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The ABC reports that Hillsong Church has moved to distance itself from Mercy Ministries, the women’s charity long associated with the church, which has received negative publicity in recent years.
The association between Gloria Jeans Coffee, the Australian franchise being owned by members of Hillsong, and the charity has been widely reported (see here and here for example), but they too apparently have removed funding from Mercy Ministries.
The gist of the article is that the ACCC has been investigating the charity and claims that “young women seeking psychological and medical support were instead essentially enrolled in a Bible program”. Women have allegedly been told that they would receive appropriate medical care and psychological counselling but were instead subjected to exorcisms and religious dogma. It is reported that Mercy Ministries will be ceasing operations due to lack of funding.
A win for reason.
I came across this advertisement when we were in Melbourne? Do you think he’ll reply? I can’t imagine that it is free since most of those dodgy text services are extremely pricey.
One could hardly describe the appearance of this blog as static. I think that I have been through about 5 or 6 themes since I started it in 2007. This new appearance is thanks to a highly customisable Wordpress Theme called Atahualpa and it more the look that I originally intended for my blog back when it was going to be called quixote.org.
Anyway I am pretty pleased with it and I am hoping that the new appearance will give me the extra little push I need to blog more frequently. But this isn’t going to be one of the posts about how infrequently I post and how I will try harder and then don’t. Nor will I make excuses.
I have two posts planned in my head. One about running and one about Windows 7. Stay tuned.
There came a point some months ago when I realised that I couldn’t go on with the LG Viewty. It was as awful as the name and the $20 per month price tag would suggest. It had a touch screen that made life harder than easier, a web browser that was completely unusable and an interface that I never managed to learn completely and would often have me staring at it with intense perplexity on my face. It had to go.
The problem always was that I knew how good the iPhone was, but I couldn’t justify the price. Virgin’s $70 per month with 1 GB of data was a good plan, however that was $50 more than I was spending. Fortunately with the release of the iPhone 3GS prices started to fall and I secured myself a shiny white 32GB iPhone 3GS for $54 per month. Having paid off my car loan I could suddenly afford it.
A great deal has been written about the iPhone – mostly in praise. I don’t plan to add my own review. I would like to offer my own observations on the amazing little device. Arthur C. Clark once said that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic – well the iPhone is magic – with a couple of caveats.
Firstly the 3GS is a good deal quicker than the 3G. Next to my friend Pete’s 8GB iPhone 3G applications seemingly launch twice as fast – we tested this with the Flickr app. I was browsing photos while Pete was still loading the application.
Putting the speed of the 3GS aside it is the sheer usefulness of the iPhone and the way that it insinuates itself into your life that is truly amazing. The iPhone means access to the real Internet anywhere. Sure there are loads of phones that go online, but it is Apple’s implementation of Safari that makes it usable in the palm of your hand. The Internet brings us to the massive range of applications that are available for the iPhone.
The last time I took notice of it there was something like 25,000 iPhone applications. Some are free, some a paid for. I have to admit that I don’t like spending money and I have found that for most applications there is a free version or a free competitor. The applications transform the phone into things like a spirit level, a games console, a book and a myriad other devices. I highly recommend Stanza (an eBook reader), Word Warp, Scramble, Twitterific, Dictionary.com, Now Playing and Flickr.
The built-in applications are pretty useful too. The combination of Google maps client and GPS means I’ll never be lost again. The Nike+ application that works with a dongle in your shoe to monitor your runs is great. I used it with the iPod nano before but the implementation on the iPhone is even better.
Then there’s the camera. I’ve always considered cameras on phones to be a useless gimmick. The Viewty had a 5 megapixel camera but I could never take a good picture with it. The iPhone camera just seems more accessible and somehow better than the Viewty’s. The pictures are definitely better.
Like my iPod touch before it (now languishing in a drawer) I just can’t put my iPhone down. Whether I am listening to it in the car, checking my RSS feeds, using the GPS, running, checking the weather, reading a book, watching a movie, or even making a phone call it is there.
I really shouldn’t travel. Actually, that’s not true. I am very good at travelling and enjoy it immensely – airports on the other hand I should avoid.
My main problem is lack of patience and goodness knows you need a lot of that. It has been suggested that my British heritage ought to make me an expert queuer, but despite a genetic predisposition to standing and waiting I am only moments away from terrible violence in a line.
Kath and I are headed to Melbourne. We got to the airport nice and early to be sure that the cut price airline gave us seats together and so had to wait for check-in to open. I was eying off the other potential passengers lest they get into the queue before us but despite my diligence two men from the Indian subcontinent managed to squeeze in front of us. Then when the staff were ready to serve people some guy appeared at one of the desks and decided to tell his life story (or so it seemed). Then when they started serving people the Indians had too much luggage and that needed to be sorted out. I stood imagining how the movable barrier could be weaponised. Then, with no apologies or explanation the screens above the check-in desks changed to say the flight would be taking off 45 minutes late.
We are not ammused, nor are we certain that we will taking the red-eye to Melbourne again.
Sitting in the airport at this awful hour, out of my mind with sleep depravation I know that it can’t last forever, but it doesn’t feel like it.
It is the curse of modern media reporting, particularly science reporting, that they feel “balance” is necessary in the reporting of all topics, even where the “other side” lacks any credibility or evidence. See this piece by the ABC. Rather than focus on the reassuring news that a vaccine for the H1N1 virus has been developed and is shortly going to be made available to the public, the ABC have chosen to use a sensationalist headline spreading the brand of fear, uncertainty and doubt pushed by the Australian Vaccination Network.
I wrote about the AVN back in December last year before they came into the public eye through the Channel 7 program about deaths from whooping cough. The leader of the AVN, Meryl Dorey, was widely censured by the Australian media, skeptics and general public for her comments regarding the death of a new born baby from whooping cough, and the position of the AVN that vaccination was dangerous and does not prevent illness. In my piece about vaccination I debunked the myths surrounding it and rounded on the people who would condemn us to the return of an age with high infant mortality.
Why the ABC would take seriously anything that Dorey says is beyond my comprehension. Flu vaccines are effective against those viruses that they are developed for. Prior to each flu season a decision is made regarding the strains that will be inoculated against – this varies from year to year. Each dose of the vaccine is produced using a chicken egg. The vaccine for H1N1 is no different from other flu vaccines and carries with it the same risk – yes there are calculable risks associated with vaccines, but the incidence of complications is far lower than the potential incidence of the disease they provide immunity against. That you can get the flu from the flu immunisation is a common myth. Since the vaccine contains no living viruses this is not possible. It is actually the case that people who develop a true flu (as opposed to a bad cold) subsequent to immunisation have contracted a strain they were not inoculated against. Some people may develop mild flu like symptoms following the immunisation, but this is the body’s immune response.
Gladly the ABC, despite giving a voice to the AVN, did something to silence it once more, reminding readers that H1N1 can be extremely dangerous and that 172 people have died from the virus in Australia and thousands have been hospitalised.
I don’t drink alcohol and I find it a strange coincidence that two other skeptical bloggers in Perth, both of whom are in my blog roll, are also teetotallers. Just like me neither Kylie at Podblack nor Andy at Thinking is Real drink alcohol. Both talk about the pressure to conform in a society where consumption of alcohol is both a rite of passage and a way of life. To not drink in Australia is to be somehow less of a man.
For me the decision not to drink alcohol is quite easy. Since I suffer from chronic pancreatitis and alcohol is like pouring petrol on the fire, I choose not to inflict agonising pain on my body. When I was a teenager I had the odd drink, but I can honestly say I have never been drunk. Since I have always retained a state of sobriety I have had plenty of opportunities to observe those who do drink.
Everybody who I know likes a drink and I generally don’t have a problem with it since they all drink responsibly. They enjoy a couple of glasses of wine in the evening, the odd beer or some mixed spirits. I mention this because I want to be clear that I am not completely down on alcohol. However, alcohol is responsible for a good deal of personal misery and societal problems.
For many people a good night out is one where they drink to excess. As a teetotaller it puzzles me why somebody would spend well over $100 in an evening just to lose control of their decision making processes. I have no sympathy for people who get drunk and wake up in the morning with a self-inflicted hangover. Once a person becomes inebriated they are more likely to make decisions that are detrimental to their well-being – drink driving, unsafe sex or exposing themselves to personal risk. It seems that once some people start drinking they can’t stop until they can physically take no more.
Alcohol is implicated in a high proportion of incidents of domestic violence. According to the Australian Family and Domestic Violence Clearing House up to 80% of domestic violence cases involved alcohol. 40% of women in a 12 month period who suffered sexual or physical assault cited alcohol as a contributing factor. In fact in 1997 over 72,000 hospital admissions were attributable to high-rish drinking.
The costs to society of alcohol are enormous. The Department of Health and Ageing research shows that in 2004/5 the combined cost to Australia of alcohol misuse was over $10 billion. This takes into account reduction in the workforce and absenteeism ($3.5 billion), premature death and sickness ($1.5 billion), healthcare including ambulances and hospitals ($2 billion), car crashes ($2 billion) and crime ($1.4 billion).
For the same period the Department of Health estimated the cost of illicit drug use to be $8.2 billion. Not that I am advocating illicit drug use as an alternative to alcohol, but remember that alcohol is legal. I’ll leave drug laws for another time, but the amount of money spent in the war on drugs would form a large proportion of that bill.
Putting aside the mess that alcohol causes, I have a few other brief observations.
- When I go to the bar and order a Diet Coke and beer, the Coke always has a straw in it – the assumption being it is for a woman.
- When I am with a group of people who are drinking there comes a certain point where they have drunk enough that they are no longer able to engage in interesting conversation with any other than other drunks – it gets boring.
- People always assume that you drink and question why you aren’t drinking.
- You can sing karaoke straight sober – difference is you know how bad you are.
- Driving is cheaper than a taxi – unfortunately your friends no this too.
- Soft drink is cheaper than alcohol.
- I’ve never had a dodgy kebab at 2 am.
- Police officers at booze buses never believe you don’t drink and don’t think it’s funny when you call them “ocifer”.
- Alcohol smells really bad and lingers for a long time – I can tell when you have had a drink 10 minutes ago or 10 hours ago.
- No regrets in the morning.
It’s enough to drive a man to drink.
Since I always try to keep finger on the pulse of the tech world, and particularly on Apple’s pulse, I have been reading a lot of reviews and reports about Snow Leopard.
While all of the reviews I have read have gone something this: “Snow Leopard contains lots of under the bonnet improvements invisible to users and a few minor visual changes. It is a worthwhile upgrade and refinement”, it is the reports that are a bit more worrying. It seems a lot of users are having issues with the upgrade.
Some report preferences lost, applications broken, plug-ins lost, and even worse data destroyed. My personal experience has been 1 from 2. That is upgrading two machines saw one complete success and one almost total failure. From what I can tell the more customised your machine is, the more likely you are to have issues. My MacBook is sort of my test-bed for plugins and software tweaks. I can’t tell what broke it, but after the upgrade I couldn’t make the computer access the Internet, despite having a working wireless connection. I also couldn’t see half of the menu including the clock and wireless symbols. I could search with spotlight either. I had decided to be careful and so had a backup of my important documents on wireless Time Machine and to make doubly sure on an external hard drive.
I ended up having to format my hard drive and do a fresh install and then recover my data. The Time Machine backup I discovered was partially corrupt so while I recovered my documents from the external hard drive I had to reimport all of my user settings – some from the external hard drive and some from a manual mount of the Time Machine. It is all the things that you don’t think of that are annoying, like the contents of my Stickies and my Firefox bookmarks. Still I have everything ship-shape now.
Subsequently, I was hesitant to do the upgrade on my iMac. In the end I decided that I had everything backed up on the Time Machine (now repaired) and if all else failed I could migrate my data (all 260 GB) back over wireless or just plug the drive into iMac directly. So with great trepidation I ran the installer. 45 minutes later my iMac was running Snow Leopard, no problems except the need to update iStat menus (which may have been the problem on the MacBook and I had uninstalled prior to upgrading the iMac) and CyberDuck.
My advice – uninstall all of your non-standard stuff prior to upgrade and have a Carbon Copy sector level clone of your drive so you can restore completely if everything goes pair shaped.
I’ll write about my thoughts on Snow Leopard when I have been using it for a week or so.
To a certain extent the whinging pom is a self-perpetuating stereotype since it is impossible to argue against it without appearing to whinge. As a result many of the people to whom the term is applied suffer the insult in silence. Until recently I had not had the term hurled at me since I was in high-school. That changed this week when someone with whom I was trying to have a rational discussion decided to use it in an ad hominem attack. I’ll put aside cause of the argument (needless to say I was right – certainty is a gift that only arrogance can provide) for the sake of the apology that followed, but it got me thinking about “poms”
Like all derogatory nouns the offence that it causes its target is contextual. Although cringingly embarrassing use of the term as a self-reference may be seen as harmless. Similarly within a circle of close friends, particularly if they are of the same cultural background and no insult is implied, the term normally lacks any barbs. At some point, however, it is intended to cause offence and like other slurs based on cultural identity or race it hits home.
In the case of the personal attack on me the term “whinging pom” was used in an attempt to negate my argument by suggesting that since I am English and all English people whinge that my statements were therefore groundless and the result of my countrymen’s tendency to complain about things which are perfectly acceptable to everyone else – those people being Australians. The immediate effect of these words upon was shock that another adult – a professional – could use them, then anger that they were used so glibly. The anger then extended to the term itself.
Unlike other cultural slurs, the use of the word pom is still culturally acceptable in Australia. To me this is appalling. Those who would argue that it is a term of endearment, a bit of fun, or gentle teasing, have obviously not been on the receiving end of the term. Certainly the implications of terms that are derogatory to people on the basis of their ethnicity carry a greater sting and imply a lot more about the person. For people with African heritage the derogatory word frequently used to describe them is without doubt the most hurtful term and carries with it all of the human rights abuses they suffered during the slave era and suffer still today. Terms applied to immigrants to Australia in the post-war years from Europe such as wog, were, like pom, seen as a bit of fun and quite often the target of the expression would laugh along with it for want of any other response. Ask immigrate who went to school during this era how they really felt about it and I am sure they would tell a different story. Like pom if used self-referentially then these terms are possibly harmless, unlike pom they are not culturally acceptable – they are in fact extremely racist.
Another argument used by the pom apologists is the largest proportion of Australians are Anglo-Saxon, then there is no racism. I quite agree, it is not a racial issue. It is a cultural issue. The Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants are of the same race. The Bosnian Serbs and Croatians were of the same race. There are essentially no racial differences between Israelis and Palestinians. I doubt that the terms that these groups use for each other are considered acceptable by anyone.
The irony of pom is, of course, found in the fact that the mouths that the term comes from are often the progeny of English immigrants. Were people who call those with English accents poms to be honest with themselves it is only chance that they too weren’t born in Blighty. The other irony is that when it comes to complaining it is Australians who are the world champions, particularly in the sporting arena. The number of sports officials who make decisions denying Australians victory in the athletic arena is staggering. How can such incompetence thrive? Australians have a history of being happy-go-lucky that is rapidly being eroded by shrill voices of those unhappy with their lot drowning out the rest of their countrymen.
But what would I know? I’m just a whinging pom.
Some time ago I pondered the concept of an Apple netbook. The idea naturally occured to many other people and since then there has been a great deal of discussion on the topic. Even Apple weighed in with Phil Schiller essentially saying that Apple aren’t interested in the netbook market because they don’t believe that the user experience is that great. Those wanting an Apple netbook have contrived to create the “Hackintosh” – a netbook with OS X hacked onto it. Apparently Dell’s are quite popular for this and a hack to allow the installation of OS X is officially available on the Dell website.
Apple’s reluctance to enter the netbook market has been ascribed by others to the company’s policy of not competing on price. At the netbook end of the market margins are slim and Apple does very well selling high quality computers at top prices and making a lot of money doing so. A study recently found that 91% of laptops sold over US$1000 were Apple computers.
Regardless of the above rumours of an Apple netbook have refused to die. Along the way they have become fused with the persistant myth of an Apple tablet computer – rumours that predate the iPhone and can be traced all the way back to the death of the Newton in 1997. Recently the rumours of an Apple tablet computer that will compete against netbooks have been gaining fever pitch. It is as though the fabled tablet computer has almost been made reality be the collective yearning of the Apple faithful.
The stars seem to be in alignment for the rumor to come true – dodgy mockups, quotes from annonymous but reliable sources, whispers from Taiwan, device codes found in the latest software builds and stony silence from Apple. There is a lot that we don’t know (pretty much everything), but it is believed that the device will have a 10″ touch screen and will be released in September – or 2010. It might run the iPhone OS, it might have 3G wireless, it might run the iPhone hardware with beefed up RAM and storage, it might run a processor designed by Apple, it might run a new version of OS X. If the unknowns were a book the knowns would be a sentence on the last page.
For a long time I have believed an Apple tablet to be a solution without a problem – a product without a segment. Apple have famously created market segments or innovated in areas to make them their own. They know what they are doing and are incredibly hard to be second guessed. Even so I can’t see any place for a 10″ iPod touch, which is what it would ultimately be. Too big for a pocket and too small to warrant the extra difficulty of carrying it around/ This is what the rumours seem to be suggesting is on its way, but I don’t believe it.
The tablet will run something closer to desktop OS X, perhaps not straight Snow Leopard, but something with more usability than an iPod touch. It will need to offer document editing, mass storage and other features expected of a netbook. However, a software keyboard will allow it to be a flexible multimedia player and eBook reader. It would great if a keyboard and mouse could be connected via Bluetooth and the device to have a dock allowing it to stand upright.
Apple know what they are doing. They have over US$31 billion in cash and a market cap bigger than Google. We’ll see…
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