Blog Marco

The view from the first of many turrets on the Great Wall of China.

Keep in mind that it was raining cats and dogs outside. The fact that it was raining and the dark green foliage of the trees in this part of China probably contributed to the blue-greenish hue of the photo.

Taken with a D70 with kit lens (18-70mm f3.5-4.5) arrangement.

The UTS teaching website UTSOnline is currently down. A rare event.

According to my System Information for Windows XP I've left my laptop on for 3 days, 1 hour, 45 minutes and 48 seconds.

I've found that if you want to be able to find out how long you've left your computer on and you've got XP - here's how you do it:

1) Open up a Command Prompt - usually found under
Start>All Programs>Accessories>Command Prompt

2) Type in this command:
Systeminfo | Find "Up Time"
By the way this symbol "|" is found on top of backslash "\" on most keyboards.

And there you have it!

Did you guys know my website is built using Drupal?

Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS) which allows users to post information up on the internet with ease.

Drupal is available for use for FREE at Drupal.org! Any novice can do it, although you will need plenty of time to set it up and configure the website.

There is plenty of information on the internet about it and there's plenty of free online support in their forums. Im my recent query about the 'read more' in CMS default. The friendly drupal volunteers and other community members came up with a php hack to come up with what people wanted.

However, if you are in the market for a CMS, Drupal may not be for you. There are plenty of free CMS' out there if you search for it.

Wow, this catch is just 2 blocks away from where I live!
------------------------------------------
Police raid nets Sydney cannabis haul
September 9, 2005 - 6:25AM

Police have discovered more than $1.2 million worth of hydroponically-grown cannabis in a raid in Sydney's west.

The attached article states that: "Many students [will] never earn enough to repay their loan," Ms Macklin said. "Students are already saying to us, and research shows, that young graduates are finding it harder and harder to buy a home and start a family because of the very high levels of HECS debt that they have. People don't want to carry those very high levels of debt throughout their lives."

That statement above is a little frightening as most people go to university in the hope of earning a better living.

But with "one-third of the multi-billion dollar HECS debt owed by university students has been written off by the Federal Government as a bad or doubtful debt"... means that a significant number of students aren't earning enough to even pay off their education debt completely.

Television shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, depicting forensic scientists at work, are helping criminals avoid identification, New Scientist magazine says.

I wonder how on earth does he teach (effectively) with such a disability...

I can attest to this... finally a reliable train system. (Fingers crossed)

Having witnessed many late or cancelled services in the past 10 years - more so in the recent years, I've learned to live with it.

The new timetable does bring disadvantages - less services and slower stopping patterns. And you do notice that the trains stop longer than usual. And if they don't stop longer - they arrive unusually early at the next station - and if the station master there is extra vigilant, they won't let the train leave the platform until it hits its scheduled time of departure.

Here's hoping for better service.

Looks like we'll be paying a premium for petrol these coming weeks, months... years (?)

Hopefully not. Just to think that just last year we were paying about 90c... and on a good day plus a petrol voucher (discount of 4c) get unleaded petrol at around 85c if you were lucky.

A useful strategy for non-Americans when travelling overseas to countries other than USA is to change their local currency to the US Greenback.

This could be useful as the US Dollar is more recognised throughout the world.

So if you do take this route, try to buy USD bills in all denominations from $1, to $5, $10 etc... A $1 bill could be useful when tipping a bellhop or even in a local Chinese market where they would often consider accepting the greenback as payment.

My 1986 edition of World Book details Communism as "a term that has several meanings. It can be a form of government, an economic system, a way of life, or a goal or ideal. Communism is also a set of ideas about how and why history moves, and in what direction it is headed. these ideas were developed mainly by Lenin from the writings of Karl Marx. Lenin was a Russian revolutionary leader of the early 1900's. Marx was a german social philosopher who lived in the 1800's."

Why do I want to explore this topic anyways?

It was when I was in China that I realised that I didn't know enough about Communism even though I thought I did.

Wikipedia entry on Communism

It can be argued that China is on a thin line between Communism and Socialism. It is said that both Communists and Socialists seek public ownership or control of the principal means of production. But while most socialists favour peaceful methods to achieve their goals, the Communists have often prepared to use force. (Tibet... wink wink - There was actually a Current Affairs program in Australia that played a segment about Tibet - See below for TRANSCRIPT... )

In Shanghai and in Beijing it is apparent that there is a Socialist Government in control as there is ruling that no private entity can own any land. All land is rented out to the people, as the land is owned by the government. The government also enforces a one child policy to control their population numbers.

The following question lingers in my mind - if China was a Socialist Government, why are there still beggars on the street?

Wikipedia article on Socialism

Anyhow, one can argue that the Australian government is a Socialist government... "Socialist ideologies tend to emphasize economic cooperation over economic competition; virtually all envision some sort of economic planning." We pay our taxes, some of it get distributed in our Social Security System... they make laws to protect us, the consumers and laws to protect Aussie companies from overseas competition.

Who am I to say it's a bad system? Then again, Communism, Socialism and Capitalism all has their own scales ranging from extremism to moderate and mild applications and all their different theories... That I can't be bothered to look at...

====================================================
TRANSCRIPT:
China and Tibet's spiritual struggle Broadcast 3/9/2005

As China celebrates the 40th anniversary of the creation of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, Beijing and the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, are in a contest for control of the Tibetan soul. The decade-long clash centres around the Panchen Lama, the person who will one day lead the search for the Dalai Lama's reincarnation. China installed its choice for Panchen Lama, and the boy chosen by Tibetan Buddhists has been hidden by China for years.

Channel Nine replayed my favourite CSI episode tonight: "2X21: ANATOMY OF A LYE". (I'm no geek - I didn't know that these episodes had a title.)

I didn't even realise that these shows are transcripted by fans until I Googled "You were off the hook until he died CSI scripts" which includes a line in the episode. The search led me to http://www.crimelab.nl/ which is CSI heaven to any fan.

In my opinion this is the best episode due to the ending. The ending gives the a little twist in the end... have a little read:

BEN WESTON is the criminal lawyer who is under investigation of running a pedestrian over.

SARA and GRISSOM are both Las Vegas CSI's

....
(SARA closes the door, sits down and hands the paper to GRISSOM. GRISSOM puts
his glasses on to read it. He looks over at SARA. GRISSOM takes off his
glasses and turns to BEN WESTON.)

GRISSOM: When a driver hits a pedestrian the presumption is the driver is
negligent. When a driver's been drinking and he hits a pedestrian it's no
longer negligence, it's reckless homicide. But when a pedestrian intentionally
throws himself in front of a moving vehicle then the driver's no longer
responsible. Legally, he's off the hook.

SARA: This suicide letter was written by Bob Martin to his wife Charlotte.
When you hit him Monday night it wasn't an accident.

(Quick flashback to close up of BOB MARTIN standing behind the bus stop. As the
car driven by BEN WESTON approaches, BOB MARTIN deliberately walks toward it,
stops and stands in front of the car waiting to be hit. Cut to BEN WESTON
looking to the side presumably to put his cell phone down. The car impacts BOB
MARTIN and he crashes in through the passenger wind shield. End of flashback.
Resume to present.)

SARA: You were off the hook.

GRISSOM: Until you let him die.

(Camera holds on BEN WESTON.)

FADE TO BLACK.

==========================
THE END
==========================

It was City2Surf time of the year again last week. A fun run event in Sydney, Australia, usually held in the second Sunday of August every year. Sydney threw another glorious day for the event to be held. This was my third time to run it, but I know for a fact that this fun run had been held on a perfect day for the last four years...

Around 60,000 heads turned up, 50,271 officially finished the 14km run from the City of Sydney to the shores of Bondi Beach.

The photo below was taken by a 2 megapixel mobile phone camera: the Sony Ericsson K750i. I was in the midst of the "Back of the Pack" - that is the group that gets to run last... out of four groups - there are staggered starts to space the people out.

There is always a sense of positive energy throughout the day and people always have a good attitude on the day.

The photo below is the last turn into Bondi after running some 13.75km's.

In the tradition of programming, this post is entitled "hello, world"

Wikipedia has some very good insights into the historical background of this phrase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world

When learning any program language (as I have done when I first touched C programming), you learen this:

main( ) {
printf("Hello, World!");
}

And upon compilation the program, in the MS-DOS prompt, just spits out "Hello, world!"

Exciting Stuff.

And after one point five (1.5) hours of installation of this blog which includes all the brute force troubleshooting of trying to make the blog work, plus another two (2) hours trying to figure out how it works and installing additional modules and finally another two (2) hours to get it customised to my settings - that is after a lot of trial and error.

"What does this do?" Click.

"Oh, okay, thats what is does." Delete.

"What about this?" Click.

"Great! Thats exactly what I was looking for..."

So after about 5.5 hours here we have it. The birth of my first ever blog.

So after three (3) years of the Photos2View.com domain and nine (9) years on the internet, I've actually got my first blog now.