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.

Fun and games with Windows Calculator

In Microsoft Windows, there are a bunch of default applications, one of which is Calculator. A fairly standard application that I just discovered something interesting about today. A picture of the application from Win 7 is below.

As computers only really know two numbers (1 and 0), there is interesting work that happens in the background when trying to deal with complex math. Take for example the following scenario:

• 3 x 3 = 9, also known as the square of 3 is 9.
• Conversely, sqrt(9) = 3 (i.e. the square root of 9 is 3).
• Hence the expectation is: sqrt(9) - 3 = 0.

Try that on Windows Calculator, and you'll get a very interesting result. Calculator is reporting a very small number, but it isn't actually quite zero.

Also if you use different numbers, e.g. sqrt(16) - 4, and so on, you'll get slight variances in the result.

The math behind why this is so, is discussed more here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/79124007-4127-4d50-a182-f91bde71e0fe/issue-in-calculator?forum=w8itprogeneral