Value of an education

On the train home yesterday, there were three girls seated a few rows in front discussing the futures and dreams. I didn't go out of my way to eavesdrop, but they made it easy to overhear as they all seemed rather enthusiastic.

Listening to the conversation, it seemed the girls were still getting to know one another, but their acquaintance was due to them all attending the same dance college in the city area. So their discussion was about their backgrounds and dreams. None of them had finished high school and thus the only thing approaching tertiary training was going to be their dance training.

They each expressed an earnest passion to travel the world, working as a dancer as they enjoyed all the excitement of moving from country to country. Sounds nice, until you realise that although it isn't impossible, it unfortunately is more likely to end in tears.

You could blame movies, as many movies revolve around people chasing and achieving dreams that we all share. But perhaps it is because they also haven't had a wiser person around to guide and mentor them.

There's nothing wrong with pursuing a passion, but one needs to be intelligent in recognising levels of risk and being able to have a fallback, or being able to recognise when you may have to let the dream go.

I've had dreams of running my own business, and even got quite serious at one stage about running my own go-kart track business. To the point of beginning TAFE business training courses, and completing a draft of the business proposal and revenue projections to submit to the bank for funding.

In the end though, I weighed up risks and realised that there wasn't room in the market for it to succeed. People love the stories of underdogs that beat the odds and become success stories, but what they gloss over and ignore is the fact that countless more fail than the ones that succeed, and its often not due to a lack of effort. And in some cases, someone who succeeds will do so at the expense of another.

Basically, it isn't all as golden as the movies would make it out to be, and not everyone can win.

You need a back up plan, and these girls with the dreams of being a dancer and seeing the world did not have one. If you read the interviews with successful Hollywood actors, many of them share the same story of beginnings which involve living from hand-to-mouth, while going to every audition to try to make it.

So if only a few make it, imagine how many didn't. And if they don't have another career to turn to, what happens then?

My point? If you have a friend or family member who has an exciting dream, but one with risk or a limited lifespan (e.g. you can only be a professional soccer player while your body holds out), then be the voice of wisdom in their life. Don't extinguish their dream, but help them to at least think about a plan B, in the event that plan A doesn't happen.

Late bloomer

I've been a software engineer for 16 years now (well, just a glorified code monkey) and have now only just crossed a milestone:

I have finally actually used inheritance in some code I've written.

I've known what it is for many years, and I'd seen examples of it, but never actually ever created anything with it. I might have finally graduated from n00b. Go me!

Don't like...

In any corporation, one of the biggest outgoings is salary. If you talk to any corporate accountant or payroll master, and they'll tell you that alot of money goes towards people's salaries. Hence companies want to know what employees do, and hence timesheets feature quite commonly in the private sector of the corporate world.

I shouldn't really complain, because in many regards I have it easy. To hear a full rant, talk to any lawyer, clerk or accountant employed by a firm. They have to account for their time in as small as 5min increments, as it all gets billed to customers.

The reason for this, is that the clients who pay the money to a company for a service, often want an invoice so they can see where that money is going, and to give them a chance to see whether the costs are reasonable. You can understand it when you go shopping at the supermarket or take your car to the mechanic, as when you see a bill for a few hundred, then obviously you want to have a chance to make sure that no 'extras' are being slipped into that total.

So my company does the same. At the end of each day, I need to fill out a sheet detailing the time I spent on different tasks and different projects. My "cost" to the company is then recorded against each project so they can determine how much that project cost in the end.

Now where my gripes for this post come from, are that my role is odd. I'm like the courier that provides supplies to the office. I'm a necessary part that supports a number of teams on different projects to extend test automation, but I don't do any automation or test itself. So sometimes the work I do, supports several projects, and other times it is for stuff that isn't in the pipeline yet. Now from a project costing point of view, I'm an undesirable component, hence many projects that are tight on funds end up telling me to not bill to them. Way too many times, my timesheets get rejected by managers who don't want my costs on their project, even though my work that day may have benefited their team.

So I don't have to provide the fine resolution reporting that some people have to endure, but I do get the run-around alot when it comes to just filling that thing in.

Its the neighbourhood

I have a short route I like to walk when I need to get away from my desk. About 3 times a week, I'll just need to get away, and go for a 15min stroll for some fresh air and exercise.

On my stroll, the first 500metres will pass 5 law firms and one private investigator office. One deals with property actions, such as settlement and conveyancing, the second deals with corporate law for business. The remaining 3 law firms specialise in what they call "family law", which encompasses all those relationship breakdown items such as alimony, divorce, divorce settlements, contesting wills, custody, pre-nuptial agreements, and the like.

5 law firms seems like alot, and 3 out of 5 on family law also seems a little disproportionate. Part of me wonders if its to do with the 3 brothels that are also within a 400 metre radius of where I work.

More than a generation gap

One side of my family has chinese heritage. My wife's family has chinese heritage. There is a fair amount of immigration from various asian regions of people who have chinese heritage, and along with that comes people who have grown up with certain cultural norms.

Norms that I don't understand and really dislike.

Now this isn't a racist rant. It's a post about the "aunties" that come with this demographic. The aunties are the older ladies of chinese background, who are around my parent's background and fall into the age bracket where people are either close to, or already have, retired.

For some reason, these aunties feel they can take certain social liberties, particularly with the younger generation, when it comes to the things they do and the things they say. Some of these include:

• "Have you put on weight?" (Ummm... no, you haven't seen me in 3 years, and I'm actually the same weight as before)
• To get your attention, they pull your sleeve urgently, even though you're in the middle of a conversation with someone else. Or worse, they pinch your arm, or poke you firmly in the shoulder.
• They walk up to pregnant women and without asking, greet them by placing both their hands on the woman's pregnancy bump.

If I returned the favour in any of these ways, I'd be considered rude. So can anyone tell me how this works? Because the next aunty who asks me if I'm getting fat, even though they weigh more than me, is going to get the same question right back.

I'll pass thanks.

I like the occassional soda, and with Burger King doing their $1 frozen Coke, it makes it hard to resist on a scorching summers day.

But the Australian government has been pushing pretty hard with their adverts seeking to educate people against the hidden dangers of continual junk food indulgence. This one, which was in a recent saturday paper made me start thinking I'll have to look at skipping the frozen cokes now too.

They suddenly don't seem to taste as nice, now that I've seen this.

Watch for blindspots

One of the blogs that I read frequently was from a fellow who used to be a bouncer at nightclubs, but through a variety of opportunities created, in part through his talent with words and storytelling, he has been able to transition away from that world into something more office orientated and now runs his own business. He still makes amusing and occassionally insightful observations into a culture that I've never understood. Despite the coarse language, I had always deemed him to be thoughtful and balanced in his judgements.

One of the themes that crops up in his blog is about how much he notices that people judge by appearances and this is something that he has experienced personally. Being a fairly muscular individual and not being blessed with a welcoming, or even neutral, facial expression, he has occassionally suffered not being given the benefit of the doubt when accused of harassment or bullying. As a result, when stories come up in the media of an individual being accused of similar things (while investigations are ongoing) this blogger frequently takes the side of the accused, because of his own experiences.

His recent post seemed to reveal a degree of hypocrisy that surprised me though. He reiterated an instance where he had been deemed as guilty of bullying, just because his size was significantly larger than the other individual who felt intimidated by the blogger's appearance, although the blogger claims he had always been nothing but reconciliatory and professional towards the other individual. He then follows up with expressing his support for Richie Incognito who the blogger acknowledges has been recorded saying racist, misogynistic and threatening statements to another sportsperson. Its one thing to judge on appearances, but when there is a record of the individual speaking and acting in that fashion, that's no longer being discriminated against.

Which makes me realise that at times, it can be easy to get caught up in our own experience that it can completely cloud our own ability to evaluate things properly.

Its important to maintain perspective.

Socially stupid

This proliferation of social interaction on the internet that permeates everything just annoys me. Its worth because I am trying to work on a Mac which is being extremely difficult, so already in a bad mood.

But how can it possibly be a good thing that even going into Apple's application portal that it offers these options when choosing to install an application?

Are there really people who want to broadcast on Facebook or Twitter that they've chosen to install/update a given program on their computer? And how is that even socially acceptable?

In a face to face environment, I might share information along those lines if I feel it is relevant to their interests, or is something that is fitting to the current social environment. But using social media is akin to virtually getting all your friends/acquaintances/family together at once, and yelling it out, then going back to what you were doing.

Its insane, especially when you consider that most of the stuff that gets "yelled out" is not interesting or relevant to most of the recipients. Its probably even offensive to half of them. The reason why this is particularly bad, is because people can't really engage through social media. Not like when you are face to face. So it all ends up being highly superficial, or else a flood of aggravated noise.

And I'm still mad at how hard it is to use Macs.

Don't try this at home

Going back a few years, at least back to 2007, there was a trend of holiday makers photographing themselves jumping on hotel beds. A quick search on the internet turns up more and more ridiculous photos of people getting some pretty good height as they treat hotel beds as trampolines.

Obviously the hotel owners aren't impressed as this is not an activity that beds in general are designed for, so bed frames and mattresses have their service lives prematurely shortened.

Well I managed to break my own bed doing a similar thing. I don't stand on the bed and jump, but sometimes after a hectic day, I'm eager for a nap as a reward, so its tempting to leap into bed rather than ease myself in.

While it seems that the pine planks can manage holding up a heavy mattress, they don't do well with sudden applications of weight so two of the planks which had knots in their section, fractured and broke yesterday afternoon.

If you have an annoyed wife telling you to get that fixed before Bunnings shuts, then you pretty much learn to treat the bed with a whole lot more respect from then on. No more of this, I guess.

Warning signs

I think I've gone senile. Time to put me out to pasture, or the glue factory, whichever is closer.

There's been a few occassions now when my wife and I are going out, I drive down the end of our street and get ready to join the main road, then I realise that I've completely forgotten where we were going. Its happened often enough now that she's actually started getting into the habit of reminding me when we reach the end of our street.

Its probably what I get for being grumpy most of the time. Blown all my brain cells from the blood pressure.

Grumpy just keeps on going

Our public transport isn't the best financially managed mass-transit service in the world. Far from it in fact.

One of the examples of poor management is the way that they happily go with lowest bidders on infrastructure almost everytime. Escalators are a good example of this. Think about how many escalators there are in the world and just how long they've been around for. The first prototype was built in 1899 (courtesy of Wikipedia) and they've been getting built and refined ever since. So, much like cars, its not that the technology is new, just that you get to know that some manufacturers make them a little better than others. The ones who don't generally sell their stuff cheaper in order to remain in the market, hence the general view that "you get what you pay for".

Well that view seems to have been ignored when our PTA bought escalators, and also when they bought the equipment to support an electronic ticketing system and automatic ticketing gates.

The problems we have with the electronic ticketing system, is that I'd guess about one in every 200 passengers will tap their pass, have it registered but then the gate doesn't open. Leaving them to either jump the gate, or reverse out and go to the manned opening. What compounds this, is that the gate recognises the error and will not register any more swipes for 10 seconds.

To further this, the touch pads are a little particular, preferring that no other proximity devices be with the electronic ticket when the user taps, and that the ticket not be wrapped in any thick materials. So when people put their ticket in the wallet with their bank cards and work swipe cards, it often fails, and that also screws up the flow of passengers. When you have tens of thousands of commuters moving through, this is not going to go well. Again it isn't a problem with technology as you just have to watch how well electronic gates work in other countries to see that some are better than others, or in this case; most are better than ours.

I need to just take a chill pill and relax, but the problem is that there is always an advisable maximum dosage, and I hit my pill limit very quickly on public transport. I need to get my ass in gear and start cycling again.

More grumpy old man

Kids are back at school. They've been back at school for their second week now, so the space and peace on the public transport has vanished as the children now seek to get to and from school. Now I'll state right up front here that this isn't a problem with just children, as I see adults do the exact same thing, but because the bus I catch in the morning goes past two rather popular high schools, it means that easily 80% of the passengers are kids.

The buses have the same configuration that they have in most countries of doors at the front and at the middle. When people get on and have to stand, they frequently tend to congregate one of the doors as no one wants to be stuck halfway up the aisle when their stop arrives. The front door is less of an issue as everyone has to get on there, so the issue here is the middle door. So the sequence that leads up to my grumpy rant today is this:

• Some people get on, and move along to the middle of the bus so they are near the centre doors.
• More people get on, move along and stand near the people at the centre doors.
• Repeat, until the bus arrives to where I get on.

By this stage, the group of standing people now back up to the front doors. The people standing have their room, so they aren't applying pressure for people to move up, and the people in the centre are insulated by the crowd, so they don't hear the driver urging people to move up, and they are also don't see (or its easier to pretend to not see) that people can not get on anymore.

The killer though, is that the standing room extends to the back of the bus. So there is capacity for another 12 adults to get on if everyone shuffles up.

A couple of days ago I finally reached the point where I can't avoid the fact that I need to do something rather than just whine about it here. So I now yell down the bus to get the rugrats to move along so we can all get on. Annoyingly, my first day of beginning this, I also had to yell at the driver to re-open the doors as a lady didn't make it to the centre doors in time to get off. A lot of yelling that day. But its a chance to begin a new chapter in my life of 'the real grumpy Kingston'.

Get off my lawn.

Watch out for that.... tree

My skateboard is a little different most, mainly because it has drum brakes integrated with the rear truck. If you search google for skateboard brakes, you'll see that quite a number of people have enquired about it at various times and there have been a number of attempts at filling that need with various degrees of practicality.

http://www.longboardshop.de/shop/product_info.php?cPath=62_213&products_id=2158
Interestingly, there's even a few YouTube videos showing how to make similar brakes as this out of PVC plumbing pipes. Nasty engineering, and with either the professional assembly or the PVC version, both mean you now have even more holes in your skateboard.

http://skatebrake.com/kits.html
But I don't like the idea of the cable flapping around. It works well though, and is a much more affordable price.

http://brakeboard.com/
This is what I'm actually using. They're expensive, I won't deny that. But they work well, and there is no odd pipes or pistons sticking out from the skateboard for you to trip on or to get snagged on bumps.

There's a bunch of techniques for braking without some fancy assembly, but they really only work when you've got space and on a fairly smooth predictable surface. Around town, its much harder to use foot brakes or slides to take off speed at a moment's notice. Just this morning the brake saved some lady who suddenly decided to sprint for the bus and ran straight in front of me.

The brake is unusual enough that I'm getting comments and looks quite a lot of the time on the train, and even recently had one guy walk into a sign because he was more focussed on trying to get a look at the brake assembly than where he was going.

That event really made my day.

Ooooo, Shiny!

Often when you get into a car and drive, you don't check stuff. Most people don't even check the fuel gauge, let alone more critical stuff like oil levels, coolant, braking and steering fluids, tyre tread, air pressure, state of the spare wheel, tools for changing said spare wheel.

I can't blame them, you just start to assume as it takes a modest effort to go through all those checks, its dirty work, and if anything does go wrong; then it'll be expensive and inconvenient, but unlikely to be catastrophic (compared to an aircraft, for example). When its your own car, you also get to know its state, and assume that your periodic servicing, plus regularly being around it, will mean that you'd notice if something had degraded unexpectedly. I know that's not the case for everybody though.

When you pick up a vehicle from a rental yard or vehicle dealership, you just naturally assume that various maintenance and safety checks have been done by them. At dealerships, especially the larger ones which are part of an overall corporation, you begin to expect they mean it when they say that all their vehicles are well maintained and of high quality. Barring fuel levels, I should be able to just grab the key and go.

I got a surprise when I was told to go refuel one of the utes in our yard. It was a Ford Falcon 1-tonner, so a 4Litre inline 6, and these are popular with the lads as the rear end is easy to spin when the tray is empty. It seems my dealership wasn't always regular with checking tyre wear as even taking off from rest at the lights was a tricky event. The ute had to be slowly eased into motion if you didn't want to end up sliding into the next lane. When I finally got back to the yard, a quick inspection confirmed that the rear tyres had both been polished smooth from past over-enthusiastic use.

No wonder that the young sales guys loved taking that car home.

Buggered

Man, it's barely half way through friday (yeah I know its midway through the afternoon, but I started late, so I'll be finishing late) and I can't even stand to look at the computer screen anymore. I'm just getting snowed under by requests from managers from all directions, as well as still slipping behind schedule with the prototyping I'm supposed to be doing.

I could really go a beer right now. It doesn't make me work better, but it does help numb frustration.

And I also just remembered that I haven't been updating my timesheet all week. Crap.

American entertainment

In past posts, I'd written about Ninja Warrior (Sasuke), the physical challenge game show from Japan. I'd watched most of their episodes through SBS2 to the point where SBS had caught up to the latest show. Kind of the downside of SBS overdosing us on it. Doing 1, sometimes 2, episodes a day means that they exhausted 29 seasons within a few months. I still think about the show and scan the tv guide for it though, as many of the competitors just have normal day jobs, and I find it an encouragement that I could achieve a similar fitness if I get off my butt.

Anyway, it relisted on tv again in the past month and it wasn't flagged as repeats, so I tuned in thinking that we had a new season. It turns out that SBS has learned and is now just broadcasting a couple of episodes a week, but starting from the beginning again.

The reason why it isn't flagged as a repeat, is because they are showing the American edited version of the Japanese telecast.

This is bad because the American networks know how to milk everything and leave it tasteless:

• Regular pauses in the original show to have an American presenter rattle on about hype
• Constantly going through top 20 lists. Top 20 competitors, characteristics, fails, costumes, etc
• Doing a short segment covering just the female competitors that seems more gratuitous, rather than giving any respect to what they achieved
• Even more editing, so that we actually get slightly less of the original content

American entertainment networks just can't leave well enough alone. Still a fan of the show, but I'm only going to watch the original  Sasuke edits.

OfficeWorks and printing

I got myself into a bit of grief the past couple of weeks. We're changing the curriculum for our sunday school program at church, and I've been madly trying to finalise the details before this sunday, as that when the sunday school program begins in earnest.

We only just finalised the material a few weeks ago, and I'd been in touch over the phone with a girl in our church who works at a printing company. Almost 2 weeks ago, I sent off the material to her to get printing going, but then after a week of silence, I found out I was using the wrong email address as she'd changed to a new one a short while ago. So now I was down to 6 working days left before classes start, and I have nothing printed.

So in frantic searching to at least get printing done for the first few months, I had called OfficeWorks and asked how long it would take if I submitted online. Now I had been given a warning, as there was a review on YellowPages about the printing service of the OfficeWorks near my workplace. But the staff at OfficeWorks said that if I submitted that night (Friday 31st Jan), they'd have it done by the saturday afternoon as things were quiet.

Sweet!!

So my order was submitted and I had fully expected to collect monday afternoon. Well monday morning I called, as the online document tracking service even tells you if your order is in the process of being printed. And my online tracking said that it hadn't even started.

Well they now said that the friday night guy wasn't from the printing department and didn't know what he was talking about. As apparently there were 36 jobs in front of mine. Hence the earliest may be thursday.

Dude... not happy Jan.

They've got a whole department dedicated to printing documents and photos, and when I passed on Monday to get my other order, the three guys in that section were milling around reading, rather than sweating over a commercial printer spraying out paper. If I had access to a binding machine, it would have been cheaper for me to do this on my home printer.

Anyway, Tuesday afternoon I get a message saying its done. They're only just 500m down the street, so I was going to go late in the afternoon. Just before I leave, I get a call from one of the printing guys 90minutes after the original message:

"No it isn't ready. I clicked the wrong button. I meant to click  the 'in progress' status. And by the way, our machine broke and can't do the binding option you wanted. We can only do a more expensive binding option."

Ouch. In one way, I'm glad I hadn't rushed down straight away to collect the order, as its hot out and a 500m walk each way in the sun, would not be nice.

Wednesday afternoon, another call:

"It's done, and we won't charge you for the more expensive binding."

Which I'm glad they clarified that, as I didn't really feel like being railroaded into paying even more. Ok, so thursday morning on my way to work, I wander in to collect. It's done by this weekend which is what I really needed, so all is good.

The staff are young and not really customer service orientated. I get a cheerful greeting from the only guy at the checkout as I guess its quiet and he hasn't had to deal with any difficult customers yet. But the printing section was a whole different story. The staff behind the counter seemed kinda busy and they weren't even making eye contact with the people in the queue, let alone even the customer they were serving at the time.

There were no smiles or pleasantries from the people in this section. Seems like printing is perhaps not the department to be in. I got my stuff and didn't have to go back through the checkout, so I'm done and satisfied now.

Ultimately, I think sometimes the smaller print shops can be better and similar in competitive pricing. I've now found out about one near one of my train changeover stops. They're doing the rest of my less time-critical printing. So far its going well.

Dr Life

Last year I was wandering through a bookstore and came across an eye catching book by Dr Jeffrey Life. The thing that made the book eye catching was the cover, which featured a shirtless 72 year old man with the body of a professional body builder.

I'm always into wanting to stay fit, although I don't have the discipline to carry it out. So I decided to flip through and find out what he was offering in terms of getting fit.

Dr Life's story is interesting as he claims that his fitness pursuit started at the age of 64. He includes a photo of himself at, presumably, 64 to see that it wasn't a case of already being of good fitness, but that he was more of the stereotypical 64 year old american male.

The bulk of his fitness is through careful diet and serious daily exercise, but the bit that threw me off was that he also resorted to hormone replacement therapy and testosterone injections. His main motivations were due to aging, the male body naturally loses testosterone and that results in making it harder maintain large muscle mass.

Dr Life was not just about being fit, but being a body builder. I pretty much gave up at that point on reading any more of his book. But the underlying part of discipline and effort is still solid, so I need to start eyeing my pull-up bar again...

Is it really love?

Ok, so McDonalds has a promotion on nationwide for this whole "Amore Deal", and I was curious as to how it works, and whether this sort of thing can recoup the cost of:

• advertising
• menu changes
• administering and providing the prizes (listed as $528,736.00 total)

Apparently, this really is stacked in McDonald's favour. If you buy any of their special overpriced meals, you get a random code, which of itself has no bearing on whether you are a winner or not. How it works is only one car can be won each day, and there is a narrow timeslot allocated to each day. The first person who submits their code in that timeslot, is the winner for the day.

The timeslot is not announced, and apparently will change each day.

They also don't announce what will happen if there is no winner that day.

Now the prize pool is not worth $528,000. The "valued worth" of the vehicles are the full recommended retail of the vehicles by Suzuki, which also includes a provided margin for the dealership. However in truth the vehicles are actually worth less as McDonalds sources these directly from the Subaru national distributor. Dealership yards are only involved as collection points, but don't come from the dealership's own stock.

• So the 24 base model Suzuki Swift GL probably have an actual wholesale value to McDonalds of $11,000 each. They may actually even be provided for less, as Suzuki is getting free publicity out of this as well.
• There are 4 Suzuki S-Cross GLX (which is one tier up from base model for the S-Cross). These would have a higher wholesale worth in the region of $25,000 each.

But fair enough, there is website administration costs, staff to chase down and handle vehicles, television and internet advertising costs, distribution of material and updated menus to restaurants, training of staff, software updates for the registers, and probably more things I can't think of. Additionally they may have to pay for independent auditing for approval by the ACCC.

Lets say the full cost to McDonalds is $1,000,000. That may be slightly conservative.

Can they recoup that cost? They most likely wouldn't be wanting to turn a profit from the whole venture, but just try to get more people into the restaurants to develop a greater market share and cultivate the habit of eating there in a larger number of people. That would pay off in the long run.

So the approved menu items to get an entry code start at $10, with options to further add cost by upsizing or picking more premium menu items. But lets assume that each meal sold is $10 and 15% goes to the McDonalds corporation.

So they need additional sales (not conversions of existing regular sales) to recoup cost and achieve their goal of increasing market share.

So at $1.50 per sale, that means 666,667 additional meal sales over the month of February, or 23,810 per day.

There are 900 stores across Australia, as reported by McDonalds themselves, so they need 27 Amore meal sales per store per day, without a drop in their regular sales.

Does that seem unachievable?

Most McDonalds operate 24 hours, with the exception of the ones within mall food courts. Even if the outlets were averaged out of operate 13 hours a day, then they just need 2 people an hour. That's 2 people an hour who either make an added trip to McDonalds, or normally wouldn't go but want to have a shot at getting a car. Even if I was under with my estimate of total cost to the company, I think that the potential to cover their cost is still very reasonable.

Would sales die each day after the car was won? Apparently no. You wouldn't know if you missed out, as McDonalds won't announce the details of the winner for at least 3 business days, as they seek to contact and verify the eligibility of the winner, including sighting the related ticket. So it is quite likely that the announcement that the prize for the day has been won, will only come the following day, if not several days after.

There will be 28 fortunate people across Australia with a new car that only cost them $10 by the end of the month. But the real winner will be McDonalds who won't be out of pocket, but would have potentially trained Australians to eat McDonalds 666,667 more times each month.

If there's love, then its the board of directors loving the sound of money.

Sombre thoughts because its only mid-week.

I started thinking about general scams this morning, and as I pondered ideas on how criminals in scams could be traced or caught, it eventually led to bigger problems.

Any solution to counter crime, winds up with measures that the general population don't like, and the reason for this is because the measures have to applied across everyone, as any person could be a criminal. So everyone is impacted because of a minority.

For example: the security tags now on clothes. Now your clothing item already has one or two very small holes before you've even gotten it home, and its an additional wait at the checkout while the tags are removed.

But this is minor when we look at serious problems. Take a country which is experiencing serious anarchy or militant activity. The presence of security checkpoints at a number of places means that going to markets, hotels, government offices, crossing into safe zones, all slow down what should be a easy and quick trip.

The application of civilian ID cards, tracking devices, detailed surveillance and phone tapping, all help detect possible threats and trouble, but also mean that a malicious government could use it for their own purpose, such as ethnic cleansing or factional bias.

It makes me see all my 1st world problems for the petty issues they are, when I see that much of the trauma and heartache in the world stems from the corruption and self serving that exists in all of us, but because it isn't always restrained, then it causes loss and suffering around.

God tells us of the sin that exists in every person:

"None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands; no one seeks for God." Romans 3:11

Maybe you believe, maybe you don't. But ponder why people are the cause of much of the suffering to each other, and see if that does not illustrate a world that has turned its back on its creator.

Bad calories are bad.

At the office we have one of those commercial fridges available for the staff to use. All our lunches, snacks, milk for tea and coffee, etc all get put into there as a convenience for employees.

I think most larger offices tend to also run social clubs. Clubs which organise social activities to keep employee morale up and to try and reduce staff attrition. To fund the activities of the social club, then the sale of snacks and soda is one of the main sources of revenue, otherwise they'd have to have a monthly fee for the social club members.

In our case, we have the snacks. Part of that is a large shoebox which is filled with those kids sized mars bars and the like, and this sits prominently in the fridge. Quite often, including just a few minutes ago, I saw the usual battle of people who wrestle with the afternoon calorie craving and stand in front of the fridge staring at the chocolates while they try to weigh up between a guilty conscience and gratuitous snacking.

The most recent case involved our CTO, and this time it seems his conscience won.

Good effort!

Pop Culture

I don't know how much anime Japan turns out each year. I tried a quick Google search, but the vast majority of articles that turned up were all focused on the shrinking financial returns, and concerns that there was no longterm viability with the way that the industry currently operated.

I'm not going to go into that here as many people cover it better, but rather I was surprised by coming across this advert on YouTube:

Although the manga version started almost 5 years ago, the animated version of the series was apparently quite successful both in Japan and overseas. Even so that Subaru used it in their recent advert. Maybe that is common in Japan, in the way that I'd posted about aspects of Matrix featuring in a US car advert?

I just find watching pop culture trends interesting, guess I'm still new at paying attention to this stuff.

Not happy with Officeworks

Today I went to collect some office supplies for home, from OfficeWorks. They have some stuff that can only be ordered online, but with the option that if you don't want to pay for delivery, then you can collect it from the nearest Officeworks outlet of your choice.

This sounds pretty sweet until I went to collect my gear today. I hadn't ever made use of this before, but when I wandered into the store, the first thing that became apparent was that there was nothing clearly labelled as a collection point. The order is already paid for online, so all that is left is to turn up, present my order receipt and go.

The guys at the print desk only dealt with printing orders, so I found a guy at a checkout who was just finishing up serving a customer and he happily took my paperwork. After about 3minutes he came back and told me to line up in the only other checkout which was now 7 people long.

Despite my protests that it was already paid for, the answer remained the same, so another wait to stand in line to just pick up my box from the checkout desk.

To be honest, all up, it was only about 10min in store. But I didn't quite see why I had to queue in a checkout queue to pick up the box that the first guy had already run around to the back to bring up.

To top it off, I was reminded once again why you should open the box to check stuff in store: OfficeWorks no longer puts packaging in their boxes for online orders. The idea is to save materials, and reduce costs, to result in "savings for the customer". It also means that they jammed my ream of paper in sideways, now meaning I am the proud owner of 500 sheets of bent paper.

*sigh*

Well, later this week will be interesting as I also have a document printing order in with them that is still being processed, so I'll post on how that goes in a few days time.

Smelly socks?

Even though I sit at a desk in a airconditioned office all day, I find my feet get hot in my sneakers during the day, so I'd taken up the practice of taking my shoes off once I'm at my desk, for quite some years now.

OH&S issues aside, I only just realised that wondering into the mens washroom in my socks isn't actually the best practice, as alot of guys have terrible aim. It's also made me realise that there have probably lots of invisble nasties infesting my footwear.

Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Anyway, I'm pleased to reassure you that I've changed my habits, although you most likely still will never ever ever borrow my shoes.

Hot potato!

I worked for Motorola, one of their Australian software houses, for almost 10 years. I was actually about 3 months short of hitting that milestone when my final day came after being retrenched.

But it was pretty much my first permament job and I'd developed an odd passion for it while I was there. I poured money into buying their shirts, pens, desk ornaments, phones, commemorative memorabilia, and other really useless junk.

I'd also get into occassional debates at why Motorola was the better phone, even though the market was showing we were getting outstripped by Nokia and Sony-Ericsson, and hounded by the likes of LG. This was even in the days before Apple and Samsung. Those debates were always lost, heh. Should have known. When you are trying to defend a electronics brand, and the general person on the street doesn't even know that they make that? Kinda means you're unlikely to convince them that its a good item.

Well the old guard lacked innovation, and Motorola was the first to crumble, followed by Sony-Ericsson and, to my surprise, even Nokia.

Motorola's mobile division eventually got sold to Google, and a little part of me that still cherished my 'Moto' t-shirts, fervently hoped that Google's innovation would revitalise the brand.

No luck. Its still dead. It is so dead, that Google who bought it at US$12.5 billion 2 years ago, has just agreed to sell it for US$2.3billion to Lenovo. Of course the article at SMH states that Google is keeping a large portion of Motorola's patents. Which means that if Lenovo uses parts of Motorola tech that rely on any of those patents, they will then have to pay royalties to Google.

It makes me sad. I know I should let go of any attachment to that company, but there were some pretty good people and some really good times working there.

My dad's recent foray into the smartphone industry means his current and previous phones are Motorola. I love the fact that my dad wants to support the company that I was a part of for so long.

But Dad... you can stop buying their stuff.