Bullet Holed Messenger

I make this same rant every damn year but screw it, it’s necessary.

Daylight Savings needs to be taken out the back of the barn and shot. And then killed again with fire, just to be sure. It always brings out the libertarian in me because it pretty much exemplifies everything that’s bad about what governments do.

1. It’s a pointless and arbitrary exercise of power - Think about it for a moment. We all collectively try to pretend it’s one hour later than it really is, just because the governments tell us to. But it’s not.
2. It’s a ‘zombie law’ - Most laws passed by governments are a reactive measure to deal with a specific problem that’s happening at the time. The trouble is, these problems usually go away of their own accord, but the laws still stay around being an unnecessary nuisance. Daylight Savings was initially an austerity measure in world war one back in the days when lighting was precious and expensive.
3. It has effects contrary to its intended goals due to unintended consequence - Daylight savings is supposed to save energy due to not having to use lighting so much. However, lighting isn’t really a big user of energy. Air conditioning uses several orders of magnitude more energy, and daylight savings increases its use.
4. It’s done for the convenience of big business - One of the big reasons it sticks around is because the retail industry lobbies for its continuation and extension.
5. It is a darling policy of the “We’re willing to do anything to save the world except research” set - Environmentalists are the present manifestation of this phenomenon and they’re the present champions of daylight savings. Of course, their reason for supporting it is the energy savings they claim it delivers. If they bothered to do even a few minutes of research they’d be horrified to discover that it wastes energy and continues in order to encourage consumerism. But they won’t do that. Instead they’ll just loudly support a policy which achieves the exact opposite of what they claim to want because they’re more interested in preening moral vanity than results.
6. It kills people and ruins lives - Every time there’s a shift, either to or from daylight savings, there’s an increase in traffic accidents due to insomnia caused by people’s circadians being screwed up. So despite the fact that it doesn’t deliver any real benefits, there are people out there being killed, crippled and horribly maimed because of this stupid law every damn year.

So this is why I hate daylight savings. I have a hard enough time coping with ‘normal’ sleep schedules, it just adds insult to injury through the sheer obvious pointlessness of it all.

So, that $700 Billion bailout got torpedoed. After finding out from my friend Greg that Fannie and Freddie were already bailed out in early September I went rather lukewarm on the idea of throwing that much money at commercial banks who got saddled with all this bad debt due to playing funny buggers with Fannie and Freddie.

But seriously friends, what’s the deal with all the panic because the stock market has taken a massive dive?

You said that banks which trade in a shonky and dishonest fashion ought to be allowed to fail. Well, did you think that was going to happen without massive short-term stock market losses?

Some of the apex predators of the financial industry are going to fall over and die. It’s going to wipe out a lot of value from the stock market and for a while, those who are left are going to struggle to fill the vacuum.

And that’s going to look pretty damn horrible for a while, but it’s the market doing what it does. This is going to pass through like a plague, wiping out those weakened by consuming too much toxic debt.

But I want everyone to keep in mind that as chaotic and random and horrible and senseless it will seem, those sort of crap is exactly the sort of corrective action that’s meant to occur if we take it too damn far and that it will eventually end and leave a much more fundamentally sound (albeit somewhat diminished) market once it’s all finished.

At least, it will if we keep our heads. Remember, not every massive sharemarket loss is a herald of the next Great Depression. Those massive losses you’re seeing aren’t losses, it isn’t money inexplicably disappearing. It’s money and value that never existed (just a collective fantasy of creative accounting) being written off. It’s financial assets falling out of dangerously incompetent hands being given a chance for someone more capable to pick them up.

This is a crisis, but in every crisis lies the opportunity to make things better. Let’s approach things that way.

I’m hearing a lot of talk about “greed” with regards to the housing crisis and the Fannie & Freddie bailout. This is all fine and well, but it’s somewhat misinformed.

I’m not going to do a Gordon Gecko and go “Greed is Good” because that’s also a stupid position. But I think some people are misunderstanding the nature of greed.

In particular, greed is not a variable, it’s a constant. Greed is essentially looking at what you have and saying “I want more than this”. Humans will always think like that unless they’ve been brainwashed.

This can be a good thing. If we didn’t have this attitude we would never have got out of the caves. Indeed, we might never have even got into the caves in the first place (Ooh, Mr Fancy Lord Muck in his cave thinks he’s too good to sit out in the driving rain with the rest of us).

And of course, it can be a very bad thing, since throughout most of human history, people who wanted more than they presently had usually got it on the point of a sword.

One of the reasons why we’ve achieved so much improvement in living standards in the past few centuries is because we’ve developed more effective ways of channeling greed in constructive rather than destructive ways.

But when it goes wrong to turn around and go “It’s all Greed’s fault!” is just silly. Is banking the only sector of the economy where the people working in it are greedy? Hardly. So if everyone in every sector of the economy is greedy but one sector of the economy experiences a serious failure, why blame the greed (which is constant) rather than something else, which is variable?

The day greed stops being a problem for us to deal with will be a day when we’ll have transformed ourselves into something unrecognisable as human. Any market designed to work in the absence of greed would bear no resemblance to any economic system we’ve ever seen in operation.

And since, last time I checked, we’re still human and thus need to run in an economic system designed for humans, pissing and moaning about greed is a great big waste of time. We’re greedy, get over it.

This established, it’s time to introduce the notion of a Moral Hazard. Economists, being the cynical people that they are, recognise that humans are inherently greedy bastards. And if they’re protected from the downside of doing something risky, they’re going to just chase the biggest jackpot they possibly can, because that’s the best action for them.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and being protected from risk isn’t the same thing as there not being any risk. It means some other poor schmuck gets stuck with the consequences. Thus creating a situation best described as “with no power comes great responsibility for the behaviour of random Armani-clad jerkasses”. If this situation sounds ridiculous and immoral to you, then you have a basic and instinctual understanding of what a moral hazard is.

So anyhow, what’s ended up causing all this problem is that in the supposedly “free market” of the USA, there’s been these two massive government created banks called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which essentially had a blank cheque from the government to hoover up as much debt as they damn well felt like. And what ended up happening was that banks saw an opportunity to give out mortgages like candy and just sell the crap ones on to Fannie and Freddie because they didn’t care debt they ate (they were government guaranteed all along). Incidentally, that’s why this bailout is happening - the government owned this debt all along in theory, but Fannie and Freddie are cashing their blank cheques and making it official.

Yes, it’s not morally right to do that. But that sort of thing is exactly what’s going to happen if there’s some entity in a market who will uncomplainingly take up any risk you offer it. Remember that markets merely channel greed. That’s precisely why things like that have absolutely no place being in a free market because that is how they will be used in a free market (to everyone’s detriment).

So now people want US Congress to regulate the banking system to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. Good luck with that, guys. These are pretty much the exact same people who are so economically ignorant they deregulated a banking system and failed to recognise the big, fat moral hazard of their own making in the middle of it.

But you know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe somehow A Miracle Will Occur and a bunch of people ignorant of a basic aspect of economics will somehow manage to come up with a regulatory system for the most economically complex industry in the entire world that anticipates every possible contingency, and doesn’t over regulate the entire system into fatal paralysis.

However, being the sceptical conservative I am, I disapprove of such “faith based” approaches to governance. I prefer the old-fashioned approach of “if something’s worth doing, do it properly” so if you’re going to have a free market (which I certainly have no problem with), then we need to purge the market of all the government-funded moral hazards which have no place in it.

I’ve been thinking lately about how an awful lot of popular political ideologies annoy me because they’re too simplistic. It’s a pretty common formula to go “We’re going to get one particular virtue and elevate it above all others”.

And I’ve been trying my damndest to think through them and I can’t think of any one moral value I’d want to place in an priveledged position without intolerable side-effects resulting from it.

• We can’t have “freedom above all else” because it inevitably degenerates into the arbitray indulgence of whims of the moments.
• We can’t have “responsibility above all else” because that leads to a situation where the happiness of others inevitably takes precedence over one’s own.
• We can’t have “the greater good above all else” because it leaves nobody free from the terrible day when their life or livelihood may be the next one destroyed in the name of the greater good.
• We can’t have “equality above all else” because people aren’t equal.
• We can’t even have “egalitarianism above all else” because that only serves to rob society of the potential of its greatest members.
• We can’t have “liberty above all else” because the frailties of the human mind give us far too many opportunities to harm ourselves and those around us.
• We can’t have “charity above all else” because to write a blank cheque to the unproductive at the expense of the productive is an unsustainable situation.
• We can’t have “choice above all else” because not all choices are equally good.
• We can’t have “tolerance above all else” because there are some things which it is suicidal to tolerate.
• We can’t have “strength above all else” because it serves to reward people in proportion to their talent for violence and cruelty.
• We can’t have “compassion above all else” because if you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of anyone.
• We can’t have “God before all else” because God so frequently serves as a justification for people’s petty bigotries.
• We can’t have “hard work before all else” because hard work is a means, not an end.
• We can’t have “moderation above all else” because some situations require you to damn restraint and make a desperate effort.
• We can’t have “independence above all else” because it is so often more efficient to do things by means of co-operation.
• We can’t have “unity above all else” because mere agreement offers no guarantee that a course of action is wise.
• We can’t have “peace above all else” because that merely puts one at the mercy of the first one to resort to violence.
• We can’t have “stability above all else” because at no point in human history have we ever had a lifestyle that is indefinitely sustainable.
• We can’t have “law and order above all else” because they merely serve as proxies for the ideal of justice and sometimes get in the way of achieving justice.
• We can’t have “progress above all else” because much that seems like progress is actually an illusion if not subjected to proper scepticism first.
• We can’t have “happiness above all else” because one person’s source of pleasure is another’s source of disgust.
• We can’t have “health above all else” because so much of what makes life worth living is unhealthy.
• We can’t have “honesty above all else” because the exposure of some secrets only serve to harm others.
• We can’t have “technological progress above all else” because technology is a means, not an end.
• We can’t have “economic growth above all else” because wealth is a means, not an end.
• We can’t have “environment above all else” because that serves to elevate the welfare of the non-sapient above that of the sapient.
• We can’t have “safety above all else” because that leads to stasis, which is the most dangerous thing of all.

There’s others I could address, but I’m pretty sure the point of diminishing returns in deconstructing more virtues is barely visible in the distance behind me. I’d rather not scrape the bottom of the barrel by invoking really daft ones (e.g: Faith) or impossibly idealistic ones (e.g: Justice).

But my point stands and I believe I have discovered another fundamental axiom of harmful beliefs: That the world’s problems could be solved by simply making an idol of one particular virtue and sacrificing all others to it as the situation demands.

This belief is a fundamentally harmful one because the universe we live in has all virtues in a state of tension with each other and every decision a challenge in deciding to what degree we can serve one without fatally compromising another.

Ah, just a couple of days till the holidays. At least the worst of my trials for this term are passed, with the TTI mid semester exam done. Now I just need to get through work experience tomorrow and Friday’s RF lessons.

Finished the ‘Reads’ trade paperback of Cerebus. Did so really quickly, too. That was because I took up the suggestion Dave Sim gave in the intro to ignore all the text parts if they offended me.

Which they did because HOLY SHIT I really cannot stand to hear Dave Sim piss and moan about women for 50 fucking pages. Not when I’m much more interested in the much more interesting story of the actual damn comic. I can see why Cerebus started sloughing off readers like a bad habit at about this point, because it had got self-indulgent, lazy and boring.

Oh and repetitive. My God, the sheer mindnumbing repetition. Yes, we get it Dave. Most women are pisspoor company and you believe it’s all feminism’s fault.

Well, I will agree, to a certain extent. Most women are pisspoor company. But I’d mainly ascribe that as being a natural flow-on of the fact that most people are pisspoor company.

I understand, it’s difficult to be an intelligent person and find other people worth talking to. Because talking to people significantly less intelligent is just fucking exhausting. You have to explain everything and you can’t use innuendo or puns without getting a blank look in response.

Dave seems to think that feminism gets smart women and makes them dumb by turning them into ideological meme-bots, unable to do anything but endlessly repeat memorised slogans about how their belief system is awesome. However, frankly that’s just something that social movements do. And furthermore, I haven’t encountered too many genuinely smart people who actually end up having their brains totally hijacked by social movements. I mean, we all go through phases where we drink some manner of ideological Kool Aid and say things which are regrettably stupid in retrospect. But I believe that nobody who stays that way was ever a very smart or strong person to begin with and thus really isn’t much of a loss.

I actually deeply suspect that poor old Dave may have never met a genuinely intelligent woman in all his life. Given that by his own admission he only ever talked with women because he wanted to sleep with them and considering he spent practically all his life in a Canadian town with a population equivalent of my local council area, it’s actually entirely possible. This serves to only make me thankful for my Mum, who served as an example that women can be intelligent and worth talking to, which helped me to go to the bother of finding all the other intelligent women I’ve known.

And thus, hearing Dave go on and on and on about all the stupid annoying crap women do and how it’s all the fault of Feminism Neo-Kevilism (I C what U did thar!) is really fucking boring. So I just skipped all the parts where he’s banging on about that.

And so far, at least, it’s still a good comic. Let’s hope I can get to the end of “Guys” without this sort of crap penetrating the comic itself too badly.

The world has assumed that strange hallucinatory quality that I get the day after I take sleep medication. I don’t entirely mind it, as I’m far more calm and inclined to ‘go with the flow’ of course it also makes me terribly lazy and the idea of doing anything involving effort or difficulty just seems repellent.

Different drugs are good for different situations, I guess.

At least it balances out the caffeine I had on Friday. I am in a terrible bind with regards to that chemical. I almost never have anything with caffeine in it, as a result, on those occasions when I do take it, it works altogether too well and I end up staying up until 4AM, terribly exhausted but also unable to sleep. The problem is that the only way to become desensitised to caffeine is to drink a lot of it, which will induce a whole bunch of paranoia and insomnia that I most emphatically DO NOT WANT.

Not to mention the possibility of caffeine addiction, a condition which seems to be surprisingly omnipresent yet frequently undiagnosed. There seems to be a fine line between being too sensitive to the stuff and being dependant on it. Of course, a great deal of the people I know who are addicted to caffeine don’t get nearly enough sleep. I’m still considered a freak of nature for insisting upon 8 or 9 hours a night.

Have been reading comics a lot lately. Mainly Cerebus and Y: The Last Man. They both have awesome writing and really interesting female characters. The latter is something I generally feel starved of in my fiction. Almost all of my favourite movies are total sausage fests and my favourite TV shows are rarely much better. Most writers don’t seem to be able to deal with female characters as people rather than devices and as a result women tend to only show up when they need to fulfill some sort of plot related purpose.

It may sound odd to hear that Cerebus, written by one of the most infamous raving misogynists out there, has interesting female characters, but it does. I don’t know quite how Dave manages to reconcile the utter hatred he has for real life females with the utmost respect with which he treats his female creations, but maybe I’ll figure out the secret behind the apparent contradiction as I keep reading.

I will say that I found his observations with regards to “Cirinist” (mother-centric) and “Kevilist” (Daughter-centric) female empowerment philosophies were quite a revelation to me. It caused a whole lot of things which formerly went right over my head to suddenly make sense. Now I’m having fun at thinking about where women who I know, either in person or through the media, sit on the Kevilist-Cirinist continuum. It’s particularly fun to see how people at either of the extremes are completely baffled by the motives of the other.

And of course, Y: The Last Man has to have interesting female characters by necessity since the hook of the series is that everything on earth with a Y chromosome is dead apart from some dude and his pet monkey. I haven’t read too far in that one, though since I want to just focus on reading through Cerebus (up to the end of the ‘Guys’ trade paperback, which is what I predict to be the furthest point in the comic that I’ll find enjoyable) before reading something else.

Anyone else who knows comics which have interesting female characters, let me know about it. I generally have a taste for most stuff on the Vertigo line (I’m more into horror than spandex). I’ve tried Promethea and Fables and I find them kinda so-so, although I might be inclined to give Promethea another shot later on.

It seems that every week when I have only Saturday as a “day off” I get some manner of drama that eats up most of my free time that day. This time it was the cordless phone unexpectedly dying. I took it apart to see if there was some problem with the contacts I could easily fix by resoldering, but lamentably not. Although everything passed continuity check, the quality of the soldering in the phone was abominable, with almost every joint either being a “cold solder” or visibly oxidised. The proliferation of surface mount components made resoldering impossible and not worth my time anyway.

So I had to go and get a new phone. I was determined at this point to get a good quality, expensive phone so I would not have to go through this bullshit again any time soon. Of course, Ma was terribly worried as to what this would do to the household budget and I ate some of the expense in order to quiet her down. Apparently the one I bought has one of the lowest return rates of the cordless phones available in the store, so let’s hope it works out. So far it seems to perform acceptably, although not without quirks.

I’ve been playing Spore in my free time pretty much whenever I can (except when I’m too damn tired to be arsed playing a game). I’ve gone from the cell stage to the space stage 3 times now, although that’s not as much play time as you might think since every time you do it, it gets easier and quicker.

One thing that’s been weird is seeing the sheer hostility some hardcore gamers had for this game. They act as if it kidnapped and raped their dog or something. And why? Because it didn’t include every single thing that Will Wright said he might include in some sort of offhand comment. They also whinge about it being buggy and unstable on their “sweet gaming rigs”.

The latter amuses me incredibly. I play my copy of Spore on a middle of the road HP laptop. It’s operated almost entirely bug-free for me over 20 hours of play. After so often being unable to play stuff due to using an Intel graphics adapter, the irony of my unfashionable graphics hardware (which is technically not even officially supported due to being a laptop variant) work almost flawlessly is delicious.

Also, those players having a gigantic whinge because they can’t build underwater cities seem to have forgotten that this is an EA/Maxis game. You know, the studio notorious for building a small number of titles and OVER NINE THOUSAND expansion packs. If you can think of it, Spore will have an expansion pack for it eventually.

And also there’s the gigantic whinge everyone is having over the DRM. Yes, SecuROM sucks. The 10 planet limit per account is stupid and arbitrary. But (and this is the important part) it doesn’t ruin the game. The account system was going to be necessary due to the nature of the game. In fact, linking games to online accounts is going to be necessary and probably standard copy protection in future and is probably the only sane and reasonable compromise possible between developers and players.

EA/Maxis are indeed being overly restrictive about it but that’s probably release paranoia, which will go away eventually. But so long as insanely militant anti-DRM activists keep giving them justification for being paranoid, the stupid and arbitrary restrictions will most likely remain.

The other big complaint is about the Space stage. That one’s actually got some meat to it, but a great number of people having a whinge about the Space stage are plain and simply DOIN’ IT WRONG!

Part of this is because Will Wright did a pisspoor job of explaining what it’s really like. He made it sound as if it was this marvelous endgame where you whizzed about a huge galaxy in a UFO with Godlike Powers and just did whatever the hell you damn well wanted.

And maybe it is like that eventually, when you get all the sweet gear and establish alliances with everyone and wipe out the belligerent arsehole races near your own area of dominion. But it’s most certainly not like that at first.

The game up to this point has been a mad headlong rush to be the peak of evolutionary fitness, trying to survive and prosper in a world that is largely harsh and indifferent towards you. Truth of the matter is that the universe is no different. You started as the weakest of the weak in the cell stage and that’s exactly what you start as in the Space stage. You’re a primitive and backward species in a chaotic universe where the only law is survival of the fittest.

And thus you either learn to survive or you get slapped down, hard. The first time you will almost certainly end up getting owned because you don’t know how to survive and quite likely don’t even know that you have to have a strategy to survive right from the get-go. The game does admittedly lousy job of informing the player of this because it acts as if you’re in some sort of tutorial phase when the kid gloves are in fact very much off. But anyone who has played games by Sid Meier knows what the deal is - yes the game is explaining things to you, but it’s not prepared to alter the rules at any point to protect you from daft decisions made early on.

This, I must say, is a pretty dick move to pull on the player when it takes several hours to even get to this point and doesn’t allow multiple saves (or even have autosave. The lack of autosave is a glaring omission).

However, I can give you the following tips to help you in the space phase:

• Unless you’re a super awesome gamer (I’m certainly not) you will need consequence powers. As such, always play from the cell stage. Every time you do it, you find out how to do each stage more quickly anyway.
• Every decision you’ve made in the past has consequence powers attached to it. If your consequence powers are not well-suited to your playing style, you will almost certainly die.
• As a consequence of this, the sad reality is that the first few species you get to the space stage will most likely end up as experiments as to finding out what style and power combinations. Once you have it figured out, play something from the Cell stage with the aim of getting the power combinations you find optimal. This will make things easier for you down the track.
• Some species are just plain dicks. Obviously the Grox are, but pretty much everyone with a Zealot culture are violent, intolerant assholes. As a result, you’re going to need to know how to fight. Playing a pacifist species isn’t a terribly good idea.
• This said, the other extreme isn’t a good idea either. If you act like a violent, intolerant dickhead, especially early on when you aren’t very technologically sophisticated, you’ll just get an alliance of the relatively more peaceful species teaming up to beat the snot out of you while they still can.
• Making friends is thus very important. Try to make as many as you possibly can. One of the best ways to deal with belligerent asshole species is to get your friends to blow the snot out of them for you.
• But this is all rather expensive, so be good at making money since even close friends don’t enter military conflicts for free.
• Speaking of money, if you get a belligerent asshole species ransoming you FOR GOD’S SAKE PAY THE MAN! Even if you say you have insufficient funds, they’ll take that as acceptable. But don’t tell them to piss off unless you’ve already prepared yourself comprehensively to take their punk asses down. War is an expensive and difficult business and starting one you aren’t properly prepared to win will be more expensive than any ransom. You can always make the money back.

That’s really all the general advice I can give on the matter of the space stage. But until someone else writes a more detailed guide on GameFAQs or the mechanics of the space stage are tweaked to make it less unforgiving and brutal, it’s better than any other advice I’ve seen out there. Well, I can also give my rather subjective opinions on the relative merits of consequence abilities. Always remember to check your history regularly so you know which of the three outcomes of any stage you’re headed towards (and that it’s the one you want).

Cell:
Carnivore - Power Monger: More energy. Helps you travel further and fire your weapons longer. Pretty damn useful.
Herbivore - Social Suave: Discount on social technology. Kinda meh.
Omnivore - Gentle Generalist: Save money on lots of stuff. Pretty damn useful if you want to be peaceful and buy your friends.

Creature:
Predator - Prime Specimen: Tougher ship. Very awesome.
Adaptable - Speed Demon: Faster ship, good for running away and chasing enemy combatants. Very useful for some play strategies.
Social - Pleasing Performance: When you do a favour for an ally, they remain grateful for it for longer. Useful if you want to have a lot of friends for less effort.

Tribal stage:
Aggressive - Arms Dealer: Cheaper weapons. Plenty of these so you’ll save a fair bit of money if you just want to go kill lots of people.
Industrious - Colony Craze: Colony equipment is cheaper. Unless you prefer to buy out allied colonies, you’ll buy a shitload of this stuff, so saving money on it is a very good thing.
Friendly - Gracious Greeting: An extra 10 points in relations score for all races. You’re popular, everyone likes you. Even the obnoxious arsehole races that normally shoot first and ask questions later are willing to negotiate and be bribed into a more agreeable frame of mind. Makes the early stages of the space phase inestimably easier.

Civilisation stage:
Military - Pirates B Gone: Pirates attack you much less infrequently. Very handy because it frees up a lot of time you would otherwise be spending dealing with those damn pirates.
Economic - Spice Savant: You produce more spice to trade with other colonies. Helps you make arseloads of money. Have I mentioned everything’s easier with money?
Religious - Green Keeper: Less biodisasters in your colonies. Biodisasters have to be dealt with VERY quickly and only you can deal with them. But once you get to the affected planet it’s pretty easy. Thus not as good as the other two.

In a species I custom built to suit my playing style for the space stage I’ve gone through the following path:
Cell: Omnivore. (Gentle Generalist)
Creature: Predator. (Prime Specimen)
Tribe: Friendly (Gracious Greeter) (This was hard, because I had to swing from one extreme to the other)
Civilisation: Military. (Pirates B Gone)

That got me a species with the “Knight” trait. So I’m fairly tough but friendly. I’m currently in two minds as to whether I should stick with that trait (the ability to summon backup anywhere is rather nifty) or take on the “Bard” trait with the ability to create temporary ceasefires. (Plus I just like the style of Bard species, they are hilarious and totally crazy)

So, uh, yeah. I bought Spore.

And so far it’s proving pretty much as awesome as I was hoping it would be. Even the RTS-ish parts are surprisingly non-annoying. The interface for the RTS bits is still hideous, but RTS is my most hated genre in all of video gaming so my experiences of interfaces for such range from “hideous, but bearable” to “OH GOD IT BURNS PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!”. Plus, genociding those pesky-ass tribes who make the mistake of choosing violence over diplomacy feels good.

About the only complaint I have is that just when a certain section of the game starts to feel good (that is, when you’re dominating) it whisks you to the next one. And then you’re all weak and crappy again. If you try to stay around, the game will get downright anviliscious about encouraging you to move on. For instance, in the creature stage where I stuck around after developing sapience so I could collect more parts and tweak my creature design more, all the species I allied with disappeared, to be replaced by hostile ones.

BTW I’m playing a herbivore, but my recent success in kicking ass is making me rethink the pacifism track I was previously on. That’s going to make for an interesting archaeology down the track - “We were once a previous species, but then soon after we started forming tribes, we started ruthlessly wiping out the competition”. Oh well, some people just don’t want to play nice, too bad for them. I should warn that at the end of the creature phase, optimising your creature build for combat is a really good idea.

Don’t expect to hear very much from me for a while. I hope you take comfort in knowing I’m a whole lot happier, though

My friends, my politically oriented and partisan friends, I’m going to have to express a great deal of disappointment in many of you. I apologise if this last sentence or the ones that come afterward come off as patronising, that is not my intent.

I’ve been trying to avoid coverage of commentary about the 2008 presidential elections because frankly I think both candidates would make lousy presidents. I won’t claim to be completely unbiased, I do consider McCain the lesser of two evils but I am in no way enthusiastic about the concept of President McCain.

What particularly bothers me is the sheer nastiness of partisan rhetoric I’m seeing bandied about. Yes, I am hearing nastiness coming from both sides. However, since most of my friends are left-wing I am obviously hearing more of one kind of nastiness than the other.

The thing that upsets me is this: While I’m by no means left-wing, I have lots of left-wing friends because I recognise that beneath the ideological differences, they hold dear to noble principles which I respect and admire. However, in the name of partisanship, I am seeing a great deal of them sell out on their principles the moment it gives them a chance to say something nasty about someone they don’t know very much about at all but whom they violently dislike on the basis of what side of the partisan divide they’re on.

It’s Sarah Palin that was the last straw for me. There’s certainly legitimate criticism to be made of her. I intensely disagree with her stance on abortion, reproductive rights and sexual education. I find her support for teaching religious theories of creationism in science class preposterous (I do not mind religion being taught in schools, but a science class is a violently innappropriate place to do so). Her previous support for the “bridge to nowhere” speaks of a mentality that prioritises parochialism over sound economic judgment (which is a very bad quality in a President). She is also surprisingly inexperienced in executive manners (but then, Obama is moreso and he’s running for President).

This said, the number of people I’ve seen make offhand remarks to the effect of “Oh, she was just chosen because she’s a woman and the RNC think that’ll get women to vote republican” has staggered me. Has it not occurred to anyone who has said this that they are effectively writing Palin off because she’s a woman? I am quite aware that there is a tactical element to picking Sarah Palin and that the RNC hopes to pick up some disgruntled ex-Hillary supporters this way. But to hear the notion that this is all Palin is good for seriously expressed by so many people I am friends with seems shockingly out of character. Who are you and what the hell happened to the decent and rational people I knew you to be before the election campaign began in earnest?

To someone like myself who was raised with liberal feminist principles, to see good friends of mine so casually write someone off because of their sex is quite shocking to me. To see that all it takes for someone to do such a thing is a vice presidential nomination disappoints me profoundly. I expected better from you.

One of the reasons I got burnt out on politics and rarely write about it anymore is precisely this kind of partisan nastiness which I saw so dominated the whole affair. As a person who has struggled his whole life to keep destructive passions like anger and hatred in check, I decided that it did me no good to keep an active interest in a field of human endeavour so dominated by these passions. I do not ask that you become disinterested like myself. Instead, I implore that when you write about politics, that you take a step back before hitting the “submit” button and see whether you are contributing to reasoned public discourse, or if you are just throwing fuel on the fire of partisan hatred.

I still believe passionately that the world can be made a better place. But I do not believe that these mudslinging matches I am seeing more and more of all over the internet will do that at all.

I’m not making any apologies for hardly ever posting. Pretty much every day when I get home from class or work experience it’s like I sit down and blink and it’s time for bed. Just typing this entry has eaten up every minute of free time I have today.

The problem is this: For the past 3 semesters the course has been diluted and dumbed down in order to maximise the number of stupid and lazy students who pass. However, this situation of indulging the weakest at the expense of all could not continue indefinitely and now in the final semester the shit has hit the fan.

You see, we still have to display competency in key areas in order to pass the course. So now they’re scrambling desperately to try and make up for inadequately preparing us. So how to make up for 3 semesters of lax standards? CRANK UP THE WORKLOAD TO 11, MOTHERFUCKER!

This is not helped by the fact that some teachers seem to consider this state of affairs hilarious and think they’re being clever and unique by assigning a shitload of homework. This is despite the fact that they’ve crammed the schedule with almost twice the number of class hours as previous semesters, and on top of that required us to do a day of unpaid work experience every week. This all adds up to more hours than a full time job (plus all the time burnt up by commuting on public transport) and they think that “burn the midnight oil” is the magical solution to the hole they’ve dug themselves?

People cannot be made to work that hard, that long without consequences. The more callous disregard the teachers show to such consequences, the more contempt and loathing I harbour towards them.

Despite the absolute clusterfuck they’ve made of this situation, I still believe I’ll be able to get through it and pass the course. I just hope that when I finally do come out of it with my qualification I’m not going to be rendered so cynical in the process as to rob me of any remaining enthusiasm for electronics or programming and thus be unemployable yet again.

I had this problem back when I did my degree in Japanese. I found learning Japanese such a difficult and stressful experience that by the end I simply could not separate Japanese culture and language from what I went through in learning it. As a result I ended up with a deep-seated antipathy towards Japan that I’m still struggling to get over. And naturally I have forgotten almost all the Japanese I ever learned due to never having any cause or inclination to ever use it again.

I’m worried the exact same thing is going to happen again with this course. Or that I’m going to yet again end up traumatised by the unprofessional conduct of people in authority. I now know one of the reasons why I’ve often been terrible at job interviews is that I’ve so often served under people who abused their authority over me that I was obviously extremely paranoid about authority figures. For obvious reasons, that made me a very unattractive pick as a potential hire, regardless of my abilities. It took a long time and a great deal of self examination for me to even realise that was a problem affecting my employability.

Now I’m worried that all my hard work in identifying and dealing with these issues is going to go down the drain. I have problems with unhealthy levels of cynicism and paranoia. Normally I can keep them under control enough to be functional, but this takes a great deal of effort. Those who know me well are familiar with my freaky levels of willpower and self control. Not so many seem to be aware of the reason I have them - I need them to stay sane and functional. While I can temporarily divert that energy to do extraordinary things, doing so is risky for my mental health.

If I’m put under too much stress for too long, I deplete the reserves of mental energy I need to keep my cynicism and paranoia on a leash. When that happens, they become pathological and I begin honestly believing that everyone around me operates with malicious intent. And I’m capable of frightening acts of ruthlessness and cruelty towards those I suspect of malicious intent (I’ve had to be capable of such to survive through some earlier parts of my life).

It’s been a long time since I’ve got that bad, and I really don’t want to go back there again. I also really don’t want to have to choose between passing this course and keeping my sanity. Surely it cannot be asking too much to have both?

I’ve been out of action with the flu since Tuesday. I just woke up feeling like ass, but dragged myself to class anyway because Ken’s Tuesday morning class is pretty much the only one that’s impossible to catch up on so you go if you are physically able.

So I did go. I managed to get through the whole lesson and take some notes and that was pretty much it. I was exhausted so I headed home immediately after that.

And then apart from a visit to the doctor the next day where I found out what I had was the flu I’ve pretty much been spending the whole week sleeping. Those times I have been awake I’ve mainly been sitting at the computer in a semi-comatose state reading the Let’s Play Archive.

I don’t know why it is, but when I get sick, I get really fucking sick. Having the flu felt like being possessed by demons. Motor control went right out the window. I couldn’t keep my balance so I had to hold onto things when I walked, I had the shakes, everything hurt and it hurt like hell to do anything. Especially sneezing, which I did a lot and would send pain shooting through my back and arms for reasons I can’t imagine but which had me dreading a sneeze every time one was coming.

It’s only today I’ve started to feel even remotely human. The fever has finally broken, so I’m no longer constantly freezing, I can hold a thought for more than two seconds, I have my motor control and a little of my strength back. I still feel like I’ve got a head cold but that still feels like a million bucks compared to only yesterday. I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to come back to class tomorrow but if I keep improving I should be able to make a reasonable effort tomorrow (thank goodness I don’t have a morning class on Mondays anymore).

One of the hard things has been my sister’s bullshit. My sister’s been struggling with some sort of mysterious urinary problem (do NOT want to get into details) and is now convinced she has endometrisis. And now, in addition to her family’s impudence at not cheerfully agreeing with her own assumption prior to a professional diagnosis, her brother has the cheek, THE FUCKING NERVE to go and get the flu and take precious attention away from her own suffering!

Now, in all fairness, she go and get me some medicine when I asked for some. Trouble was it was not the kind I asked for and in all likelihood completely useless. Still, as far as she’s concerned, even though I paid for it I should still try it anyway, never mind that you can’t bring it back once you open it. So I’m just an ungrateful shit who doesn’t immediately guzzle whatever random-arse medication she decides to get me. Despite living with me her entire life she refuses to concede there’s ever a method to my madness, in this case having learned in a trial and error process taking years what cold medicines actually deliver me some sort of beneficial effect.

Eventually, she decided that since I had a flu, then she had to have one, too! (Never mind she’s already had this flu, medical impossibility be damned!). The thing about my sister is that even when bad shit happens to her, she still manages to massively overdraw her sympathy account. I’ll believe she has the flu if she becomes significantly quieter. Otherwise I’m going to say it’s her usual MO where she works herself into a neurotic frenzy to the extent where she makes herself ill. She’s awesome at that.

It’s not all been bad, though. Captain Dipshit, the dodgy ebay seller from Sydney, finally noticed that I was digging up dirt on him and delivering it to Paypal. So he stopped being a useless, incompetent douchebag and shipped my damn iPod Touch. I got it on Wednesday, pretty much just after I left for the doctor’s appointment (My sister signed for the courier in my absence, so there’s something genuinely nice and useful she did for me this week). To my surprise, it actually works, although the damn battery was flat on arrival. I’m not sure how long it’s been flat (which isn’t good for the battery) but the battery life doesn’t seem as good as it ought be. I suspect I’ll probably have to get the battery replaced earlier than if I bought it new due to the abuse *sigh* sure am getting what I paid for. But at least I have an iPod touch now. Hmm, now I can think straight, might see about upgrading the firmware now.

On Monday, after my singing lesson, the car wouldn’t start.

Turns out that the way in which I’ve been using the car has been horribly abusive to the battery.

For quite a while, I was noticing it having difficulty starting in cold weather, which I figured was just a problem with lubrication because motor oil tends to go viscous when it gets cold. Although I was repeatedly told that’s really not an issue with modern motor oils and Australian weather. Still, until that night, I wasn’t given any other plausible explanations.

At least till the car finally wouldn’t start and I sought refuge in a ham radio shop. Fortunately the shop owner was there late and he was nice enough to let me in where it was warmer. In addition to tea and sympathy, he also explained to me what my problem probably was.

You see, due to Mum’s disability I’ve effectively inherited the car. The trouble is that cars are made to run pretty much every day and things tend to go bad if they’re driven infrequently. This is especially the case when I usually only use it once a week for short trips to pick up the shopping. Cranking the starter motor takes a considerable amount of power and it takes quite a bit of driving for the alternator to have enough time to properly recharge the battery. 15 minute trips to the local mall just don’t cut it.

Eventually, the battery gets more and more drained and lead-acid batteries do not appreciate being treated like this. They also don’t tolerate the cold very well. So eventually, the battery is so low on charge it can’t start the car any more and death by sulfation usually isn’t that far away.

After what I learned in alternative energy and power systems class, I’m kinda embarrassed I didn’t figure this out on my own. That said, I thought it only took about 5 minutes for the alternator to top up the battery after starting the car. Electricity is weird when used for power rather than information, that’s really the best defence I can give.

I was rather disappointed when I got home from TAFE and couldn’t start the car so I could drive it down to Autobarn and get a battery charger and some jumper leads. After I had it jump started on Monday night, I drove it to Lilydale and back and figured that would be enough time to give the battery a decent charge. Guess again!

So I had to go take the train and buy the stuff from Super Cheap Auto, which had moved from where I thought it was. Fortunately despite the name, not everything they have is crap. I got a rather sophisticated pulse charger which supposedly breaks down sulfation and extends battery life. I have absolutely no idea if this is true but it sounds rather plausible. In any case, it’s one of those fancy-pants computer controlled chargers so at least it’s not going to kill the battery by overcharging it. I just hope the idea I get from the manual that it’s a delta-V based charger and not one of those lousy time-based models that kills your battery if there’s a power failure. But given the fact that it’s supposedly capable of handling a wide variety of amp-hour ratings then I’m pretty sure it’s the good kind.

I also got some jump leads. I really should have done this a long time ago considering that the car is an automatic. As is typical of me, they are hideous overkill leads. There were some ones for a good price that were 2.5M and rated for 100A but that didn’t seem quite sufficient. It is downright aggravating when jump leads are just that little bit too short and I regularly hear 200A quoted as a ballpark figure for the current ratings of starter motors. The 400A ones were the only ones that had what I deemed a sufficient length (3M) and I suspect they’re used for starting trucks or something. Naturally, they have surge protection so people won’t have a gigantic whinge about using them with their computer controlled car (although mine does also have EFI).

Moral of the story: If you have an automatic, get some jump leads. If you don’t drive your car very often, get a battery charger. In the long run it’ll save you a lot of money and hassle.

In other news, that iPod I ordered over eBay still hasn’t arrived. I’ve got tired of lame excuses from this guy and launched an official complaint with Paypal. Also, I’m probably gonna call the tax office on this twerp because he’s being an idiot and not putting his ABN on his auctions, emails or website like he’s required to by law. I used to think he was just some Chinese guy operating out of his garage and screwing up my order because he’s in way over his head but I just checked his recent negative feedback. Previously I’d just seen the unpunctuated, terse, simple English of the emails he’s sent in response to me. When responding to negative feedback he’s a whole other animal - a smartass little twerp who likes to insult the intelligence of his customers. If I have my way, he’s about to get a lesson in humility, and multiple audits from various government agencies, eBay and Paypal.

The trouble with being a condescending smartass is that there’s always someone smarter than you out there. I’ve learned that one the hard way myself at times, looks like it’s his turn.

I’ve had the ennui both yesterday and today and really that’s not fucking fair. The whole reason it’s bearable at all is because I know I’ll go to sleep and the roulette wheel that is my brain hormonal balance will spin on something else and odds are pretty good it’ll be something better.

Have I mentioned lately that it’s really awful not knowing what state my mind will be in the next day? I can shift the odds a bit in my favour by chowing down on St Johns Wort but it doesn’t change the randomness. The mind really can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.

The iPod Touch I ordered nearly 3 weeks ago still has not arrived at my place yet. When I got home today I sent the people I bought it from an industrial grade nastygram. I don’t think they’re actually defrauding me, because there’s too much evidence on their ebay profile that they’re legitimate. I just reckon they’re shitty at the business and logistics side of things, so I need to give them a little motivation to clean their fucking act up by sending them emails full of scary legal language.

Nastygrams are pointless for genuine ebay frauds anyway because by the time you’ve realised they’re ripping you off, it’s really too late to do much besides fuck with their ebay and paypal accounts.

Anyhow, today at work experience was nice. Having finished building my development board last week, this week was all software. I am more of a software than a hardware guy, so this was lovely. The only thing that sucked was one of my programs didn’t work and I can’t tell if it’s because of some programming goof I made or because the AVR Studio/WinAVR GCC toolchain is screwing up again. I’ve had serious problems with this API before, the debug tools are a crapshoot and the watch function is pretty much useless. Ah, is there anything opensource people can’t fuck up?

Still, even with a shitty API, spending all day programming in C and quietly pondering solutions to problems using elegant logic and mathematics was glorious. I really could see myself doing this for a living. Shame the company I’m doing work experience for are hardware guys, but at least I might be able to hit them up for people who do embedded software and are looking to hire newbies. The more I do coding, the more I like it!

That’s partly why I want my iPod touch to arrive so badly. I want to jailbreak it and bust out the iPhone SDK and start developing apps for it. I doubt I’m going to be like those people making out like a bandit from the App Store ($2000 in one week? HOLY SHIT, BATMAN!) but it strikes me as a damn fine way to cut my teeth in mobile software development and maybe even make a name for myself and some extra beer money.

There’s a couple of things I’ve been getting into rather a lot lately (Yay for periodic obsessions!). The first is mash-ups. It started when I was watching this chick’s vlog, just because she was hot and I wanted to perve on her. I noticed the music behind her and that it was awesome and started to wonder what it was. At first I thought it was a particularly good cover of ‘Mad World’ (Gary Jules can suck my cock, honestly. I fucking hate his mopey version of the song). Then I realised it had the synth hook from ‘Bad Touch’ by the Bloodhound Gang and figured out it was a mash-up. Once I had that figured it only took a few minutes of googling to find out what it was.

That’s when I stumbled upon Norwegian Recycling. Epic fucking win, people! Pretty much all his stuff rules, although I do have a soft spot for the song that I initially heard: All Bad touches (Come to an end). I always had a certain respect for Nelly Furtado ever since I heard that she doesn’t use autotune but I had no idea she could be so awesome. He likes to mash up Furtado a lot, which I’m certainly fine with. I listened to her album ‘Loose’ which I got off a mate of mine, and strangely I only find her voice sexy when she’s just being all artsy (as opposed to her OMG I’M BEING SEXY HERE songs).

The funny thing about mashups is it seems that the cheesier the pop idol they’re bastardising, the better they get. It reaches its pinnacle in this Britney/Britney mashup. There’s only one thing wrong with this piece of pure poetry - NO FUCKING DOWNLOAD LINK!

Another thing I’ve been really into lately is comic books. For the longest time, they were pretty much the only stereotypical nerd hobby I just didn’t get (I’ve hit all the other bases - anime, video games, RPGs, MMORPGs, blogging) but now I think I’m finally starting to “get it”.

A couple of years ago I got into Cerebus in a big way for a while but then my interest died down a bit. And it was really just Cerebus, rather than comics in general. However, while I was waiting for my ‘Phone Books’ to arrive, I bought the trade paperback of Watchmen. I read it and really enjoyed it, but not as much as Cerebus, because it was still a superhero comic and I generally looked down on that sort of thing.

However, one of the side-effects of reading TV Tropes has been finding out that while a lot of superhero comics are indeed silly crap for kids, occasionally there’s a run with some awesome writer on board who elevates it to epic win. That made me more open-minded and when the Watchmen Trailer came out a few weeks ago I was impressed by its awesome and felt the urge to read Watchmen again.

Wow. Awesome comic is awesome.

So I decided, OK, superhero comics can be good. Couple that with me getting into long and wanky discussions on the relationship between Batman and Joker on the Badgermaster forums after watching The Dark Knight and I realised that yes, I was becoming a guy who liked comic books. Although I still haven’t read any Batman.

After finishing Watchmen, I wanted more, so I went down to Minotaur and started looking for the good stuff. Magz had recommended ‘Y: The Last Man’ and ‘Fables’. I also picked up ‘Promethea’ on the recommendation of an Alan Moore fangirl who happened to be checking out the Vertigo section at the same time as I.

‘Y: The Last Man’ was epic win and I really want to get a hold of the TP2 so I can keep reading. ‘Promethea’ I was not really getting into until about the 3rd issue in, when it shifted gears from “Whee! I have kewl powerz!” to “TRIPPY SHIT COMING RIGHT AT YOU, IN YOUR FACE, BITCHES!”. Although I’d still categorise it as “Will pick it up if I see it on the shelf” rather than something I’d bug the clerk about when it’ll be back in stock. I am presently chewing through ‘Fables’ and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it so far. Most of what I like about it has more to do with the police procedural plot it’s going through rather than the “Fairytale legends living amongst us in New York” thing which is meant to be its main selling point.

I also got 3 more Cerebus Phone books (all the way up to Jaka’s Story). They’ll last me a good long time and at the price they cost, they damn well oughta! I always feel self-conscious with Cerebus books due to the Dave Sim’s rep as a misogynist nutball, but I probably vastly overestimate the number of people who even know who he is these days.

I’m going to start one of those entries which is initially about how I can’t seem to write about anything lately and which will probably meander all over the fucking place as random shit that goes through my head finally starts spilling out in an alarmingly uncontrolled fashion. Hopefully it won’t end up being really emo, but no guarantees.

Anyway, back from my second week of work experience. Better than the first one, and that’s even taking into account being burned by a little blob of solder and having a little blister on my index finger as a result. Also, water-soluble flux, while very convenient for washing the boards, seems to have this really nasty tendency to ’spit’ onto your hands like bacon fat. It’s most disconcerting. But at least today I actually got something finished and feel a bit less ridiculously useless and noobish. Also, in a great irony I have found that going there by public transport is way easier than driving. If going contraflow, peak hour public transport is fucking awesome.

Also more used to the place. The general silence of the people working there and the news/talkback radio playing constantly no longer seems strange. I now understand how the hell it is that talkback stations remain viable. It’s hideously dull if you’re doing nothing but sitting there listening to it, but as something to drift in and out of your awareness while you’re busy working it’s quite nice and is much less ruinous to productivity than going on Digg because you’re bored and want a brief break from the problem you’re pondering.

My studies are becoming a grind of boredom. The sheer amount of time they eat up is the main thing that gets to me. Get me to do anything for long enough without a break and I’ll want to do just about anything else. This is a bother because the classes drag on and I know the stuff being talked about is important but I really can’t bring myself to give much of a shit. All of my classmates are likewise, I’d worry about failing but the standards seem to be so low that fear of failure ceases to be a motivation for me. Which is a good thing because running almost exclusively on that was fucking exhausting.

I’d really like to be able to find what we’re doing interesting, but I just can’t. I don’t know if it’s because the TAFE gets money from the government based on how many hours they teach us and are padding things out with boring crap. I’m worried I’m losing interest in electronics because it seems like I study things and then lose interest before I can actually make money out of what I’ve learned. Now that I’m in my mid twenties, it’s increasingly difficult to pretend that sort of behaviour is even remotely respectable. That said, I still come up with mad scientist ideas for electronics fairly regularly so I suspect it’s probably just Attack Of The Boring-Ass Classes.

I still don’t have the iPod touch I ordered nearly two weeks ago, which is really annoying me. It seems the place I ordered from really wasn’t kidding when they said “7 to 10 working days” (which is weasel-speak for 2 weeks) and are determine to take as long as they think they can get away with to get it to me, this is considerably lame.

As well as the yearning I have to try developing applications for the iPhone platform, I’ve also been getting a weird hankering to try my hand at doing some writing. Fiction writing. For those who aren’t aware, previous attempts I’ve made to write fiction have been pretty woeful. However, after reading TV Tropes in what spare time I have in the past few months, I feel much more confident to try my hand at it again.

Previously, I’d always had problems either being hideously derivative or trying to do something ‘original’ and then just have it end up being lame (and unintentionally derivative). Now that I’m more aware of Tropes, I don’t feel the need to worry about doing something new because now I see that it’s generally better to be aware of what you’re doing and just try to do it well. Now, coming up with ideas feels a bit like a recipe “Ah, and then for the Villain a bit of Badass Normal, then let’s add some Knight Templar“.

I’m just not sure what I’d like to write at the present. I have a strange urge to write a superhero comic, even though I cannot draw one and haven’t the slightest interest in learning how, either. Perhaps this is just because I’ve been reading Watchmen, after seeing the very impressive movie trailer. I’ve been on a weird retro kick lately, listening to some of the first CDs I ever bought back in the mid 90s. Amazingly, they’re just as awesome as I remember them being.

To be honest, I don’t really know where it’s all going at the moment. The future doesn’t look bleak, but it’s worryingly uncertain in a way I didn’t think it’d be at this point.

My sister is being a royal bitch and embarrassing the hell out of me today.

Because of my Mum’s disability, she’s not able to clean the house very well any more, so the government subsidises a cleaning service to come in regularly and pick up some of the slack.

The ladies who work in the cleaning service don’t exactly earn very much money and it’s not a particularly pleasant job. So I appreciate what they do, even if the damn company who schedules them is hideously erratic about doing so.

My sister, instead starts bitching about them loudly while they’re here and generally treating them like some manner of house servant. My Mum reckons the cleaner left early because she found my sister just so damn unpleasant to be around. If she keeps treating cleaners like this, nobody’s going to want to come over and frankly I’m embarrassed to be associated with her when she acts so rudely.

Her present excuse is that after some time of idealising the Irish as being these wonderful, oppressed people, she’s learned something from an Irish internet forum that I’ve known for several years and Ma for decades. Namely, that most Irish people from Ireland are a shower of bastards - aggressively insular and narrow minded. And they really hate people like my family, who are part of the Irish diaspora. I bet they’d be particularly horrified if they learned my sister and I are (*gasp*) protestants.

We’re not REAL Irish to them (Plastic Paddies) and frankly I’m inclined to agree and take it as a compliment. I don’t harbour any particular yearnings for the old country and although I recognise that my Irish ethnicity has left its mark on my behaviour, it’s not a key part of my identity. But then, my sister is different because she actually looks Irish (I look more Viking than Celtic) and as such has internalised Irishness as a greater part of her own identity.

My Mum left Ireland because she found it to be an unpleasant backwater country full of judgemental, narrow-minded reactionaries devoted to an extremist, flat-earth interpretation of Catholicism. Our family never did the whole ‘ethnic community’ thing - we never hung out in Irish clubs or went to Mass or anything like that. Ma simply held onto the music, literature and history of Ireland, because that was the only parts of the culture she liked.

Ireland finally made something of itself through a series of economic reforms but it is still rife with the same cultural problems that left it in stagnation for most of the 20th century. I might find Anglo-Australians to be like another freakin’ species (most of my friends are children of Greek, Italian or Asian immigrants) and they find me equally strange, but I suspect I would be less warmly welcomed in Ireland than in Australia.

I guess this is the point of her life at which my sister has to come to terms with the whole “don’t really fit in anywhere” aspect of being an immigrant’s child. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise if you think about it - we’re descended from people who are inclined to look for greener pastures elsewhere. I don’t think that getting too hung up on things like nationality is healthy for people like us.

One of my classmates brought in his brand new 3G iPhone yesterday. I have to say I was really very impressed by it. The user interface was fantastic, the electrical conductivity based touchscreen is amazing - clear and shiny glass rather than the ugly scratched plastic of normal pressure based touchscreens.

The internet browser is really easy to use and does a great job of rendering pretty much any site that isn’t flash video based. The zoom in and out function was very intuitive and I was quite used to it after browsing with an EeePC.

As a mobile internet appliance, it certainly gives the EeePC a run for its money. It’s pocket sized and has a much better battery life. But the EeePC has a proper keyboard, a higher resolution display and also has the advantage of being a real computer.

Although the “real computer” bit is a mixed blessing. Since I’m running Ubuntu on it, I can expand its capabilities with the huge library of software available on the ubuntu repositories. The downside is that it’s a real crapshoot doing this. Sometimes everything works perfectly out of the box, other times it’s a gigantic pain in the arse such as when I spent two hours yesterday fruitlessly attempting to get the fucking microphone to work. As usual, I followed the instructions letter-perfectly and got errors when the instructions assumed everything would work perfectly.

Apparently there’s a fix for this, that involves installing a custom kernel. Yes, let’s just go over that one again: I need to load up an entirely new kernel in order to get a microphone to work. Admittedly, there’s other improvements such as improved boot times, but it’s still a pretty ridiculous situation. Unfortunately it seems that no matter what improvements Linux makes, it still ends up pissing me off at some fundamental level because everything is either in development and buggy as hell, or stable but obsolete and unsupported.

And given that the capabilities of an iPhone can be expanded with applications from the app store (some of which are even free!) that’s not even an advantage that’s exclusive to the EeePC.

Truth be told, in my mind there’s only two clear advantages to the EeePC for me. The first is the keyboard, it’s lousy but still miles ahead of one-finger qwerty typing on a touchscreen. The second is that the EeePC is better for 3G intern