Just hours after Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin told Sky News that the federal government has no intention of setting up a compensation fund for the stolen generation, federal finance minister Lindsay Tanner has told Sky News that victims of the Stolen Generation can take legal action against the government if it fails to establish a compensation fund.
Is this really the same man who told Sky News today that the government needs to keep a tight control on spending to try and prevent future interest rate rises?
Mr. Tanner seems to be just a tad confused about what constitutes “spending”.
According to India’s cricket captain Anil Kumble, yesterday’s victory by Australia “should have been a draw”. According to him Australia did not play in the spirit of the game.
It’s nice to see that Mr. Kumble is capable of losing a cricket match with some dignity. There’s a term for it…”sore loser”.
Apart from the obvious reason that I did not steal children and therefore I have nothing to apologise for, we have the latest revelation that Aboriginal leaders are looking for legal representation so that they can launch a billion dollar class action against the federal government to compensate the stolen generation.
I will be more than happy to publicly distance myself from any apology to the stolen generation. It was a bad idea in my mind when I first heard about it as a child, and my opinion has only changed in the direction of it being an even worse idea ever since.
I’m not surprised, something crazy is bound to happen at Summernats every year, it’s just the nature of the event.
This year it’s a (reportedly) drunken mob hurling verbal abuse and causing other problems, simply because a few of their mates were kicked out of the event.
The organisers of Summernats repeatedly refused to get the police involved despite the mob clearly being quite unruly and causing quite a bit of upset and stress amongst the rest of the attendees. Organiser Chic Henry has made his annual “no no no, nothing happened, nothing at all, we’re just a nice quiet group of people…just don’t point the camera over there” speech, this time referring to the mob as a “parade”.
Something dangerously stupid like this happens each year, and that we can expect something like this each year is definitely not an excuse.
I had a brief conversation with Mike Jeffreys (welcome back from leave Mike) on 2CC this morning in which Mike asked if I was there, I was more than happy to say “I’m never there”. Summernats is not an event which interests me and in previous years I have managed to upset a number of Canberra’s more die-hard supporters of Summernats with my annual annoyance over the event. Due to this upset I have to make it clear that it’s not the genuine car lovers or the car festival that annoys me, it’s the loutish element which it attracts.
The reason I rang Mike this morning was to express my pleasure in the lack of the usual, annual, Saturday night and Sunday morning noisy activity near my place. I was pleasantly surprised by it only lasting from 1am to 3am and only containing a noisy activity once every fifteen to twenty minutes…a vast improvement over previous years where the noise has been noticeable every ten to fifteen minutes from about 11pm until 4am or 5am.
When I noticed this lack of activity on Saturday night I thought for a few hours that finally Summernats had carefully weeded out the undesirable element. I was disheartened, but not surprised, when the news broke of the mini-riot. It seems that you can get rid of one form of idiot, and get a different one instead.
This is what bothers me, every year this event attracts an undesirable element and something stupid seems to happen at the event…this year the two just happened to involve the same group. And just as predictably, organiser Chic Henry will come out and say something ludicrous in an attempt to make the event sound like it’s a heap of wholesome family fun.
I have no doubt that the event works miracles for the ACT’s economy, and that a lot of very talented people bring their cars to Summernats to display the immaculate work they have done to them. It’s just a pity that the very nature of the event also attracts a bunch of lunatics…they may be a small minority of the visitors but they are a large enough number to cause plenty of trouble.
As much as I would be happy to see Summernats banned, I know that it is merely a pleasant fantasy. I think the only other option is an increased Police presence…if it doesn’t deter the nuts, at least there will be enough Police on hand to deal with the problems when they inevitably arise. An increased Police presence will also prevent another occurrence of the ridiculous situation where they don’t attend simply because the Summernats organisers decline assistance on the phone.
Of course I would also like to see Chic Henry hire a sane spokesman who doesn’t try to convince everyone that a chanting, angry mob is a parade…but my opinions of Chic Henry are a matter for another day, and probably a good basis for him to launch a defamation lawsuit against me.
Update 8:47am: Mike Jeffreys just interviewed Chic Henry, I think the following sentence from Chic Henry explains half of the problem with Summernats. “There were a lot of people there that had consumed a lot of alcohol during the day”.
Just about every other event in this country has some sort of limit on the amount of alcohol people can consume, and they have these limits to prevent this sort of incident. Also, unlike the behaviour of Summernats security personnel described by Mr. Henry, other events have security staff who will stop this kind of incident rather than let it proceed.
The two lessons to be learnt from this:
1. Summernats needs some sort of alcohol limit
2. The security staff need to be a bit more responsive. It may have started as a confusing “parade”, but it should never have been allowed to reach the point where a group were trying to push a truck over.
The radio industry is in mouring yet again. 32 year old sport commentator Clinton Grybas has died. He was found in his apartment today after he didn’t turn up for work, he was rushed to hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. There are no suspicious circumstances.
Clinton Grybas, born on the 9th of February 1975, was an integral part of Radio 3AW’s AFL commentary team. Colleague Graeme Bond has expressed his shock in an emotional interview 3AW this afternoon:
[audio:https://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/ClintonGrybasGraemeBond.mp3] Download link
(Audio and photo courtesy 3AW/Fairfax)
I don’t know an awful lot about Clinton, although I will say that behind Bruce McAvaney he was, in my opinion, the nation’s best sport commentator. The two were co-commentators during the Melbourne Commonwealth Games.
During the AFL season, it was very common for me to mute the television and turn on the 3AW webstream to hear Clinton’s coverage of the match, and even when I didn’t have access to a television I would listen to Clinton’s call of a match.
Clinton was a fantastic broadcaster and was one of the few commentators capable of painting a mental picture of an event with only words. I’m sure that Rex Hunt, Graeme Bond and the rest of 3AW’s commentary team will carry on, but it won’t be the same without Clinton.
Clinton was not a stranger to the rest of the nation either. He was a regular commentator for Fox Sport (and previously Fox Footy Channel), his reports were regularly heard across the Southern Cross/Fairfax news network, and as previously mentioned he provided the bulk of the commercial radio coverage of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. Prior to working for 3AW, Clinton was a commentator for ABC Radio, primarily covering AFL and National Basketball League matches, although covering fifteen sports in total.
Clinton was named AFL Radio Broadcaster of the Year in 2005 and received the Australian Commercial Radio Award for Best Metropolitan Sports Presenter in 2007.
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Remember to get a comprehensive database on exports for the national elections, and not in the query of the database, it is a very important meeting of the cartel WordPress.
If you have trouble downloading information in the combination. Return slowly into the database, you can add additional information on this topic was discussed. Costumes?
Whilst I would have preferred Pakistan to go ahead with their January 8 election, February 18 seems like a reasonable date. It’s not an overly long delay, it gives the electoral commission time to repair damaged infrastructure and it gives the late Benazir Bhutto’s family some extra time to make sure her political party is ready for the election.
As long as it isn’t delayed again, I think this is a reasonable decision.
I’m not sure if it’s a case of “let’s make life difficult” or “here’s a hidden feature, let’s pick a random setting for it”, but Microsoft have done it again. From the people who decided that Windows Vista didn’t need the rather useful telnet client installed by default and that support for 32 bit .hlp files was unnecessary but 16 bit .hlp files needed to be supported, comes the decision that various older office files should be locked out in Office 2003 Service Pack 3.
I can almost see a use for this feature in corporate environments where ancient file formats might be disallowed for security reasons, but even then it doesn’t make much sense. Such ancient files would almost certainly be internally archived files, and on the rare occasion that such an ancient file would be sent in an infected state, any anti-virus program worth it’s installation should be able to detect an ancient exploit.
The ancient files can be unblocked with some registry editing but that is going to be a painful annoyance for a number of IT departments that will now be forced to research the problem and then apply the fix, not to mention the inconvenience for the people trying to use older files.
By default the blocked files are:
A bunch of Lotus and Quattro spreadsheet files
.dif and .slk spreadsheet and database files
PowerPoint files prior to PowerPoint 97
MS Word files prior to version 6.0
I can’t see how these file formats could be considered a security risk because they really aren’t. The only logic I can see here is that Microsoft have decided to discontinue support for these formats so that they don’t have to write code that makes it possible for each new version of Office to understand the growing number of outdated file formats. Rather than just dropping support they are blocking the formats to see how many people jump up and down about it, and if there aren’t enough people complaining then support for the formats will be dropped.
It really comes back to the argument for open standards. A lot of these older files are not open standards, especially the older MS Office formats, and if it only takes 15-20 years for Microsoft to decide that the formats are no longer worth supporting, then what hope do governments, or anybody else required to keep records for that matter, have of maintaining records if they are using proprietary formats which are common today, but gone in twenty years?
At least with open standards it is possible for third parties to create software capable of working with the files. Currently the best that can be done is reverse engineering the formats…a process which produces good results, but not perfect results…and if we want to maintain files for hundreds or thousands of years, we need perfect results.
I suppose the best I can hope for here is that either:
1. Blocking, with the option to unblock, is as far as Microsoft will take this, or
2. Once Microsoft officially kill support for ancient formats, they release the formats as open standards. Obviously they can only do this with formats they own the rights to (eg. not Lotus or Quattro), but it would be a step in the right direction.
I don’t usually bother with new year’s resolutions, and this year was almost the same. When forced last night I managed to come up with not throwing toy darts at a particular work colleague…we’ll see how long that one lasts…but I do have a serious one.
I’ve been considering it for a while, and the new year is as good a reason as any to “deactivate” my Facebook account. I would prefer to get rid of it completely but that doesn’t appear to be possible. Unfortunately to deactivate it I have to answer a question about why I am leaving, I can’t see why this question is compulsory as it’s my choice if I don’t want to have any further part in the website. Anyway, my options are:
This is temporary. I’ll be back.
I have another Facebook account.
I receive too many emails from Facebook.
I don’t feel safe on the site.
I don’t find Facebook useful.
I spend too much time using Facebook.
I don’t understand how to use the site.
I need to fix something in my account.
Facebook is resulting in social drama for me.
Other (Please explain further)
Many of the options result in other text appearing with solutions to your problem in an effort to try and convince you to stay. My answer is “I don’t find Facebook useful” to which I receive the rather unhelpful advice that:
You might find Facebook more useful if you connect with more of your friends. Check out our Friend Finder, or search for them.
Also try taking a tour of Facebook to learn about features others find useful.
I’m not entirely sure why that would help when it is the number of friends which is half the problem. I don’t receive many emails from Facebook because I’m not particularly active on the site, the emails don’t bother me. What does bother me is that I have 34 Facebook friends, the vast majority of which I haven’t spoken to in over a year and, to be perfectly honest, I have almost no interest in their day-to-day activities, and yet every time I log in to Facebook to deal with one of the sporadic email notifications it sends to me, I am bombarded with useless information about every little thing they have done on Facebook lately. I currently have 25 bits of information about the activities of others sitting on my Facebook homepage, and only one of those bits of information is even remotely useful, and I received it by private email from the person anyway.
Amongst my collection of useless information I have the incredibly useful news that a person I barely know and a person I’ve never heard of “are now friends. They found each other using the Friend Finder”, another person I barely know “added the What fruit are you? application” (whatever that may be) and another person wrote a fake weather forecast.
Add to that my 38 pending requests which I have almost no interest in, summarised by Facebook thusly:
1 group invitation, 1 onetrack invitation, 4 petrolhead invitations, 2 you’re hot requests, 1 funwall friend request, 1 new wall post request, 1 are you interested? invitation, 1 blackjack invitation, 1 five year old fight invitation, 1 compare request, 1 compare request, 1 invite request, 1 cause invitation, 1 cause invitation, 1 risk invitation, 1 zombies invitation, 1 top friends friend request, 1 werewolves invitation, 3 werewolf invitations, 1 tv show trivia invitation, 2 my questions friend requests, 1 filthbook request, 2 ninja invitations, 1 texas hold’em invitation, 1 superpoke! friend request, 1 invite to pacman invitation, 3 likeness quiz requests, 1 pirate invitation.
This video seems to be a fairly accurate indication of how useless Facebook is for me.
I don’t use Facebook for anything and the concept doesn’t really interest me. The suggestion that adding more friends so that I can see more useless information was quite ridiculous. I avoided MySpace, and I will be more than happy to avoid Facebook from now on.
I’m sure it is very useful for some people, but I am not one of them. Goodbye Facebook, please do not bother me again. Account “deactivated”.
The radio industry is in mouring yet again. 32 year old sport commentator Clinton Grybas has died. He was found in his apartment today after he didn’t turn up for work, he was rushed to hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. There are no suspicious circumstances.