2025: A reflection

So another year done. Overall I think 2025 was a positive year.

Work

For three quarters of the year I was on higher duties acting as the team lead while the regular lead was on extended leave. It was a different set of challenges (managing people is a bit different to managing things) and some new lessons to learn. I think I did ok, but other people have said I did well so I’ll try to believe them. There has been a bit of adjustment back to my old role I haven’t fully done yet. I’m still prone to get distracted from the main part of the job with the bigger picture items that are the lead’s responsibility, and I leave too much of the basic tasks to the other operators in my team.

I did apply for a lead position with one of the investigative teams which would have been interesting, and a bit of a change working regular hours. However I missed out and the feedback was mostly around interview performance, which is something I’ve heard before, and I’ll admit while I made the case for why it would be good for me to get the job, I didn’t make a case as to why that would be good for the company. I did get sounded out about filling in for the person who did get the job, but passed on that as it was a rather large pay cut to do so (I find myself in a bit of a trap where any sideways move within the business will likely involve a large pay cut due to no longer doing shift work, and even a step up will likely be a reduction), and for 2026 I have plans already for that money. So for 2026 I’m not going to look at options outside the Ops Hub, and maybe in 2027 look at day shift options then.

Travel

Last year I racked up a few more kilometres than I have for some time. In addition to the usual trips to Albury for Bordercon, Melbourne for PAXAus, and Innisfail to visit family, I visited NZ for the first time. Mostly I was in Auckland, but took day trips to Rotorua and Hobbiton, and spent a few days on Great Barrier Island which is a dark sky sanctuary. This is the first time I’ve been overseas since returning to Australia in 2009, and hopefully there will be more to come.

Health

I've continued to work on my health. I've continued with the PT sessions focusing on strength, and have generally been improving. My PB for barbell squats is 91kg and I've managed 120kg for deadlifts, which is more than I would have thought myself capable of even a year ago. I've also kept up going to Parkruns, even doing my first international Parkrun while I was in New Zealand. Last year I was hoping to get my 5k time down into the low thirties, and in the middle of the year I set a PB of 31:01. After that I started trying to build up distance in prep for the Bridge to Brisbane which was a 10k run and since then my times have stayed in the mid thirties. But I'm still going regularly (yesterday was my 38th Parkrun, I should reach 50 by the middle of the year. My weight while steady for most of the year at a little over 100kg jumped up during October when I was traveling a lot and is now around 108kg. I'd like to get that back down and am trying to regain my focus on better eating.

Social

A bit better this year. I've actually hosted some games nights which has been fun. The dating app I was trying didn't really result in much, a few matches and conversations, but only one date which was pleasant but no really spark on either side. I have recently switched to a different app which has produced a higher rate of matches, so maybe picking the one I knew was used by a Star Trek actress wasn't the best choice. I also went to a few speed date events without much success, and the last one was so loud and crowded that I found it very stressful and struggled to carry on a conversation halfway through, so I probably won't try that again.

 Looking Forward

 This year will be a more laid back year. I'm not going to push my career forward (although there are one or two specific things that if they became available I'd apply for). The big thing I have planned is using my long service leave at the end of the year to travel around South America. I'm going to do some package tours in Mexico and Peru, and will finish it off with a cruise down to Antarctica. This is the big expense of the year, and pretty much all my financial surplus will go to paying for this. I'll be off work from the start of October through to the week before Christmas, and I'm really looking forward to it.

The Poster

When I started university, my plan was to get my degree, do honours, then a PhD, then become a researcher/lecturer, and then after about 40 years retire at around 65 (probably the most optimistic part of that whole plan). Of course, that kind of crashed and burned when I dropped out of my PhD, but that academic culture still sticks with me.

A part of that is the process of producing knowledge, and disseminating it. While I never had to publish or perish, the significance of getting a paper accepted and printed, and the related process of attending and presenting at conferences still carries the hallmarks of progress, success, and significance for me. 

At a conference, there are various levels of presentations. At the top you have the keynote speaker, then featured presenters, and then regular talks. The lowest of these is the poster presentation, where you have an A1 poster about your topic that people can look at, and depending on the conference, there might be some time where you're expected to stand by your poster for people to talk to you and ask questions. This is generally where you start out, and over time you work your way up.

And indeed this is where I started out. While I no longer have a copy of the poster, the paper that went with it is still online. 

But then life happened, and conferences weren't a part of what I did.

Until now.

Towards the end of last year the company that I now work at was encouraging staff to submit presentations for an industry conference as we are one of the main sponsors this year. After a little thought, I submitted a topic, and was accepted. And so I put together a poster for the conference.

 

The conference started on Tuesday, and after the opening address the first thing I did was walk through the expo hall to find where my poster was. Seeing it there did give a thrill and a sense of pride. 

 

While thinking about this I have internally been minimising this in comparison to what I did in university. I still put academia on a bit of a pedestal, which I think is something I need to dial back on. When you boil it down, in both cases, the content being shared was "We did a thing, here's how it went." And while at uni I had lofty ambitions of adding to the sum total of humanity's knowledge, being honest my current job helps make life a little better for a lot more people than any amount of studying oddly behaving crystals.

Anyway, I did a thing, and that's how it went.

A Note on the Australian Constitution

One of the byproducts of the transition from having Kevin Rudd as PM to Julia Gillard has been a bunch of people who think we live in America complaining that the whole process was undemocratic and not what they voted for. They say that they voted for Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, and not Julia Gillard.

On this they are wrong. None of the voted for Kevin Rudd to be Prime Minister. Most of them didn't vote for Kevin Rudd for anything (I happen to be registered in his electorate, but he didn't get my first preference (I think he would have been around second or third depending on what other parties were running)). They voted for a member to represent their electorate.

They should take a closer look at the Australian constitution. And then they could tell me which part of it says we get to vote for a Prime Minister. In fact, if they can find anything about there being a Prime Minister I'll be surprised.

Back when they were setting up the federal government in the late 19th century, and they cribbed a lot of stuff of the British, including the concept of the Prime Minister, who was basically the member of parliament who had the most support from the other members of parliament. If the PM loses the support of parliament, he loses the job.

And that's what happened here. By losing the support of his party, Kevin Rudd effectively lost the support of parliament as a whole. And while technically he did not have to stand down as soon as it was apparent he had lost that support, by doing so he avoided a lot of messy parliamentary procedure that would have had the same end result.

This is all a well accepted part of the Westminster system. The government we have today is the same government we had before and is the one we elected. While you can definitely question the motivation of the Labor party (the support of the party has gone to the person they think will give them the best chance of being reelected, which is not necessarily the same thing as who will be the best leader of the country) in making this change, what they have done is in no one unprecedented, or even unexpected. Keating did the same thing to Hawke, and Costello should have done it to Howard.

So, in conclusion, let us welcome our new red-headed PM, and hope she does right by the country, even if she has missed an early opportunity to get rid of Senator Stephen "Internet Filter" Conroy.

Abbott's Paradox

Does anyone else find it odd that Tony Abbott's statement that we should only take his scripted statements to be 100% correct was not scripted, and so shouldn't be taken as 100% accurate?

On Contacts

Most people who know me have only seen me while wearing glasses. In fact, there is a decent bunch of people who have only seen me in one specific pair of glasses. In fact the only time I've seen myself without glasses since I was in high school was either as a blur or from about 15cm away from the mirror, neither of which give the greatest perspective. So going to contact lenses was kind of a big step.

I had tried contact lenses once in university when the optometrist on campus was offering one day trials (I guess this must have been when daily lenses were a new thing) and they were all right then, but I didn't have to put them in or take them out myself, and being a broke uni student with a relatively new pair of glasses at the time, I didn't follow it up further.

So why did I decide to try sticking pieces of soft plastic directly on my eyeballs instead of just continuing to wear glasses? The answer is pretty easy, my bike. Glasses and a helmet don't work well. Neither do glasses and peripheral vision.

Getting the lenses didn't turn out to be too tricky. I made an appointment with an optometrist, and after an eye test it turned out my eyes were just bad enough that medicare would cover some trial lenses to see what worked best for me. So then I waited for a week for a pair in my prescription to arrive, and the next Friday I was back to learn how to put them on and take them out.

Now putting a piece of plastic on your eyeball, much like putting anything one your eyeball is not something you generally want to do, and the body has a whole bunch of automatic systems that try and stop you doing this. And these even interfere with trying to take the damn thing off as well. So it started out with the optometrist putting the contacts in. Then I had to take them out. This involves holding your top eyelid open with one hand while first sliding the lens down the eye so as to form a fold, and then grabbing the fold and pulling the lens out. sounds easy when you say it, but you try poking yourself in the eye and see how easy it is.

Next I had to put them in myself. This proved even trickier than taking them out. You need to hold both eyelids close, and then stick the lens straight onto your eye. And if you don't hold your eyelids tight enough and blink halfway through, well then you just have to start again. I think it took about twice as long to get them in as to take them out. But get them in I did, and with a few other pieces of advice I was sent on my way.

I hung around the city for a little while to give my eyes some time to adjust to the presence of these intruders on my eyeball before riding out to Chermside for games night.

This first pair was meant to be a fortnight pair, but I stopped wearing them after about a week. After getting them on the Friday, I think on Wednesday night while they were meant to be soaking in contact lens fluid the right lens got stuck on the lid of teh container and so stayed out of the fluid. In the morning it had a bend in it and I couldn't get it in, and so wore my glasses and let it spend the day soaking in fluid. The next day I was able to get it in, but on the Saturday I was reading when the right lens fell out. I didn't notice immediately, but after a while noticed that the focus of my two eyes was different, and assumed that the right lens was a bit out of place. Close my eye and rubbing the eyelid did not do much to restore vision in the right eye, and so I decided to just take them out for the night. Only when trying to take off the lens and getting a more than normally unpleasant sensation did I realise the lens was actually not there. I did manage to find where it fell out, but decided that that was that for that pair of lenses.

At the follow up appointment on the next Tuesday I got two pairs of daily lenses and a monthly pair. Unfortunately I only got to wear one pair of the dailies as I managed to drop one while trying to put it in, and it ws then that I truly began to appreciate how helpful it was that the first pair I'd got were actually blue (it didn't seem to affect my perception of colour, but it did make seeing the things a lot easier). As a lens in just the left eye isn't much use, after get one day out of the daily, I started using the monthly pair, which I'm still using now.

In general the contacts are best while I'm out and about, either walking around or riding the bike, although riding the bike tends to dry them out a bit. Sitting in front of the computer gets a bit uncomfortable after a while, and when I play on my Wii I tend to lose focus a bit, forcing me to close my eyes for a little bit, which during most games can be a disadvantage. If I'm at home I stick with the glasses, as my routine has become such that I put the lenses in after taking a shower (I should ask if it's ok to wear them in the shower. I was told to use a daily pair if I was going to go swimming or such so I'm not sure), so when they go in depends a bit on my schedule.

I'm going to have to make a decision soon on if I want to keep going with them, as medicare will only pay for so much trying out different things. I think I'll continue using them, even if they are a bit uncomfortable at times (I presume that that will change with time). The improvement in vision is pretty good. It does avoid the hassles of the glasses not fitting in the helmet well, although it does introduce the whole eyeball poking as an alternative hassle.

I was also surprised by the general lack of comment brought about by switching to contacts. It was about two weeks before anyone commented on the fact, and in the month I've been wearing them there have been only 4 comments, and one was asking why I had gone back to the glasses on that day. I guess like a few other circumstances I've tried applying it to, Daria episodes are not a suitable guide for life. I guess perhaps its not so big a change from other people's perspectives. I have had two people not recognize me straight away, but one is understandable since I hadn't seen her in about 4 years and have a beard now as well (although given my irregular shaving habits back then that's not such a big change) although the other person had no such excuse.

Here endeth the stream of consciousness

Thoughts on an empty blog

So it seems my life has become boring. This is the only conclusion I can come to after considering the fact that I have only written one blog post in the last almost two months, and that 2010 was already shaping up to be a record slow year as far as the blog went.

There have been a few things I've meant to write up but haven't for various reasons. Something on wearing contacts should have been written a few weeks ago to be timely, but I just haven't done it yet. There was something I wanted to write about involving an incident with some people I know, but since I was felt there was a pretty decent chance of at least one involved person reading it, I didn't put it up. Given that this blog started out as an emotional outlet for me to try and work stuff out by writing it up and putting it out on the interwebs shows that that has changed.

My current job is less exciting than my old ones. No exotic (or at least foreign) locales. No adventures on the weekends. The biggest thrill that's happened was a systems crash today that meant I got to sit around bludging for two and a half hours or so while getting paid.

I considered writing something for my birthday, now a month gone, but felt that it would probably end up to whiny and emo, much as this one seems to be trending.

Perhaps this situation has developed because my current situation is what one could describe as safe. I've got a place where I get room and board pretty cheap, I've not worried about money since I've got back to Australia, although being on the dole was frustrating, my current job is modestly lucrative but not challenging, and in general I've got a pretty regular schedule going with a mix of new friends and old.

There are a few things that by previous standards of notability would have gone up on my blog. These include buying a motorbike and getting my motorbike license, being a bridesmaid at a friends wedding, comments on various news pieces the most recent of which being the situation regarding the alleged sinking of a South Korean navy ship by North Korea, getting a new job, tests for my finance course, learning to play go and a whole bunch more.

I do see this lack of writing to be problematic. I've had times where I've aimed to put something up every day. Now my goal of something every three days has a massive backlog. I guess I need to make more of an effort.

Your not really making the point you think you're making

Thanks to Media Watch I found out about a little bit Alan Jones did reading out another of those chain emails that gets certain types of people going. This particular one was on the topic of refugees. As Alan read out

Alan Jones: The smugglers know the rules. The new ones. They know you don't have to go to Nauru now. You don't have detention in the desert now. You don't have a temporary protection visa now... There's an email doing the rounds at the moment which is most probably a bit apocryphal and a bit inventive but it's instructive and it says that:
"If you cross the North Korean border illegally you get 12 years hard labour.
If you cross the Iranian border illegally you are detained indefinitely.
If you cross the Afghan border illegally, you'll get shot...
If you cross the Chinese border illegally you may never be heard from again...
but" as the email says, "if you cross the Australian border illegally you'll get a job, a driver's licence, a social security card, welfare..."

The point I think Alan wants us to take away from this little monologue is that we need to be tougher on refugees coming to Australia illegally.

That's not the message I take away from this. The message I take away from this is "and that's one of the reasons why Australia is a better country than those other countries."

Now I know that the problem of a higher than desired number of refugees arriving through improper channels is complex and will require a multi-facted solution, there are two things I'm reasonably sure are not part of that solution.

One, a race to the bottom between nations for who can treat such people the worst (and trust me, Australia will lose on this one anyway),

and Two, not helping the countries the refugees are coming from become better and safer countries to live in will just keep them coming.

Legislation, we hardly know ye.

One of the subjects I'm currently studying is Law, Regulations and Ethics. Since it's part of a finance course, the law part of it is pretty much the Corporations Act 2001 (Aust), and a few other related bits and pieces like the Corporations Regulations 2001 (Aust) and the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Funding Act (2006), but it's given me more of an understanding of how legislation reads.

The first thing is that law is confusing. This is the main reason lawyers make big bucks. They need to know this stuff inside and out and they need to know a lot of it. I barely dented Chapter 7 of the Corporations Act, let alone the whole thing.

There are a number of reasons why the law is confusing. The main reason for this is the fact that so much of it is indirect. Take the Corporations Act. Section 1311 starts out by saying that anyone who does something that is prohibited by the act or doesn't do something required by the act is guilty of an offense. But then it goes on to say that they're guilty of an offense for some things only if a penalty is listed in schedule 3. Fortunately schedule 3 is pretty straightforward.

Then there's the language used. From what I've seen every act has a list of definitions in there somewhere. This is because words don't always mean what they normally do. Sometimes this is because the normal meaning is a bit vague in what it covers, or sometimes they want a word to cover other things like it, but not quite the same.

There's also a lot of language that makes you wonder just how pedantic the people writing this are. Take for example this lovely bit of prose
(1) A margin lending facility is:

(a) a standard margin lending facility; or

(b) a non‑standard margin lending facility; or

(c) a facility of a kind that has been declared by ASIC to be a margin lending facility under subsection (8);

unless the facility is of a kind that has been declared by ASIC not to be a margin lending facility under subsection (9).

So a margin lending facility is either a standard or a non-standard margin lending facility, or something ASIC has said is a margin lending facility, unless ASIC has said it isn't. All very clear. Fortunately it does go on to give a bit more detail as to what a standard and non-standard margin lending facility are, but still.

This also makes me think about the idea that ignorance of the law is no excuse. There are great swathes of the law I'm completely ignorant about, and likely the bits I think I know about I have huge misconceptions about. We all know the basic stuff like don't steal, don't kill, don't run red lights, etc, but what does the average person actually know of the law? Now, I'll admit there's not much chance the average person is going to commit an offense under the Corporations Act without knowing it, but what other laws are lurking out there that we don't know of.

There are certainly expectations that people who want to do certain things are aware of the relevant laws. People need to prove they know the rules of the road to be able to get a license. To get a financial services license you need to show that you know the relevant laws. But there's no requirement to know other sorts of laws to get by in everyday life. I think this is definitely a gap that needs to be filled. High school would probably be a good place to teach this, but I'm not sure how interested kids would be in it then, or how you would fit it in with all the other things schools have to teach. The more cynical part of me thinks maybe make it and stuff about our system of government part a course you have to pass to enroll to vote, although I don't think that would go down well, especially if you required everyone already enrolled to vote to go through it as well (maybe give them 10 years to pass the test or their off the roll)

Not Everything Needs to be 3D

According to the Times Online, Avatar, in addition to making people depressed, is causing movie makers to want to go back and upgrade their movies to 3D.

Now I can understand why. 3D is cool, and a number of the movies mentioned would have been awesome if done in 3D, but the fact is that they weren't. And regardless of the amount of computer jiggery-pokery that gets done, it's not going to change the fact that going from 3D to 2D is really easy, but going from 2D to 3D is very tough.

The movies discussed are action movies that relied on lots of special effects the first time round, and depending on how much of the computer models still exist, you might even get some pretty good 3D in parts, but the more everyday scenes with just people and sets won't have that advantage, and will diminish the effect.

Such upgraded movies will also lack in comparison to made for 3D movies. Avatar does 3D well because it was planned as such from the beginning, and this gave the creators new tools to use when composing scenes and designing locations. Upgraded 2D films will not have these benefits and it will show.

All this improving of old movies to fit with new technology is not unprecedented. Classic black and white films have had color added to them later, to a generally negative reception. One of Orson Welles last requests a few weeks before he died was to not let Citizen Kane be colourised.

Now before you go calling me a neo-luddite or what not, let me sum things up on a positive note. Great 2D films, like great black and white films are great because of the art that went into them, the direction, the design, the acting, the writing, all of it. No one denigrates Citizen Kane because it's not in colour (no one with sense, anyway), they praise it for its merits. And so to if movie making transitions to 3D as a standard, people aren't going to mock today's greats for their lack of a third dimension. They will still praise the stories, the art, the greatness for what it is. Movie makers don't need to go add the latest gimmick to their movies.

On a final note, let it be said that no one should be surprised that George Lucas is one of those movie makers who can not wait to do this, and to be fair to him, if he does, I will go (to episodes III-VI at least)

Some Last Words

Not from me of course. I'm sure I have many more words to come (the second half of 2009 not withstanding). The last words in question come from a subset of the population of Texas, namely those who were executed by the state.

I initially came across this while browsing through the Popular Items in Google Reader, and curious as to where it came from, followed the link and explored a bit, soon arriving at this page, which gives info on almost three decades of executees.

Going through such a collection may seem a bit grim or morbid, but also an interesting look into the state of mind of these people. The main thing that stands out amongst them all is the acceptance of imminent death. None I've read try and stop the execution, even those proclaiming their innocence. I'm not sure of how long before the execution they are told of the exact day that will be their last, the time on death row nonetheless gives plenty of time to come to terms with the idea. (While writing this I thought of perhaps a cruel way to schedule executions. Once the death sentence is confirmed, and all the appeals and such are done, apply some random chance (about 1 in 100 sounds like the right ball park. 1 in 10 is too low and 1 in 1000 is too high), and each day the prisoner either told "not today" or taken off to be executed. This could perhaps be calculated beforehand to aid in scheduling, so long as the actual day of execution is not communicated to the inmate)

Other themes that come through include remorse and denial, although these never come together. The remorseful seem genuine, and there's not much to be gained by them. The deniers are hard to judge just from the words, but knowing the statistics it seems likely that there were some innocent men in there.

I'm still not sure what exactly to make of the site. I'm pretty sure it's been put online purely as part of making public records more available, but such documents have more meaning than just that they exist. Capitol punishment is mostly something that happens in the distance, as an abstract thing. Few people see it as it happens, and fewer still would be there in circumstances of their choosing. So the chance to see that the people executed are real and to read their words brings it home that it is flesh and blood humans that are facing their end here, and that is something that should not be lost.

Dead Authors Society

Recently I've read two books in series started by an author now dead. One lived up to my expectations while the other I doubt I'll bother to include in the canon of that series.

First is And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer. This is part six in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. I had not previously read any of Colfer's work, but have heard good things about the Artemis Fowl series, so I didn't go in entirely pessimistic, but I can't say I was expecting greatness. Which is just as well, because Adams set a high bar, and unfortunately Colfer didn't reach the bar. The introduction was promising, but Colfer couldn't work Adams' style, and the voice of the piece felt off. The guide entries in particular did not work as well they did for Douglas Adams. Overall I though it was a story that might work OK, but didn't fit the characters and the world that it was grafted onto.

The second book I found did a much better job of things. The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brian Sanderson (Sanderson's name is about a quarter the size of Jordan's on the cover, which is not to unfair since Jordan did manage to write the previous eleven books on his own before passing). Sanderson's style, while distinct from Jordan's is a good fit and does shore up some of the weaknesses that Jordan had, the big one being the at times horrendously slow pacing. In The Gathering Storm things are always moving along, and for the first time in many years, you begin to feel like you may actually see the end of the road. Numerous plot threads were tied up in this volume, some of which have been dangling since the early books. All in all it is a much more satisfying read than And Another Thing.

I don't know if there will be another Hitchhiker's sequel (I'm not sure I'd read it if there was), but there are two more Wheel of Time books to go (I've heard rumours of some prequels as well, but nothing is happening there until after the series is finished) and I will definitely be reading them (I started reading the series a decade ago, a decade after the first book was published) as I do want to see the end. I just hope Brian Sanderson can keep doing such a good job.

What's so great about this picture

As part of my end of month internet splurge (I try and somewhat moderate my internet usage during the month, so at the end of the month whatever's left gets blown in an outrageous fashion) I've been uploading a bunch of photos up to my flickr account. This has led to a surge in people looking at my photos, which is kind of to be expected since flickr shows people random recently uploaded photos, and I have it set up so that a message goes up on facebook when I upload photos.

Looking at the stats flickr provides though shows one anomaly, this picture:
Yesterday it got 237 views. This blows away the next best photo which currently sits at around 85 views and is of what I would consider to be a much more popular subject. In fact this photo beats the next 4 photos combined when it comes to views.

So I have to wonder, what's so great about this picture? It's a fire place with a statue above it in Cardiff Castle. It's not significantly better than any of my other pictures, nor is it significantly noteworthy in terms of content or style.

Any ideas readers?

Finished

I've just posted the last entry of my travels from earlier this year. Given that I returned to Australia in early June and it is now early mid September, this has taken longer than I had hoped.

Early on most of the writing was done on trains between cities, just after I had left them. Since returning to Brisbane, pretty much all of my writing has been done at the Myer Centre Starbucks, so I guess a shout out to them is due.

All up I wrote 222 pages of travels plus another 20-30 pages of other materials. Coming up is a series of Cool and Not Cool for each country.

There is a certain amount of satisfaction in having completed this. It was a rather epic trip, and the tome in which I wrote it down will stay on my bookshelf for many years to come.

I am considering what to do with the rest of the space in the journal. The two options I can see is to keep it as a diary of sorts for everyday life, or to keep it for the next time I go a big trip. There's also the fact that I have been using the unruled section for various miscellania from life in Brisbane, which may come down on the everyday diary side of things, but now that I've thought about a next trip, that does seem like a nice idea.

On the topic of a next trip, since I've knocked a lot of stuff off my want to see list, a few new contenders are at the top. The top three would be in no particular order Egypt, China and South America. Other places that are on the list include Malta, North Korea, northern Europe, the rest of Australia, a pop-culture tour of America where I would try and see live all the things I like from America like The Colbert Report and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me (New York or California would be a must).

The next trip is of course some time away, and I think that the next time I go on a big trip it would be good to have a travelling companion. While it was nice meeting lots of people along the way, there was also times where it got lonely, like the six days on a train as the only English speaker on the carriage.

Some Thoughts on the American Heath Care Debate

The big issue in American politics right now is health care reform, and a lot of stuff is going on related to this. I want to comment on a few things that have happened.

First, is this little clipAll I can say is "Well done, Sir, well done." The level of hyperbole that has come up at some of these town hall meetings is huge, and some of these people need to just shut up rather than asking questions to score points and fear monger. They should also think before using words like Nazi, especially when asking a gay Jew why they support Nazi policies.

Next is people bringing guns to these meetings. Sure, it can be reassuring to have a gun, it can give you a feeling of power, but are you really that scared of rational debate and your fellow citizens? There have been several cases of people bringing guns along to town hall meetings held by Barack Obama. It's not clear if the people were allowed into the meeting with the guns, but they were definitely allowed into the area outside the venues. And Fox News then goes and puts these people with guns up on TV to show just how crazy some of them are. This also shows a big change from the previous administration. How do you think the Bush government would have reacted to people bringing guns to their events? Given how they reacted to signs and t-shirts, I wouldn't have wanted to find out for myself.

The whole "Death Panel" fiasco is another highlight for those who enjoy seeing stupidity run free. Starting with the woman who writes her own comedy bits, Sarah Palin, who recanted her claims the next day, but had unleashed a beast that just will not die. The relevant piece of the legislation merely allows for people to get reimbursed for talking to their doctor about options for family members who are in a fatal condition. It's just letting you talk to your doctor. No one but you is making the decisions. And in another piece of irony, this piece of the bill that is getting so many Republicans upset was introduced by a Republican. If I were a cynical, suspicious bastard I'd think it was introduced to provoke some outrage.

Finally, there is the reluctance from a great swath of the American people to even consider the idea of making sure everyone has adequate health care as something worth doing. Given the problems of the current system it seems clear that reform is needed, and yet they don't want to do it.

End Post
Writing time: 20 minutes
Time since last post: a week or so
Current media: Leverage

Living Large in Lviv

It was only while looking at the stamp I got in my passport today that I realized that today is one month from when I left Korea. And I've only just made it to the third country. I've entered the EU, but not yet entered the Schengen zone or the Eurozone. That will probably occur in about two weeks when I make it to Greece.

As has often happened in my life, I don't feel like I've done enough to fill up a month. Nine days (including today) have been spent on trains. Twelve in Russian cities and seven in Ukrainian cities. That adds up to twenty-eight.

I think I've kind of stuck within my budget on average. I had a few bumps with regards to taxis on this front, but should not repeat that as I've decided to avoid taxis and make sure I stay at places that give good direction and are close to public transport. I'm using a different website to book hostels which is a lot better than the first site for giving directions. Hostel World for those who want to know. I've used my credit card a lot to get local funds as it's usually been easier than exchanging the cash I have(at least in Russia. The Ukraine and Romania have exchange booths everywhere).I'm going to cut back on that as I have only three, maybe four more countries outside the Eurozone, so I will try and use up my US dollars in those countries, and cash in my travelers cheques when I hit Greece.

I'm on another train as I write this (no surprise there. I seem to pretty much just write these on the train). I have the carriage by myself at this point. There was an Italian couple on board, but they got off around lunch time. In fact, when the train arrived in Lviv, this carriage was not yet part of the train, which initially caused me some confusion as my ticket said I was in car 16 and the train only went up to car 8.

Lviv was a nice town with lots of old buildings. The town center was quite historic looking with lots of statues and churches and other stuff around. My first day I did a walking tour from the Lonely Planet which took in a few churches, a few vacant lots that were synagogues until WWII, Castle Hill which distinctly lacks a castle but does have a good view, a few museums that were closed that day (I tried to go into one, noticed the sign saying it was closed on Wednesdays, thought nothing of it as it was surely later in the week than Wednesday, got confused at the lack of anyone trying to sell me a ticket until one of the men I passed on the way in showed me the sign again, at which point I realized it was indeed Wednesday).

On Thursday I visited Lychakivskiy Cemetery which had many cool tombstones that I was unable to photograph as the battery in my camera died. After the cemetery I went back into town to visit some of the museums and the tower of the town hall. The museum I liked the most was the Arsenal, which as its name suggests has a display of weapons from all over the world including swords, axes, maces, crossbows, pistols, rifles and cannons.

My last four days in the Ukraine I have had dinner at the same chain of restaurants, which is a non all you can eat buffet. The food was good and cheap. I sort of liked the borscht. The soup was good but I'd leave the cabbage behind. I wonder if it's possible to make borscht without the cabbage.

The hostel in Lviv wasn't as good as the others I've stayed at. The building was old and the stairs were not level and it was a bit dank. The theme was good (it was called Kosmonaut and had pictures of Yuri Gagarin on the wall and a vampire Lenin). While I was there I was the only guest, so I had not only a room to myself but the whole place. It was OK, but I prefer the liveliness of the place I stayed in Kiev. Another plus for the Kosmonaut is that I got a free t-shirt from them.

I arrive in Bucharest tonight and will spend a few days there. Then I'll head north a bit to Brasov and do the Transylvania thing (If I'm lucky I'll get to stake a vamp or two, though I doubt it). Then I'll move south again to Sofia in Bulgaria (via Bucharest no doubt) and then onto Istanbul, the second on my "must see" list for this trip (the list includes Moscow, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Paris and London). Other places are on the "what's cool around or between those places" list. It will probably be about one and a half to two weeks before I arrive in Istanbul. I have a plan for what I'm going to do with my pictures from Istanbul, so look forward to that one.

Limited Free Speech Doesn't Work

The General Assembly of the United Nations has once again passed a non binding resolution condemning religious discrimination while idly saying that freedom of speech may be subject to limitations. This is the fourth year in a row the General Assembly has passed such a resolution, this year with a reduced vote (actually it only got a plurality, not a majority this time around).

This resolution is mainly backed by Islamic states and opposed by western states. Not a surprising division on the issue. The Islamic states backing the resolution say they don't want to limit free speech, they just want to stop things like the Dutch Mohammed cartoons from a few years ago.

The cognitive dissonance in such a statement is amazing. They don't want to limit speech, they just want to limit speech that upsets them. It's almost as if they don't get the idea that freedom of speech includes speech that upsets them.

Freedoms like speech are one of the things I tend to get absolutist about. Individual liberties are the foundation on which the rest of society is built. If you undermine those, you undermine society.

End Post
Writing time: a while
Time since last post: too long
Current media: None

Inferno, Canto XXXIV, tercet 139

Last Saturday night I was out rather late (or more accurately, very early on Sunday), and I saw something that I have not seen very much of in Korea.

After the taxi ride back from downtown, I was walking down the street looking up at the sky and thought to myself "ah, there's Orion". It took me a few moments to realize the significance of this thought.

For the first time during my stay in Korea, the sky, while not full, contained many stars. I believe I may have even identified Polaris, a star that has not been visible to me during the greater number of my days.

Apparently it was a combination of the late hour and the cold evening that let me see that which is normally invisible here.

It really is quite depressing looking up at the night sky and seeing just black with only the moon to break things up. It makes the universe seem such a hollow and empty thing, lacking the glory and wonder I know it has.

I have occasionally thought what would science have been like if the night sky had always been like this. Geocentrism would have been a lot stronger, although it would have fallen eventually. Telescopes would still exist, but would anyone bother pointing them upwards. Astronomy would have been stunted at birth, although its evil twin astrology would have been still born. I think science on such a world would still get to where we are, but it would be a slower process and lack some of the wonder we get to experience.

That's all.

For those wondering about the title of this post, the line referenced reads "and we came out to see once more the stars."

End Post
Writing time: 39 minutes (although I was distracted by Wikipedia partway through)
Time since last post: I guess two or three days.
Current media: None (soon to be rectfied).

The Appropriate Size for a Fridge

Recent events have left me with a fridge of smaller dimension than I was previously used to. This has led me to realise that I do actually have standard for what size fridge is sufficient for my purposes.

A fridge should be large enough that you can lay a pizza box flat on a shelf and still close the door and have a bit of space next to the pizza box. The vertical dimension is more flexible but should be in the normal fridge proportions to the horizontal dimensions.

Discuss.

End Post
Writing time: 3 minutes
Time since last post: A while
Current media: Drop the Hate by Fatboy Slim

A Sight For Sore Muscles

A rather unusual result from the Korean Constitutional Court has been delivered recently. The court has upheld a law that only allows people who are blind to be a licensed masseur.

This is rather unfair to all the sighted people who want to be masseurs, and there are about 200,000 of them while there are only around 7,100 licensed masseurs. A sighted person working as a masseur can face fines and prison (although I'm sure they avoid most such problems like the street food stands do. A few quite payments to the local police and a brief holiday during crackdown week (I've ranted previously about corruption here and my involvement thereof)).

While I can agree with the court for wanting to make sure that blind people have the ability to earn a living for themselves, I don't believe the way to do this is to give them a monopoly on an industry, especially one where there is sufficient demand for almost thirty times the number of practitioners. The way to do it is to ensure that blind people are able to enter any profession that they are capable of performing (I don't think it's wrong to not hire a blind person as a photographer for example) and that there is a sufficient set of social services available to support them as they do so.

End Post
Writing time: 15 minutes (this one had a few paragraphs rewritten)
Time since last post: about an hour
Current media: still none

I hope this doesn't set a precedent

The nation of Jordan has decided to get a little bit tricky when it comes to dealing with international critics of its state religion. Back in 2006 they amended their Justice Act to allow the prosecution of those who affect Jordanians by electronic means, even if those people aren't in Jordan themselves. Now, prosecutors are using this to go after people in other countries, by filing charges and getting warrants for these people, and the asking Interpol to extradite them to Jordan.

Fortunately, so far no one seems to be playing ball with Jordan, as the people they asked to be extradited are mostly from western democracies, who won't extradite someone for exercising their freedom of speech. But if any of those people go on holiday to the middle east, they might not be so lucky.

Another rather worrying aspect of this is that even though the amendment was made in 2006, they are going after people whose alleged crimes were in 2005. This is a rather worrisome retroactive application of a criminal law. Nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege is a very old and very good legal maxim. No one should be punished for a crime if there was no law at the time the act was done.

This also raises again the rather complicated issue of who has jurisdiction over the internet. With this law Jordan is claiming that anything that can affect the people of Jordan electronically falls within its jurisdiction, which essentially means the whole of the internet is subject to their laws. This is all very good, but what does Jordan do if say Israel claims the same thing and starts prosecuting anti-Semites in Jordan (I'm reasonably sure there must be some who have internet access) and asking for their extradition. My prediction is Jordan would tell them to go to hell. The only sensible way to handle internet jurisdiction is that each country looks after those in its territory and leaves the rest of the world alone.

Were it otherwise anyone defamed by something on the internet could simply choose the country with the most advantageous defamation laws and bring their case there to their benefit. And can countries that guarantee freedom of speech keep that guarantee while allowing its citizens to be prosecuted by countries with strict restrictions on speech like China. Overlapping jurisdictions do not work.

End Post
Writing time: 32 minutes
Time since last post: a few days
Current media: The Middleman