Category: General

Reflections on how I got started in this biz…

I was listening to the audio presentation by Woz at ITConversations.com recently. I was really interested in his stories about how he got interested in hardware hacking, and it made me reflect on my early experiences with computers.
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Fun facts about time zones

Did you know that there are places in the world with timezone offsets in quarter-hour increments

The timezone for Nepal is UTC+5:45. Chatham Island (a territory of New Zealand) uses UTC+12:45. Interesting…

I must be missing something

Bush is proposing a 2.5 trillion dollar budget. Supposedly, this manages the following:

  • it is the “president’s most austere budget to date”
  • it pushes the US federal budget deficit to “a record $427 billion”, and “is the third straight year the Bush administration will have set, in dollar terms, a deficit high.”

Continue reading “I must be missing something”

Monday 24th worst day of the year? What a day to start a new job!

Apparently, next Monday will be the worst day of the year. Naturally, that’s the day I start at Wotif

Fortunately, the formula is based on such variables as the weather, and thus it is only the worst day in the Northern hemisphere. *phew*.

There’s more to managing an economy than lowering taxest

Interesting article in the New York Times on how GW Bush is looking to reshape the American tax break.
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Warning systems aren’t enough

Danny Ayers writes about a global internet tsunami warning system He missed the point; the SE-Asian Tsunami was detected in minutes by research centers in Hawaii. But there was no way to get the message out.

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Well, I’m back up… shame the server wasn’t.

About two weeks ago, the server company I go through (iwebserv.com.au) had an “incident”… one of the hard disks on the main server died. This caused an extended outage (almost a week), and a total loss of data. For one reason or another, iwebserv have not been able to resurrect the data on the server yet.
Continue reading “Well, I’m back up… shame the server wasn’t.”

Who said that e-voting was hard?

As this video makes abundantly clear, e-voting is simple… as long as you want to vote for Dubya.

On a more serious note, Slashdot covered some real problems with the e-voting machines in Florida recently.

I’d rather be right than certain

The New York Times has a really interesting article on the faith-based presidency entitled Without a Doubt It covers a lot of the concerns, particularly within the Republican party, that people have about Bush’s willingness to ignore inconvenient facts.
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