, with my language and my subjective understanding of reality. That's not to say that I don’t still find parts of the bible unbelievably inspiring and enlightening. The elegance of Jesus' words "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" is amazingly poignant and very applicable to our lives today. The problem is, the Bible is statically locked in time and place, and as a consequence there are a great many things for which it does not and cannot speak. Biblical literalists try desperately to extrapolate, but in my opinion just end up causing pain both for there own adherents and for others who they try to inflict their out-dated ideas onto.

One of the things that bothers me about my whole journey to this point, is why it took me so long. It wasn't until I was 25 that I really started to ask first-order questions about the faith I was raised with. The only conclusion I can come to is that the combination of the brainwashing working so well, and my own personal insecurities as a young adult caused me to want to keep believing it for so long.

My Response to Wall Streets Response

2011-10-30T10:56:00.001+11:00

Wall Streets response to Occupy Wall Street

I find it quite insulting. My mother was a primary school teacher, and she worked very hard. Not only did she have to drive almost an hour each way to get to school, after working a full day, she'd then have to come home, prepare dinner for the family, and then sit at her desk until late at night preparing the next days lessons. All for such a small salary. The only benefit was the decent amount of holidays she had, half of which were spent preparing for the next semesters classes.

I find this response arrogant, and displays the ignorance of someone who has only ever worked on Wall Street. I find it laughable that these people think they could possibly settle for a teachers salary. They don't seem to realise the extent of the lifestyle change they'd have to make to adjust to the disparity in income. I am a reasonably well paid software engineer, and earn significantly more than both of my parents combined, yet I don't think even I could deal with the lifestyle change that I would require to change my career to teaching, even if I could walk straight into a teaching job today.

I do respect what these very smart people do, and I don't think anyone is suggesting they change jobs. Part of the problem with occupy wall street is that there is a lot of confusion about what is being asked for. Things like eliminating corporate corruption, the unfairness of corporate criminals going unpunished while defaulting mortgagees are kicked out on the street, the ever increasing disparity in income for the super rich, corporate bailouts, and a plethora of other issues all thrown in together. My personal concern is that the system we have been building is unsustainable. Sure wealth disparity is a natural part of life, and from an economic point of view it can be a very good thing. However, there is only so much disparity that the majority will accept before there is a revolution. If you want to base your right to be greedy/wealthy on the concept of “the trickle down effect”, you have to be sure the wealth is trickling down, not accumulating at the top. Maybe occupy wall street is a warning that we are approaching a limit that is unacceptable. This response from Wall Street sounds to me very much like “Let them eat cake”.

You don’t incarcerate ‘clients’

2011-10-28T11:13:00.001+11:00

I’m not going to fill up more of the internet explaining how disgraceful Australia’s refugee policy is. Many, and much more eloquent people have done this already. I just want to draw attention to the sickening abuse of the word ‘client’ that the private security firm Serco use to refer to the people they guard. This is a classic PR trick. Take a term with harsh connotations and water it down by using a more generic or (as I argue here) a completely different word instead. For example, calling a “Garbage man” a “Sanitization Professional”. The technique can also be very effectively used in reverse, such as renaming “Female circumcision” to “Female genital mutilation”. In this case it takes a practice that is protected by religious traditions, and calls it out for what it is.

We need to be very careful of the words we use to name things, in particular when naming relationships. Our language plays a pivotal role in defining how we think, and consequently how we act as a society. Personally I don’t want to be part of a society that mandatorily locks asylum seekers up. Everyone should have the right to seek protection from persecution, without incurring further persecution. To call the people who have been mandatorily detained ‘clients’ is misleading and attempts to hide what we are really doing to these people. Call them “prisoners”, “inmates”, or any other synonym thereof, but the only client that Serco has is the Australian Government.

If we call these refugees ‘prisoners’, then we are forced to conclude, at the end of the processing; when roughly 80+% of them are found to be genuine refugees fleeing from persecution, that we ‘imprisoned’ a vulnerable person who did nothing wrong. If we continue to call them ‘clients’, then it may just be possible to convince ourselves that they are merely purchasing a service from us, a transaction entered into willingly on their part, and the conclusion is a successful ’transaction’. Everybody is happy, and the responsibility has been very subtly shifted. The Australian public can go on burying their heads in the sand and ignoring the grief and trauma we are causing through our Governments policies. Denying someone’s freedom should never be seen as a business transaction.

A rose by any other name, a milonga in any other venue

2011-10-09T05:19:00.001+11:00

I’d heard the rumours when I was back in Melbourne. Cachirulo had moved to Villa Malcolm. Even 12000 klms away, that just sounded incongruous. Villa Malcolm was at the heart of nuevo tango. All the beautiful young things went there, those too young to have felt the need for plastic surgery, those that were experimenting with wild outrageous moves involving an embrace that moved fluidly between fully closed, and dramatically open, and even off axis. Snooty little porteñas who wouldn’t condescend to look at a gringo let alone dance with one. Arrogant porteños who cared more about how freaking hot they looked on the dance floor, than who they bumped into when trying to lead their latest DNI inspired sequence. Cachirulo was in comparison the ‘ultra-orthodoxy’ of tango. The rules posted on the wall at the former venue, Maipu 444 stated: “We dance strictly milonguero style”, “We follow the line of dance” “heels stay on the ground”, “we use the cabaceo to invite” etc…. The organizers Hector and Norma were very strict about this. I even have a friend who dances nuevo and made the mistake of venturing to Cachirulo be asked to leave if he insisted on dancing open embrace. As opposed to the lasa fair first come first served approach to seating at a normal Villa Malcolm night, Hector insisted on seating everyone explicitly in a spot that he felt best suited… (I want to say them, but I can’t, the seating arrangements at Cachirulo serve the milonga more than any individual). I have heard Hector referred to as a “tango Nazi”. Regardless of your feelings on all of the protocols and traditions of Cachirulo, it attracts some of the best social tango dancers in Buenos Aires, and as such fast became one of my favourite milongas. I spent 7 months going every Saturday night to this milonga back in 2008-2009, many times arriving at around 8pm and staying ‘til they played La Cumparsita (some time around 4:30am). Even managed to get invited to their Christmas party in L’anus. Sure, there were still some egos, and attitudes, but I consistently had fantastic dances at Cachirulo, and the DJ there, ‘Carlos Rey’ became my favourite DJ in Buenos Aires.

It was with more than a little apprehension that I ventured to Villa Malcolm last Saturday night to see for myself. I received a very warm welcome from the organisers, and after chatting a little, Hector showed me to a reasonably good seat on the men’s wall. As I sat down I began to notice the lengths they had gone to to make it look and feel like Cachirulo in Maipu. The seating had been arranged exactly how it was in Maipu, and the tables had been covered in a similar style. There was of course the wall of women on the opposite side of the dance floor to the wall of men. For a few seconds I even forgot that I was in Villa Malcolm as I looked around at some of the familiar faces. Milongueros came up to me and greeted me with the traditional Argentine kiss on the cheek. One even said to me in spanish, “You returned”, and then followed it up with “It’s like a drug no?”

I looked around again, and saw Villa Malcolm, and it just felt so bizarre, like a collision of cultures. I couldn’t forget the poor night I had here just over a week ago at the infamous “Tango Cool”, being snubbed by the snooty porteñas, and began to worry that I may have similar fate tonight. The fearing that it was the venue itself that was jinxed was hard to shake, plus it had been over 2 years since I was last here. I saw one of my old favourites dancing with her regular partner, and smiled at her as she danced past. She returned the smile. This gave me confidence, and next tanda saw me dancing with this wonderful woman. Carlos Rey was still spinning the discs, and as the night wore on, and I had some wonderful dances, I began to realise that a milonga has very little to do with the venue, and much more to do with the organisers, the DJ, the day of the week, and the people it attracts.

So I guess it’s no surprise where I’m heading this Saturday night.

Back in Buenos Aires

2011-10-02T10:19:00.001+11:00

It’s been almost 2 weeks now that I have been back in Buenos Aires, and it’s been a real mix of emotions. Joy, sadness, happiness, anxiety, relief, exhilaration, frustration. Buenos Aires tends to amplify everything. The highs are ecstatic, the lows devastating… but one thing’s for sure, you know you’re alive.

I have been out dancing every night except for one. This too has been a mixed bag. One milonga I went to I was snobbed off all night by snotty little porteñas’ who think their excrement smells oh so sweet, and wouldn’t even condescend to look at a gringo, let alone dance with one, even though their tango isn’t all that great, and spent most of the night dancing with beginners. Fortunately not all porteñas are like that, and I have had some magic moments. The second night I was here, I was taken out to a milonga way out of town, that doesn’t even appear in any of the tango magazines. It was a donation milonga (i.e. no official entrance charge but you are asked to give a donation), and I had the most awesome time. I was reminded of why we tango dancers insist on coming to Buenos Aires, every single dance was pure heaven. The connection with the music blows you away, the presence in the dance, just perfect.

I had forgotten just how difficult life is here. Not so much for me, I know how privileged I am, and even though getting certain things done can be challenging at times, I know I have it pretty easy here. Life for the people who live and work here; the lower classes, and even the struggling middle class, have it very tough. Let alone those who have no job or home. Just taking a ride on the subte (underground) brings it home. hardly anyone smiles, and if you look close enough you can see a deep weariness chiselled into most of the faces, and a resigned frustration in their eyes. Having said that, if you engage most people, they can soon become jovial and animated if they like you.

Highway 1 and Santa Barbara

2011-09-25T06:18:00.001+10:00

Having made a few friends from Santa Barbara at the milongas in LA, I had no shortage of people willing to show me around. Firstly though, I really wanted to do one of the suggestions my Taxi Adventure friend had made. Hwy 1 runs up the coast of California, and promised some pretty spectacular scenery, so after the conference had ended, I attempted to set off.

In the hotel car park, I decided to try to find my passport so that I had something to show the police if I got pulled over. I went through my carryon, without success, I then opened the trunk of the car and pulled out my suitcase, unlocked it and went through that. It then dawned on me that I had left it in the hotel room that I had since checked out of. I raced to the concierge, and was informed that the room had yet to be cleaned. He arranged for security to meet me at the room. When I arrived at the room, the cleaner had her cart sitting outside my door, but was nowhere to be seen. As the security arrived, the cleaner heard the commotion, and came out and before we even entered the room, told me “here it is”, opening her top draw and handing me my flight centre travel pack containing my passport and flight tickets. I was very relieved. After struggling with the GPS lock code that I hadn’t anticipated, I was finally on my way.

First stop however was a cafe called Intelligencia in Venice (suburb of LA) that a friend had recommended after hearing me complain about the “hideous coffee in the US, and that Starbucks actually made sense here”. As I walked into the cafe, I immediately felt completely out of place. I’m not sure what the collective noun for turtle-neck-wearing apple mac users is… flange??? band???? flock???? pride???? culture???? hive???? whatever, there was one there. I ordered my cappuccino, found a seat and resolutely took out my brand spanking new Windows 8 (developer preview) slate PC… and proceeded to play Word Hunt in resolute defiance of the obvious protocol in place. The coffee was a tad bitter for my liking, but certainly was by far the best coffee I had consumed in the US. Sorry, but still not as good as Melbourne.

After making a few mistakes with my GPS, and the damn thing freezing on me, I eventually found a petrol station. I pulled up at the pump, selected the fuel I wanted, and then waited…. expecting the attendant to allow the pump to flow. I waited for a good 2 minutes before reading the sign “Cash customers must pay before fuelling”. After working things out with the attendant, the fuel flowed, and I was on my way.

My next destination was Malibu, but only after navigating LA peek hour traffic. One experience I would rather have done without.

I Travelled along Highway 1, which displayed some fantastic scenery. Reminding me a little of The Great Ocean Road, although, much more built up, and much wider highways. I arrived in Malibu just in time to see a spectacular sunset that stayed with me pretty much all along Highway 1.

I eventually arrived in Santa Barbara a little after 8pm.

The next day my friend took me to yet another coffee shop, determined to convince me that coffee in the US could actually be palatable… and yes, it was palatable, but sorry… still not as good as Melbourne. After this she took me to Sterns Wharf where we enjoyed a beautiful sunny day by the sea. We walked around the beach, and then decided on “Moby Dicks Restaurant” for dinner, where I tried the Oysters Rockafella for the first time, and really loved it.

I was also able to witness another spectacular Californian sunset as we dined.

The next day, my friend took me to an Australian owned winery called Kalyra, but not before taking me to yet another coffee shop. This time I ordered a dark chocolate mocha which was really nice, even though I would have to class it as lolly coffee. We did some wine tasiting at the winery, and purchased some nice dessert wines.

After that, it was a quick dash back to LA to squeeze in 45 minutes of dancing at the Argentine Association, and then back in the car to catch the worlds longest flight from LA to Bs As.

Disneyland

2011-09-24T08:00:00.001+10:00

It was always a childhood dream of my sister and me to visit Disney land, but 2 things made this dream impossible as a child. Firstly, we were never really well off enough to afford such a trip, and secondly, my father would never have flown. As we got older, we learned to sublimate our childhood yearnings for such frivolous fun into a cynical critique of western consumerism and that seemed to satisfy us as adults. I had pretty much resigned to the fact that I was never going to see Disneyland, as there was no real reason for me to go out of my way to visit Anaheim California. It wasn’t until I booked my tickets for the BUILD Windows conference which just so happened to be in Anaheim, that the question arose again.

I struggled with the question of wether to go or not, I wasn’t quite sure how the leftist, sceptical adult that I had become would react when faced with some of the most banal displays of western consumerism known to man kind. However, I figured that the odds of me being that close to Disneyland again were pretty slim, and I may as well suck it up.

I decided to go the day before the conference. I was advised to take plenty of water, and food as the prices in Disneyland were extortionate. I payed my $80 entry fee, and proceeded.

I have to say that Disneyland certainly had a magical charm to it. I discovered that my inner child had not quite been strangled to death by the cynical adult, and in fact both of them were able to have some fun that day. Although primarily for children, the people at Disneyland had not forgotten that children often drag adults along with them, and so there was adult based entertainment as well. I stopped by the Disneyland opera house and saw an animatronics feature called “Memorable moments with Lincoln”, and I was reminded powerfully of just how much the civil war still impacts on the psyche of Americans today.

The one ride that I really wanted to go on “Pirates of the Caribbean” was closed, so I had to make do with others. I enjoyed the splash mountain and the Thunder Mountain rides. Also The American rivers cruise on the steam boat was very relaxing.

There was also a demonstration of the robot ASIMOV in tomorrow land which was aimed more at children, but had enough content to keep the science geek in me happy.

I decided to abuse my digestive system and try a corn dog from the “traditional corn dog stand”, and it lived up to my expectations, which is more a reflection on my lack of expectations than any quality on the part of the corn dog. It reminded me of the pluto pups we used to get in Australia as a kid, although, I have to say pluto pups are much better.

I stuck around for the parade which is the main event in Disneyland. It was an extravagant display of all of the Disney cartoon characters bought to life with music and dancing, and I could see how children would really enjoy it.

All in all, I enjoyed my day out, but I think it would be much more fun either as a kid, or with a group of friends. I don’t think I’d go back if I was in the area, I’d probably prefer to spend the day in LA and catch a milonga, but I’m glad I finally had the opportunity to go.

Tango in LA

2011-09-23T06:42:00.001+10:00

The first thing any self respecting tango dancer does when they decide to visit another city in the world is to open Google, and type in the name of the city, followed by the word “tango” to see what their options are. It is always exciting going to a new city with lots of people that you have never danced with before, but it is also sometimes a little confronting as you don’t know anyone, and you don’t know the subset of the protocols used within that scene. Basic things like do they play tanda’s, do they use the cabaceo to invite etc…. Of course when I typed in the words “Anaheim Tango” into Google, I really didn’t get much joy. It was then I decided that I may just have to spend the weekend before the conference in Los Angeles. Typing in “Los Angeles tango” got better results, but it wasn’t until I typed in “Los Angeles milongas” that I eventually found a blog that aggregated all of the tango in Los Angeles. I also managed to make contact with the blogs author so that I felt like I actually knew someone there. As it turned out I never actually met up with the blogs author, however his advice on tango and other matters proved invaluable.

When you only have 2 days in a city, it tends to focus your efforts, so after getting off the plane at 6:30am, the first chance to go out for a tango was later that same night at El Encuentro in Sherman Oaks. I arrived about an hour after the milonga had officially started, and dropped the blog authors name and that I was from Melbourne, Australia to get me a warm welcome from the organizer. I watched the floor for a while, and noted the good dancers. There seemed to be a reasonably good level, and I knew that if I could just get over the nervousness about asking for a first dance, I should be in for a pretty good night. As it happened, I accidently stared at one of the girls who I had picked as being a good dancer for a bit too long, and she took it as a cabaceo, and promptly agreed to dance with me. Aside from a few refusals later that night, I barely sat down all night. I think it was about 2:30am when I finally and dragged myself away. I had some wonderful dances, and was overall very impressed with the level of dancing in LA. I also had a few not so fabulous dances, but that' happens from time to time, especially if you are not known in the scene, and if you ask women you’ve never seen dance. I met a table of people who drove down from Santa Barbara, and told them that I had been toying with the idea of driving up to Santa Barbara after the conference. I was quickly offered a couch by one of the girls I had connected with particularly well, and we danced about 6 tandas together that night. My trip was starting to come together, and it was only my first night in LA. The music was reasonably good, although there was an extraneous vals inserted in the middle of a tango tanda, and some of the the tandas didn’t flow that well together, but I managed to have a thoroughly enjoyable night, and made a few new friends.

The next night was The Argentine Association. I got there about 8ish and the class was still going, so I got talking to the Argentinian man at the door, it was good to get a bit of Spanish practice. There weren’t as many good dancers at this milonga as there was at El Encuentro, however, my friend from Santa Barbara made a special effort to come down, so I still had a good night.

I was pretty sure that the conference would take up most of my time during the week, but my friend from Santa Barbara turned out to be very persuasive, and got me to drive up to LA on Tuesday night after the conference had devolved into lots of drinking and playing computer games which didn’t really interest me. It was a quite night at Leonardo’s Night Club, and mainly danced with my friend.

My final tango in LA was a flash 45 minute visit (due partly to traffic, and partly to my fear of missing my flight to Buenos Aires) to The Argentine Association, where I managed to squeeze in 5 tandas before diving into the car and racing to the airport.

All in all, I really enjoyed the Los Angeles tango scene, and would love to go back there sometime.

LA–The Food

2011-09-20T07:13:00.001+10:00

I have to confess, I have inside information when it comes to this. A friend of mine grew up in California. She is also a well known food critic, so if I couldn’t get a decent meal in California, there was something wrong. I met Layne in Buenos Aires a few years back where she captivated my imagination with a project she had started and referred to as “Taxi Adventures”. Someone seriously needs to give Layne her own travel show, but while the networks have foolishly ignored her, the rumour is there’s a book in the works based on her taxi adventures.

My first meal in LA was certainly not from Layne’s list of suggestions, and was more out of necessity, cheapness and jet-lag that I took advantage of the free breakfast at “Denny’s” that came with signing up the “The Best Western” customer loyalty program. I won’t go into details, but lets just say that I’ve learnt my lesson, and will avoid Denny’s in the future.

Anyhow, Layne made a number of suggestions with respects to eating in LA. Unfortunately being there for only the weekend, I was not able to sample all of them. Of her suggestions, I was able to try two. Firstly Tommy’s Chilli Cheese burger from the “original” and in Layne’s opinion, the best Tommy’s hamburger stand on Beverly Blvd.

I found it no problems (thanks in no small part to the advice she and others had given about getting a rental with a GPS), and as I wasn’t very hungry, decided to walk a bit down Beverly Blvd. I have to confess, it wasn’t quite the glitzy glamorous LA I had been expecting. This was definitely the low socio-economic side of town, and very obviously heavily Hispanic. In fact, most of the signs in this area were in Spanish, and I only heard English spoken when I went back to get my hamburger. After walking about 7 or 8 blocks, I decided I was hungry enough and headed back. I asked for exactly what Layne had suggested, a chilli cheeseburger. I was asked if I’d like fries with that, and remembering the lessons I’d learnt from Morgan Spurlock, declined. She seemed to look at me a bit weird, but I wasn’t that hungry. I waited about 1 and a half minutes before my burger was un-ceremoniously dumped on the counter in front of me. I found a bench near-by and examined what I had been given. The meat paddy was a big thick slice of beef, it had a thick slice of tomato, and some pickled cucumbers, all of which was drowning in a mixture of thick, rich chilli sauce and melted cheese. It tasted very decadent; the rich chilli sauce was just hot enough, but not too hot, and combined with the cheese, it oozed out everywhere. I now understood why people generally have chips with it. Deep fried potato chips would make the perfect dipping implement to clean up the fallout as you attempt to consume the burger. Definitely worth checking out.

The Second was to eat as many bagels as possible from the “Brooklyn Bagel Bakery”. Now we have pretty good bagels back home, and to be honest, it’s not something I’d regularly go out of my way for, however, I enjoy them from time to time. The Brooklyn Bagel Bakery was just a few blocks up from Tommy’s Hamburger stand, so it felt a little like deja vu when I rocked up to roughly the same place on the second day. I walked into the bakery, and started to look at my options. I was second in line, and as I had picked out the bagels I wanted, first the cheese and onion, then the cheese, one by one the woman in front of me who was obviously planning a big party, cleaned out the bakery of those flavours. How rude. I ended up settling on an onion bagel and a jalapeño bagel. I also purchased some cream cheese to go with them, and decided to try to find myself a near-by park to eat my lunch. I decided not to switch the GPS on this time, but instead to just drive down Beverly blvd. Block after block I kept driving, and no park did I find. I did notice though that as I travelled, the houses slowly became more grand, until I felt so far from the scenery of the bakery, I could have easily been in a different country. The run-down units and street full of homeless had given way to pristine tree lined mansions and fancy cafe’s. This is the more glitzy side of LA that I was expecting. Eventually after driving many miles (yes I am getting into some Americanisms as it confuses them when you talk about kilometres), I eventually found a tiny square of grass that could almost (if you squint hard enough) be called a park. I parked the car and sat on a bench in the “park” and ate my bagels with cream cheese. They were very nice, and compare favourably with those from home. I actually regretted not buying some more for my adventures the next day.

After my lunch I decided I needed a coffee (and maybe some dessert). So I walked a few blocks up and found a cafe called “Shaky Alibi” that looked promising.

I had decided to set my expectations for coffee fairly low as I know that it’s very hard to compete with Melbourne for coffee, unless you’re somewhere like Italy. Having said that, my expectations where lowered even more when they bought me a cappuccino in a soup bowl. Even with my expectations lowered, the coffee struggled to meet them. At the end of the day it was a source of caffeine and being an addict, I wasn’t likely to refuse it.

However, they also had waffles, and the awesomeness of a waffle covered in home made dark chocolate ice cream, and bananas, and the chattiness and friendliness of the servers managed to take my mind off the coffee.

As grateful as I am for Laynes suggestions, I do always like to discover one or two things for myself as well. I noticed in one of the guide books in my Hotel room a reference to a place on Santa Monica Blvd called “Bar Pintxos”. As I am a big fan of Sheryl Crow, and having the annoyingly addictive melody “until the sun comes up over Santa Monica boulevard” rattling around in my head, I decided to check it out. I also wanted to see how authentic pintxos were done so I could see if we were getting something similar at “Naked For Satan” (a pintxos bar that has recently opened up in Melbourne.

I sat down at the bar, and after ordering a local beer started browsing the menu. I struck up a number of conversations with other patrons at the bar, and we compared food as they bought it out. LA people seem to be very friendly. All the food was delightful, the mushrooms were particularly good as well as the garlic prawns (although I probably shouldn’t have had them before going out to tango), and I couldn’t help thinking that “Naked for Satan” was relatively authentic in that they are charging quite dear prices for tiny amounts of high quality food. I guess it comes down to a value judgement in the end, and for me pintxos will always be a special treat for when I am feeling rich.

Driving in Los Angeles

2011-09-12T10:58:00.001+10:00

I asked a few locals advice about what to do in California, and all of them unanimously said “rent a car with a GPS”. Hrmmm… being a huge public transport advocate, and also having lived in Melbourne for 7 years without a vehicle of any description, I was initially a little bit reluctant. Add to this the whole issue of driving on the right-hand side of the road, and I was especially hesitant. But, I asked their advice, and knowing that I did have a fair bit of travelling to do, so I decided to overcome my fears and ideologies, and rented a car. The first obstacle was figuring out where to rent them from. After clearing customs at LAX, I thought I’d just follow the signs to the car rental places like at Sydney or Melbourne airport. No such thing. All I saw were signs that said “Rental Car Shuttles”. After walking around for a while trying to find where the rental car kiosks were, and flip-flopping between just getting a cab or shuttle to my hotel, and sorting out car rental later, I eventually figured out that the rental car places were so far away from the terminal that they required a shuttle bus to pick potential customers up and take them there. Not having a booking, I hopped on an the first shuttle that came my way. It was an Avis shuttle. Not having a booking wasn’t a problem at all, and I was soon in my Kia Rio with a GPS programmed to take me to the hotel.

I was very aware of the fact that I had never driven on the right-side of the road, and that made me super conscious of the fact. I kept repeating to myself, I’m in the US, they drive on the right, right-hand turns don’t cross traffic, left had turns do”. I discovered soon enough that there was much more I needed to be aware of than just which side of the road to drive on.

Firstly, a lot of the iconography you rely on for fast information assimilation is different in a foreign country. This affects more than just driving. Even crossing the road takes me a good few seconds to figure out exactly where the signals are, I have been trained by conventions in Australia to expect them to be in a certain location and to have a certain look. In the US they are in a different relative location, and look significantly different. Add to that they often don’t have pedestrian buttons at intersections, but just rely on the continuous cycling of the lights to give everyone a fair chance at the intersection.

This difference in iconography was important on my trip from the airport to the hotel, as I could not seem to find a speed limit signs anywhere. My brain was just not picking up the differences in the signs. Of course to add to it, in Australia we use kilometres, but the Americans use miles. It is quite interesting how your eye becomes trained to picking up on certain visuals.

US speed limit sign vs Australian speed limit sign.

Thankfully stop signs are exactly the same, and traffic lights aren’t too different either.

Another thing that I’m finding is doing my brain in at the moment is the concept of the driver being on the left-hand side of the vehicle. This really messes with years of ingrained spatial awareness. Keeping the car in the centre of the lane gives you a very awkward feeling that you constantly have to fight against. So many times I have gone to look in my right-hand rear vision mirror to change lanes only to see the GPS I had set up on the dash-board exactly where my mind expects to see the potential on-coming traffic.

Also the road rules are subtly different. The “Right turn on red if clear” rule makes complete sense to me, but it is just so hard to break my conditioning and actually go through a red light, but of course if you don’t, you risk the wrath of drivers behind you who also want to turn right.

All this requires you to be in a state of awareness about your driving that years of driving in your home country has rendered unnecessary for day to day driving. The danger is always present that the mind will simply slip back into auto-pilot and you’ll do a left-hand turn and end up facing on-coming traffic, or make some other driving guffaw calling down the ire of other motorists and pedestrians just going about their normal lives.

Travelling Again

2011-09-12T10:15:00.001+10:00

I am currently travelling overseas, partly for work partly for pleasure… actually mostly for pleasure. As with other times, I find that travelling to foreign countries creates a lot to reflect on, and consequently write about. My first stop will be California. I am currently in a hotel in Los Angeles, on Monday I will be driving to Anaheim where I will be attending the Microsoft Build Windows conference, then I am planning to head to Santa Barbra for a bit of R & R. After that I will be visiting Buenos Aires. I will use this my personal blog as essentially a travel diary, but my geek blog as a means of recording my thoughts on the conference.

Conficker and Password Advice

2009-01-24T05:30:00.002+11:00

I was just reading an article in The Age today about the Conficker virus, and the article was pretty straight forward… bad virus, infected lots of machines, uses brute force to crack passwords. Some of the advice that was given was obvious, use stronger passwords, make sure your OS is up to date, and any anti virus software you use is also up to date. However, the last sentence really bothered me

From the article :

"Go get a notebook, keep it next to your computer and record your password in it. No hacker in the world can hack the written page locked away in your office."

This is a quote from David Perry a “Software Security Specialist” from Trend Micro.

I have not heard worse advice regarding password security in many many years. Sure a virus can not leap out of the computer file through your notebook and try everything written down, but what about anyone who uses your office. Your cleaner, your spouse, your kids, their friends etc…. It’s the same basic principle with you bank card PIN number. If you write it down, then another person can potentially see it and use it, and if you follow the other advice in the article about using numbers and special characters (which you should) it makes it quite easy for a human to pick out a password from a heap of other random scribbling on your desk-side notepad. You may well say, but it’s only my spouse and my kids that use my office, and I trust them. Sure, but I’ve never seen it as an issue of trust in these cases, I see it as an issue of protection. I trust my spouse implicitly, but will never tell her my password. The reason being that if there is ever a security violation using my account, and my company asks me who else may have been able to find out my password, I can honestly and confidently say no-one, not even my spouse, there-by protecting her from any suspicion.

So what’s the solution. We know for a fact that username and password is a flawed security model, and we often talk about three-factor security, ie username, password and hardware key like a smartcard, as being more desirable. However, the reality is that the vast majority of systems are still protected by the humble username and password (two-factor security), so how do you choose a password that will protect your computer without the dreaded fear of forgetting it?

My tips are as follows. Pick something from your life that is obscure enough that other people wouldn’t be able to guess. As an example you may be into 70’s rock music, and in particular you may love the album from WHAM called “Make it Big”. That’s pretty obscure (not to say quite sad), or you may have just finished reading Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” which is in itself an achievement worth remembering long after. Pick something from this aspect of your life, a phrase or a name, so in the first instance you might pick “Guilty feet have got no rhythm”, in the second case lets say one of the characters names “Dimitry Fyodorovich”, although a minor character may work even better, now adapt this to a password. Leave out some words and leave out spaces (if you want), then replace certain letters with numbers, capitalize others, and replace others with special characters like this “gui1tY#eeTn0rhythM”. In the second case something like this might would work “d!m!trYfY0d0r0v!ch”. Make sure the password length is greater than say twelve characters, and satisfies any other constraints your Systems Administrators want to put on your corporate network. Now you have a password that is, for you, fairly easy to remember without the necessity of writing it down, and extremely hard for a brute force crack to guess, or (and this is where the obscure thing comes in), no one who knows you will be able to guess either.

The other good thing is you now have a scheme for creating really interesting passwords, and it means that you can change the password regularly, and each time it is a game to see just how creative you can get in picking your new password. The more creative you get, the harder it will be for anyone or anything to break it, and the easier it will be for you to remember what it is.

Technorati tags: Security

The problem with Humanism

2008-12-16T03:52:00.001+11:00

As an Atheist, if anyone asked me how I would define my world view, and a subsequent system of ethics, I would have to say that humanism is my chosen philosophy. It appeals to me that as humans we are responsible for our own destiny (whatever that may be). As much as I like the ideas endorsed by humanism, I do believe that it suffers from a few problems. The main problem being that of an assumption of a certain level of intelligence or at the very least a certain level of education for an individual.

As systems of ethics, religions have survived very well from an evolutionary point of view because they short cut a lot of critical thinking to arrive at (in most cases) some very important ends. I'm not talking here about the fanaticism of strapping explosives onto oneself, or even the evangelical fever of attempting to convert everyone to your way of thinking. I'm talking about basics like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or "Thou shalt not murder", "thou shalt not covet" etc.... These basic ideas come through not only in many religions, but also in humanism itself. The difference is that religion takes a massive short cut by claiming "God says <insert ethical code here> and therefore you have to do it otherwise <insert divine punishment here>". This way of thinking, this threat of supernatural consequences has historically been extremely effective in keeping vast societies of human beings generally adhering to a similar set of ethics. This is one reason I believe that the various memes associated with religion have been very successful in perpetuating themselves throughout our evolutionary history. This is how it has been ever since humans developed the ability of abstract thought and consequently tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Humanism has no ultimate individual punishment for its adherents in this life, and no afterlife. So instead it relies on the ability of the adherent to think through not only the possible individual consequences of any particular action, but also the more ethereal social aspects of the action. This suffers from the classic prisoners' dilemma situation in which acting for individual benefit will always (from the point of view of the individual) have a better outcome than acting out of a social conscience, but acting with a social conscience will have the optimal group outcome.

I remember in my philosophy course at university, when my lecturer first explained "prisoners' dilemma" to us and discussed possible ways of solving the "prisoners' dilemma". His analogy was of a Godfather character who would say to each prisoner, "I need you guys out of jail as soon as possible, so if either of you squeals, it's concrete shoes for you". This brings about an obvious solution to the decision matrix and forces the prisoners into acting for the benefit of the group instead of for their own benefit. Religion is the ultimate Godfather with concrete shoes. There is no need to think through any possible consequences in this lifetime, and no need to trust in your fellow man to do the right thing. Any decision matrix is always going to be clouded by the threat of divine punishment aimed at drawing the individual towards whatever the pre-determined decision should be.

The tenets that form most religious ethical systems are based on a mixture of heuristically determined social values, and specific values decided upon by those in the hierarchical power system of the religion. These ethical tenets aren't necessarily bad in and of themselves. In fact, some of them become self evident when you take a humanistic approach to ethics. Others become meaningless, or even dangerous when taken out of their historical and/or geo-political setting.

The problem for humanism is that unless someone is willing to put a serious amount of thought into the way they live their lives and the value system they employ, there is no way to ensure a socially optimal set of values or ethical tenets. This amount of thought requires an understanding of the prisoners dilemma scenario (not necessarily exactly as it is stated, but certainly the ethos of the problem), and then a giant leap of trust in your fellow man (humanist or not) to make the same decision to benefit the group. Obviously this dilemma gets more and more complicated the more 'prisoners' you add to it, but the end result is the same.

For the people that profess to adhere to humanism, generally they are willing to put in the necessary thought and act accordingly for the benefit of the human species. The issue is that there appears to be only a small percentage in any given population that are able and willing to employ the necessary forethought themselves to arrive at such a set of ethics. For whatever reason (laziness, ignorance, stupidity, lack of education) the vast majority of humans still require the short circuit provided by some divine consequence, to cajole them into behaving in a way to benefit the group instead of themselves. I just can't see at this point in time that humanism is ready to replace religion as a mass means of crowd control. I would like to think that humans would eventually out-evolve the need for religion (at least for the purposes of determining a system of ethics), but evolution has no specific direction or higher purpose at all, so unless the inherent inefficiencies in religion out-weigh the 'benefits' that religion provides, this won't happen.

Anniversaries (Writing task)

2008-08-05T10:49:00.001+10:00

So this weeks writing task was on Anniversaries. I think this is my weakest effort yet, but for completeness, I shall put it here.

My partner and I aren't married, and see little reason to get married. When our relationship started, there was a very grey area between friends & lovers that spanned a few months, so we don't really have an anniversary. What we do celebrate is the anniversary of when we first spoke to each other. Six months of seeing each other at milongas & classes, not a word. Then at one tango bar, at the edge of a crowded dance floor we see each other, and she simply says, "I think you're the only regular I haven't danced with, mind if I ask you for a dance next time I see you?"
The rest, as they say, is history.

Duende (Writing Task)

2008-07-25T01:42:00.001+10:00

This weeks writing task was on "Duende". Duende is a term coined by Federico Garcia Lorca to describe a certain spiritual intensity of a creative performer. This intensity comes often from a very dark place and goes beyond any concepts of artistic proficiency. It lifts the observer to another place, beyond the physical realm. The only way to truly understand the concept of Duende is to experience it. So here's my piece.

Duende

Duende happens. Duende surprises. I sit enjoying a drink at a milonga chatting to my friends. There are no expectations, no idea that something spiritual is going to happen. I mean how can an atheist experience the spiritual?
Waiting for a tango orchestra to start, I'd heard them before, at the markets in front of the church. The piano was out of tune, the sound was tossed and broken on the wind. I had no expectations. I even hear one of the bandeneon players practicing at 11am in our apartment building when I'm debating getting out of bed.
The orchestra starts, the piano is still out of tune, but they have duende.

Risk (Writing task)

2008-07-17T09:12:00.001+10:00

This is the continuation of the writing tasks that I am doing as part of being involved in a writers group of ex-pats while living in Buenos Aires. This weeks topic was risk, and I am a risk averse person, so here's my take.

Risk

The taking of a risk for a risk averse person is only done after much planning, a lot of forethought and a number of attempts at removing said risk.By the time the risk is taken, it almost seems as though there is nothing that could possibly go wrong, and the act of taking a risk reduced to a few simple formulas all with known outcomes. Serendipity still seems to have the last word though, it is the constant in the formula you never bothered to find the real magnitude of because you mistakenly believed it to be insignificant.

Independence (Writing task)

2008-07-17T08:57:00.001+10:00

I am currently living in Buenos Aires and have hooked up with a group of ex-pat writers who are meeting once a week to discuss their current work and generally help and inspire each other. One of the benefits is that we get to hear some really awesome pieces of work in progress literature, and comment on them. Another great thing, although I must admit a little scary, is that we usually do a writing exercise. We are given a topic, or some other form of inspiration, and asked to do a 5 minute stream of consciousness writing on the theme. Last week was both American Independence day (4th of July), and Argentinean Independence day (9th of July), so the theme was independence. I approached the task from the negative (ie how dependant I am). This approach I blamed on being the only Australian in the group, and Australia not really having an independence day as we are still bound to Mother England by an umbilical chord that refuses to be cut. I thought I'd start posting the writing tasks on this blog, just becasue no-one reads this blog anymore, and I figured I may as well.

Independence

I am a geek. I have every gadget known to mankind, and even a few that aren't. Over the oast few weeks one of the gadgets that I love most started to die... my phone. It's not just a phone, it's my calendar, my notepad, email and internet access, GPS guidance system, link to the world. Not being able to trust this pandoras box has made me realize just how dependant I have become on this piece of technology. I contract out to it many functions that in the past would only require a good memory. Phone numbers addresses, dates, meeting places etc.... I am totally dependant.

Tango Trails

2008-04-06T09:26:00.001+10:00

Those who know me, know that I am a passionate Argentinean Tango dancer. Those who know anything about Argentinean Tango know that if your serious enough about Tango, Buenos Aires becomes like Mecca... you have to visit it once in your life. Niki and I are planning such a trip, and as such have decided to start a blog about not only the trip, but anything relating to our journey into Tango. For anyone that's interested, the blog is called "Tango Trails".

Problems with Sony Camcorder software

2008-03-30T19:35:00.001+11:00

I purchased a Sony HDR SR7E camcorder a while back, and for the most part I love it, but there is one thing that is really frustrating me. The software that comes with it to playback videos on your home PC in the native AVCHD format (Motion Picture Browser) has a really unusual problem.

As you can see the top half of the screen is fine, but the bottom half is just a solid green line. The camcorder itself plays back the videos fine, and when you make a DVD or convert the videos to mpeg-2 format, the resultant video is fine, the problem only seems to exist in the Motion Picture Browser software.

I am running Windows Vista, Motion Picture Browser Version 2.1.00.04170 on a Dell Latitude D820 with 2GB RAM. I can't seem to find any mention of it on Sony's website, the only other mention of it I have been able to find is here. If anyone else has seen this issue, or if anyone else knows what the solution might be, I'd love to hear about it.

Technorati tags: Sony, handycam, HDR SR7E, AVCHD

Vote below the line campaign (more info)

2007-11-20T21:31:00.001+11:00

I Found a really good article in The Age that explains just how important your preferences are.

Performing at the Hispanic Fiesta

2007-11-11T16:05:00.001+11:00

Niki & I are performing again, this time as part of the the Spanish Club's participation in the Hispanic Fiesta (otherwise known as the Johston Street fiesta or the Spanish festival).

Details

where : Hogar Espanol (The Spainsh Club) 59 - 61 Johnston Street Fitzroy

when : 3:30 pm, Saturday and Sunday the 17th and 18th of November 2007.

Vote below the line campaign (cont.)

2007-11-11T15:19:00.001+11:00

The group voting tickets for the 2007 Federal election are now available on-line at the AEC website, and I urge anyone who has read my previous post on the topic of voting below the line and is still thinking of voting above the line to download the group voting ticket for their own state to see just how their preferences are being re-distributed. Even if you are going to vote below the line, it is good to have a look at who different parties are preferring. As I take a quick look over the Victorian paper, I can't help but wonder at some of the deals that must have gone on under the hood, or even at the reason that some of the parties even exist in the first place.

Vote below the line campaign

2007-10-27T12:14:00.001+10:00

Who do you prefer

Yes, it's that time again. The 2007 Australian Federal election campaign is in full swing, and for the vast majority of Australians it will come down to a choice between the boxer in red shorts in the right corner, John Winston Howard, and the boxer in the blue shorts in the ... other right corner, Kevin (I speak Mandarin) Rudd. Now I'm under no illusions here, although I am an active member of The Australian Greens, I realise that the next prime minister of Australia will be either Rampaging Rudd or Horrible Howard, however, there is the balance of power in the senate that is up for grabs, which is where I think the Greens can make a real difference, beyond the democrats failed attempts at "Keeping the bastards honest", I think The Greens can not only keep them honest, but also keep them on track on important issues such as climate change, social justice, transparency, and workplace relations. The subtle thing that a lot of people don't realise is that the only reason The Greens don't already have more influence in the senate is because of the above the line preferential voting system and the preference deals that go on behind the scenes that ordinary voters are completely oblivious to.

I have blogged about this before when the Family First Senator Steven Fielding was elected to the senate in 2004 purely on Labor preferences even though he received little more than one fifth of the primary votes that the Greens Lead senate Candidate David Risstrom received. All the Labor voters I know were appalled when they realised that they were responsible for this miscarriage of democracy, some have even vowed never to vote 1 for Labor again, others have decided to vote below the line and distribute their own preferences.

Now I know that The Greens are no strangers to preference deals, and there are some in the party like me who are frustrated when deals are done. I personally think that the whole preferential voting system needs overhauling, and have said this in the past at branch meetings. This issue is an entire blog post on its own, and in this post I want to concentrate on what can be done this election to get who we really prefer into the senate.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't resent Family First coming on to the political scenes, I think that one of the major problems with the Australian political climate is that their is a lack of representation, and Family First do represent a valid cross-section of Australian society who are entitled to their say. In fact my parents and my sister all support and campaign for Family First, it's just that Family First don't have the numbers and support to legitimately hold any seat in the senate in their own right. So what can we do?

I personally think that people need to stop voting above the line in the senate, and to analyze your how to vote cards for the lower house as well to determine if you really want your preferences to go the way your party of choice is suggesting. I concede that the preferential voting system is very difficult to understand, and it is sooooo much easier to put a single digit in the section above the line, but you need to realise that this gives the party you voted for the power to redistribute your preferences as they see fit. I don't trust any party, not even The Greens to redistribute my preferences. To aid with the understanding of the Preferential voting system, the Australian Electoral Commission has educational material, and if you are still thinking about voting above the line, then be sure to to check out the AEC's 2007 Election website closer to the election when they will post the Group Voting Tickets for the senate that will show how your preferences will be redistributed if you choose to vote above the line. It is instructional to see the AEC's 2004 election webiste, and in particular look at the Victorian Group Voting Ticket, and see how the Labor party preferenced Family First above The Greens.

I would like use this blog post to start a campaign to get as many people as possible to vote below the line in the forth coming election so that the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing over preferences is rendered meaningless. Please link to this post, or write your own blog post urging people to vote below the line, and let your preferences be known.

Technorati tags: election, politics, vote, prerefential voting, senate, preferences, The Greens, Australia, below the line campaign

Performing on the fringes

2007-10-06T23:49:00.001+10:00

Niki and I have been asked to perform some tango at a production by one of our close friends at this years Melbourne Fringe Festival. The show is called Movimientos, and there are some really great dancers involved, so it is worth checking out.

Technorati tags: tango, dance, fringe festival

Lunch at Gocos's home

2007-10-01T04:50:00.001+10:00

23-Sep-2007

Every one of Niki's Aunts and Uncles were keen to have us over for a meal. This is partly to show off their great cooking skills, and partly just to have an excuse to get everyone together and enjoy one of the favourite Cypriot pass times... eating lots of really good food.

Gocos (Cyproit version of George) is Niki's Uncle on her mothers side, and I was particularly keen to go to his house for lunch as he impressed me with his cooking skills last time we were here. So at 1pm we arrived at Gocos's house. Gocos was dressed in only in his shorts, and wearing his enormous belly like a badge of honour indicating just how good a cook he is. He was also wearing his trademark smile showing just how jovial a character he is. He had the outside oven (fourni) on since 9am that morning cooking Kleftiko (Goat) and potatoes. He removed the mud from around the oven door that was sealing in the heat, and took a look at the contents, it smelt awesome. He then took bits of Kleftiko and potato out of one of the pots that was in the oven, and we sat around on the back steps drinking beer and doing a thorough job of quality assuring the food.

We sprinkled some salt and lemon juice on the Kleftiko. The tangy taste of the salt and lemon juice hitting my tongue was only surpassed by the softness and juicyness of the Kleftiko as it melted in my mouth. The potatoes were cooked to perfection, holding there shape just long enough to get to my mouth, and then exploding into mush in my mouth having soaked up the wonderful flavours of the goat. Eventually we tired of the quality assuring and moved inside for the main round.

Gocos is famous for his octopus which he had made again, he'd also made some squid, a lovely tabouli, Canaloni, Vine leaf Dolmas, Ravioli, the list goes on and on. I told Gocos that I wanted to start a restaurant with him as head chef, and me as the apprentice, and I wouldn't even ask for any pay, just for 1 meal a day from whatever he was cooking. He seemed to liked the idea.

Tango in Limassol

2007-09-29T01:53:00.001+10:00

21-Sep-2007

After the cruise, we arrived back at Cyprus's main port of Limassol. 2 and a half years ago when we were in Cyprus last, there was no tango scene, and so we had to go to Greece to get our fix of Tango. Fortunately about 2 years ago, a tango scene sprung up in Cyprus, and there is a Milonga in Limassol every Friday night. This suited us perfectly, we decided to stay the night in Limassol at the Curium Palace which is the hotel that hosts the Milonga. Niki's parents dropped us off, and we checked in. we were both very impressed with the Hotel, although at the bargain basement price of 65 Cyprus Pounds ($185 AU) per night we were expecting to be impressed. I went for a swim while Niki drifted between reading and sleeping beside the pool.

After all the food we had consumed on board the cruise we decided to have a light lunch, a salad or something, nothing too much. We went for a walk, and found a restaurant called "La Mer" and sat down to order. Niki ordered a Seafood salad, and I ordered Sheftalia (traditional Cypriot sausage) with a side salad. The first thing to come out was the side salad, and I kid you not, it was huge, the bowl was twice as tall and twice as wide as a normal soup bowl, and we honestly thought that it must have been the main salad that Niki had ordered, but they insisted it was the side salad. They then started to bring out some bread and 3 dips, then some chips and potato salad. At this stage we questioned them about it saying "we didn't order this" to which they replied "it comes with the salad". They then proceeded to bring out another 6 side dishes, beetroot, black eyed beans, fasolia (Cypriot style white beans), Ocra... and this is before they bought out the main dish. Finally Niki's salad arrived in a massive tray the size of two and a half regular dinner plates, followed by my Sheftalia (4 sausages) and accompanying side of steamed Veggies. So much for a light lunch. We ate as much as humanly possible (less than half of what was on the table), and then sat back and let them clear the debris. As soon as they had cleared everything away, they then bought out a complimentary desert which we were forced to eat at gun point. The food was absolutely fabulous, and I would recommend it to anyone who is visiting Limassol, I would just suggest that you only order for half the amount of people at the table.

That night after a dinner consisting of an apple and half a banana, we went down and joined in the Milonga. We met Julia, the woman responsible for starting the tango scene in Cyprus. She is a beautiful tango dancer, and after dancing with some of her students, she is obviously a very good teacher. It was great to see the budding scene in Cyprus, and they seemed fairly good considering it had only been going for a couple of years.

I met one guy there, Ismail, who saw me sweating profusely in the Cyprus heat after coming off the dance floor, and he told me to save my sweat because tango sweat is Holy. He was a real character, and he also teaches tango in the Northern (Turkish occupied) side of Cyprus. We went to a Milonga run by him in the northern part of Nicossia a week later, I must admit it was the first time I've ever had to show my passport on the way to a Milonga.

It was also an amazing experience to dance with women who knew almost no English, and be able to communicate in a common language of Tango.

Island Hopping

2007-09-29T01:49:00.001+10:00

17th - 21st September

Niki's parents were keen to take us on a cruise (something that I found out is very popular among Cypriots). We boarded the Princessa Marissa on the Monday and headed off into the Aegean sea to visit 5 of the Greek Islands.

In the 4 days, we visited 5 islands, first Patmos, then Tinos, followed by Paros, then by Simi, and finally Rhodes. When all was said and done, I have to confess that if I wanted to see the Greek islands, an island hopping cruise would not be the way I would choose to do it. At each island we had between 5 and 7 hours before we had to be back on board. The lovely people on the ship had already confiscated our passports, holding them as ransom, just in case we got any ideas about staying on one of the islands. Even as small as some of the Greek islands are, 5 - 7 hours doesn't really give you a lot of opportunity to explore. In fact it barely gives you enough time to walk past the streets of tacky tourist souvenir shops that are conveniently located directly in front of where you get off the ship. We made an effort on every island to wonder off away from the "tourist strip", to get a glimpse of the daily life of the people who live there, and so I didn't have to write the phrase, "if you go to [insert island name here] you just have to check out the tourist shops". On some islands it was more difficult than others.

Patmos

The legendary island where St John wrote the book of Revelations. Once you got away from all the tourist shops, we found the labyrinthine streets rising into the mountain a fantastic place to get lost amongst the white washed houses, each of which was completely unique having to adapt to the contours of its surroundings.

Tinos

The church at Tinos was apparently very famous, and apparently a pilgrimage site for many Greek Orthodox. There were the standard icons that everyone insisted on kissing, but then there was also a tap that lots of people were frantically filling up bottles from. Niki's father explained to me that the icons were found buried there near the natural mountain springs, and as such the springs were considered in some way holy. His attitude was somewhat more pragmatic, telling me that at one point in the early church there was a division over the the icons one group claiming that of certain members pertaining to the icons was tantamount to idolatry, probably true enough, but of course in true religious style, persecution ensued, and the people who liked the icons fled, and set up communities near water supplies and buried the icons so that they wouldn't be discovered and destroyed by the persecutors. Of course the church makes money by selling this water bottled to people claiming that it has healing properties, a practice that Varnavas calls out right exploitation, and I couldn't agree more.

One thing in Tinos that really bothered me was an old woman I saw on the steep road to the hill. She was crawling slowly along the roadside, inch by inch up the quite steep hill that led to the church. It was obvious she'd been doing this since the bottom of the hill which was quite some way down below us, and she still had a fair way to go. I found it quite difficult to imagine the line of logic that this woman has swallowed to cause her to think that in her old age that she should perform this supplication in order to twist Gods arm into hearing her prayers, and struggled to come to terms with what it might be she wanted so badly from this sadistic God that required this kind of penance.

Also there were a lot of shops selling candles that you could take to the church and light as you said a prayer. What bothered me was the different sizes of candles, ranging from the fairly small to the massive, (and with the associated price scale). I sarcastically said to Varnavas that the idea is the probability of having your prayers answered was proportional to the size of the candle you purchased.

Paros

I think Paros was probably my favourite, probably because we actually decided to go on one of the (overpriced) shore tours where they take you around to various places and teach you a bit about the local area. We went to 2 churches (there are just so many churches everywhere), and a vineyard. I also learnt that Paros is famous for it's marble, which was perfect for sculptures.

Simi

Apparently Simi has a population of about 1200 people, so it is one of the smaller Greek Islands. Loved the houses build into the mountain side, and the enormous stair cases to get to them.

Rhodes

Rhodes was a very busy place, lots of castles and other ancient structures.

The Cruise

More than the actual islands I actually enjoyed the cruise itself. It was a good opportunity to get away from everything, and be forced to relax. There was not internet connection on the ship (or at least I chose not to search one out). There was no phone reception when you were between islands. All your meals were taken care of, literally nothing to do. So we read, we played backgammon, we played cards we walked around the ship, we slept, we ate, we drank, we watched really tacky cabaret etc....

One evil thought did occur to me while on board. I realised why Cyprus doesn't really have a culture of aged care institutions. It seemed to me just from the sheer volume of elderly people blocking the stairs every time I needed to go between decks, and sitting around in the lounges or out on the deck, that the cruise ships were essentially floating old peoples homes.

Two Cypriot Weddings

2007-09-29T01:43:00.001+10:00

15th and 16th Sep 2007

It was an extremely lucky coincidence that we managed to be in Cyprus for one of Niki's school friend's wedding. Andri and Niki have been friends since Primary school, and have kept in contact ever since. Last time we were in Cyprus (Jan 2005), Andri told Niki she was seeing a guy by the name of Marios, but we were not fortunate enough to meet him then. This visit we were invited to their wedding. We arrived at the church (one of the large churches in the suburbs of Nicosia), moments before the bridal party arrived with horns blaring to announce their arrival. This was to be my first experience of a Greek Orthodox wedding, so I was curious to note the similarities and differences between protestant weddings and the Greek Orthodox tradition. As fair as the bride and groom's clothing were, there were no real surprises, Andri wore a really nice white number with a veil, and Marios wore a black suit. There was a best man, but no other groomsmen, and also, a maid of honor but no other bridesmaids. There were however no shortage of flower girls and page boys.

The differences start with the ceremony. The entire wedding ceremony is a sung liturgy in high Greek which goes for about 30 minutes with various different symbolic gestures such as large rings tied together with ribbon placed over the bride and grooms heads symbolising their union, and a couple of laps around the alter being their first steps as husband and wife. Also lots of kissing of an ornate bible by the bride, groom, best man, maid of honor and the priest (you've really got to hope that none of them have any kind of communicable disease). One notable thing missing from all this (from my perception of what a wedding should be) was the exchange of vows. After the ceremony was over, there was a cocktail party style reception in the courtyard of the church where the bride and groom, and both sets of parents stood as guests filed past congratulating them. Later there was a private reception for close friends and family at a very nice restaurant in the city. This apparently is where Andri and Marios departed from the standard traditional style of reception. To explain further I will move on to a more traditional style wedding which was the one we went to the following evening.

This was the wedding of.... well actually I don't know either the bride or the grooms names, and no one seemed terribly interested in telling me their names, all I know to this day is that the bride is the daughter of Niki's father's first cousin. The first thing to note was that we didn't actually bother going to the ceremony at the church for this one. This struck me as quite odd, because in Australia where wedding receptions are extremely costly, it is common to invite everyone along to see the actual church service, but restrict access to the reception to only close friends and immediate family, (and if you're really rich, or have very forceful parents, maybe certain members of the extended family). In Cyprus the ceremony is attended only by those closest to the bride and groom, and the reception is actually a net money making exercise. The tradition is based on the idea that the best way in which to help start a newly wed couples married life is to give them money. In the past people would pin money to the bride and groom's wedding outfits, these days, there is a small white envelope containing some money, and a small card saying who the gift came from, handed to either the bride or the groom as you file past. So of course the more people you can invite to your reception, the more money you can make.

This wedding was held out in one of the villages, at a massive restaurant about 30 minutes drive from Niki's parents' place. The invitation said that it started at 8:00pm, we turned up just before 8:30pm, but nobody seemed particularly fussed about being late, and when we got there we joined a fairly large queue of people who were waiting to file past the bride and groom, and wish them all the best and slip them their white envelope. I felt quite uneasy, just waiting for someone to come up to me and ask "how do you know the bride and groom?", and tried to stick close to Niki for some sense of "context", who herself didn't really feel like she had much "context", but wasn't as worried about it as I was. She eventually just said to me, "just pretend you're going out to a restaurant for dinner".

While we were waiting, I suddenly realised that I didn't know what I should say to the bride and groom, and to their respective parents (my Greek isn't that good, barely beyond non-existent), so seconds before we got to the wedding party, I asked Niki what I should say, she told me 2 separate phrases to use, one for the bride and groom, the other for their parents. I hurriedly practiced these two phrases, but by the time I got to them, it was all mashed on my mind due to nerves, so for the bride and groom, I mouthed something that might have resembled what they were expecting to hear, but was in all honesty nothing like what I was supposed to say, By the time I got to the parents (and grand parents), I had resorted to a nod of the head, and in some cases just saying "congratulations" in English. It worked for 2 reasons, firstly the fact that there was a lot of noise around me (Cypriots are a very loud bunch), and secondly because the wedding party had already done this hundreds of times already that day, and were already in automatic mode and they weren't really paying much attention to detail.

Standing in the queue I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed by just how many people there were, more people had turned up after us, and the queue was growing with every passing minute, but nothing had prepared me for what was to follow. As we finally got through our congratulating of the wedding party, and then joined the queue for the buffet style meal, we were finally able to see the vastness of the restaurant and just how many people were at the reception. The restaurant was an open hall with 2 serveries running taking up a small amount of space on the left hand side of the ground floor, a bar at the front, and then row after row of tables, each seating 14 people. I think there would easily have been around 30 of these tables on the ground floor, and probably another 15 or so on the second floor. As we were queuing for the food, the hall looked just over half full, and people were still streaming past the wedding party, and joining the queue for food.

We served ourselves some food and sat down at one of the tables. The food was traditional Greek/Cypriot food, olives, taramousalata, Kleftiko, Greek salad, Haloumi Cheese etc..., and it was of a fairly good quality. We ate and watched as the people kept streaming past the wedding party. About half way through the meal, the hall would have been around 70% full, kids were running everywhere, the band was playing way too loud, and I had finally realised that my search for context was irrelevant. I estimate there were just under a thousand people people at the wedding, at the most the bride and groom would have known maybe 200 of them. Niki also explained to me that the other reason for the size of the reception is that a wedding in Cyprus is also an opportunity for the parents to brag, and show off their great parenting skills by having raised a child to the point where they have found a life partner and tied the knot, so the invitation list is more about who the parents know rather than who the people getting married know. Also, Village weddings tend to invite the entire village, including the priest that performed the ceremony.

After we finished dinner we sat around for a while taking in the ambiance and complaining about the band being too loud, even though they'd gone from the rock music they started with to more traditional Greek music with only the introduction of the Bouzouki as the necessary instrumentation change. Many people had already left by this stage, the duties of congratulating people, handing over white envelopes, and consuming food having been sufficiently performed. After a while we also decided to leave, and as we were leaving i was amazed to see people still filing in past the wedding party. I did see the flow of people ease up from time to time, and the bride and groom were able to steal a couple of moments to sit down and talk, but the stream had been fairly constant since we'd arrived. When we got to the car park (around 10:30pm), there were still people arriving.

I have to admit I enjoyed Andri and Marios wedding a lot more, but the sheer sense of awe at the size of the second wedding has caused me to spend the greater part of this blog article on it. Another difference I noticed between both the Cypriot receptions and your standard anlgo wedding was the absence of speeches(speeches are not really part of the culture)

Governors Beach

2007-09-25T23:50:00.001+10:00

14-Sep-2007

The weather has been fairly hot, averaging in the high 30's, so Niki's parents decided to take us to Governors beach. No surprise that it got it's name because one of the British Governors of Cyprus when it was a colony took a fancy to it, and decided to claim it. I must admit that I have a particular habit of comparing any beach I come across in the world to my home beaches in Newcastle, and I find I am almost always dissapointed. The sand was coarse and dark grey in colour, and it is not a surf beach. All that aside, it was nice to go for a swim, and cool off.

One thing that I noticed that got me thinking was the beach chairs. The beach chairs were placed all along the beach, anyone could use them.

I also noticed Niki's family dragging some of the chairs together, and a plastic table that was near by for us all to sit around and have lunch at. Their sense of civic duty also compelled them to drag the beach chairs back to where they were originally, ready for the next set of visitors. Apparently the local council is charged with providing and maintaining these beach chairs, and it really struck me as odd that I couldn't imagine this type of thing happening in Australia. I have seen beach chairs in Australia, but they are usually hired out, and I think that potential theft or mindless vandalism would be cited as reasons for not having the councils provide and care for them. Makes me wonder what we are not doing right in Australia.

Lefkara

2007-09-25T23:45:00.001+10:00

13-Sep-2007

Niki's parents decided to take us to a villiage called Lefkara which is about a 45 minute drive from Nicosia up in the mountains. Lefkara is famous for its lace work, and silver smiths. We wondered the streets where the lace shops are, and saw the women sitting outside their shops making the artefacts that you could purchace inside. Even though it was obvious that the streets were specifically set up for the tourists, at least you knew that the goods were made locally and not in china. The lace weaving skills are still apparently passed down from mother to daughter, and the villiage survives almost solely on the revenue generated by the lace weavers and silver smiths in the region.

The only other thing in the town is the 'Fatsa' wax museum that uses wax figurines to show aspects of the history of cyprus.

After this we went to Zigi to a "Psarotaverna" (literally fish tavern) for lunch. Niki's father explained to us that the word "Zigi" is greek for scales (the type you use to weigh things), and that the only reason the town existed at all was because there was a set of scales there that would be used to weigh carobs from the plantations before they were shipped out for export, but since the war in 1974, there was a need to establish more towns to relocate the 200,000 refugees, and Zigi has grown significantly, and now is part of the booming tourist industry with Psarotaverna's everywhere, and appropriate tourist pricing.

Later that night, Niki's sister Elena, took us into the city to the Marco Polo bar where there is a cuban band playing every night, and some pretty good salsa dancers. We had a good time, met some of Elena friends, and salsad til about 1:30 am.

While we were there we met an Australian girl who lived in Richmond, Melbourne (not far from where we live). Her parents are cypriot and she was visiting cyprus for the first time in 20 years. She was complaining that there was nothing uniquely cypriot that she could take her english friends to see, and cited the cuban salsa band as a case in point of a distinct lack of cypriot identity. I told her to show them the villiages, she agreed. What I forgot to say is that you can always take them to a traditional cypriot taverna.

Arrival in Cyprus

2007-09-25T23:44:00.001+10:00

12-Sep-2007

We arrived at Larnaca Airport at about 10:30am, and Niki's parents were there to meet us and take us back to their place in Nicossia. We had lunch, and then a bit of a rest.

That night Niki's father startred the grill, and cooked up some of the delecacies Cyprus is renound for, Souvlaki, Bastourma, and Sheftalia. All of Niki's Aunts, Uncles and Cousins gathered at their house to welcome us.

Stop over in Dubai

2007-09-25T02:01:00.001+10:00

11-Sep-2007

We arrived at Kuala Lumpur airport and had enough time to get our boarding pass for the connecting flight, sit down and have some dinner, attempt (but fail) to pay our Tolls incurred in Sydney over the internet, and then check out the Duty Free.

We then jumped on a plane to Dubai, I surprised myself and actually managed to get some small amount of sleep this time. We arrived at Dubai airport just before 4:00am, and it was already 31 degrees celcius. By the time we'd collected our luggage, and headed to the tourist information desk it was around 4:30am. We managed to book a hotel, but couldn't check in until 7am, so we waited at the airport til then. I remember distinctly the first time I heard the call to prayer was at 5am in the airport.

Close to 7am, we made our way out to try and catch a cab, we were immediately approached by a guy who asked us if we were looking for a cab, to which I honestly replied "Yes", he motioned to follow him, and he took our trolley with our luggage and led us across the car park. Niki had the presence of mind to ask him if it was a regular cab, to which he replied "it's a limosine", and when pressed told us it would be 70 Dirams ($AU 26), Niki smelled a rat, and insisted that we would get our own cab. We found the queue for the cabs, and got one within minutes, and the journey cost us 30 Dirams (AU $11). We arrived at the hotel, and immediately went to sleep.

We awoke some time after 10am, and decided to wonder down the street. By this stage it was over 40 degrees celcuis, and the high humidity made the walk quite an exhausting affair. The reward was seeing the extremely modern architecture of the city juxtoposed against the occasional ancient building. The heat was oppressive, and it didn't take long before we were forced to seek shelter and rest for a while. We stopped for a few minutes at the river, and looked at all the dinner cruise boats that we would loved to have had dinner on if we were staying in Dubai for longer. We decided to get a cab back to the hotel, and so stood on the main road and attempted to flag a cab, unfortunately every cab that passed was taken, we walked further along the main road to find lots of people trying (and also failing) to flag a cab. Again the heat got the better of us, and we ended up in an air conditioned restaurant for lunch. After lunch we started the long walk back to the hotel, but by this time the heat was unbearable. We decided that the bus was te best option, and after asking a few drivers, and getting a number of differeing responses, we finally found a driver that said he was going near where we wanted to be.

Dubai is supposedly famous for its shopping malls, and so we decided to check out the one closest to our hotel, (at least we would be in air conditioned comfort). So we went to the City Centre shopping mall, and to our "complete surprise" it was pretty much the same as any other shopping centre anywhere else in the world... large, air conditioned and full of places where cheerful attendants will happily assist in lightining your wallet in exchange for items that a consumeristic society has convinced you that you really need.

We went back to the hotel room hot and with very sore feet, (and slightly lighter wallets). I went for a swim while Niki slept. That night we had a very enjoyable dinner in the hotel, and then went to bed early. We got up the next morning at 4am ad made our way to the airport where we caught our plane to Cyprus after allowing the Dubai duty free to lighten the load on our wallets a little further.

On Holidays - Sydney for Chris and Alison's Wedding

2007-09-16T20:13:00.001+10:00

We decided to tie our holidays in with Chris and Alison's wedding in Sydney. We arrived at Sydney airport on Friday afternoon after an extremely stressful process of getting to Melbourne airport. Niki was coming from Fitzroy, and I was coming from Essendon. I arrived at the airport in plenty of time, whereas Niki had a slight issue with the taxi not turning up, and she almost missed the plane.

After having made it to Sydney I proceeded to pick up a hire car and drive out to Berowra for the wedding rehearsal, and Niki checked into the hotel (The Marque), and then went out for a tango in Glebe.

I was concerned about driving from the airport to Berowra, especially considering that APEC was on at the time, and I don't really know my way around Sydney that well, but once I got on the Eastern Distributor... and then finally turned around and headed in the correct direction, I just followed the signs to Newcastle, and I was OK. That was until I missed the Berowra Exit and had to Drive 15 minutes to the next exit where I could turn around. I arrived at Chris and Alison's place, and very quickly went through my role as best man, and then Chris, Alison, Alana (Alison's head bridesmaid), went off to the pub for a drink. It was only 10:00pm, but they had already called last drinks at the bar, none of us could believe it, so we quickly ordered drinks and sat down and talked.

On the Saturday, Niki and I went shopping, and then I headed out to spend some more time with Chris. Niki went dancing again. Chris and I had Pizza and then I caught the train back to Strathfield to catch the last hour and a half of the Milonga (Tango night) with Niki.

The next day we arrived at Chris's place at around 10:30am to find him still stressing about work. He eventually finished what he was doing, and we had lunch together with the other Groomsmen, (Rob his Uncle, and Rodney a friend from Newport). We then started to get ready for the wedding. We were cutting it fine as it was, and just at the point when we really had to leave to make it on time, we discovered that we'd lost the keys to our hire car. This put us into a bit of a panic, and we rushed around stressing for about 15 minutes until we eventually found them. We arrived at the Loxley on Bellbird Hill where the wedding was to take place at 3:00pm instead of 2:30pm, but this was OK, the official part of the day wasn't scheduled to start until 3:30pm. I must say, Loxley was just the most picturesque place for the wedding, it was beautiful, and the staff were a really friendly and helpful bunch of people. The wedding was just lovely, and everything went pretty much to plan from what I could tell.

We stayed the night at Loxley, and then had breakfast with Chris, Alison, and a few other wedding guests who had also stayed the night. We then hit the road at about 10:30am to get to Sydney airport for our flight to Cyprus.

I have to admit, I have always hated driving in Sydney, but this trip from the blue mountains solidified my absolute detest for the Sydney road infrastructure. The quickest way (and the only way that is actually sign posted) to get from the Blue Mountains to Kingsford Smith Airport is via a number of toll roads. The M7, the M5, the M2, and the Sydney Harbor tunnel, all of which have different operators, some of which have toll collection points, others have only e-tag, or E-Pass payment options, and each of which have a different procedure for paying. We had a hire car, we were NEVER going to use that car again, we are also very unlikely to need to use any of these roads again (at least in the near future), and consequently we just wanted to pay out one off toll, we didn't want to buy an e-tag, or create an account with any of these companies, and I seriously thought that as a business model, people would generally find ways of making it easy for consumers to give them money, but I must say I am still confused as to what we have paid for, and wouldn't be surprised to find an infringement notice in our letter box when we get back. C'mon Sydney, is this the best you can do, your tollway system has to be the worst in the world, I don't understand why a government department could not at the very least manage the collection of all tolls, and then distribute the funds to the different agencies as necessary, at least that way, there would be a consistent means of paying.

Anyway, with that off my chest.... we managed to arrive at the airport in time, and boarded the plane, First stop Kuala Lumpa, followed by Dubai.

Virgin Blue - Sexist policy

2007-08-26T18:52:00.001+10:00

I travel virgin blue quite frequently, but today on my way home from a visit to Sydney, I ran foul of one of Virgin Blue's policies that I find to be overtly sexist.

I had boarded the plane, and was sitting in the very last row, in the isle seat. I was thinking I must have been extremely lucky when it appeared as though there was going to be no-one else sitting in my row. It meant I could get out my laptop and not have to worry about bumping elbows with the person next to me as I wrote a blog post I am currently working on. Just as they were closing the doors, one of the stewards came down the back with a young boy who looked about 8 years of age, and sat him in the window seat. Still good, the middle seat was still vacant, so I would still not be bumping elbows with anyone. It appeared as though the woman who was supposed to be sitting in the middle seat had not shown up. It was at this point the stewards asked the woman sitting in front of me to change to the middle seat between me and the child. When I looked quizically at the stewardess she revealed that "it is virgin blue policy to ensure that a male is not sitting next to an unaccompanied minor". I couldn't believe it!

I was not given any reason for the policy, I can only assume that with all the media hype around child abuses that Virgin Blue management feel that it is safest to treat all men as potential child molesters, and the obvious assumption, based on a 1920's understanding of gender, is that it is better to have a female sitting next to a child, because obviously a woman would never abuse a child.

I expressed my indignation to the stewards, not that it really bothered me who I sat next to on my hour and a half flight from Sydney to Melbourne, and told them I thought it was sexist. One of the male stewards agreed with me and encouraged me to file a complaint form which I did.

When all is said and done, it may seem like a silly little thing to complain about, and not something that I should get too upset about, but what bothers me is what it says about the kind of society we are becomming. What this kind of policy does is to make males feel uncomfortable around children. We are already at a point where the first thought when an adult male hugs or shows any kind of affection towards a child in public is one of suspicion. I fear that attitudes like this will feed into the already stark gender imbalance in our education system, and into other social activities involving children meaning that a generation of children will grow up not quite knowing how to have healthy relationships with adult males.

Public Transport Frustration

2007-06-28T09:00:00.001+10:00

I'm on a mission at the moment to figure out the best way to get from my place in Fitzroy to the Client I am currently workin for who is located at Airport West, just behind Essendon Airport (map).

To drive there even in peak hour takes around half an hour. Yesterday I decided I'd start with the most basic possible route. Catch a 112 tram from my place into Elizabeth Street in the city, then a 59 Tram from Elizabeth Street out to Airport West. I was first thwarted by overcrowded trams. I had to let two 112 trams go by because there was just no room on them. Then I had to wait about 10 minutes or so for a 59 Tram (which I guess isn't too much). The tram then got caught in Peek hour traffic on Keilor Road between Essendon Train Station, and Matthews Avenue. So even though I left my home at 7:40am, I didn't arrive at work til around 9:20am. It is no wonder people don't like public transport.

So today I decided to get catch the 546 bus along Princes Street, and meet up with the 59 tram on Flemington Road, hopefully being able to get an earlier tram, and avoid peek hour on Keilor Road. Again leaving home at 7:40am, I did my usual thing of not checking the time table, and found out that the bus only runs every half hour, and the next one wasn't til 8:00am. OK, that was my fault, I'll know next time that I need to catch the 7:30am. However, the bus was of course late, and further more, during peek times, doesn't go all the way to Flemington Road, so I had to walk back a fair way to get to the tram stop. it is now 9:00am, and I'm guessing I'm going to get caught in Peek hour traffic on Keilor road again. There has to be a better way to get there.

Tomorrow I'll try a 112 Tram into Parliament station, then a Train to Essendon station, and finally the 59 tram from Essendon Station. This has been the biggest ever challenge to my resolution not to own a car, and to use public transport to get everywhere.

Public transport Rally

2007-05-30T14:38:00.001+10:00

Just a quick post to alert anyone who is interested that there is a public transport Rally on tomorrow in Melbourne.

http://www.linkupmelbourne.org.au/index.php

Tango Performance

2007-04-22T11:23:00.001+10:00

Just to show how behind the times I am, here is my first ever appearance on You Tube. This is a Tango performance Niki and I did last weekend at our friend Yeow's birthday party. Niki and I have been dancing Argentinean Tango for 6 years now, and it is becoming an all consuming passion.

Technorati tags: Tango

Blog posts as an indication of my state of mind

2007-04-16T22:01:00.000+10:00

When I started blogging way back at the start of 2004 (see http://scottbaldwin.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_archive.html, (I'd like to say before blogging became popular, but that would definitely be a lie) I was in a very stressful job that I didn't really enjoy, it was taking up far too much of my time, and was making me feel quite frustrated with the IT industry to the point where I was almost ready to leave the field for good. So even though I found out about blogging through my work in the IT field, the first blog I started was nothing to do with IT at all, in fact musings of a morbid mind was where I intended to post all of my political rantings and ravings, my general thoughts on topics (generally outside of IT), family and travel photos etc... , and just a general writing exersize for me. I started my geek blod Daily Dribblings of a Demented Developer shortly after (May 2004), but it was always the poor cousin of my musings (btw no prizes for guessig that alliteration is one of my favourite literary devices). I started work for Readify at the start of 2005, and since then, my writings on my Geek blog have steadily increased, and my writings on my musings blog have decreased, to the point where I noticed today that my geek blog has almost caught up, and what's more surprising the blog articles I've got in the pipeline are almost ALL for my Geek blog.

Its amazing the amount of difference working for a good company can make, there are still aspects of the IT industry I'm not enraptured about, and I still get stressed from time to time when things don't work the way I expect them to, but I have come to realise that there is a lot I do enjoy about IT.

I finally decided to get "Soft Cinema"

2007-04-16T21:54:00.000+10:00

I wrote a long time ago about an interesting database narative project I saw called soft cinema, but the other day I finally decided to source it. It has now arrived and all that remains is for me to actually find the time to sit down and watch it, I look forward to seeing it, I'll see if I can't write a review at some stage.

Australian Values and the significance of Gallipoli

2006-12-13T22:16:00.000+11:00

According to news reports, One of the test questions for the infamous Australian Values and History test will be about the significance of Gallopoli to the Australian psyche.

I know it's sacroligious, but I can just see it now when potential Turkish immigrants see the question and answer "We whipped your Butts and sent you packing".

Australian Values and Language test, a recurring theme

2006-12-13T21:24:00.000+11:00

Yet again, the idea of an Australian Values and Language test gets trotted out. I can only think that the howard Government is attempting to divert attention from other concerns such as the war in Iraq, and interest rates, by taking advantage of a xenophobic climate and focusing on what is an absolutely useless peice of legislation.

I have said it before, and it looks like I'll say it again, it is extremely dangerous mixing the concepts of law and values.

The beauty of the rule of law (or atleast the theory of it) is that everyone is treated equally under it, regardless of race color, creed, sexual preference, ability to speak a particular language etc.... When people start to talk about things like values in the same sentence, there is a very subtle shift in the logic. I personally do not want John Howard or any Government for that matter dictating to me what my values should be. There are very few values I would say are "Universal" to Australians, and even those values need to be challenged from time to time.

As for the "History test", aside of the question about which version of history you follow, studies have been done that show that migrant children generally know more Australian history than children of Australian citizens, so in other words we'd be asking them to do more than we are even willing to do.

The language test I think is just a watered down version of the "White Australia Policy". I think it is also a great opportunity for indigenous Austrlia to perhaps do their own language and values test, and go around to every Australian citizen that can't trace their heritage back more than 250 years and insist that they sit an indigenous version of the language and values test, or otherwise go back to where they came from.

tags: Australian Politics Values

As Kermit would say... "It's not easy being Green"

2006-12-04T21:18:00.000+11:00

A fellow collegue of mine Darren Neimke has posted a rather interesting post on his blog, which has got me thinking. Now I have to admit, I do consider myself to be a "Greenie", however, far from having "jumped on the bandwagon, I have been a member of The Australian Greens now for well over 3 years, and in fact I can trace my pilgramage from the high slopes of comfortable numbness about environmental issues into the radical valley of the shadow of Greenie Activism to a course I took back at uni, almost 11 years ago. A philosophy course aimed at Engineers called Technology and Human Values in which we studied "systems engineering" approaches to the ways technologies are used and abused both here and in developing countries.

Anyway, my main reason for writing this blog article is to suggest to Darren, that I feel has has understated some of the issues slightly. I am ussuming that some of the understatements were intentional and for effect like " .... Or some ice melting in Antarctica." trivialising the disapearance of entire glaciers, however, I the one I really want to concerntrate on is the issue of research and the problems of people reading something and just believing it. From his post

Research is a skill that is being diminished by the one-click world of Google and the new media. People hear something and believe it to be true without even having the faintest clue of how they would ratify such assertions.

I think in this statement are a number of problems all rolled into one.
Firstly, yes we live in a society based on instant gratification. Google is a great tool, that can be used to justify any point of view you want to throw at it.
Secondly, I think it is quite difficult to "ratify" certain facts. The problem comes from the nature of the beast that is science. To really fully understand the latest scientific findings, requires you to pretty much be at the forefront of scientific reseach in that particular area, and this requires not only having a PHD, but being actively involved in hands on research. The problem is that even scientists at this level can't always seem to agree, and the way in which research projects get funding often requires researchers to make bold (sometimes even rediculous) statements to gain the attention of the various institutions that are willing to put up the money to fund this research. How is your average punter expected to be able to know what the truth is even if they have tracked down the information from people considered leaders in their field.

Not wanting to be all doom and gloom, I think that there are solutions emerging to these problems.

If I may use a buzz-word, with the web 2.0 paradigm, we are starting to understand the "wisdom of the crowd", in fact google has used this in its search algorithms for a while, but there are even more powerful tools that enable collaboration on an unprecidented scale, sites such as wikipedia are classic examples of this.

With respects to the scientific community, by its very nature, it is a dynamic exchange of ideas and theories. unlike other debates we encounter, such as religion, politics etc... there are not the same intitutionalised barriers to callenging the status quo. If a scientist or group of scientists have a theory, this will be critiqued by many other scientists who will then be able to repeat either the same experiment and validate the findings, or disprove them. Even if a scientist or group of scientist start to hold some political sway, and spread inaccurate theories for a time, eventually someone will be able to challenge the theory, and a better theory will prevail.

So where does that leave us with the environment debate. Well, my personal feeling is that the premise that us 6 billion humans are having a noticable impact on the world we live in has been kicking around for long enough now, and the vast majority of scientists who are working in the field seem to agree on some of the big ticket items that constitute climate change. What the results might be are admitedly speculation. Educated speculation, but speculation none the less. However, I think that we can no longer use the ignorance is bliss approach to keeping the status quo. We have to realise that systematic change is essential if we as a species want to continue to maintain the quality of life that we currently do. Even more so if we want to take any significant amount of non-human species into future. This then becomes a battle that sometimes needs to be fought on a political level, and sometimes on a personal level. So Darren, next time I'm bending your ear about how stupid it is to be logging our water catchments for wood chips in the middle of a drought, and you slip seemlessly into that glazed over look, at least you'll know where I'm comming from.

Political satire as therapy

2006-12-03T16:36:00.000+11:00

A friend and I have been using a political satire blog as therapy as we observe the sad state of Australian politics. http://everybodyhateslatham.blogspot.com.

The name (loosley derived from the American sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond"), was inspired by the events around the last federal election, and the concept is that we have cast various famous actors for the roles of all the politicians that have made the news in the past few weeks, and then put our spin on what we think really happens behind closed doors, in cabinet meetings and in parliament itself. It's a bit of fun, and ranges from the rediculous to the sublime.

The latest episode is I think one of our best, and contains a number of guest appearances. Those familiar with the BBC comedy Absolute Power may recognise the inclusion of the dynamic duo of british PR Prentiss McCabe. We also have Molly Melldrum to an album review of a new offering from Peter Garrett.

Check it out http://everybodyhateslatham.blogspot.com/2006/12/episode-9-silly-season.html

Last time Labor Preference Deal, this time Labor Lies

2006-11-26T12:16:00.000+11:00

The 2004 Federal Election saw a pitched battle for the final Victorian Senate seat go down to the wire as the Greens battled it out for what should have been a 5th seat in the Senate. The deciding factor between the Greens candidate David Ristrom (who scored around 12% of the primary vote) and the Family First candidate Steven Fielding (who scored just under 2% of the primary vote) was an unholy preference deal made between Family First and The ALP that saw ALP Preferences going to Family First ahead of the Greens. OK, yes, I am still bitter and twisted about this, maybe I should seek therapy.

In this years state election Labor did their predictable tactic of making out that the election was going to be close, in the attempt to get people who were thinking about registering a protest vote for one of the minor parties to vote for Labor just to ensure that Labor get over the line. This is a fair enough tactic, and I'd hope that the electorate are smart enough to see right through it. What is worse though is that the Greens were polling fairly well (around 13% state wide), a few weeks prior to the election, and Labor were seriously concerned about loosing a few key seats in inner city Melbourne, where locals are fed up with the amount of inactivity on issues like public transport and feel that Labor has stopped listening. So rather than attempt the hard road of re-connecting to the electorate and engaging in a meaningful dialogue around policies that may address some of the reasons the Greens were polling so well, the Labor party machine kicked into action with a tactic of lies and deceptions aimed at eroding the base of the Greens.
About a week before the election the Secretary of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor party, made the statement that "The Greens had done a grubby preferrence deal with the Liberals", and claimed that if people voted for the Greens this may in turn mean a Liberal government. The fact that this was not true did not matter in the least. Once said, the damage was done, people who would otherwise have voted for the Greens believing (rightly) that the Greens are a party based on Principles, not career politicians and strategists with a meglomatic drive for votes, were now angry with the percieved betrayal.

The Labor party went even further, by seconding their only MP who until this election actually had some environmental credentials, Peter Garrett to write letters to all victorians in certain inner city electorates that they were concerned about, attempting to spread this lie about Greens Preferences. He also appeared in the Melbourne electorate with the Labor candidate Bronwyn Pike, and the premier Steve Bracks, trying to talk up these fictitious preference deals. Once a personal hero of mine for standing up for the environment, and social justice issues, I have now lost all respect for him as he has become merely a highly prized cog in the Labor party machine. They will now continue to trot him out at any point where they feel threatened by The Greens, but hopefully his reputation as an environmentalist and activist will be so damaged by this episode that the electorate will eventally stop listenning and instead lament the fall of a once great campaigner. He is nothing but a sell out and no longer deserves the title of activist.

The truth about Greens Preferences and the Peter Garrett sell out can be found not only at The Greens website (naturally) but also exposed on Crikey.com.

The Problem of Preferences

2006-11-20T08:54:00.000+11:00

Every election there seems to be a huge debarcle over how parties distribute their preferences. I personally think that it should not be as big an issue. The basics of the preference system is that the individual on polling day can themselves decide which candidates they would prefer in which order, so it is completely up to the individual to appropriately decide their own personal preferences, not the parties who are putting forward candidates. So where is the problem, if the responsibility falls on the individual to determine their own preferences, then why the big fuss over the parties preferences.

If only it were that simple. The issue arises because of the humble How To Vote cards that get handed out at poling booths. These How To Vote cards are handed out by all major parties contesting an election, the reason being is that without these how to vote cards, many well intentioned people attempting to vote for a particular party if they don't have a How To Vote card that could render their vote invalid. This is a very real concern, and the parties are quite right to worry about this. So they will issue How To Vote Cards, but because if they don't actually fill in the How To Vote cards completely, there is a significant risk that the people who want to vote for them will do the exact same thing as what's on their How To Vote card, again rendering the vote invalid. So the issue remains, parties need to present a completed valid How To Vote card just in case people follow them to the letter. The issue is that the majority of people do follow the How To Vote cards to the letter. The case is even worse for the senate (or upper house) representatives where in Australia you are offered the choice of voting in 2 seperate ways, a single number "above the line" for the party you want to vote for directly, or numbering up to 60 or 70 individual candidates "below the line". The average voter will vote above the line saving them an enormous amount of time and concern attempting to decide who you really prefer the least, the "shooters for greener forests party", or the "peoples rights for bowel movements party". The question is, if you vote above the line, what happens if the party you vote for does not make it to the senate position? Well, if you vote above the line, the party gets to determine where your preferences go. This information has to be registered with the electoral commision a few weeks before an election, but the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of people have no idea where their preferences will go after they vote in this way.

Given that most people follow the How To Vote cards blindly, the way the parties lay out their How To Vote cards for the lower house, how who they give their preferences to in the upper house, becomes vitally important as elections can be won/lost all on these preferences. Their have been numerous cases where parties have sprung up simply to divert preferences to some other party. Liberals for the forest are a classic example of this, a party that had absolutely no hope of winning a senate seat, but were in fact there simply to capture the votes from people who voted above the line. This starts to become extremely un-democratic. The classic case of this happened at the last federal election here in Victoria where a releatiely inknown party called "Family First" did a preference swap with the Labor party. The Labor party increasingly worried about the Greens becomming a third political force in Australian politics, decided to preference the Family First candidate Steven Fielding above The Greens. Assuming that Family First had enough of a support base to get Labor across the line over The Greens, but not enough to get themselves across the line, they thought this was a safe bet. The Labor party mis-calculated hugely, and the result is that with just under 2% of the primary vote, Steven Fielding Managed to narrowly beat the Greens candidate David Ristrom (who incidently got 12% of the primary vote) purely on labors preferences. The Labor voters I know were horrified when they realised that they'd helped get Steven Fielding into the senate, and I know all of them would have "preferred" David Ristrom from The Greens, who would have been much more in line with labors ideals than a right wing, conservative politician like Steven Fielding.

The real problem of preferences is that for parties it often boils down to "How can we structure our How To Vote card to give us the best chance of winning a seat". which is distinctly at odds with the imperative of the voter which is "Who would I prefer to win this seat".

I think that the solution to this dilema is that people actually need to become more aware of the political process, not just follow blindly the How To Vote cards. You still need to be careful enough to ensure your vote counts as a valid vote, and there needs to be more education on this as part of any election campaign. but if people start to actually vote the way they genuinely prefer, and they stop voting above the line in upper house elections, then there won't be as much emphasis placed on the preference swaps and dealings that go on before the election, and parties will be more likely to use the How To Vote cards as a true indication of who they prefer rather than what deal will win me the seat. If you do insist on voting above the line or following the How To Vote cards exactly, make sure you look at the preferences before you get to the polling both. This information is usually available on the various electoral commision web sites, so for the Victorian election next week, see the VEC, for Australian Federal elections see The AEC.

Tags : Australian Politics, Politics, Elections

Australian Values.... no real opposition

2006-09-16T18:07:00.000+10:00

I know I keep harping on about this, but I think it's a serious problem in the Australian political climate. It's not enough for the Liberal Government to appeal to the baser instincts of the electorate, the opposition has now decided to weigh in on the debate, but not with what you'd expect from an opposition, they are essentially saying that The Governments Australian Values push is not just a good idea, but that it doesn't go far enough, and that everyone who comes to Australia should sign a document promising to uphold Australian Values.

hmmmm.... I'm sure the terrorists are now trembling in fear and madly panicing trying to cancel their booked flights to Australia saying to each other "curses, they've foiled us, we can't possibly go to Australia now because we have to sign a statement promising to uphold Australian Values".

My question to Kim Beazley is simply, What's the point? Anyone who sets foot in another country has already implicitly yielded to the laws of that country and is bound by those laws and is forced to accept any consequences of breaking those laws. To insist on upholding a set of values is a very small step from accusing someone of thought crime.

To rhetorically answer my question, the only point I can see in Kim Beazley and the Labor party jumping on the Australian Values band wagon is to attempt to capture the xenophobia market of voters that the Liberals seem to have fairly well wrapped up instead of actually pointing out that the Liberal party is playing the race card again. You're treading on dangerous ground Kim when you attempt to take on Howard on his own turf.

Australian Values - again

2006-09-03T09:57:00.000+10:00

I've been wondering for a while now what devious plan the Howard government is going to use to win the next election. Seeing as interest rates (last elections devious plan) are on the rise, and "Howards battlers" are now starting to feel the strain of the new industrial relations policies, the Howard Government needed something to take attention off these and other thorny issues (such as the proposed sale of more of Telstra). It surprises me though that Howards political repotoire is so small, that he has to dig up the technique from the 2001 election.... that's right, he's playing the "Race Card" again.

The PM's recent comments about "Australian Values" and "Learning English" are extremely divisive, and unnecessary. I have commented previously on other comments about Australian Values by Peter Costello, and I still believe that it is NOT really possible to come up with a set of values that every Australian could subscribe to without it being a useless mother-hood statement. Or maybe Mr Howard and Mr Costello want us to subscribe to the same set of values as those who took part in the Cronulla race riots, or the more recent attacks on islamic community leaders where a car was smashed up, and hate emails were sent. Is this the set of values we all should subscribe to Mr Howard? Your devisive comments certainly suggest that we sould single out minority groups who are different or don't speak our language as being potentially dangerous.

We live in a country that subscribes to the rule of law, and I fully accept that any one who wants to be a part of our society must be treated fairly and with impartiality under the law. I know multi-culturlaism is difficult to get right, but making comments like this is a sure way to stir up racism and intollerance.

Orange Parrot is the new Red Herring

2006-08-05T12:18:00.000+10:00

With the Federal Government putting the $220 million dollar Victorian wind farm project on hold over dubious concerns that the Endangered Orange Bellied Parrot may be further threatened by the existance of the wind turbines in a region it rarely visits, a few of my work collegues have decided to hijack an old enlglish idiom to highlight just how ludicrous the debate has become.

From now on instead of using the term "Red Herring" to describe a situation or topic designed to divert attention from the real issues at hand, we have decided to use the term "Orange Parrot". So when we describe something as an "Orange Parrot" the idea is that it is a side issue raised to craftily turn debate away from the real issues.

Hopefully this will take on, and will expose the stupid political games the Federal Government is playing at the expense of furthering progress on renewable energy technologies.

Another interest rate rise

2006-08-02T23:14:00.000+10:00

Well, interest rates have risen by another 0.25% making it the highest in 5 years.

The irony is that people are blaming the government. now I'd be the last person to defend the Howard Government, I think that the Howard Government has been a dangerously ideologically driven government that has paid no heed to ethics and the greater common good in the pursuit of their economic rationalist objectives, but the truth of the matter is that the Government is not to blame.

The issue comes back to the promise from the last election that "under a Howard Government, interest rates would remain at record lows", what no one seems to be mentioning is that this was a stupid promise in the first place, and that the Australian public were gullable for believing that the government was able to fulfill that kind of a promise.

Even more rediculous is that the opposition refuses to point out that this was a promise that could not have been kept, probably because they want the Australian voting public to view this as another Howard broken promise, and to think that maybe a labor Government could do better, so that they stand a chance of actually winning the next election.

I think the whole problem comes down to the vast majority of Australians having a certain amount of political apathy such that they'll be swayed by vague promises of financial security that have no real substance, if they're shouted loudly enough to them just before an election. C'mon Australia, it's time for something better, lets inject a bit of realism into the political debate, it's time to get involved NOW, not one month before the next federal election.

Google Maps and sustainable transport

2006-07-06T09:07:00.000+10:00

I have found a great site that is a mashup of google maps. http://www.bikely.com. The idea is you can search the user entered database for the best way to get between various points by bike. The website also allows you to sign in and create your own bike route so you can share your favourite rides with others. You can even put comments at each point that appear as pop-ups on the map. I'll have to start riding my bike more so that I can contribute.

Government Backdown on Snowy River sell-out

2006-06-03T13:43:00.000+10:00

It was good to read in the news today that the Federal Government had decided to pull out of the sale of The Snowy River Hydro-Electric scheme forcing the NSW and Victorian state governments to follow suit, and I think that all though the people protesting over the sale have done a lot of hard work and deserve some credit, I believe that the decision is far more politically motivated than being a great dislpay of "people-power" forcing a Governments hand.

So what politically did the government gain by back flipping on this issue. Well, since the last election where Howard won control of the senate he has set about enforcing a very aggresive policy agenda. He has pushed through a number of bills that have been extremely unpopular. From attacks on personal liberties under the guise of fighting terrorism, to the extremely unpopular IR reforms, as well as others such as Voluntary Student unionism which will essentially bring about the end of the Student unions, and refugee policy that is motivated not out of what's best for Australia and what our international obligations are, but born from foreign pressure. All of which had equally vocal, community movements against them as did the sell-out of the snowy mountains scheme. So why this one and not others? Why not a backflip on the full sale of telstra for instance?

I think this needs to be looked at in the context of how easy a backflip it was. Firstly it wasn't an election promise, secondly the investment by the Federal Government in the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme was minimal (13%), and thirdly it was unpopular with an already jaded electorate. So not only does the Government get to spin it their way "yes people... we are listening to you", but they also get to make things tough for the New South Wales and Victorian Labor Governments as they grapple to deal with the buget short-falls from what would have been a more significant money eraner for them, all while looking like a knight in shinning armour riding in on a white horse to save the day. As the political analysts have mentioned, it is a politically astute move, but I believe that the unpopularity of the sale was merely an easy out for political objectives that are much more sinister.

Cyclovia comes to Melbourne

2006-05-28T15:37:00.000+10:00

I just got back from Cyclovia in which Sydney road was closed to traffic for half the day and only cyclist, pedestrians and trams were allowed through.

Here are some photos from the event.

The event was very enjoyable, and I really liked the ride from Fistzroy Street to Brunswick. I did have to stop myselft from yelling out "Make public transport public" when the transport Minister Peter Bachelor got up to speak on "sustainable transport". It seems as though Yarra Council is also interested in the concept. I think it would be great to do something similar in Yarra, maybe close off Brunswick and Smith streets.

Coffee Art

2006-05-28T15:32:00.000+10:00

My partner and I were shopping on Bridge Road Richmond and decided to stop for a coffee. We chose a backery cafe and ordered a flat white. We could not believe it when we were presented with said flat white.

Yes that's right not only have they done the whole funky thing with the frothed milk, but they'd even gone to the extent of writing the words "Flat White" in the top right hand corner. I think that's going just a little too far.

Alexander Downer Memorial sale

2006-05-26T08:35:00.000+10:00

alexawbmemorialsale
Originally uploaded by scott.baldwin.

Well, the flying bike has been removed, it didn't take long, but Fitzroy never ceases to surprise me. This is the sight that greeted me at the local nursery as I waited for a tram into the city yesterday morning.

It is the Alexander Downer Memorial AWB Kickback SALE. I don't think Alexander Downer will ever live down those fishnet stockings.... just please don't do a song and dance routine for us Alex.

Fitzroys Flying Bike day 2

2006-05-20T12:13:00.000+10:00

FLyingBike5
Originally uploaded by scott.baldwin.

I've decided to follow the progress of Fitzroys prestigious flying bike. It is still there 1 day after I first noticed it, and I still have no idea who did it, what it's purpose is, or how long it will stay there. I'd love to hear some ideas from readers.... (OK who am I fooling... Reader if I'm lucky) on this topic.

Fitzroy's Flying Bike

2006-05-19T09:34:00.000+10:00

FlyingBike4
Originally uploaded by scott.baldwin.

When I work from home I have a ritual of walking down to the local coffee shop, buying a coffee and then walking back before starting work, it's kinda like seperating work from home, I leave home, lock up and start my journey to work, on the way I buy a coffee, and then I head to work, which just so happens to be home.

This morning on the way to work, I discovered this site. Luckily I had my phone with me.
Is it art? Is it a practical joke? Knowing Brunswick Street either is possible. I'm just curios how long it's going to last there.

Fairfield Boat House

2006-05-09T10:30:00.000+10:00

I'm currently on a well deserved holiday, and yesterday I took the opportunity to go for a noce ride. Wasn't sure where I would end up, but I found a lovely spot called the Fairfield Boat House.

I sat and had a coffee and scones while I read my book, and defended my scones from a very hingry minor bird

Games Mania

2006-03-18T20:48:00.000+11:00

Well, Melbourne is in the grips of commonwealth games fever, and it is obvious walking around the city.

St. Pauls Kathederal was not missing any opportunity to cash in on the advertising revenue from the games

The city was crowded, I don't think I've ever seen Federation Square quite so full.

Niki and I took a walk over the Yarra, down to the arts centre where there was an artificial beach set up. Basically they'd just dumped a whole heap of sand on the arts centre lawn and called it a beach.

On the way, we got a good shot of the fish used in the openning ceremony to bring the queens baton relay up the Yarra to the MCG (in the background)

Speaking of the Openning Ceremony, Niki and I were lucky enough to get free tickets to the Dress Rehersal of the openning ceremony.
We had a good time, , and there were some good moments but we weren't overly impressed with the ceremony. I think for me personally, I'm not a big fan of the major event production style, I prefer smaller productions, but that's just me.

Cartoon on Australian Values

2006-03-01T12:34:00.000+11:00

Gotta love this guys sense of humor. This relates to the comment by Peter Costello about some mythical set of Australian Values that we are all supposed to share. refer to my earlier article.

http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/cartoon_3984.html

Flooded

2006-02-26T16:51:00.000+11:00

On Saturday 25th of February, instead of having friends around for afternoon tea and dinner, we found ourselves defending our besieged house from a combination of torrential rain and blocked drains. The following pictures are to prove that we didn't just make it up because we were running late with the food.

This is a photo of one bright spark who thought it would be a good idea to get out of the street as fast as possible... not caring about the people houses who were, until he charged through, almost flooded.

In this one you can see in the distance a blue car up to its headlights in water, what you probably can't make out is the red car even further off in the distance that is even worse off.

This is looking out of our front door. It was about this point that we cancelled our plans for the afternoon.

Our garage was totally flooded, which has forced us to actually unpack all the boxes that we hadn't got around to unpacking since moving in.... last august.

Response to Peter Costello's recent remarks

2006-02-26T15:33:00.000+11:00

In response to Remarks last Thursday by our 'beloved' treasurer Peter Costello (ref Article "Our Values or Home") I would like to offer these criticisms.

Firstly in response to the catch phrase he used "mushy misguided multiculturalism" I would suggest that this makes a mockery of the significant efforts the majority of Australians have been making towards being a multicultural society. As observed by Peters brother Tim Costello, multiculturalism is hard, and I feel that it is something worth working towards.

Secondly by singling out people who have dual citizenship for different forms of punishment than those of us who only have Australian Citizenship, you are creating 2 distinct classes of Citizen, and the distinction is most definitely racist, boiling down essentially to "those who were born here (the pure bread "Australians") and those who weren't. I am whole heartedly in favour of the rule of law, and the law needs to be applied completely impartially to all who are in the society. Although, with the recent advent of sedition laws in Australia, I do feel there is scope to use the rule of law in a very dubious way.

Thirdly, I think that Peter Costello has confused Laws with Values, and it was scary to see the two mixed in such a casual way. You can't legislate values, the concept is preposterous. Further, I would really like to see this set of values that every Australian is supposed to subscribe to. The only possible way to have such a set of values would be to have a very small set of "motherhood statements" which no-one could feasibly disagree with. ie... "We value a peaceful society, we value family, we value community etc.... " which really is completely impractical for any legislative purpose, let alone attempting to build a society on. As soon as you start to add any more complex values, you start to have conflicting values, and you would get less and less Australians "dual citizens or otherwise" subscribing to these values. You certainly would not be able to make ridiculous sweeping statements about an entire nation of more than 20 million people holding the exact same set of values.

In conclusion I think that the analysts are correct, our 'beloved' treasurer is simply making these statements to gain political mileage. Firstly with the baser instincts of the electorate who have been fed a diet of fear ever since September 2001 and allowed our country to participate in a war who's reasons kept changing as we went along, and secondly to the more right-wing elements of his party in the hope he will be seen by them as a possible replacement for the top job.

Public education should be public

2006-02-05T11:42:00.000+11:00

I have read a few articles recently that are suggesting some form of public-private partnership as a model for bringing our beleaguered public education system into the 21st century. The latest involving a parents trust sounds OK to start with, I mean would it really hurt parents to invest in their child's education.... until you start to look under the hood a little.

I think that one of the main reasons we have a public education system is to give all children regardless of their parents earning capacities a similar footing from which to start their lives.

I believe that if either the parents trust model goes ahead, then this will negate this ideal, as parents in poorer communities will not be able to put as much into trusts as parents in richer areas. Which will inevitably lead to disparity in the quality of education in these areas and add more to the ever growing divide between rich and poor.

I also believe strongly that curriculum should be based on strong public debate and not set by the whim of a vocal minority group. All models of public-private partnership suffer from this problem, as no private interest will ever be devoid of the desire to influence in some way be it to recoup investment money (such as in the case of an enterprise investing in a school), or just because of the additional investment that parents have made to their child's education.

The solution I put both to the Federal and State governments is to fund public schooling in Australia appropriately.

The spin detection machine

2006-01-26T12:53:00.000+11:00

Interesting concept, a piece of software that detects the amount of spin in a speech. The model is based on analysing the frequency of various kinds of words in a speech and professes to be able to detect levels of deception and insincerity in English text. I must confess, I'm more than a little skeptical. I just think there are so many variables, ie the speakers/speech writers proficiency with the English language, different styles of speech writing, different topics, different audience. All of these things change the way we use language and shape what we say.

I guess the ultimate test will come when they decide to commercialise the software and produce a website dedicated to selling it..... and then run the software over the site. I guess this could be seen as an extension of the halting problem.

This is the life

2005-12-06T09:12:00.000+11:00

Ahhh... This is why I moved to Fitzroy. Sitting on Brunswick Street in a cafe with free wireless access, blogging, reading email, surfing the net.... Gee I've become such a geek.

Blogging on Blogging

2005-11-05T17:46:00.000+11:00

I don't usually blog about blogging, I find it a little too self referential for my liking, but last weekend I was talking to a friend about blogs and he told me he didn't particularly like the idea. His explanation of why he didn't see blogs as a valuable social construct went along the lines that on one side of the spectrum you had articles in journals which had high peer review, but were extremely narrow in scope. Blogs were at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, extremely wide in scope, but absolutely no peer review.

This got me thinking, and caused me to re-read the article that got me into blogging in the first place. I find it strange that whenever I mention Joi Ito, or his paper "Emergent Democracy" even to active bloggers, I get blank looks. I think it's a must read for any serious blogger. In the paper Joi Ito argues for the emergent nature of blogging and related social technologies. By emergent it is taken to mean the "self organising ability of complex systems". In refutation to my friends objection to blogs, I'd like to quote directly from the paper.

"Noise in the system is suppressed, and signal amplified. Peers read the operational chatter at Mayfield's creative network layer. At the social network layer, bloggers scan the weblogs of their 150 acquaintances and pass the information they deem significant up to the political networks. The political networks have a variety of local maxima which represent yet another layer. Because of the six degrees phenomenon, it requires very few links before a globally significant item has made it to the top of the power curve. This allows a great deal of specialization and diversity to exist at the creative layer without causing disruptive noise at the political layer."

I concede that any individual blog article by any individual blogger in and of itself has not been peer reviewed, and this is the way it should be. However the blogsphere by its very nature will self organise in such a way that it will give the effect of peer review / critique. I don't think we have reached utopia yet (my entry in this years "understatement of the year competition"), and I believe that there is still a way to go, still new technologies that are required, different online social structures to be explored, but when I originally read "Emergent Democracy" I was captured by the vision.

The Age hits out at the state of our public transport system

2005-11-05T15:18:00.000+11:00

It is good to see The Age in today's paper making some very bold criticisms of the Bracks governments lack of forward thinking on public transport. In an article entitled "Melbourne grinding to a halt", then age goes into detail about a report being released on Monday by Transport Minister Peter Bachelor that is quite critical of the state of public transport in Melbourne.

What I find most frustrating is that many groups such as the PTUA, the CBC, and many others have been trying to say this for quite some time now, but it has been falling on deaf ears. I only hope that as an outsider professor Peter Newman (author of the damning report) can succeed where others a little closer to the situation such as Professor Paul Mees have so far been unsuccessful.

My personal opinion is that Peter Bachelor should be forced to catch the train to work when parliament is in session instead of being chauffeur driven. In the IT industry we call this "Dog Fooding", where you force the people developing the product to actually use it. There is no quicker way I know of to get action on usability issues faster than forcing someone who has the power to make the changes use the damn thing. My only concern would be for Mr Bachelors safety, as by his station (Clifton Hill) during peek hour, the trains are filled to bursting point, and people aren't particularly happy when they have spent 20 mins waiting because a train was cancelled, then 15 mins smelling someone's arm pitt. If anyone were to recognise the man responsible for the atrocious state of Melbournes public transport, then rationality may give way to rage.

Everybody Hates Latham

2005-09-29T13:26:00.000+10:00

A friend of mine has started work on a blog that combines 2 of his great loves..... politics and comedy. With the ALP in disarray, and the Liberals swooping around the rotting carcass of the Democrats, there's really nobody to keep the bastards honest anymore. As the Latham diaries take there rightful place in history along side the memoires of..... Pauline Hanson, there's really only one place to turn for all the truth behind the political wrangling, and to understand why "Everybody Hates Latham".

Pointless Rant against the full sale of Telstra

2005-09-13T22:09:00.000+10:00

As Telstras last few remaining shares are sold off at the hands of a party that really should be there to protect rural Australia from the whims of narrow minded economic rationalism, I'd like to take this opportunity (not so much as a eulogy, however apt the metaphor, more as an exercise in futility) to express a few of my (increasingly pointless) objections.

The free market, according to the economists, is meant to maximize profit. Ignoring the fact that there are no guarantees about how that profit will be distributed, there are a number of axioms that underpins this assumption. One of those axioms is that there are no externalities, or at least if there are, they are compensated. This is quite a big assumption even for some of the simplest economic transactions, but when we come to communications, this axiom doesn't even begin to stand up.

There are numerous externalities most of which are so intangible they can't even begin to be compensated. One of the externalities that most concerns me is that communications is such a valuable resource resource not only to building communities, but also to business in general. The governments 2 billion dollar trust fund is to get current services to the bush, however, being a technology professional, I know how quickly communications technologies change. Telstra are even struggling to get adequate mobile coverage to rural areas, let alone other technologies such as broard band internet. The communications technologies of tomorrow is what will drive business, and without the power to regulate the egalitarian dispersion of these technologies, certain sectors of the community that, those that a privatized company can't see immediate profits to pass on to their share holders. This I believe has the potential to seriously impact on Australia as a whole.

Tram ticketing incident

2005-09-07T09:32:00.000+10:00

A colleague of mine has had a bit of a run in with a ticket inspector today, or at least her Chinese speaking mother has. My colleague’s mother boarded a tram today to go from surrey hills to box hill. She validated her ticket and then a few stops later the ticket inspector got on and asked to see her ticket. She showed her the validated zone 1 ticket, and was told that this was not a valid ticket as they were now in zone 2. The stop she boarded the tram at was in the crossover where both zone 1 and zone 2 tickets are valid. Of course, my colleague’s mother did not understand any of this as she doesn’t speak English, so to make sense of this gibberish the ticket inspector was carrying on with, she had to call her daughter at work and ask her to translate. My colleague was surprised to learn that her mother was about to be fined for fare evasion. OK, so she didn’t have the correct ticket, however, a zone 1 2 hour ticket is actually more expensive than a zone 2 2 hour ticket, but that wasn’t good enough, she is still a fare evader because she didn’t buy the right ticket. Isn’t this just the most obvious example of why we need to bring back the conductors. OK, there’s probably not a lot that a conductor could have done about the language barrier, but I’m sure if she could show the conductor the address of the box hill hospital (where she was going), a conductor would have known the right ticket, and not only would she not have been fined, but she would also have purchased a cheaper ticket.
I am all for catching genuine fare evaders, I really think that people should pay their way, but I have to confess that situations like these highlight gross deficiencies in the attitude taken by metlink. It also brings into question any statistics they might provide on fare evasion, and certainly makes a joke of their claim that one of the problems running a public transport system is that Melbourne has a "culture of fare evasion".

Carless in Melbourne

2005-07-30T16:10:00.000+10:00

Well, it's been about a year now since I finally plucked up enough courage to do what I'd been talking about for years... Sell my car and live the car free life style.
Since then I have rented a car on 2 separate weekend, once to go camping with Niki, the other time to go to a Geek Weekend in Wagga Wagga.
With the price of petrol the way it is I figure I am quite a lot better off, although I have had to sacrifice my convenience significantly. For instance, I currently work in Doncaster, which as those who live in Melbourne know is quite poorly serviced by public transport, and can take me anywhere between 50 mins and 1 hour 20 mins to get to or from. Also I have friends in the far east (Narre Warren, endeavor hills etc...) who we've practically lost contact with (although some of them do have broad band and we chat regularly using instant messenger or skype).
Shopping is a little bit more tricky, and going to Tango requires either 2 changes of public transport or a 35 minute walk (you don't always feel like doing that much tango after walking there in your good shoes).
There are some alternatives which I'm considering such as car sharing schemes, and we are seriously looking at buying push bikes, but I have to confess, I don't regret the decision to go car free, but on the same token, I can't really judge anyone for deciding it's too much effort.
A consultant started work at the company I am currently contracting to in Doncaster for a 6 month stint, the first day he got a lift, then the second day (being a public transport person) attempted to catch public transport from North Essendon to Doncaster. It took him 2 hours to get there. He resigned that day.

New house

2005-07-03T19:41:00.000+10:00

Just thought I'd put up a picture of our new house so that our family and friends could see it.

We move in early august, so I'll put up some images of the inside of the house then.

Lev Manovich: Soft Cinema

2005-07-02T22:12:00.000+10:00

Soft Cinema looks quite cool, and looks to implement in video a similar kind of thing to what I am trying to do with the written word
Lev Manovich: Soft Cinema

Back in Debt

2005-06-11T11:39:00.000+10:00

Well after almost a year of living debt free, I am now about to take on the biggest debt I have ever had. My partner and I have bought a house. So from being firmly in the black, we are now well and truly in the red. When I finally got myself out of debt (from the car loan, the holiday to South America, and the various luxuries put on various credit cards), I vowed that the only thing I would go into debt for would be a house, so there we have it, at the mercy of the banks again, I just hope the IT industry doesn’t go belly up again and I end up driving cabs for a living.
That said, we a both very excited about the prospects of owning a slice of our own home together.

Friends exhibition

2005-05-22T12:17:00.000+10:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to the openning of a friend's exhibition.

Kaye (in the middle) is a very talented artist who has just moved down to Melbourne from Canberra.

The exhibition should be on for a couple more weeks at The Old Fire Station Cafe Gallery 378 High Street Preston. I encourage all those living in Melbourne to go see it.

Yarra Sustainable Transport Coalition: Welcome to the Campaign!

2005-04-30T22:06:00.000+10:00

Yarra Sustainable Transport Coalition: Welcome to the Campaign!

Yet another group to add to my list of groups caimpagning for change in Melbourne public transport.
Keep up the good work guys, and I'll see you on thursday.

Camping at Lumby's Bend

2005-04-15T23:09:00.000+10:00

A couple of weeks ago, my partner and I went camping at Lumby's bend.

Lumby's Bend is on the Murray river not far from Rutherglen. We had a great time, but realised how ill-prepared we were for camping. We don't mind roughing it, but we need a few more basics before we go camping again.

There was a young family camped next to us with a couple of Kids.

We did see some people who were quite well prepared

These three guys just floated by us.... note the esky of VB floating down the river with them.

Liberal voters have been duped

2005-02-09T11:58:00.000+11:00

This article is to all those people who voted Liberal in the last election because of the interest rate scare campaign that the Liberal government used to buy mortgage belt votes.

As predicted by most economists before the election, the reserve bank will raise interest rates regardless of who's in government (refer to article in the age). It is obvious even to me that the government in power has so little to do with interest rates, that it isn't worth considering this as an election issue at all.
So thanks to you, not only are we still stuck with rising interest rates, but we have the Howard governments inhumane treatment of asylum seekers (as well as mentally ill people who happen to speak another language other than English), but the Liberals now have a majority in both houses, and can introduce industrial relations legislation to further increase the woes of the Aussie battler.
Thanks a lot.

Cyprus - the politics 2

2005-01-22T15:47:00.000+11:00

There have been a number of attempts to re-unit the divided Cyprus since the war in 1974, all of which have failed. The latest was the plan put forward by Kofi Anan. I have little idea what the details of the plan involved, but from what I was told by the Greek Cypriots, it was extremely unfair to them, and consequently when it was put to a vote about 9 months ago, the result was more than 80% of the population voting NO to accepting the Anan plan.
It was on the news in Australia, but ever so briefly, but even though it was 9 months ago, the evidence was still all around in Cyprus. The most common form of political activism seems to be graffiti.

"No to Anan" (ie no to the Anan plan) - Nicosia

"No to the betrayal" - Limasol

"No for our children's sake" - Limasol

Bad Experience on Poros

2005-01-22T14:33:00.000+11:00

As I promised earlier, I was going to say a bit about our bad experience in Poros.
When we got back to Athens we found some really cheap accommodation, and started to plan out our final days in Greece. We decided that the next morning we'd go to one of the Greek Islands. We chose Poros for it's convenience (and because I'd heard of it), and went down to the port. We found a tourist agent selling tickets for the ferry to Poros, and asked what times the ferries were. He told us we could get one that left Athens at midday, and then left Poros at 6:00pm. This sounded good, we could go over to Poros, find somewhere nice for lunch, have a bit of an explore, then head back to Athens and be home in time to go dancing later that night. We glanced briefly at our tickets after we left the shop to discover that the ticket actually said 1:00pm, we went back to the tourist shop and the agent agreed that it was 1:00pm and denied ever mentioning midday. I didn't know because Niki did all the conversing with such people in Greek. So there went 1 hour of exploring time. We caught the Ferry at 1:00pm and arrived at Poros at 2:00pm. The island was obviously very touristy, but because we were there in the off season, most things had closed down, but it was still a beautiful island. Most people there used a motor scooter for transport.

and there were sailing boats and fishing boats everywhere you looked.

We tried to hire a motor scooter, but the guy didn't have insurance for foreigners, so we were stuck with walking. We met an English lady who was living on Poros and she suggested a restaurant for us to have lunch in. Lunch was fantastic, and after a lot of food and a couple of jugs of wine we stumbled out of the restaurant, and headed back towards the wharf where the ferry would depart from. We stop off on the way to have a coffee, thinking we had plenty of time, and at 5:00pm we left the cafe for the wharf. We were about a hundred metres away from the wharf when I noticed that a ferry had just left and it looked like the ferry we should have been on. We ran back to the ferry agent on Poros who informed us that yes that was our ferry, and it was the last ferry out of Poros for the night. We were not happy, we looked at the tickets and sure enough they said 5:00pm, and the agent in Athens had told us the time the ferry gets back to Athens, not the time it leaves Poros. We complained to the girl at the Poros ferry agent, but she said there was nothing we could do about it as we should have checked our tickets, to which I retorted that I was beginning to believe that it was a standard trick the Greeks play on unsuspecting tourists to try and squeeze more tourist dollars out of them.
So even though we had already booked accommodation in Athens and left our suit cases there, we were forced to find accommodation on Poros for the night. It left us with a bad taste in our mouths and a 50 Euro whole in our wallets.

Paphos and Limasol

2005-01-21T22:44:00.000+11:00

I have been chided by a friend for not having enough photos on my blog, so with an apology to those poor people still using dial up connections, here are some photos from Paphos (coastal town on the west of the Island), and Limasol the major port in Cyprus which we visited on our final weekend in Cyprus.

Paphos - The Tomb of the Kings

The Tomb of the kings wasn't actually used to burry any kings, it was actually just used to burry Paphos's extremely wealthy, but Tomb of the extremely wealthy wouldn't attract as many tourists, so Tomb of the Kings it is.

Limasol

Language Difficulties

2005-01-21T21:06:00.000+11:00

While in Cyprus, I was trying to learn as much Greek as I could, which is complicated by the fact that the Cypriots speak a dialect of Greek, and the text book I was learning from back in Australia was main land Greek. However cultural difference also complicated things.
We drank a lot of Turkish coffee while I was in Cyprus, (although because of strained relations with Turkey some of them call it a Cyprus Coffee), but from the first time they offered me a Cyprus coffee, they asked me if I wanted it "Metrio" which I knew was the Greek work meaning Medium, which I thought logically referred to the strength of the coffee. They were all having theres "Sketo" which by logical deduction was "strong", I thought that they were assuming that I wouldn't be able to handle it as strong as they could. It was only by accident that I learnt that "Metrio" and "Sketo" referred not to the strength, but to the amount of sugar in the coffee. "Sketo" literally means straight (ie no sugar), "Metrio" (medium as I knew) meant half a teaspoon of sugar or medium sweetness, and "Gliki" means sweet (ie 1 full teaspoon of sugar). By the time I'd found out about this, I was used to having my Cyprus coffee "Metrio", and so I stuck to it, but the Cypriots had a good laugh at my mis-understanding.

Cyprus - the politics

2005-01-11T21:46:00.000+11:00

The very first day I arrived in Cyprus, Niki's father handed me a book called "The Cyprus Conspiracy" that explains the events that have caused all the problems in Cyprus. For those who aren't familiar with the plight of Cyprus, the current status stems from the Turkish invasion in 1973. Turkey now occupy the Northern third of Cyprus and it is called "The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus". They have their own flag and they use the Turkish currency, but Turkey is the only country to officially recognise them as an independent nation. The book is quite interesting, and explains the extremely rough path from British colony after the second world war to independent nation in 1960 and then the events that consequently caused Turkey to invade. It really scares me all the dirty tricks, hidden agenda's and double dealing that goes on in the world of international politics. The British and Americans have an awful lot to answer for. Nicosia, the capital is left divided between the independent Cyprus and The Turkish occupied North. In the mountains overlooking the city of Nicosia, is an image painted into the mountain of both the Turkish flag, and the flag of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

You can see this image from many parts of the the independent side of Nicosia, a blatant reminder of the turmoil. I promised previously more on Macarios. Macarios was the Arch Bishop of Cyprus from 1950 til 1977. Because of the religious orientation of the Greek Cypriot population, Macarios in his position as Arch Bishop, also assumed the role of President. Macarios was instrumental in the struggle for independence from Britain, and many still consider him a hero. He did however, make some mistakes, his support for the guerrilla movement EOKA, made up of Greek Cypriots, and his doctrine of enosis (union with Greece) caused a rift between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot population which (amongst other circumstances) eventually lead to the Turkish invasion in an attempt to protect the rights of the minority Turkish Cypriot population.
Although not necessarily a mistake, Makarios felt compelled to seek support from the Soviets which caused the Americans to panic at a very crucial time during the cold war. They feared that the Soviets may gain too much influence over NATO's "unsinkable aircraft carrier".

Greek / Turkish Cypriot

I feel that it's quite important at this point to clarify the terms Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot. Because of all the divisions caused between the two different communities in Cyprus, there are some who really don't like the terms Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot preferring to identify simply as Cypriot. However, in attempting to understand the Islands socio-political make up, it does make it easier to distinguish between the communities in such a way that Greek Cypriot means someone who speaks Greek, is Greek Orthodox, cooks Greek style food, and barracks for the Greek soccer team in the world cup, and Turkish Cypriot as someone who speaks Turkish, is Muslim, and barracks for the Turkish soccer team.

Christos

2005-01-11T21:36:00.000+11:00

One of Niki's cousins 6 year old Christos doesn't speak any English, so I was at a loss as to how to make any kind of a connection with him, until I noticed him bouncing a soccer ball around the room. I signaled to him using gestures that I would like to go outside and kick the soccer ball around with him. It's surprising how 'goal' is understood in pretty much every language. After about 10mins of play I was called in for some dessert. Christos followed me inside and waited patiently.... for about 3 minutes then went up to his mum and asked (in Greek) 'how do you say 'ella' in english' a few seconds later he comes up to me and says 'come Scott', and gestured for me to go back out and play more soccer with him. I think I not only broke through the language barrier but also made a friend.

Back in Athens

2005-01-11T21:23:00.000+11:00

Our last 4 days in Greece were back in Athens, and after Thessaloniki, the traffic in Athens seemed quite serene. We stayed in a hotel in a place called "monesteraki" which means literally "small monastery". There were a whole heap of flea markets nearby, so we spent all afternoon looking at the fleas. The rest of the day we spent wondering around Athens looking at all the ancient sites. The next day we decided to go to the island of Poros which is about a 1 hour ferry ride from Athens. Poros itself was a really lovely place, but we had a bad experience there which meant that we didn't enjoy it as much as we perhaps could have, more about that in another post. The next day we went to an exhibition of works by Escher, I know this makes me look like such a geek, but Niki really enjoyed it too. That night we went to a tango social dance, and this time stayed until 3:00am. We left the Acropolis until the last day, and with our luck, it poured down raining. We braved it, but alas our $5 umbrella was not up for the task. We got drenched. That evening, we found a nice restaurant that had live traditional Greek music. We left very early the next morning for Cyprus.

Thessaloniki

2004-12-21T03:30:00.000+11:00

Our first experience of Thessaloniki was of peak hour mayhem as we dragged our luggage around the streets looking for our C grade hotel after being informed that we'd missed our bus stop. Speaking for myself, I very quickly started to dislike the city, and when we took a wrong turn down a side street that was obviously a red light area I think Niki had some reservations about the city as well. Not to mention that the traffic is worse here than in Athens. Here the footpaths aren't safe as motor scooters use them as extra lanes to get around congested traffic. They also have very creative parking practices, in Australia, you aren't supposed to park on corners, in Thessaloniki, it was not un-common to see cars double parked on corners. We also discovered that the green man on traffic lights doesn't mean 'walk' as in Australia, it means 'run for your life', and is merely an indication that your chances of surviving a road crossing at this moment is slightly better than when the red man is displayed, though no guarantees. After finally locating our hotel, we dumped our luggage and gathered enough courage to brave the city streets once more. Walking along the streets, and trying to avoid being run over at each intersection we crossed, every so often, amongst the shops, office buildings and cafes, we'd discover remnants of a bygone era - beautiful Byzantine churches with roadside chapels, an old Turkish bath house (Bei Haman), the arch of Galeious - and slowly this crazy, dangerous, frantic city started to show us its beautiful side.
We spent the next day exploring this amazing city, but we learned that the best way to survive the traffic was to make sure there were plenty of locals either side of us each time we crossed.

Volos

2004-12-21T03:14:00.000+11:00

We traveled by train from Athens to Volos on Saturday the 11th of December, a 5 hour journey. We arrived at about 11pm & went straight to our cheap hotel. On Sunday morning we had breakfast by the sea, then walked along the peer past all the local fisherman. It was amazing to see all the little villages nestled up in the hills behind us. Just after midday we caught a bus up the mountain side to one of the villages called Portaria.

The scenery was absolutely spectacular as we wound our way up the mountain, and there was some really amazing looking houses built into the mountain, and jutting out into what seemed like mid air.

We found a Taverna and sat down to a magnificent meal. The kind of meal where every mouthful is a spectacular sensation, but you insist on not finishing the meal, because to finish would leave you feeling bloated and spoil the experience. They also had a really nice wine, made locally and poured from the barrel.

By the time we were leaving Volos the next day, I was wishing I could spend a couple of weeks there, the place had such a beautiful feel, and the mountains were just such a relaxing peaceful place.

Athens - Chaos 9th & 10th dec

2004-12-21T03:03:00.000+11:00

Niki gave me some very sage advice the other day, 'Never drive in a country who's language you can't swear in'. I saw the full meaning of this when we arrived in Athens. The sheer volume & constancy of the traffic made Melbourne's peak hour seem like sunday afternoon driving, add to this the hundreds of motor scooters & tiny little cars and 3 wheeled mini trucks zipping in and around all the other traffic, and the unspocken road rule of 'motor scooter beats pedestrian, car beats motor scooter, truck beats car', and I didn't feel safe on the chaotic streets of Athens. Our objective in Athens (at least at this end of our journey) was to hunt down a milonga (tango social dance night). We found one not far from our hotel that started at 10:30pm and went til 4:30am. We're getting old, so we piked out at around 2am.
The next day we met up with Niki's cousin Andreas, then headed off for Volos.

Sunday 5-12-04

2004-12-21T02:22:00.000+11:00

Today Niki's family decided to take a visit to the Turkish occupied north of Cyprus. For those that don't know, Turkey invaded the Northern third of Cyprus in 1974, and only recently (about 6 months ago) re-opened it to visitors from the south. (more on the ethno-political situation in another - longer - blog post).First stop was a visit to the village that niki's mother (Maria) is originally from, Kethrae. In 1974, Maria & Barnabas were engaged, and had just finished building the house they hoped to live in when war broke out & they had to flee to the south. We saw the house, and met the people who now own it. They were very welcoming, and I have to admit, I had to choke back a tear or two as I watched Barnabas embrace the Turkish-Cypriot couple and talk about peace & how their country was abused by foreign powers, and short sighted radicals on both sides of the Turkish/Greek equation. We walked around the village with Barnabas showing me where different members of the family used to live before the war. Next we visited the church of St Barnabas which has now been turned into a museum. Finally we drove out to a place called Famagusta to see some ancient Greek ruins kown as Salamina.

Appology

2004-12-21T02:18:00.000+11:00

Due to the fact that Niki and I have been hopping all around Greece, I haven't had time to update this blog, I have been taking notes on my pocket pc though, and will now post a few of them.

Saturday 4-12-04

2004-12-07T19:55:00.000+11:00

Barnabas (Niki's father) was working in the morning so Niki, Maria (Niki's mother), Elena (Niki's sister) and me went to the Arch bishops Palace. There's a huge statue of the Arch Bishop Makarios (circa 1970's, more about Makarios in another post).

There was an ancient Greek orthodox church there with an ornately decorated alter & a plethora of wall paintings depicting various biblical & other scenes (this was the church in which both my mother's sisters got married in - Niki). Of course we weren't allowed to take photos inside the church, but of course there was a stall just outside the church selling postcards with pictures from the church.
There was also a museum depicting the sacred art throughout the Byzantine era, the museum had works from as early as the 9th century, and I think the virgin with child has to be by far the most painted scene in all of history. After the museum, we decided to drop in on Andonia (one of Niki's aunties) initially for coffee, but after being forced to eat delicious Greek sweets (again), she convinced us to stay for lunch. Banos (Andonia's husband) had some wine that had been brewed in the mountains in the traditional way, it was quite sweet, and played with the tongue in an unusual way, but was still quite nice. In the evening we went out to a taverna for dinner. In the taverna's there is no set menu, the only choice you have is what you want to drink. Greek Taverna's in Melbourne use the no menu idea to enable them to practice creative pricing scheme's on the sound principle that if you don't have a menu you don't know how much you're meal should cost at the end of the night. Not so in the tavernas in Cyprus, it is a set price per person, £6 (AUD$18) which they were complaining was a little bit expensive. In comparison, there is no way in hell of getting out of a Greek taverna in Melbourne for under AUD$30 per person.The meal was fantastic, but I think the best thing about the meal was the wine brewed in Cyprus from old grape vines. I'm no longer worried about fitting into the economy class plane seat..... with all the weight we're putting on, it'll be an effort just to squeeze in the door of the plane.

Friday 3-12-04

2004-12-07T19:49:00.000+11:00

Payed a quick visit to one of Niki's aunties for coffee and internet access. We were force fed all kinds of delicious sweets.
Went to the hair dressers (apparently this is a sibling bonding ritual that Niki & her sister do every time she visits, I just desperately needed a haircut). Booked flights to Athens for the 10th to the 19th. We decided to cook our red pepper beef for everyone. After dinner we were sitting around and Niki's auntie Evangalia called to say she was making golokopita (sweet pumpkin pies) and wanted us to come around not so much to help, but for the experience. We sat around drinking zivania (a very strong spirit traditional to Cyprus, otherwise known by the locals as fire water), eating sweets, talking politics, and eventually making golokopita, which of course we ate 15 minutes later when they were cooked. I'm starting to get worried about cramming myself into the economy class plane seat with all the weight I'm going to put on this trip.

Thursday 2-12-04

2004-12-07T19:46:00.000+11:00

Yet another lazy day recovering, but we did do a bit of a trip looking for cheap flights to Athens. Niki's mum made us a Cypriot soup for dinner trahcona which consists of goats milk, goats cheese & Boughlgul rice, very nice.

Wed 1st Dec

2004-12-06T21:08:00.000+11:00

The morning was pretty uneventful, and we needed some time to recuperate after the flights.

In the afternoon Niki and I took a leisurely stroll around the old part of Nicosia (capital of Cyprus). A cultural difference to be aware of in Cyprus is that on a Wednesday all the shops shut around 1:00pm, so the streets, although usually alive with all kinds of tourist shops were quite empty.

We stopped off at a cafe on the main street "Makarios Avenue" (named after the Arch bishop back in the 70's) at a cafe called "Da Capo". We had 1 coffee and 1 tea, and the cost came to 5 Cyprus pound which is AUD$15. It's going to be an expensive stay....

Arrival

2004-12-06T20:37:00.000+11:00

So much has happened in the 5 days since we arrived, but I guess I should go right back to the beginning.
We arrived at Cyprus at about 3:30pm (Cyprus time) and were met at the airport by Niki's parents and sister.
We drove from the Airport to their house which took a bit over half an hour.
Both Niki and I were quite tired from the trip, so we had a bit of a nap before dinner. At around 8:30pm her Niki's extended family came over for a family dinner. This consisted of about 18 people. Keep in mind this is only Niki's Mothers side of the family.
The meal was a typical Cypriot meal with all kinds of tasty treats.

Even though there were 18 of us, they still cooked enough so that we were eating leftovers for the next 3 days.

Cyprus

2004-12-03T22:11:00.000+11:00

Finally made it to Cyprus after a shopping expedition in Singapore the likes of which have never been seen before..... And with our bank accounts the way they are, will never be seen again.

We were lucky enough to be upgraded to Business class not only From Sydney to Singapore, but also from Singapore to Bahrain. This included access to the Gulf Air Transfer lounge in Singapore, and a free breakfast in Bahrain. I could quite easily get used to this sort of treatment.

We have been busy meeting family, and so I haven't been able to update the bloc as often as I'd like, and even now, I don't have long.

I am finding it really frustrating not being able to understand Greek, but Niki is trying to encourage me.

Singapore 2 - Sore feet

2004-11-29T21:37:00.000+11:00

We have trekked all over Singapore now, and my feet are extremely sore.

Being in little India, we had to sample the local Indian food, there are so many restaurants, but I decided to test a theory that seems to work pretty well in Melbourne. I have noticed that in Melbourne, the restaurants on the main street are pretty average, but if you go down some of the back streets and alley ways, you tend to find some really fantastic ones. We took a slight detour off the main road were there were plenty of restaurants, and found a place that was full of Indian people eating. The only problem was that they weren't using any cutlery. Fingers seemed to be the preferred method of placing food into the correct orifice, and it looked very messy. Niki was worried about this at first, but consoled herself with the realisation that the waiter obviously realised we were tourists and would bring us cutlery. He did, but what Niki didn't count on was that the Indian woman next to us would be so amused by the sight of cutlery that her laughter would be enough to shame both of us into trying it the traditional way. This said, we both made a mess but had a ball, and the food was absolutely fantastic, and pretty cheap too, at just $4 (Singapore dollars) for each meal.

Today was spent navigating the train network, and I must say, Singapore has the best train system I have seen so far (true, I have only Melbourne, Sydney Buenos Aires and New York that I can really compare it to), but it was so easy to find our way around, and the ticketing system is excellent.

Anyway, I'm dribbling, must go and find somewhere for dinner, we leave for Cyprus at 4:00 am in the morning.

Singapore

2004-11-28T16:37:00.000+11:00

We have just arrived in Singapore, we landed at 4:00am Singapore time, the temperature outside was 27 degrees Celsius, and it was raining.
It is now 1:30pm, the temperature feels like 37 degrees Celsius...... and it is raining.
We are enjoying all the sites and sounds of little India, and we have already put in a good 4 hours of shopping.
We had a very pleasant surprise waiting for us at Sydney airport, when we checked in they told us that there was a problem with our tickets..... and that they would have to upgrade us to business class. This was my first ever upgrade (although Niki's a bit of a veteran when it comes to upgrades), and we made the most of it, although most of it was spent sleeping, we did enjoy the extra leg room.

Holiday

2004-11-26T23:56:00.000+11:00

Niki and I are off to Cyprus tomorrow. I don't know how frequently I'll be able to update this blog, but we're hoping to post photos and generally keep everyone who is interested up to date with everything that's going on, so keep an eye on this blog.