Blog Marco

Personally, I think the bigger picture in Australia is... Australia has an aging population - people are getting older, no one is replacing them in their old jobs. Everyone who wants to work has a job - unemployment rates are at an all time low. Since people are getting older, there is a shift in what people want. Most of the nation's wealth is held with the older generation. What does this all mean?

WTF? This website, yep this blog you're reading at the moment is classed as a porn site according to the University of Technology, Sydney's (UTS) Information Technology Division.

Why?

I guessing their porn filters have caught the "photos" as a catchword and then blocked this offending website.

As a sidenote, this service by the UTS also blocks mail.yahoo.com as they restrict access to mail websites. (This only applies to the UTS Engineering PC labs - they started blocking everything due to the porn, games and viruses people introduced a few years back.)

Its exam time for university students in Australia at the moment... I was studying late at night last night and rather than tuning into an Internet radio station as per usual, I decided to try the old FM bands on the old radio boom box...

I hit onto an RnB and Hip Hop set, and it turned out to be the local Aboriginal Radio Station - Koori Radio 93.7 FM (The Koori is the local Aboriginal tribe in a region of Sydney). It was a good mix of songs - some new, some old and nothing too hardcore.

RnB and Hip Hop was a rarity on the airwaves in Sydney for a while. The Edge 96.1 fm has a set from 7pm to 9pm weeknights with "K-Sera and The Dirty Dozen" that does a good job of playing local acts from Australia/New Zealand and of course American acts and a few old school classics every now and then. (Just in case you're wondering - the "Dirty Dozen" aren't people but "Sydney’s 12 hottest, hip-hop & R&B, plus predictions and old school classics."

Anyway back to the Koori Radio... that RnB and Hip Hop set was on late at night - I tuned in around (Friday) 1030pm or 2230 hours for you 24 hour people. It ended at around 1am in the morning.

Do you know how I knew it ended?

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so – Douglas Adams

The other day, a friend and I had a stimulation discussion about time. We both agreed that time passes by so unbelievably fast. New Year's Eve 2004 seems just a couple of months ago and now we are but a few, brief weeks before 2005 emerges. Man is a creature caught in the dimension of time whether we like it or not, we have to live life in linked episodes or seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. After an animated repartee about the nature and peculiarities of time, my friend surprised me with a rhetorical question, "Where does time go?"

THE REALITY OF TIME
Thomas Mann says, “Time has no divisions to mark its passage. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

Yes, time is a man-made concept for conveniently marking historical events, measuring duration, and scheduling day-to-day activities. It evolved from man's observation of nature's cycles and seasons. Ancient astronomers and astrologers took the 365 days it takes the earth to revolve around the sun to signify a year. Following this logic, time has to be a variable factor relative to a planet. Thus, a year in Jupiter is determined by how long it takes to revolve around the sun, and so on with other planets.

I'm starting to rack up a lot of bookmarks (or favourites - depends on which browser you use)... which is one of my bad habits while surfing on the internet.

You visit a site, get the information you want and see other stuff that you might want later or you feel you may need later. Or you may only get a portion of the infomation and you want to refer to it later. So you bookmark it. What happens next is chaos.

Were all living things created by Darwinian theory ("survival of the fittest") or by "Intelligent Design" (Creationist theory - living things created by an intellectual being - i.e. God)?

The question the report poses is whether or not "Intelligent Design" should be taught at Australian School syllabus during "Science class"? The real question is that "Is Intelligent Design, Science?"

The report gives a balanced view, although it seemed to lean on the scientist's side of the battle.

The main argument the scientists put forward in the campaign to stop this "Intelligent Design" from being taught at schools is because in Science the hypothesis being tested, and in "Intelligent Design" this hypothesis cannot be tested as the 'designer' cannot simply be presented. Whereas is Darwinian theory the hypoethsis has been tested and proof is all around us.

The creationists refute that it gives the person/student a choice in which to believe. The "Intelligent Design" theory is already being taught at one Christian School in Australia.

The Dean of Science at the UNSW (University of New South Wales) has the final word: "If you open up the door to that then why not open up the science class door to creation science, to fork bending, to flat earth. Why just teach astronomy? Let's teach astrology. All of these things would have equal right to claim time in the science classroom. What would bother me is even if you just give each of these sort of slightly cute and you know fun but a bit nutsy zones there's simply going to be no time left for teaching real science. That's the worry I have."

• More than 80% of high-rises lack a 13th floor.
• Many airports skip the 13th gate.
• Airplanes have no 13th aisle.
• Hospitals and hotels regularly have no room number 13.

Just another one of those Column 8 exerpts:

An email forwarded to me by a friend... (and she doesn't usually forward stuff on - so it should be good!)
---
European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

Being at this age, i should be searching for a job that would "launch my career" and "build foundations" that would help reach "my dream."

Picked up this article from somewhere... A little bit on the business side of things but the author did have a few interesting points: "Such temperatures are believed by many to be the result of global warming. Global warming is believed by many to be caused by greenhouse gases. The main source of greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuels. If it weren’t for the tragedy, the irony would be palpable."

Here's a photo of our General Peter Cosgrove. General Cosgrove and his wife happened to be on the same flight from Shanghai to Beijing as the one my tour group was on.

My mum was the one to first recognise him - her being the news obsessed person she is (!). As we were boarding the airplane he was seated on the first seat to the right - in business class.

Anyhow, upon disembarkation of the plane, we approached him to say hi and ask for a photo. His wife was happy to take this snap with my K750i.

Who is General Cosgrove??? I hear some people say...

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.