Author: Dave

Purry and furry

Today was one of those days where you really appreciate having a cat.

Simone was on call last night, so although I didn’t fare as badly has her, I lost a fair bit of sleep from her being called a number of times.

Then I has a pretty average day, with several quite sick patients that needed sorting out.

Finally trafic was quite scarey on the drive home, with a nasty habit of changing collective speed from 105kph to 35kph with little or no warning (I had to throw out the anchors on several occasions).

So to arrive home to Jack being cute, fluffy, and friendly, was just glorious.

Fuzz therapy goes an awfully long way to making the world better at times like that.

Socknapping

For whatever reason, Jack seems to love stealing socks.

This is most amusing and inconvenient when you’re running late in the morning and put a pair of socks on the bed while you’re putting your shirt or trousers on, and at the opportune moment when you are incapacitated by having one and a half legs in your pants, or the shirt over your head, Jack will tear in, grab the socks and tear out of the room with them, and then of course it becomes a little game for him of scamper around while daddy alternates between laughing and ineffectually trying to retrieve his socks.

Great amusement for all really.

Water and power from poo

Straight from the “How we should really be using our brains” files, comes this story about the guy who built the segway (if you have no idea what that is, have a look at the site: they are an astounding piece of engineering, but are equally a spectacularly frivolous toy in almost all applications) who has designed a 1kilowatt power plant and a ~1000L/day water purifier system that work by burning cow dung (or for that matter, just about anything you can find that you can set fire to…).

The notion is that if they can get the price of production down, and put one or two in each small african and asian village, then the villagers will have clean water (which in effect = no water borne illness, which = decreased illness, increased productivity, and better lives) and power for small applications (like a community refrigerator, or a light bulb in each house (which will allow them to spend evenings in recreation, education, or further productivity)).

For all the brilliance and creativity of our modern science and engineering, there are far too few of these ideas being developed as far as I can tell, and so we must loudly aplaud this guy for his genius and his social responsibility.

More thoughts on copyright

The BBC has an interesting discussion piece about the appartent push by certain industry lobby groups in Britain to extend copyright from it’s current 50 years.

Regular readers will be quite familiar with my opinions on matters of copyright and IP as it pertains to popular culture, so I will forgo my usual tired tirade, but the piece is certainly an interesting and quite fairly balanced discussion of the issue.

Celebrity confusion

It was very funny flicking past Oprah the other day long enough to watch her being utterly confused by the concepts of how the internet worked.

The guy who was explaining, who was using really basic terminology and analogies to explain the system, would explain how routers and network switches and DNS servers worked and Oprah’s brow just furrowed deeper and deeper. She seemed to kind of think that it all just went through the air, and had no idea how things (emails for example) found their way from their starting point to their intended destination.

Very funny to watch. Also very scarey when you consider that Oprah is apparently a pretty intelligent individual. Obviously not that tech savvy though..

Abortion debate?… Ah crap

It has amazed and irritated me for the last week or so hearing stupid politicians trundle out their “harrowing tales” of wives, partners and girlfriends who have had abortions and how it has affected the politicians lives, without realising that the thing they are debating has absolutely zero to do with the morality of abortion.

Abortion within Australia is legal within tightly defined pre-existing parameters.

This debate had nothing whatsoever to do with the legality or morality of abortion.

It was entirely to do with whether the health minister alone and with no oversight should be allowed to decide whether a safe method of carrying out a legal proceedure should be available, or whether this decision should be entrusted to the organisation that makes these same decisions on all other medications that are available in Australia, and who posess significantly more expertise in the fields of medicine, public health, pharmacology, and medical ethics than the health minister personally does.
If the politicians want to try and change legislation to outlaw abortion then they are perfectly welcome to try to do just that, and they can have their emotional stories, and they can have their fiery debates (and they can also loose the next election because they alienate the majority of the female vote, and they can live with the fact that women will go back to having so called “back yard” abortions, and they can have the many deaths which will result from this on their conscience).

Sticking it to China

Being someone who hasn’t let the fact that china has the world’s fastest growing economy distract me from the fact that it also has one of the most repressive systems of goverment*, I am mighty pleased to see this article in slashdot, which talks about a new piece of software which passes encrpyted packets to allow people in china (and other countries that monitor internet activity of individuals who want to read about such subversive ideas as “freedom” and “democracy”) to read pages that would otherwise be blocked by government firewalls, and to read them in a way that is theoretically undetectable.

Here’s hoping it works, and that it inspires others to release other pieces of subversive software to encourage freedom of information.

*which of course sets me apart from numerous other people, companies, organisations and governments who seem happy to turn a blind eye if there is a profit or advantage in it for them (microsoft, google, US government, we’re looking at you…).

Jack likes downhill

We had the Winter Olympics on last night and they had the downhill skiing on, and it turns out that Jack is a huge fan.

Well.. he likes intently watching the skiers and pouncing at the TV screen when it looks like the fast moving brightly coloured skier was coming close.

It really was most delightful to watch. The concentration was so amusing, and the leaping and jumping was a real hoot.

We really are terrible fur parents. Always talking about our little kiddy.. I mean kitty.. 🙂

A cat of simple tastes

AKA Fun with household items
In spite of us buying jack a fair number of not inexpensive toys, and having recieved even more toys from assorted family friends and well wishers, Jack seems to continue to delight in directing most of his attention to playing with inexpensive things that can be found around the house.

  • The duster
  • Paper from the office rubbish bin
  • The office rubbish bin itself
  • Socks
  • Just about any item of clothing hanging from a coat hanger within pouncing height
  • My computer cables
  • Toes
  • Towels
  • Toes again
  • The kitchen and front door mats

Given that he’s so easy to amuse it makes you wonder why we buy him toys at all…