Category: Life

I won’t describe the brilliance of this idea; you just have to see it.

Here’s a good overview of an issue I’ve discussed a lot of times with people : the looming Digital Dark Ages, where electronic records – unlike paper-based records – become unreadable after only a few years. It’s all because of the different ways technology is heading.
Just think of all the emails being sent around the world which are being deleted. In the old days; all mail was written on paper, and many of it is still around to give us an insight into everyday life from way back then. Now, unless you print it out (albeit with unstable ink) your grandkids are never going to see any of the love emails you’ve sent in the past; the instant messages about how people felt about Australia winning the cricket, the diary entries about how we’re going to lose track of our electronic records in the future…

Happy Australia Day, everyone. A chance to celebrate the great privilege we have to live in this magnificent country; the best country on earth.
I mean it. Why would you want to live anywhere else?
I note that the campaign is on in earnest to unseat ‘Advance Australia Fair’ as the national anthem. Two years ago I could see the beginnings of a slow, steady marketing campaign for ‘I Am Australian‘ to be installed as the new national song, and I’ve been wary of it ever since.
It’s a nice song, and all, but it’s no anthem. It represents us well; trying to squeeze in as many multicultural groups as it can and give credit to the aboriginal people as the original inhabitants. It doesn’t sound *too* forced.
Problem is, it describes no vision. It says who we are, but not what we want to be. It says nothing much other than ‘here we are; we want to make a go of it together’, which is a tad too wishy-washy for my liking.
‘Advance Australia Fair’ isn’t perfect, but it does call us together to a higher goal for the country: to advance it; not just sing together about how great it is to be singing together.
I know what you’re doing, Howard Government, and I’ll be fighting against it.

We’re seeing evolution in action in the Cook Toybox.
A long time ago, we had the occasional toy which would make a sound or say a word or two, then came the keyboards and noisemakers. Then, good old ‘Furby’, whose comments always sounded vaguely insulting.
Now, courtesy Santa, we’re housing Alexa under our roof. I don’t mind ‘her’ too much, mainly because the technology it takes for Alexa to co-ordinate her own wardrobe is quite impressive. I can even handle the toys which try to mis-educate you, like the ‘Speak and Spell’ I owned when I was younger which penalised me for the incorrect spelling of ‘colour’.
But when the toys start setting a bad example,… well, that’s when you have a problem.
Oftentimes, we’re informed in a nasal valley-girl accent that the word of the day is ‘Glam-a-licious‘ and that Allanah’s nickname will be ‘Sweetness‘ for the day. Cute. (Or, as Alexa would say ‘Ooh la la‘: she’s ‘tres’ much into French strangulation.) But the big one came the other day. I will quote verbatim:
“Hey, I had a dream about you last night. I dreamt you were a fashion designer in New York“.
I kid you not. Like; Bogus, dood. Whatever happened to ‘You will grow up and marry a rich doctor’?

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one.
It’s always fascinating to find out where your old acquaintances have wound up: did they go on to fame and fortune, or retire to home life? Both?
When one of your former girlfriends turns up as a ‘drag king‘ online (caution: risque link) , presumably ‘batting for the other side’, it’s definitely pause for thought. Maybe you’d wonder what happened. Maybe you’d wonder where you went wrong. Maybe you’d wonder if she’d be using any of your material. (Or maybe you wouldn’t – on the off chance she read this at some point in the future)
Maybe you’d congratulate her. Does anyone know any good greeting cards for this sort of occasion?

It seems Australian Slang is finally taking off in the U.S. – it seems like only yesterday that Paul Hogan was making Crocodile Dundee and since then, it’s apparently spread across the land like wildfire, according to the media reports. Boy, what an overnight sensation that’s turned out to be.
Seriously, though; I was interested to learn from a US colleague that videos by The Wiggles are almost as popular over there as they are in Australia, so I guess there’ll be a lot of 5 year olds walking around the malls with few, if any “wukkas”.

In a pretty feeble (but funny) political stunt, the Labor Party has launched an online competition to find the Holy Grail: The Email Address Of The Prime Minister.
I say feeble, because I could imagine what a spammable and flameable target John’s actual email address would be. However; how much trouble would it be to set up a public and a private email address for John to use? Make one public, get the secretary to monitor it, and everyone’s happy.
Just another sign of how clueless this government is about technology, and why we’re constantly missing or botching opportunities in this country. (Internet regulation, online gaming and digital TV being three examples of what Luddites we have in Canberra at the moment)

Nice to find a net-game which you can call ‘addictive’ which isn’t like Tetris or any of those darned block games. Interface Escape is a great game; once you’ve figured it out..!

For no real reason, I’ve updated the 80s pages to make a little more sense.
UPDATE: Seeing as ‘Sussudio’ has copped a few mentions in the comments, here’s a link to a few anecdotes about its heritage.

Well, it’s taken a little longer that planned, but Caleb and David have finally achieved the big mission of the holidays; to beat Kingdom Hearts on the new Playstation 2. It’s the first story-based video game we’ve really ‘finished’, so it was the cause for some minor celebration tonight. The game clock tells me it took a good 50-odd hours of gameplay which was spread over the past 2 and a half weeks, on-and-off.
Absolutely brilliant game. If you hadn’t heard of it, it’s a collaboration between some of the best game designers in the world (that is, Japan) and Disney, to make a story-game which brings in characters from most of the Disney cartoons and some of the really cool charaters from the Final Fantasy games (some of the most amazing games of the last few years). We were already into the Final Fantasy games in a big way before this one came along, so we *had* to get our teeth into this one: the prospect of fighting with Goofy and Donald on the team was too good to pass up.
The story was quite clever; it linked all the Disney characters and worlds together nicely, and was quite complex – and even dark – in some places. You’d expect the disney characters to be just pasted-in to broaden the audience, but the whole thing looked, sounded and felt like a traditional cartoon. They voice acting is brilliant, and even uses the original character voices in a lot of cases. In some cases, you just want to wander around and admire the scenery (especially in the 100 Acre Wood).
From what I’ve read, this is the best game going at the moment – and it’s definitely highly recommended by this household. (The males, anyway. The girls just like what the female characters and princesses were wearing.)
Best of all; it’s a project that Dad and Caleb saw to the end together. Sure; it’s not like we built a cubby house or dug a hole or anything, but it’s what we’re both good at. Send us an email if you need help getting through your version.
Now, we have to do it all again on the ‘expert’ setting :-)