hpfm ramblings and prognostications

I am almost uncontrollably pissed off today. I heard about this:  http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/10/2512341.htm

Apparently this happened over a year ago, but we are only hearing about it now.

I want to see the Directors, Management and direct workers held reponsible for killing a man who’s crime seemed to be that he was aboriginal.

I am not happy.

hpfm BLOG gets mashed. well a bit of mash mashup on the way… a mashup can be any way of presenting information in a concise way. It could be from multiple sources or one source presented in multiple ways. we’ve added some google tech news on the sidebar and some open source news articles as well so that you can get a lot of info in the one page and save your finger clicking RSI. hpfmBlogs has just updated to wordpress 2.7, for those who know wordpress will understand how good that is!  hpfm is also the sponsor of free blogs using wordpress on pagesforevertry it out for yourself

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Today marks the start of the new episode. For several years now, I have a very is painful neck, so much so that it has prevented me from writing in detail of the sort I’d like to, on a whole range of topics.

Given that I’m a well-known mumbler and prevaricator.  I imagine that trying to read these posts, initially at least could be very difficult.

It should be fun to find out.  It Today is also remarkable for the fact that I have finally divorced myself from an addiction or at the least a dependence upon Apple’s, iTunes.  

I got sick of a range of issues that I was suffering from with iTunes and so I have replaced it with Mozilla is Songbird. http://getsongbird.com/

The issues that I had was when I asked by iTunes to copy my files from the standard format to an MP3 format.  Rather than replace the file the existing songs with their MP3 versions, iTunes simply made another copy of the same files.

Having done this a few times, I add it up with multiple copies of nearly every song in my music collection.  I went through all of the subfolders and directories of music and removed all duplicates leaving only the MP3 files.  

iTunes, of course, didn’t update its playlist, so I would be fortunate if one in three files listed in the playlist were actually able to play. Rather than work through the whole, iTunes environment to try and figure out what the hell was going was going on how to fix it I decided to replace iTunes altogether

I now have a new music player, which looks fantastic sounds great, and seemed to have all my music on.

What more could you ask willo, having purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking, of decided that all my posts from now will be done using speech recognition, stay well

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Today saw the current federal government cave into Australia’s filthiest companies and consigned the Barrier Reed, Kakadu and probably the Murray Darling System to history.

Given the chance to show that we truly understand how important the condidtion of the worlds atmosphere is, our representatives bubkled at the knees and gave i because it seems too hard.

They even decided to reward the most digusting forms of environmental vanadlism with an extra $4billion AUD.  This is equivalent to giving Rothmans money to fight lung cancer!!!

I thought the Rudd government was serious about this, but it seems oiling squeaky wheels is more effective if you want to stay in power.

This effort gets 3/10 simply because they announced a target - paltry and pathetic as that may be.

I guess its still slightly better than the other lot.

But either our kids, kids lose, severely.

I guess we become the titleholders of ‘most selfish lifeform ever’

I thought I’d take the opportunity of my first post to quickly outline and wholeheartedly endorse our employee health scheme.

Barry has personal experience of the problems caused and exacerbated by computer terminal use, and decided to bring in an expert to advise us on our desk ergonomics, posture etc. Before we knew it we had all signed up for a weekly one hour training session at the nearest park. I was envisioning some stretches and some hippy ‘how-to-sit’ lessons, but what we ended up with was pretty much a personal training session like you’d find at a gym, but with emphasis on exercises and stretches relevant to our jobs. And the best bit is that it’s actually quite fun (even after a couple of months).

The good points:

1. Becoming healthier
2. Feeling healthier (not necesarily the same as point 1)
3. Informal team bonding
4. Friday wind-down (a.k.a. guilt-free slacking off)
5. Hopefully fewer long-term health issues, rsi, sick days etc…

The bad points:

1. Barry has to pay

So as you can see it’s 100% good news, there’s absolutely no down-side at all!

I was looking at the Rocky Mountains Institute web page directed to transport, which follows watching The Daily Show last night in which I heard for the first time someone saying that the smart way ahead is to plan for the termination of our dependence on fossil fuels.  The RMI is planning for the end of oil, Australia I would propose needs to plan to eliminate coal mining by 2050 as well.

Why kill the goose that laid the golden egg?  Because someone is going to work out how to produce power without pollution.  That person, company, group or country will have a mortgage on the future.  The market economist must admit that with the climate situation as it is, there is definitely demand there.

In the Daily Show interview the ‘bubble’ nature of economics was discussed.  That is we had the first wave of internet players, this created a hyper infalted bubble that crashed and cost a lot of people lots of money. When the dust cleared we had this amazing resource called the World Wide Web which is now core to most of world trade.
We can look at Coal in the same way.  We currently have a hyperinflated buble of coal generated power networks.  Once this bubble bursts, there will be huge costs and business failures etc, BUT we will be left with highly valuable power networks that the new generators can leverage.

But how do we get there?

2 ways:

• Wait - then pay the price and conintue as a third rate economy, desperately trying to catch up.
• Take the pain in lumps

• Stop all subsidies to fossil fuel immediately

• E.g remove trade incentives
• Tax emissions
• Make them pay for the water they use
• Cancel all exploration permits immediately

• Free, non-poluting universal public transport
• Free, non polutting  personal  public transport
• Disuade private fossil fuel use

• in cars, lawnmowers etc

Of course we cant see thus happening for a while because of the outrageious lobbying power that these organisations have.

Coal Miners, Oil companies etc may well employ a lot of people, but the damage they are doing to us is now measurable and must be acknowledged.

Protecting these dinosaurs serves noone, we must see them off the premises for our own good, regardless of how good they make us feel.