Jackson to make The Hobbit
Peter Jackson has decided to make The Hobbit. Excellent. We get to see Smaug on screen.
Peter Jackson has decided to make The Hobbit. Excellent. We get to see Smaug on screen.
Excellent Q&A session with Sir Richard Branson this evening at UNSW. He’s a very clear spoken, doesn’t use a lot of buzzwords (which was really noticeable when compared with the closing remarks of Prof Whittred, the faculty Dean) and is just plain understandable. Starting a business at abour age 15 and slightly dyslexic, Branson is the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. The hour session basically could be condensed down into four points:
1. You’ve got to get out there and take a risk if you want to get anywhere. That may mean laying everything out on the line.
2. The most important part to business is simple People. The audience basically adopted Branson’s mantra of “People people people”. Surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and that are different from you. Learn to delegate. He emphasised this again and again, that he has attributed his success to finding the right people, as it is the people that run the business. (Obviously, Branson doesn’t have time to run all the aspects of a business.)
3. Have a passion for what you’re starting up a business in. Don’t just do it because you think it will make money.
4. Have a good company name that you can attach a strong brand to. One that can be global, even if you never make it that far (you never know).
He also mentioned that people should stay away from banks as much as is possible in terms of obtaining initial funding, because they can be ruthless.
Also interesting was his thoughts on university. He noted that virtually none of the entrepreneurs of his generation were tertiary educated. Has the trend towards more of the population getting tertiary education changed things though? Perhaps. Branson acknowledged that university provides a very good safety net in terms of finding a job. However, with regards to entrepreneurialism, which is really only where the really massive gains can be made from, life changes as you get older. People become more conservative, getting tied down with relationships, perhaps mortgages and so on. And this conservative nature runs contrary to being an entrepreneur, which is all about getting out there and giving it a go, and to hell with the consequences (which in most cases is limited to corporate bankruptcy). Basically it’s a risk versus return argument.
Just a note on business failures, it seems to be that Australia’s business culture doesn’t foster entrepreneurialism as much as, say, America. Venture capital flows like water there, compared to here, and it seems that the Americans aren’t as perturbed about business failures (they just pick themselves off the floor, try again and start a new one).
One question he fielded was from a Com/Law undergrad who was wondering whether he should take up an investment banking job, or whether he should try starting up his own business first. The answer was for the latter, because the job, you can potentially fall back on, but a business idea is hard to go back to. First mover advantage.
Bumped into Kit outside afterwards, then decided to head back inside where we grabbed Branson’s autograph. Kev mobbed him and virtually fell down on his knees begging good Sir Richard to write his business philosophy onto the card (naturally: “people, people, people”).
As always, inspirational and deceptively simple, but, given that there are so few hugely successful entrepreneurs floating around, it’s not.
Lots of political activity as of late. Naturally Latham’s ascendancy to the helm of Labor gives the ALP a fresh shot of life, but I doubt that it will be enough to prevent Howard grabbing yet another term as PM. The Democrats are in turmoil (again). The drunkard, Bartlett, is refusing to step down, and I wonder if there will be a huge voter backlash during the next election? Actually, I was at a dinner last weekend where a certain Professor remarked to the table that Bartlett and Latham’s antics are nothing too outrageous. He noted that former PM Bob Hawke used to proposition women fairly frequently, and upon being rejected would toddle away spitting, “F*cking prostitute!” The media then was not as prominent as it is today.
Actually, I’ve always wondered what would happen if the coalition had a majority in both houses of parliament. Scary thought.
There’ve been a few shots fired at Justice Kirby in the SMH lately, fervently denouncing his championing of judicial activism. The latest has been by Padraic McGuinness. For many law students, Kirby’s activist and policy oriented judgments seem quite comfortable amidst the stodgy statements of the more formalist judges on the bench. Nonetheless, just as judicial activism twists things to create law (or at least reinterpret the law), formalist judgments can twist things to make them conform with age old precedent. This means judgments produced from both approaches can sit uncomfortably in the mind. McGuinness makes a very valid point about how policy research is the domain of academia, and not the judiciary, and therefore judges using “policy arguments” are in fact only appealing to their “common sense” and their own moral beliefs – which naturally may be incorrect. (However, anyone who’s read a Kirby judgment will know, by the sheer length of his writings and the amount of journal articles and international cases he cites, that his judgments are virtually research projects within themselves.) More telling is McGuinness’ point about how activism destabilises the certainty in law. And I think this is quite a strong point. An activist court could potentially create quite a lot of uncertainty for litigants. I don’t know what effect this would have, but can you imagine a whole bench filled with activist judges? Precedent would appear to be devalued.
It’s an interesting debate. Activism has its place (an example of the effects can be seen most lately in this link) and I certainly do feel comforted, to a limited extent, that activist judges do exist, but I’m not so sure that all the judiciary should be converting to activism en masse, as Kirby seems to be encouraging.
I’ve always said that in a firm whose core competencies are not in IT, IT support staff are grossly underappreciated. Anyway, one of the systems has been down for a while, hence a lot of sitting around at work and doing nothing. I guess when you don’t drive the profit line, and a lot of your work is to do with fixing problems which never should have happened in the first place, it’s hard to gauge just how much worth you’re contributing to an organisation. The ironic thing is that, most organisations simply cannot function without an IT department these days. It’s weird being on the other side of the fence, conscious of the fact that while we wait for the systems to come back up, the “slow and useless” ISD staff are working overtime trying to figure out what some user did to stuff things up.
Speaking of stuff ups, it is rumoured that UNSW hired an IT consulting firm a couple years ago to webify the student enrolment system in the form of “New South Student”. It was an absolutely horrible implementation, I think I have bitched about it before. Anyway, they’ve done an overhaul of the system and it looks nicer, and runs much smoother now: My UNSW.
Not a gigapixel camera. It’s “only” a gigapixel photo stitched together from a lot of individual photos shot with a camera with a big lens. Still, it’s definitely impressive. The only problem is that this technique can only capture still images. I can foresee someone mounting a grid of 16+ digicams in “parallel” and firing them off simultaneously to take high res images. Sort of like how they do the bullet time scenes in Matrix (where they spin the camera around Neo as he’s dodging the bullets), except the cameras are just arranged differently.
I’ve decided that I won’t implement MMS posting just yet. I intended to get it working for my overseas trip. I got around to writing up everything (the MIME parsing code, writing attachments to hard drive, constructing the post text etc) but I realised that I have no idea about how MMS works overseas. Firstly, the system is different from SMSes – I actually had to enable GPRS with Vodafone to get MMSes to work and I don’t know if, when roaming on overseas networks, GPRS/WAP will be automatically enabled and whether I can send MMSes. Secondly, the format of MMS messages (which are essentially e-mails with attachments) seems to differ with the network which may trip up the parsing code I currently have, and there’s no way to test otherwise. And there’s no way I’m debugging code while I’m on holiday :).
Technical note: Posting to your blog with a mobile device (called Moblogging which is a stupid term, imho) is not difficult. Essentially, most mobile devices (PDAs, mobiles, Blackberry and so on) can send e-mails. SMSes need to be routed through an SMS-to-Email gateway, such as Excell. They arrive at your mail server and get processed by a script. You might run a cron job to run your script which checks for mail every so often. You might automatically pipe it to your script in through a .forward file, or with Procmail, or similar. The script then parses the email (which is where the bulk of the work lies), then posts it to the blog (via a SQL call, XML-RPC call, etc).
Has anyone noticed how different countries call mobile phones different things? In the US it’s cell phones. In Australia it’s mobile phones. In Asia it’s hand phones.
Almost there… a busy, although quite monotonous week at work. Apparently when you’re at a computer for prolonged periods, you’re meant to refocus your eyes every thirty minutes or so to reduce eyestrain. It’s quite easy to do at work when you’ve got a window seat. For some reason, although the view is nothing special, I don’t get sick of looking outside – sort of like staring out of an airplane window. There’s something cool about seeing the storm clouds and rain roll in across the city too. But enough of my idiosyncracies.
Received news today that I got selected as a social justice Intern at the Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre for second session of next year! “The principal goal of the Program is to provide students with training and practical experience in research, writing and advocacy on aspects of policy and practice relating to social justice (especially the reduction of inequity and exploitation).” Should be a terrific experience!
Next Tuesday evening I’m going to hear Sir Richard Branson talk at UNSW. Definitely will be interesting to hear what he has to say.
Good, simple movie with a bit of everything you’d expect from old style naval movies. The ocean storm and battle scenes are excellent and really capture the scale of things. Apparently Big “I don’t want any of your fucking salmon!” Russ was a bit of a prick on the set though, but what else is new?
And with today’s exam over, another academic year is all over and three glorious months of holidays await. What’s ahead…
Not completely out of the woods… I have to mark a bunch of uni exams for an IS course by next Monday. Paintball on Saturday – a little violence always helps to reduce stress. A few dinners scattered around here and there. I have a short spate of work at Mac Bank starting tomorrow and running through to the 9th of December. Should be a nice injection of cash before I head overseas on the 10th. The itinerary is:
– 10/12/03: Sydney to Singapore
– 11/12/03: Singapore to Kuala Lumpur
– 19/12/03: Kuala Lumpur to Singapore
– 22/12/03: Singapore to Bangkok and Hat Yai
– 29/12/03: Bangkok to Singapore
– 6/1/04: Singapore to Sydney
Getting taken around KL by my hospitable flatmate who has asserted that the gastronomic tour he’ll take me on will be guaranteed to give me the runs. Which is really very unsavoury given the state of public toilets in Asia. Hopefully should catch the Return of the King in Malaysia on the 18th. The dollar has rallied nicely over the year, so much so that everything in Singapore is effectively 20% off. The Ringgit to Aussie dollar exchange rate is roughly 2.7 to 1. Shopping time! Time to put back on all that weight I lost by eating too many instant noodles over the exam period. Mmmm hawker food…
If you’re a long-term reader of this site, you’ll notice I’ve been to Thailand twice in the last couple years. The reason why we’re going for a third year running is that it’s my grandfather’s 80th birthday. He seems to have some bizarre and objectionable fascination with Bangkok (I’d rather not dwell too deeply on the reason why) which is why the family is “humouring him” and going there AGAIN this year. Ah well, the upside are those damn nice Thai massages…
Before I head off, I hope to implement MMS/PXT posting to this website. Just need to write a MIME parser and something to handle image linking. When I get back, it’s time to give this site a much needed overhaul, both front and back.
The judicial system moves fast in China. Despite the irony of being offed by the hitman you hired to kill/maim your husband’s mistress, what’s really scary is that the hitman was given the death sentence last Friday, and was executed yesterday. You can be sure that John Muhammad is going to spend more than 4 days on deathrow.
I am now getting so much spam in my mailbox that it’s getting hard to separate out legitimate mail from it. I’m sure I’ve inadvertently deleted some legit mails from people I don’t know (and perhaps even people I do) due to a trigger happy delete finger. I don’t use spam filters because they tend to produce false negatives. (It helps if you provide a decent subject title and type using capital letters where they belong.) Surely I can’t be the only one experiencing this problem?
Michael Jackson, King of Pop and alleged child molester, may be about to have another horrible year ahead, but the moonwalk is still cool. Here are some instructions on how to replicate it. Sounds like you’d have to wear out several pairs of socks before you can perfect it haha.
Absolutely spectacular site showing scrolling Panoramas of Japan. The main map is here, just blindly click and you’ll get the photo for that location. This pic is extraordinary, just the sheer amount of lights.
I’m sure they’re prizewinners and all, but they still look absurd.
Jonathan Brandis is reported dead at 27. Quite shocking actually.
Another great Wired article. This one’s on autism and prodigious savants. Interesting observations on the link between music and maths, and between tonal languages and perfect pitch (what they call “absolute pitch”). A friend back in high school had perfect pitch – he also got his piano LMus in Year 11 or so. We’d hum notes to him and he’d immediately tell us what note we were humming. He was also an incredible thespian and debater who could come up with intricately structured speeches at the drop of a hat without ever needing palm cards or notes of any kind. There was one occasion, I am told, where, during a play, he had finished reciting a few lines that were in verse/rhyme. There was a mishap backstage, which resulted in a delay in the next actor appearing… so to stall for time and without skipping a beat, he ad libbed a few more lines in verse so much so that the audience didn’t realise that he was actually improvising. Scary stuff. How much normality would you trade for a “dash” of autism?
We’re not having much luck with freshwater crabs. The one Dave got for his 21st a few months back died suddenly the other day. It had the entire tank to itself, so the cause is unknown. Meanwhile, the mother yabby moulted while her babies were still hanging on to the underside of her tail. Yabbies eat their old shell to regain some calcium, so the babies were chomped up too. By the time we realised the moult had happened, the father had already dragged the tail shell back into the log to munch on. Oh well, apparently they breed several times during Spring/Summer, so there may be more on the way. And we now have a vacant tank to relocate any new babies.
Fact of the day: Sea cucumbers can defend themselves by a process called auto-evisceration. It’s exactly what it sounds like. They eject most of their internal organs through their asshole in order to distract their predator. They can still “eat” by absorbing nutrients through their skin. Incidentally, they are used in Chinese cooking (hmm, a self-gutting animal, that would make the cook’s job easier) although I never found them tasty. They have the consistency of a slug.
Some financial analysts with a bit of spare time on their hands place the Aussies ahead of the Poms on the weekend: PDF (50Kb). Some bias may be present in assigning factor weightings.
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10:47am (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 