They're trying to tell us something, and that something is: "stay the fuck out of the water" And be thankful this bastard isn't around any more.

On arriving in the CBD by train on the way to work, I got a little caught up in something. So I hobbled from Town Hall towards Wynyard along George Street in sync with the marchers, snapping some shots as I went. I'm firmly on the side of these guys but hell was it difficult to get around by public transport today. Interesting anthropological note: yes, the power of the SLR camera is confirmed. People will let you wander into their path, barge and otherwise make a nuisance of yourself if you have a big ol' SLR camera. Though come...

Western Australia is about to trial Daylight Savings Time. Literally about to. The change will begin on December 3rd and will be a three-year trial, after which WA will hold a referendum on whether to keep the change in place. So what does this mean for your computer? Well, not too much, hopefully. At Microsoft the team has been hard at work to implement a fix to the WA timezone for Windows, so WA users will not be subject to the confusion this move could potentially cause. Without this fix, automatic time changes won't happen, stored appointments may be an...

SMH reports that the NSW government will offer free wireless broadband in the Sydney CBD and significant centres by 2008. This is such great news. But the countdown begins to when Telstra try to crush this beautiful idea like a bug, since it would be percieved as a threat to their bottom line

Or is The Spin Starts Here starting to recycle material in terms of just over and over doing the "Hooray For Everything" thing over and over? I mean, does adopting some dickhead's "kind blog initiative" actually have any effect on one side or the other? I had a moment of boredom with the old "deprive us of oxygen" shit, and now, what? we seem to have the same old 'Attack some other blogger' thing going on. Where's the incisive commentary? Where the fuck is the genuine snark? I await developments. I really do. Caz, Hack, Hambo! please, entertain me. Fuck the...

It's taken a while, but I've finally watched An Inconvenient Truth. Let me tell you one thing right at the start of what will inevitably become a rant: On the large scale, it is a GOOD thing that Al Gore didn't become President of the USA in 2000. Mr Gore has had the opportunity, having stepped back from politics, where frankly he was doing no good, to actually develop a serious platform with the potential to actually benefit mankind. He has some seriously bad points, personally. For a Democrat, he's far too conservative for my own politics, and he was inevitably (as wife...

I just installed Google Earth. The installer gave me an option to install or not install Google Toolbar. I've never installed it before on this machine. Despite that, my IE instance just crashed because of Google Toolbar. I didn't ask for it. I got it. Sounds like fucking Herpes to me. Thanks Google!

So yesterday I chucked an hour or two off work in the afternoon and headed to Pearl Bay with James Taylor. It's a pretty small bouldering area but a lot of fun - despite the fact that it started raining shortly after we arrived and carried on for a good half hour. We got some pretty good stuff done, even though the Block Arete is signposted as 'out of bounds'. There's a lovely little V4 on the main wall though, which is stretchy delicate fun (problem #9 in the book) and a very unusual V3 which the book advocates doing facing out from...

One very nice feature of Windows Vista which will ease my life considerably is the new Reliability Monitor, included in the newly revamped Performance and Reliability tools, formerly - informally -  known as Perfmon. Reliability Monitor in effect keeps an eye on your machine and keeps track of its stability over time, as you can see from the graph here: It's a relatively simple interface - there's no voodoo to understand here. The dotted line shows relative stability over time. Every time there's a filaure on the machine (say, an Outlook Crash, a System blue screen or a hardware problem, Reliability monitor takes...

... I'm off to the pub.

Why is it getting warmer? And what are we doing in this handbasket anyway? Professional chewing gum. I mean, really. What has our species come to? Is this, in fact, the zenith of our civilisation's achievements, heralding our peak before our precipitous descent into obscurity? Let me just say it again: Professional. Chewing. Gum. Excuse me. I'm off now to weep quietly in a corner, for our society has, finally, convinced me of its utter, utter absurdity.

Over at Cener's Gadget Gallery, you'll find a couple of nice Windows Vista gadgets that I'm fond of. One is a Live messenger connected instant messenger gadget, which is cute. The other is a BBC Radio gadget, allowing you to listen to BBC live streams from your sidebar. I'm also running an equivalent for Australia's ABC Radio, On which I'm currently listening to TripleJ, though I have no recollection of where I got that from. That being the case I've uploaded it here: ABC Radio Gadget for Vista. Hopefully not violating any licence terms or anything, please let me know if I...

... The benighted fucktards of Citibank's Australia Pacific call center, who seem congenitally unable to follow the instruction "call my accountant for any verification info you need". I just received the third call on what should be a simple verification process, if only the mouthbreathing cockwits they employ could get it through their heads that I don't deal with any of my own tax information, but let my accountants take care of it. Now, I understand that to offer a low-cost service to the customer, Citibank have to cut costs at the other end. But why does that mean they...

The blog's been upgraded. Wow, isn't that nice. No ads at the moment, but I'll figure that out. I'm still not theme-decided, but I'll get there. For now, this Piyo thing seems OK.

... of punches to the throat, also known as: People Who Really Shit Me Today's recipient of the Drunken Madman Punch To The Throat is: People who indicate, but drive straight ahead Fuckwits. A Punch To The Throat all round, I think.

The SMH report that recording U2 live will be a criminal act soon. Good. OK, so that's not technically correct. What is actually going on is that good old Phillip Ruddock, that unflagging defender of personal freedom and staunch supporter of sleep deprivation as legitimate interrogation technique, is planning measures which would make recording a performance of a copyrighted work a criminal act. So record a gig on your mobile and get a criminal record. The best bit? Since 'Happy Birthday' is still under copyright, recording the singing of Happy Birthday at your kid's party and subsequently publishing it to, say,...

.... is hatred. Welcome to tolerant Jerusalem, centrepiece of Abrahamic religion and its message of peace and love. Do I need to add anything?

So after last weekend's strenuous session at SICG has had some longer-term repercussions. i've got rather a nasty bit of tendon pain now. A session bouldering at The Big Pump and The Block in Lane Cove Valley proved the pain, despite getting up a V3 and having a good crack on State Of Origin. I'm now thoroughly taped up and a tad worried about tomorrow's impending session. It's raining though, meaning indoors and potential new injury. So, here's the deal. Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation Rest it. dont pull hard Ice. thin tea-towel with half a tray of ice-cubes. hold it hard. you'll go a little numb,...

So, what did I get up to this Friday night? This night of nights when Sydney comes alive and the drinks flow? I went to the climbing gym and ripped a chunk out of my little finger. No really. Cranking pretty good, if I do say so myself. Managed a bunch of V4s (four of which are given V4+) as well as the usual V3 and below circuit, including a very nice blue and yellow crimpy thing, and a big burly blue thing with a feet-off swing. oh, and a nasty stemming red (try them, they'll be up for a few weeks yet). Close...

I've uploaded a set of photos from our Japan Trip, and a wedge of climbing shots from around Sydney and the Blueys. Enjoy

... cranked out Big Artie, V3, on first attempt. Ticked it as on-sight, though I may have had a minor attempt on the start a year or so back. Did Flake to Flake, The Scoop, a variant on Big Artie and had a go on the State of Origin trio (though they're nasty round the lip). Moved up to 29 in the www.8a.nu Australian boulder rankings, which is nice. A few things there are a bit ankle-breaky so a spotter would have made it more productive I think. Bouldering in the Lane Cove Valley is great at this time of year,...

I just dug this excellent article up via the Richard Dawkins Website. It proposes, much in the vein of 'The Brights', a new label for rationalist, non-religious thinking people. You know, those of us that don't believe in all that unsupportable superstitious claptrap. My particular favourite sentence is this: “...if there is an interventionist God then there would be continuing demonstrable evidence of such, which there most certainly is not, and if there is a creator God who is non-interventionist then he neither requires nor merits worship, and if there is no God at all then so be it. ” Which kinda captures...