That means there about 2400 pages of readings we’re meant to revise. Hah. This is Week 14, next week is Stuvac, and then the week after that, the real pain starts. I am sooooo gone for Admin Law, the subject from hell. Is there anything more scintillating than the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth)? Oh no, I don’t think so. Time to get back to it.
Otto’s is in Woolloomooloo, on the wharf, near the famous Harry’s Cafe de Wheels. (Harry’s is probably famous more for the fact that it’s open late at night rather than having excellent meat pies – I find them rather ordinary.)
It’s an Italian restaurant (it claims to serve “modern Italian” cuisine, whatever that means) with outdoor seating faced towards a vista of the CBD skyline. Unfortunately, Sydney’s weather blew hot and cold yesterday, and the evening happened to be particularly cold. Even those big outdoor lamp heaters couldn’t completely ward off the wind and drizzle.
The food was pretty good, and the servings on the generous side for these types of joints. Seems like a reliable enough place to say that nothing on the menu will be a disappointment. I had a blue cod capaccio and a Wagyu steak. The steak weighed in at about 250g, which is the largest portion I’ve had of that type of beef. Wasn’t the best cut I’ve had – the fat was not really marbled in with the flesh, but separated out. With that high fat and oil content, it’s incredibly filling. So much so that dessert was out of the question!
Woolloomooloo Wharf. Those are apartments on the left.
Otto’s is great for a nice meal out, especially as the weather warms up in Summer and the sea breezes are refreshing, rather than chilling. The only thing I have to complain about is the lighting. Once darkness falls, you really can’t see what you’re eating, and that solitary candle on the table really doesn’t cut it.
Referring to posts made in the past is easy. What about the possibility of referring to posts in the future?
Often we’ll come across a bit of media news, such as the announcement of Google’s intentions to IPO. Obviously, such news doesn’t end there and its followed up, for example, with news of Microsoft’s rejected offer to “merge” with (ie, acquire) Google. However, in some cases, follow-ups happen months down the track.
Now, applying this to regular blog posts, sometimes people post about things that are in-progress. Visitors sometimes surf in, read a post, such as “I applied for Youth Allowance today”, and are interested in the outcome. Not being a daily visitor, they arrive back a month or two later, wondering if the application succeeded. Instead of having to trawl through a whole bunch of posts, wouldn’t it be good to be able to go back to an old post, and be able to find follow-ups from there?
Or if someone’s surfing through archives (maybe they arrived at the archive page through a search engine), and they want to find a follow-up post, it’d be good to be able to easily do that.
Now obviously, everything you make a follow-up post, you could go back to your old post and insert a link to the follow-up, but that’s a hassle. Here’s a solution. Perhaps someone would like to implement it in their CMS… I don’t have the time.
When writing a post that you know you will follow up in future, you flag it for follow up. So perhaps next to the post footer, which may read “Link | Comments (4)”, you add a little note, such as “Link | Comments (4) | To be followed up in future”. The last bit is a link to email the website’s owner to remind them to follow up the post if they’ve forgotten about it.
All the posts which are flagged are added to a combo box on the page where someone writes a new post (in this way it’s hard to forget posts which you were going to follow up, because the list is there everytime you make a new post). When you make a new post, you can select if it is a follow-up, and link it to the appropriate post via the combo box.
For the new post, the footer would be “Link | Comment (1) | Continuation from post #70”. The old post’s footer would be renamed to “Link | Comments (4) | Followed up in post #120”. You could also mark the new post for follow-up, and in this way you could daisy chain a series of ongoing posts.
Technically speaking, all you’d really need to do is add three extra fields to the table where posts are stored: followup (boolean), before, after. Before and after would be links to the relevant post IDs. Followup would, of course, be the flag that a post needs to be followed up. Add a bit of code and that’s it.
A Russian has made it into the Guinness Book of World records after being convicted twice of the same crime. In a case of what sounds like double jeopardy, the second conviction came ten years after the first. What a strange legal system.
Finally! I got all ten volumes of Cafe Del Mar, plus the 20th anniversary set. Go BitTorrent! (Yes, I am still on 28.8k dialup. Yes, it did take a painfully long time.) Still need the chillhouse mixes and a couple other ones though.
My favourite is still Volume 7. Jose Padilla’s stuff is the best. Bruno’s selections (Vols 8, 9) are rubbish, although Volume 10 does manage to redeem him.
That’s it. I’m not answering the doorbell anymore. No good can come out of it. I’ve had countless telecomm salespeople, religious nuts and midnight parcel delivery psychopaths. However, this afternoon was a watershed for traumatic door encounters.
So someone buzzes the door this afternoon. My ever-so-dependable “Stuart you answer the door” wussy flatmate happened to be legitimately indisposed at the time.
“Hello, I am doing door-to-door surveys, would you like to do one?”
“Erm, no sorry.”
“You get a scratchie.”
“Oh. Ok. Come right up.”
So this pudgy Asian girl bounded up the stairs and into my apartment, said, “Nice place you have here,” and launched straight into a rather lengthy self-administered questionnaire without any survey introduction at all.
Twenty minutes later, after answering countless mindnumbing questions on my softdrink drinking habits, I started questioning whether it was worth the scratchie. Example questions:
“Do you identify any of these drinks as masculine? What about feminine?”
“Do you strongly or slightly agree or disagree with the statement, ‘Solo is low on the fizz so you can slam it down fast?'”
To this, I just cracked up laughing and said, “Uh, I suppose so? Strongly?”
It did make me somewhat self-conscious when she asked, “What softdrink types do you know?” and I rattled off a list so fast that she had to ask me to repeat it several times because she couldn’t keep up (and all she had to do was circle the brands). I guess we are all guilty of consumerism when we can run off a list of 10 different
softdrinks without thinking. I was relieved when the demographics section, signalling the end of the survey, arrived.
“Would you be interested in participating in any focus groups?”
“Definitely not.”
“Do you have an internet connection? Yeah? What about our online research program?”
“Hmmm, yeah ok.”
I got this really weird look from her, like she didn’t realise how much more comfortable it is to answer questionnaires online. Anyway, she took down my contact details, and it was only when she asked for my e-mail address that I thought it probably would have been wise to ask her if there was a privacy policy or something attached to the information I was giving. And it only occurred to me because the event of disclosing my e-mail
address signalled, “Spam! Spam! Spam!” in my head. So I gave her an email address I had set up for situations like this.
Luckily, she later pulled out a slip of paper disclosing Millward Brown’s privacy policy, passed me two scratchies, and a slip of paper to sign. That’s when things got… interesting. As I was filling out the piece of paper, she continued asking rapid-fire questions and
talkingreallyfasteventhoughthesurveyhadfinished:
“So you’re a uni student right? What do you study?”
“Law.”
“Oh cool, at New South?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Ah, so what year are you in?”
“First year.”
This always elicits a quizzical look, because I don’t look like I’m 18 (despite what the cinema box office staff think), so inevitably I had to follow it up with an explanation.
“Oh this is my second degree. I did an IT degree first.”
“So how long was your first degree?”
“Four years.”
“And how long is law?”
“It’s another three years, yeah it’s a long slog!”
“Damn. I can’t imagine studying for five years, let alone seven…”
“Ah, but uni life is excellent. The only problem is that you don’t make money while you’re doing it!” I joked.
“Yeah… so you’re like… poor.”
“Uh…”
“Don’t you feel like you need to work? And why is law taking so long?”
“Well, in my first degree, I worked for about 18 months full-time and decided from that that the working life could wait.”
“Why didn’t you do law at the start? Didn’t you get the marks?”
“Yeah I did, but I wanted to do IT, and the course I did meant that I couldn’t do combined law at that stage.”
Quizzical look. More explanation required. A disturbing suspicion and discomfort growing.
“I got a scholarship for IT which meant that I couldn’t combine it with law, hence the longer time it takes to do the two degrees separately.”
“Oh wow, you got a scholarship?”
“Yeah.”
“At New South?”
“Yeah.”
“And now you’re doing law?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you really smart?”
What the? How the fuck are you supposed to answer a question like that?
“I’m alright, I suppose,” I muttered with a disturbed chuckle. Cue the bomb.
“Do you have a girlfriend?–“
“Uh… I–“
“–do you want to go out with me?”
I think I held my composure in a physical sense, but it took me a split second to regain my mental composure, which had been momentarily obliterated. (She was quite unattractive, by the way – that’s an important point.)
“Look, I don’t know you. And all you really know about me is that I drink too much Coke for my own good.”
“Oh…”
She left soon afterwards.
I felt violated. And I only won a measly $4 off the scratchies.
So, no more doorbells. Unless they’re really good looking.
Came across this quaint phrase yesterday: Hobson’s Choice. A Hobson’s Choice is where you really don’t have a choice.
Hobson’s choice is said to have had its origin in the name of one Thomas Hobson (ca. 1544-1631), at Cambridge, England, who kept a livery stable and required every customer to take either the horse nearest the stable door or none at all.
In 1914 Henry Ford offered customers of the Model T a famous Hobson’s choice, making it available in “any color so long as it is black”.
As I said, quaint.
Another very interesting Wired article:
In 1974, a Harvard sociologist made a seemingly unremarkable discovery. It is, in fact, who you know. His study asked several hundred white-collar workers how they’d landed their jobs. More than half credited a “personal connection.” Duh. But then it got interesting: The researcher, Mark Granovetter, dug deeper and discovered that four-fifths of these backdoor hires barely knew their benefactors. As it turns out, close friends are great for road trips, intimate dinners, and the occasional interest-free loan, but they suck for job leads and blind dates – they know the same people you do. In other words, it’s not so much who you know, but who you vaguely know. Granovetter called the phenomenon “the strength of weak ties.” He had discovered the human node.
I reckon uni is a microcosm for social networks. As for human hypernodes in uni… you know the people I’m talking about.
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? Intriguing article written in 1982 about the diamond trade and how the market forces are carefully regulated by the De Beers cartel. I though the 40% premium idea was a particularly nasty, but clever, piece of work. Compare with this Wired article, over 20 years on.
Google thinking of IPO… via online auction. I-Banks queasy about US$500m in fees that they could have just missed out on. How typical of a company like Google to attempt something like this: “If Google really does bypass this system in favour of an online auction a revolution could ensue.” That may be a bit dramatic, but it’s definitely an interesting situation, seeing what Google decides to do.
There’s a stick of OCZ 512MB PC3500 High Performance Ram up for grabs if you design a good sub-200kB 468×60 ad banner for Yen Industries. See here for more details.
Read the third set of Salvatore’s Drizzt books during the last holidays. As a quartet I really liked its variety, how it kept moving through different scales and environments. The fourth book, Passage to Dawn, was a really refreshing read (the wizard duel between Harkle and Robillard was a classic), although the “surprise” at the end during the showdown with Errtu was fairly predictable. Pirates of the Carribean actually reminded me of Passage to Dawn quite a bit, which is probably testimony to the rollicking good fun that Pirates was.
Daylight saving is back. It’s the start of Week 13 tomorrow. That means exams are three weeks away. Luckily, after a long week, all the assessments and assignments for this session are out of the way. Had a crim law presentation on attempted crimes, followed by a gruelling finance exam on Tuesday (let this be a lesson that while it is possible to learn, virtually from scratch, an entire semester’s worth of Applied Valuation over three evenings, it is most definitely not recommended). Got a couple of assignments back and it never ceases to amaze me how savagely they mark law essays. Went to Oktoberfest in which I performed my bi-annual test to check if my alcohol allergy was still around. Yep, it was. I think UNSW smashed through Macquarie’s pitiful world record for people drinking shots on the same day.
Elsewhere…
– iTunes? This is me. Although a Winamp 5 beta has been released. It’s version 5 and not 4 because it’s Winamp 2 + 3. What is with companies and version numbers? Even Adobe has caught on, naming their latest version of Photoshop as “Photoshop CS” which stands for Creative Studio, I think.
– New 5MP Sony digicam with zoom lens that’ll comfortably fit in most pockets. Very nice.
– Warren, of Virgin 5c SMS messages fame, has a web site. *Shudder*
– Native Koreans tend to have a very difficult time grappling with English, but I don’t think resorting to surgery (“frenotomy”) is the panacea to your child’s pronounciation problems. I’m pretty sure that all Australian-born Koreans have no problems with the Aussie accent.
– Google hunting for I-Bank to underwrite its IPO, wants US$16bn valuation. I’d invest.
Well… this film had its moments. I think Shan and I were the only two people in the cinema cracking up at the lawyer in-jokes (which weren’t all that funny, come to think of it).
– The most powerful diesel engine in the world. It’s 2300 tonnes.
– Toshiba e800: the first Pocket PC with a 640×480 resolution screen.
Interesting…
The Sydney Morning Herald has been publishing, or at least archiving, Target on the Web since 18th March 2002 – http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/puzzles/2002/03/18/target.html – or maybe the 19th because the first two are the same. Two things to note:
* The previous day’s solution (i.e. the last non-web Target) was TERRORISM.
* This year’s Iraq war started on, what, the 19th or 20th of March, depending on your time zone? So the one-year anniversary of Target being published on the Web, give or take a day.Now I know that the SMH takes Target verbatim from some UK newspaper, I forget which. It could quite possibly also be published in other papers in other countries, particularly within the Coalition of the Willing.
Tentative conclusions:
* Could newspaper puzzles (Target, crosswords, Wordwit) be a transmission medium for details of US “military targets” or, as they are more commonly known, “foreign policy”? (And is this going to turn me into John Nash?)
* Conversely, might it be possible to affect world events by heaping, say, foreign place names into a crossword that George W is known to take a shot at (or at least read the solutions for in the next day’s paper)? Word/name familiarity is fairly well known to affect decisions, that’s why stupid but memorable ads sell products… this would effectively be a form of subliminal advertising, but for potential military targets instead of shampoo.I should get back to work now.
– Shish
So should I.
– French magistrate tossed off the bench… for tossing off behind the bench.
– Star-wars themed Home Theatre. Very nice.
Recently, the definition of “Nebuchadnezzar” came up in a game of Balderdash. A while later, a question was asked at trivia about how many bottles of champagne did a “Magnum” hold. A couple days ago I got a “Split” of champagne for making the mooting semifinals (we actually won our moot, but they were running three moots for the semis and only took the top two winners). So, due to the abnormal spate of champagne references in my life, I decided to check up on these curious names. I adapted the list below from this website.
Split: 200 ml
Fillette: 375 ml
Bottle: 800 or 750 ml
Magnum: 2 bottles
Jeroboam: 4
Rehoboam: 6
Methuselah: 8
Shalmaneser: 12
Balthazar: 16
Nebuchadnezzar: 20 regular-sized bottles
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12:33am (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 