brainsnorkel.com

The recent defection of Julian McGauran to the Liberal Party reminded me of a very surreal Tony Jones Friday Forum piece on the ABC with an earlier reincarnation of Mark Latham. I’ve finally tracked down the transcript.

Money quote:

SENATOR JULIAN McGAURAN: I do believe in the Easter Bunny.

MARK LATHAM: Do you? Well, that says it all. Game, set and match.

But, wait, there’s more!

TONY JONES: Julian McGauran, I can’t let you go without asking you about this. I think you were the first politician to take advantage of the politicians boot camp idea. Did the discipline do you any good?

SENATOR JULIAN McGAURAN: A bit of discipline did me some good. It wouldn’t hurt Mark to go in either. I wonder when he’s going to sign up.

MARK LATHAM: Julian, I can’t keep up with you Tories. I mean, you’ve got Downer doing karaoke, you’re in the boot camp, Heffernan’s getting around like Inspector Gadget.

I can just look on in wonder.

TONY JONES: Did the boot camp do you any good?

SENATOR JULIAN McGAURAN: It was fantastic. The aim was to go to the sharp end of where our decisions are so often made in Parliament.

TONY JONES: A bit of cold steel.

SENATOR JULIAN McGAURAN: I joined ‘D’ company who were just about to go off to East Timor and I saw the activities that they undertake prior to leaving.

TONY JONES: Finally, Mark Latham, I know you probably don’t want to be put in the role of a music critic but how do you think Alexander Downer’s performance went down?

Will it enhance our international reputation or otherwise?

MARK LATHAM: He looked like a goose. That’s the bottom line. It’s not the first time he’s looked like a goose. He’s known for fishnet stockings and the like. I suppose for politicians it’s hard, isn’t it?

One of the criticisms is we don’t do the things that ordinary Australians do. Tony, believe it or not, there are tens of thousands of Australians out there singing tonight.

They’re not actually watching our program. So there’s a politician actually doing something but he’s on TV and he shouldn’t give up his day job.

TONY JONES: Julian McGauran, you’d have to agree he looked a little better in a tropical shirt than fishnet stockings.

SENATOR JULIAN McGAURAN: Well, what I will say is stop me if I ever stand up at a karaoke bar.

MARK LATHAM: In boot camp there would’ve been none of that. You would’ve been kicked straight out for such a floral shirt.

SENATOR JULIAN McGAURAN: Probably Alexander Downer should do a bit of time in the army.

TONY JONES: Mark Latham, what sort of duet do you suppose Peter Costello and John Howard would be doing right at the moment, given the opportunity?

MARK LATHAM: Not many harmonies. Not many harmonies at all.

TONY JONES: We’ll have to leave it there. Mark Latham, Julian McGauran, thanks to both of you for joining us tonight.

I had forgotten how long ago it was: July 27th 2001!

It’s a shame that Mark Latham and Julian McGauran are now too irrelevant to get back for a reprise interview.

What are the chances that the Optus technician who came around to decommission our cable television service yesterday might have something to do with our cable Internet access dying at the same time?

It’s only going to take Optus two days to send another technician around to investigate what might be wrong. My idea of calling the technician who had been at our house two hours earlier didn’t seem to appeal to the call centre agent. They were keen to talk about how much it would cost me if it was my fault, but not very keeen to talk about compensation if the fault was theirs.

A great post on iPod design shortcomings at Mobile Community Design:

Hierarchy

You can usually identify a bad interface based on whether its primary navigation scheme is based on a tree hierarchy or not. If it does, it probably has not been structured around user task frequencies and it’s usually bad. The IPod is all about hierarchy. To get to a game you go to Extras>Games>Title (and often you need to reverse back out of some other part of the tree before you do it.) Small screens make it difficult to get away from tree structures, which is one of the reasons they need a larger screen.

Emphasis mine.

I’ll add my list of current niggles:

1. Can’t easily move to linear play from shuffle mode.
2. Doesn’t allow computer sync and headphone listening at the same time.
3. Doesn’t sync with Outlook sensibly for cross-timezone meetings.
4. Doesn’t allow me to edit playlists.
5. Doesn’t show me previous or next tracks.

I’ve used other players. iPod rocks in comparison. I do, however, agree with the conclusions of the article.

Mobile phones are starting to introduce music player functionality. Apple is likely to be overtaken by these mobile phone companies because they have the wireless networking infrastructure to facilitate media sharing and they already own our other pocket. Will we carry two devices when we could carry one? Only if the IPod can deliver a sufficiently superior social media experience. Think different Apple.

However, I have reservations about whether mobile phone manufacturers and mobile telcos have any desire to play nice when it comes to music DRM.

This post was written in response to OddThinking and Jacob Nielsen’s mention that a biography makes a blog more approachable for readers. I’ve duplicated this post as a permanent “About” over in yonder sidebar.

No picture yet. I’m working with witnesses on an identikit photograph.

Who am I?

My name is Chris. You can tell that from my posts.

No surname? I like to preserve a thin veil of anonymity so my current and future employers allow me some of the luxury of presenting myself as I would like to be presented. I describe myself as a “software guy” because I have worked as a “programmer” of some type since December 5th 1988. When I started working IT was called EDP. That was back when you could see the electricity that was doing the data processing.

I’ve been passionately in love with Jessica since 1990. In 1995 we were married. We have three beautiful children.

What is my field of expertise? Why should you read my stuff?

Maybe the title is too audacious. I have experience with many things. I’m not sure I can claim to know enough about them to call it expertise.

I have worked for a bank as a systems programmer. I wrote S/360 assembler, JCL, APL, NCL, punched cards for cheque sorting machines, wrote C code using trigraphs and did my best to stay away from COBOL.

I have worked for a defense contractor on a system involving aircraft and tactical environment simulation as well as avionics testing. We had fun convincing the RAAF that Booch clouds were harmless abstractions and not a joke we were playing on them, and that clouds were serious replacements for the substantial polygons of times gone by. We railed against a machine that wanted 2167A and 1521 waterfalls and functional decomposition when we wanted to go all OO/Booch/Firesmith/Jacobsen and iterate our way towards mutual nirvana. “Smarter people than you wrote these standards.” Ouch.

We ISO 9000-ed. We CMM-ed. We worshipped at teh altar of Watts Humphrey. We nodded in recognition when Walker Royce said his father’s waterfalls were taken out of context. We went to the pub. A lot.

I have worked for a US-based telecommunications equipment and software company for a long time. I’m now called a systems engineer, but I find titles so limiting ;)

Politics? I think I’m centre-left. I’m not a card-carrying member of the Australian Labor Party, but I sleep with one. I have a strong interest in Australian, US, and other countries’ political landscape and issues.

I was an active member of the Australian Republican Movement for years before the convention and referendum. I didn’t like the model, the process, or the outcome. Thanks for asking.

I have an abiding interest in pop music. 80s pop. 90s pop. Synth pop. Techno pop. Anything with a hook, I’m there.

Why does Brainsnorkel exist?

I think I answered this quite well in a post called “Why Blog”:

I figure BS is that same radio program delivered from Sydney with no sound and better taste in music. It’s certainly not the second worst blog on the Internet. It is also very unlikely to be sued by the blog that aspires to be the second worst.

And why Brainsnorkel? Apart from BS being a good short form, there’s the explanation in the first post:

Why the brainsnorkel.com domain name?
1. URLs should be memorable
2. URLs should not require unique or difficult spelling
3. URLs should be a reasonably accurate representation of their content

2 out of 3 ain’t bad.