On Friday afternoon a bus in Kippax was sealed off for two and a half hours after a suspicious substance was found spread all over the back seat. The driver of the bus, after finding the substance, contacted ACTION who advised him to close the bus and wait for help to arrive. According to reports from my sources, the “help” consisted of 1 ACTION supervisor, 2 police cars, 2 fire engines, 1 hazmat van, 1 hazchem clean up van, 2 paramedics and a police media car. It is estimated that roughly 30 people were in attendance…but what did they do? Not much, in fact, in the two and a half hours that they were there, not one person went near the mystery substance, but they did eventually decide that it wasn’t a threat and left. The driver was told to take the bus back to the depot, where it was discovered that the substance was a make-up powder.
Not only did nobody attempt to determine what the substance was in Kippax, they also left the bus driver standing around in the roped off area for fear of contamination, but never attempted to de-contaminate him. This is surely one of the strangest ways to deal with a potential chemical threat, and appears to show a lack of proper procedure for handling such matters.
In an effort to give my recent editorial a longer reign at the top of the front page, I delayed the usual Sunday features by a day, so I’ll bring them to you now.
This week the musicians of the week are The Everly Brothers, and the feature song from them is Wake Up Little Susie which got to number 1 on the charts for 4 weeks. Interestingly this song was also recorded by a number of other artists, including Simon & Garfunkel, but they didn’t do quite as well with it, only reaching 27th place on the charts.
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
We’ve both been sound asleep, wake up, little Susie, and weep
The movie’s over, it’s four o’clock, and we’re in trouble deep
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well
Whatta we gonna tell your mama
Whatta we gonna tell your pa
Whatta we gonna tell our friends when they say “ooh-la-la”
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well
I told your mama that you’d be in by ten
Well Susie baby looks like we goofed again
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, we gotta go home
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
The movie wasn’t so hot, it didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well
Whatta we gonna tell your mama
Whatta we gonna tell your pa
Whatta we gonna tell our friends when they say “ooh-la-la”
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie
The Chief Turnip of the ACT, Jon Stanhope, has released a confidential document on his chief ministerial website (Warning, site contains large scary pictures at the top of every page).
The document he leaked was a confidential draft copy of the federal government’s anti-terrorism legislation. This was given to each of the state and territory leaders as part of the briefing they received on the new legislation.
The draft legislation is due before Federal parliament in a couple weeks, and will probably be refined by then, so not only is this leak a breach of confidentiality, it is also unwise and irresponsible. Not only has the chief turnip broken the trust between the federal and ACT government’s, he has also placed further sensible and logical revisions of the legislation at risk.
I will admit that it does appear to have a few rough edges, but these would have been revised before or during their time in parliament, and the early release has provided extra amunition for a propoganda campaign from the “no anti-terrorism legislation” camp. Already Green’s senator/leader Bob Brown has said that it contains a section which enables police to shoot to kill, and frankly, I don’t think anti-terrorism legislation would be complete without such a clause, and I strongly suspect that Mr. Brown has taken it out of context, and omitted any safeguards/regulations which would be part of the paragraphs in question. The federal government aren’t stupid enough to just hand out guns to the police and say “If you see something, shoot it.” They know that the “rogue senators” wouldn’t stand for it, and neither would the other parties.
“I have to question the judgement of the Chief Minister to circulate this document on the world wide web when it clearly states on the front page ‘Draft-in-Confidence”
“To my knowledge no other Labor state leaders have sort to betray the Federal Government’s confidence in this manner.”
“Mr Stanhope was the biggest critic of the Anti-Terror approach that the Federal Government was proposing to take, but then, after a special briefing at the COAG meeting he finally realised the Prime Minister’s number one goal is national security.”
“Why then has Jon Stanhope betrayed the trust of the Federal Government and his state colleagues in posting what is a very private and confidential document to his personal website for all to see?”
“This is not a smart move and shows a severe lack of judgement on the part of the Leader of this Territory.”
“Jon Stanhope has embarrassed the ACT in his actions and will never be able to be trusted with confidential material of this nature again. “
Perhaps that is just it, perhaps the chief turnip only pretended to be pleased about the new legislation so that he could leak it in an unfinished and rough state which could ultimately destroy it. If so, then this has to be one of the worst cases of political grandstanding in the history of Australian politics.
Regardless of his intentions, he has leaked a confidential government document, and deserves to be punished. If his intentions were as I stated above, then a charge of treason should also be considered…after all, isn’t an attempt to unfairly influence the proceedings of potential anti-terrorism legislation an unusual form of terrorism?
I haven’t read the draft legislation yet, but I will make sure I get read enough to get an overview of it. As unfortunate as it is, the draft legislation has been viewed by so many people now, that it would be impossible to remove it from public knowledge, and to not get see some of it now would open myself up to manipulation by those of Stanhope’s ilk. I will not store a copy of the draft legislation on this site, but I will retain my two-pages-per-page double-sided copy of it for now, and if requested, I will shred it and make sure I don’t disclose any of the contents.
For now the offending document can be viewed from the Chief Turnip’s website (warning, site contains a large scary picture of Stanhope on every page), but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is removed sometime soon…even if a court order is required.
Chief Turnip Stanhope is an outright twit, and shouldn’t be allowed to hold public office, he is a danger to our society, and can never be trusted with confidential documents ever again. The release of the draft legislation will hamper efforts to logically fix up any problems which may be part of the legislation, and has almost certainly fueled a proganda war between the “for” & “against” camps, as can be seen in the incredible amount of press releases relating to it.
Samuel
Disclaimer: Neither I, nor anybody related to this website can be held responsible for any consequences that may occur should you decide to view the confidential draft legislation, information provided here is for informational purposes only and does not constitute a recommendation, direction or otherwise that you should view the confidential document. Should you choose to do so, it is at your own risk. Comments which contravine this notice will be removed without notice.
Apparently these recordings, or highlights thereof, are scary, and if you found the other two scary then this one will be no different, nor will any of the future releases, so if you find them scary, then keep clear of this category.
Now that I have the disclaimer and warning mumbo jumbo out of the way, on with the recording. This particular recording is called “A Decade Of Samuel” as it was recorded as a special event as part of my tenth birthday. My birthday parties were always small and unconventional, my tenth was no different, in fact this recording took up a fair chunk of it.
The party was on the Saturday before my birthday (May 31, 1997), and that morning I started the recording by randomly starting recording at the start of a song on the radio and then recording the whole song. This was back when 2CC were half way between being a music station and a talk station. The first part of the highlights package has the tail end of the song (Moody Blue) and then the announcer, whose voice I recognise but can’t quite work out, announcing “1206 2CC” at which point that segment ends. By the way, if anybody can enlighten me as to the name of the announcer I would appreciate it.
It then cuts to a small section of the recording session which took place in my room as part of the party. My tenth birthday was the smallest one on record with one guest, which probably made the recordings easier. The segment contains me and my guest (Thomas) singing in Opera, I perform the high pitched sections whilst he performs the low pitched sections.
Obviously there were large parts of the party which were not recorded, but the end of the party consisted of our efforts in commentating the AFL match which was on the TV, this was somewhat amusing and continued even after he left (albeit with just me), dad came over a couple times as various boundary riders, and the highlights of the AFL coverage are included in this highlights package.
Those few things took up all of Side A of the tape, and my plan for Side B consisted of starting off by recording all of the Television news themes, and some others, I did this on that Saturday and Sunday, and I have chosen a couple for this highlights package. At that stage I absolutlely loved the David Young’s Garden theme, so I have an extract of that, if you listen carefully you will notice that the voiceover mentions the “Bruce Bond Investment Program”, I always found that name to be quite fitting for someone handing out financial advice. I also have an extract of one of the many bits of theme music Channel 7 used for the AFL…not only did they have the best AFL coverage (something that nobody has been able to match to this day) but they also had fantastic taste when it came to music.
The rest of Side B was recorded on the Monday of the following weekend (Queens Birthday Monday, June 9, 1997) and a very short segment at the end which was recorded the next weekend, on one of the two days.
As was the style of my recordings, this was all “The Samuel John Gordon-Stewart Program”, the highlights of which include an interview with one of my new toys, Dinosaur, a segment called “Teddy’s Major And Almost Major Issues” which was my take on the commercial television current affairs programs, the news (Including the news theme which was me singing “The News” in my opera), a horse race with two horses paying astronomical dividends and various other things. I had a bunch of callers who all tried to guess what the time was ten minutes ago from the time I announced the competition, as well as talking about such amazing topics as how much a chop weighs. The final segment was just me talking.
I haven’t included any callers on this occasion (there will be plenty of time for that on future releases) but I have included a section where I have to wake up my panel operator/receptionist (and don’t ask how he does both jobs at once…he just does) using a bicycle horn.
That title is misleading, Top FM/Territory FM aren’t the only station to take AIR News, but they are probably the most exciting from my viewpoint as they have a live webstream. This excites me for two reasons:
It allows potential AIR clients to hear AIR News as it goes to air
It allows people to hear some of my news bulletins
According to the AIR News member stations page, Top FM are running the news from 6am-6pm Monday to Friday and 7am-Midday on Saturday & Sunday, these times are Northern Territory time (GMT+9.5). This is good news to me, as it means that one of my bulletins is available on the webstream. Midday Saturday is one of my bulletins, and you can hear it by listening to the webstream at Midday GMT+9.5 (12:30pm AEST).
You will need Real Player to listen to it, but most people seem to have that anyway, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
For the non Australian readers, that time translates to 2:30am GMT, which you should then be able to work out from there.
The federal minister for communications, Helen Coonan has made an announcement about digital radio. Apparently the major metropolitan areas will get it first, and will use something called the Eureka 147 system, and they will provide broadcasters with 128 kilo bits per second, which is half the recommended bandwidth for the Eureka system.
Now, I don’t know much about the Eureka system, but if the bit rates are in any way similar to those of MP3 compression then 128kbps stereo will be fine for speech and some music, but won’t be great for music. In my experience “on the fly” compression generally requires higher bandwidth than “post compression” as the latter can deal the audio file as a whole whilst the former has to compress as it goes, which I find usually provides worse audio quality than post compression. The point I am trying to make here is that 128kbps stereo might be fine with post compression, but it won’t provide the same quality for broadcast.
I have read that the UK is using Eureka at 128kbps and it sounds dreadful, but I can’t confirm that, so if anybody knows better then I would be glad to hear from you.
Also Digital Radio will coexist with analog radio for now, as there is no set “switch off” date for analog radio. The same can’t be said for digital and analog television, with 2008 being confirmed as the switch off date for analog television (in metro areas anyway) to free up the airwaves for digital radio.
There hasn’t really been any clear decision made for the regional areas, except that they will get digital radio soon, and as far as I know, Canberra is considered a regional area when it comes to television and radio. The regionals might not even use Eureka, Ms. Coonan announced that DRM may be used instead. I personally don’t understand why we would use two different radio systems, but such is government regulation.
Interestingly, Radio 2 moved on to odd parts of the radio dial hoping to be part of the digital radio saga, but they have missed out, and that can’t possibly help the already dwindling share price. According to radioinfo.com.au “Low power community stations, open narrowcasters and Section 40 off-band licencees will miss out on space in the first round of allocations, which will be planned by ACMA.”
radioinfo also reports that “VHF spectrum will be the preferred carrier medium, with L Band being considered for in-fill transmission and other future uses. Spectrum planning will begin immediately, but the Minister expects that legislation and a staggered technical roll out will mean that consumers may still have to wait up to 2 years before they will be able to enjoy a full range of digital radio services.”
This certainly marks a very exciting period for the future of radio in Australia, I can only hope that the regulators make the right decisions, otherwise we may be left with a substandard system, and fixing that could be very tricky.
Samuel
UPDATE: Upon further reading it has become apparent that Eureka uses MP2, which is going to be interesting to say the least. Also, stations will be allocated 256kbps worth of bandwidth, but will only be allowed to broadcast at 128kbps, the other half of the bandwidth will be reserved for extra features and services. I don’t like the sound of this at all.
I’m very excited about the release of Ubuntu Linux 5.10, the “Breezy Badger” edition. It has a number of improvements over the 5.04 “hoary hedgehog” version, including better menu administration, a more friendly startup splash screen and better multi-language support.
Even more exciting is the educational institution specific Edubuntu release, designed for use in educational institutions, the good thing about this is that it appears to be virtually perfect for schools, including some excellent open source programs that do the same, if not better, job than the equivalent commercial programs. With any luck I should be able to play with this at Dickson College sometime soon, especially seeing as we have a limit on our Windows XP licences and don’t really intend on increasing the number…considering the awful costs involved. The good thing here is that there is a high chance the staff and students will find it highly useful and want it installed in more locations, which can only be a good thing.
The lovely people at Ubuntu, financially backed by gazillionaire Mark Shuttleworth, give away Ubuntu CDs and DVDs for free, with free shipping and all. You can still download it from the downloads page, but I’ve ordered some CDs from them, and you can to by heading over to the ShipIt page.
In the last few days I have recieved some feedback from people about things they have read, heard or been in on this blog.
The people from the Majura Cafe said that they liked the review, although the person responsible for the yellathon wasn’t entirely conviced, but did give reasons for it, mainly kitchen staff who are staff by name and not nature.
I received some feedback about some of my recordings from years gone by. Apparently they are scarier than scary movies, and potentially nightmare material…the wisdom of putting such things on the internet has also been questioned. From memory there are about 26 nightmares to go…you could always ignore them if you want! Seriously though, I enjoy them, they are relics of my past and as I am currently restoring them digitally I might as well share some of it with the rest of the world.
Just so you know, up to now there have been 9 downloads of the highlights of 32 Musical People and 7 of the highlights of 2CC (which as mentioned in the post has a link with the Canberra radio station by name only).
On a slightly related note, due to utter lunatics leaving pointless spam comments there have been further changes to the comments system. When you comment for the first time you will have to wait for me to approve the comment before it appears…I don’t want to censor you, just make sure you aren’t posting rubbish. People with an approved comment will be able to comment with no delays. I don’t like having this in place, and hopefully it will only need to be temporary, I will review this in a few weeks.
Yes, Schnappi has been relegated to the top twenty now, in 15th spot. Is this the beginning of the end or just a rough spot…wait until Sunday and find out.
It has come to my attention that I forgot my regular Sunday posts, namely the musician(s) of the week, and the Schnappi update, so I’m going to do them now. Firstly we have the Musicians Of The Week, which this week are The Eagles, and the feature song from them is Take It Easy.
Well, I’m running down the road
Tryin’ to loosen my load
I’ve got seven women on
My mind,
Four that wanna own me,
Two that wanna stone me,
One says she’s a friend of mine
Take it easy, take it easy
Don’t let the sound of your own wheels
Drive you crazy
Lighten up while you still can
Don’t even try to understand
Just find a place to make your stand
And take it easy
Well, I’m a standing on a corner
In winslow, arizona
And such a fine sight to see
It’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed
Ford slowin’ down to take a look at me
Come on, baby, don’t say maybe
I gotta know if your sweet love is
Gonna save me
We may lose and we may win though
We will never be here again
So open up, I’m climbin’ in,
So take it easy
Well I’m running down the road trying to loosen
My load, got a world of trouble on my mind
Lookin’ for a lover who won’t blow my
Cover, she’s so hard to find
Take it easy, take it easy
Don’t let the sound of your own
Wheels make you crazy
Come on baby, don’t say maybe
I gotta know if your sweet love is
Gonna save me, oh oh oh
Oh we got it easy
We oughta take it easy
I noticed something very odd in the TV guide last night, the infomercials from 2am to 4am on Prime Television were listed as being a repeat. These late night/early morning infomercials tend to advertise the same product for an hour or so, often repeating the same “interview” or audio clips from “your favourite memories of the 1960’s” twenty times in a row (or at least it feels that way). They always have a phone number down at the bottom of the screen because “our operators are waiting for your call” and naturally “if you buy two sets with your credit card in the next twenty minutes and quote the word bingo and pay an extra ten dollars we’ll send you half a photo of someone smiling, and if you are one of the first twenty callers we’ll even send the other half of the photo with it.”
Often these things are “one time offers”, so how do you run repeats? Very odd…
On a related note, I was pleased to spot a repeat of a great Australian drama, Water Rats, last night/this morning. It was on at 1am, but that didn’t stop me from watching it…it might be (c) 1999, but it was still classic drama. I was very pleased to spot that, despite the fact it was aired pre-digital television, it was in widescreen. Fantastic television, I just wish it was in primetime, it was one of Australia best dramas, and it is really should get an encore performance in prime time…if the viewing public have any sense, it would top the ratings. I could spurt out more “classic television” type quotes, but I won’t, you get the point by now.
The time has come for me to provide another LCA update, especially for those people who have been searching for combinations fo my name and the conference name.
I got three emails from Nick Phillips which all said
We’re sorry, but your talk, …, was not one of those accepted for presentation at LCA2006
It isn’t all bad news though
We’ve been very impressed by the standard of talks submitted overall, and
have had a really tough job trying to decide which talks to accept — it
looks like it’s shaping up to be a great conference!
They can look forward to it all they like, but the bottom line is that I can’t make it. It probably would be nice, but I’m sure plenty of other people will fill my seat.
I was somewhat surprised when I received one of my magazine subscriptions in the mail during the week, not because of the magazine, but because of the advertising bundled with it. Now, I could launch into a tirade about how I pay for the magazine and there is already enough advertising in it without more being sent to the subscribers, but I won’t do that now, instead I shall focus on the actual advertising.
The advertising leaflet was from the Australian Bush Heritage Fund, who are a non-profit organisation comitted to buying bits of the country to save the wildlife living in those areas. Whilst this is a somewhat worthwhile cause, it does have an odd way of doing things.
To start with, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of them, which makes me wonder about their marketing campaign, I just don’t understand why they chose to perform an assisted mass mailout to subscribers of an IT magazine…odd demographic if you ask me. Why not get the leaflet put in National Geographic and the other nature magazines? Surely that would provide a better response than IT readers who want to see technical specifications of new computer bits and pieces. Also, considering that their website is written rather poorly by somebody who obviously doesn’t understand ASP very well is not going to endear them to many IT people…although you might get a generous person offer to redo the site in something functional (and cheaper to run).
I also think there is something wrong with the way they run their schemes. They want donations so that they can buy out the land that contains the endangered species. I think they would go better if they bought the land and sold shares to people, with a contract allowing the bush heritage people to make executive decisions. Surely this would be more attractive to people. I know I would rather own a share of the land saving endangered animals, than to give money fo somebody else to buy the land.
Of course this is just my view, but I stick by it, and I think the bush heritage people would be well advised to take it on board.