Win an iPod Shuffle
If you missed it then right now through my Hobart Daily Photoblog there is the chance to win an iPod. Its dead easy as you just need to write a short review of a business or similar and you are in the running. The person that posts the most reviews wins.
The only conditions really are that you need to be an Australian resident aged 15 or over.
Right now i am worrying that no one does a review and the sponsor looses interest. Can someone do a review and get my undying gratitude 
Working ok now!
Don’t you just love technology. I use a plugin to automatically cross post from my blogs and for some reason for a couple of days it just stopped working, instead producing an error that didn’t really make any sense.
But the good news is that things are working ok again now. Sorry for any break in transmission!
City Homicide Ratings Slipping?
I just finished watching the latest episode of City Homicide which for the uninitiated out there is an Australian Cop. The acting was its usual standard and the story a little predictable but thats nothing unusual. Over acting and bad acting is pretty standard.
But what raisies the questions for me is the ratings must be slipping because they have started using any excuse they can in the last couple of episodes to include naked breasts when ever they can. Don’t get me wrong, i am a fan of womens breasts (and other parts of attractive women) but where its just a ploy in a potentially sliding show to hang on to its ratings i get … cynical.
My prediction is that it might be on its last legs. Be sure i will keep abreast of the situation!
I live in the free world.
There’s a strange thing in the world of politics, it’s called the election promise. They can be filled once in a while but normally they die a quick death out of sight and art heard from again. But disturbingly one of the ones that hasn’t disappeared is the proposal that was made during the last election that Internet filtering system for the whole of Australia be created and implemented to allow a so-called clean feed eliminating child porn at other illegal material
Now don’t get me wrong I do believe that a lot of this material does need to go part I’m siding with the critics of this system in that it won’t work reading an article today it stated that only around about 87 to 95% of all material gets blocked that is undesirable and there is the potential for a huge amount of legitimate material to be blocked. What also concerns me is the ability for the filter to be manipulated in certain politically sensitive material could easily through unscrupulous means make it into the filter allowing Australia to join such a bright nation and North Korea and China in filtering anything that they don’t like.
Now the other problem with this system is the it only turn filter webpages and on the whole webpages those days are only a tiny fraction of the traffic on the Internet. The majority is other forms which can include peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic and other forms of traffic which means instead of getting an effective system we are instead getting a political be satisfactory solution which doesn’t and should offer a solution at all just a stop gap that the politician can point to have so they did something when really they did very little.
Now the other problem with this system is 13 even if you opt out of the feed your Internet speed is still likely to be degraded which use a problem. In comparison to most of the rest of the developed world, Australia has a substandard Internet system. Our speeds are a slower and is filter is only can make them slower still which has the potential to her not only the home user but also business users in today’s multi media environment. For get your bandwidth intensive applications like streaming video as they are just as likely to be degraded to the point of not being usable thanks to the filter and will just make just a laughing stock in comparison to the rest of the world.
So no thank you I don’t live in China and North Korea or Burma. Take your Internet filtering and instead think of something that actually works and I’m all for parents actually taking responsibility to their children rather than blaming the Internet for their poor parenting supervision. There are commercially available mantle filters that will do the same standard of job that is being proposed now that Australia and the same ways that should beat those home filters is the same ways that you will beat the great firewall of Australia.
Well this is different.
In a when it comes to blogging I have posted so many posts that it sometimes gets a little hard to do something different. Know what I mean fresh interesting … fresh. I guess that’s what comes from having posted so many entries and that number I can’t even begin to speculate on. It would certainly number close to 5000 or even more perhaps. So I must say that it is exciting when this particular post because I am doing something new, different, original and something per as far as I’m aware none of my blogging buddy’s are doing. Instead of typing this I am using software to do my typing for me by: 13 what I say to text.
Now so far it’s not worked to badly all up although it does have a glitches that mean that you do need to read what it is typing otherwise you end up with something other than what you are really intending. It also has problems with some word is like for example I am becomes IM and as far as I checked I am not an IM!!! Perhaps it just doesn’t like my Aussie accent particularly or just some word to confuse it???
The other problem that I have is that while it getting used to the way that I speak it is probably quicker for me to type the post myself but that would not be as fun now would it.
I’ll those of you that are wondering none of the swear words are detected. It seems that this software only does the polite words. That makes me sound like a kid with their first dictionary going through and looking for all the rude words in their dictionary. Crap I guess I am a spoken word pervert poster!! Excellent!
Oh and it doesn’t know what to do with burping either if you are wondering.
My Own Worst Enemy
I do love catching new shows. Some are crap but just once in a while you do find a good one and enjoy it. I just caught the pilot episode of My Own Worst Enemy which proved to be enjoyable and i am now hanging out for the next episode.
The show stars Christian Slater playing the role of both Henry Spivey and Edward Albright. On one hand Henry is an average guy working as an efficiency expert living the average life with a wife, two kids and even a minivan. And then there is Edward, a tough secret agent trained to kill and who completes dangerous missions all over the world. They are as different as different can be with the only thing in common that they share the same body. When the wall between his two personalties, Henry finds himself in Russia with some dangerous types chasing him and he is hopelessly out of his depth.
I won’t go further and drop any spoilers but it does look to be worth a look.
Max Payne
I took the chance to visit an old friend today. Well not quite but kind of. Max Payne would have to be one of my favourite computer games of all time and so i took the chance to catch the Max Payne Movie.
I will start by saying that it turned out to be a stylish if dark movie and packed with special effects and of course … action. Mark Wahlberg plays Max Payne, a damaged cop whose wife and child were killed. Max works in the cold case unit and searches for the third killer that got away when he came home to find his wife dead and shot the first two dead while the third got away unseen. What follows is a trail of destruction and action as Max pursues the killers.
Now the movie was by no means perfect and i did find some of it a little too convoluted. And weird. But i did enjoy it.
So what happened again?
I sat down to watch some of the latest series of Heroes tonight. I have videoed the first couple of episodes and was about to watch them when … shock horror … i realised that i can’t remember anything that happened last series. Sure there was magical powers and evil people wanting to do anything evil that comes to miund but other than that … not a real lot.
Lucky i do have a heap of space on the hard drive of the recorder to keep it on until i rewatch all of the previous series for catch up purposes.
Oh wait, i do remember Veronica Mars turned all evil and electrified. Looking good!
Still on the topic of tv, i am totally hooked on another tv show. <a href=”http://www.hbo.com/trueblood/”>True Blood</a>. Its a little bit out of left field with vampires having come out of the shadows and about to gain legal recognition. But in the small town where the show is set, there have been several murders. I won’t say more than that but i am totally hooked. Big time.
Hello World!
Hello world.
A bit of an unplanned blogging break here but now i am back. It started off when i couldn’t think of anything to blog about and then i just plain moved on to other things instead. Of course my daily photoblogs have continued because otherwise … well they wouldn’t be daily would they.
But i have decided that this blog does need to continue if only for my own personal uses. Its nice to sit and type away about what ever insignificant thing has been going on in my life afterall. And you read it too, so it must be worth something
Promise to update more often
Ooops i guess i forgot to update for a couple of weeks it seems. That was a little careless of me but life has just been … well not busy but occupied. So in no particular order …
Boyd (the new puppy) is a lovely guy. Affectionate and cute but a little skitzo at times. The problem being after 3 weeks or so he and Grissom are still not getting on well. If that doesn’t change then his days are numbered as it will be back to the home 
Work. Work is busy, work is weird. I am still busily working on what seems to be the demise of my own job. It seems strange i know but at the end of the day it looks like the best thing for the workplace.
Other than that, not a lot of news. I have been out and about over the last couple of weekends in various places and i even did EXERCISE. Oh the horror and the humanity. And the sore muscles the next day too now that i think about it too. But some really beautiful scenery and lots of photographs on top of that too.
Promise to update more often!