Swandives

You know, I’m not surprised that it was Microsoft, not Google, that ended up with the share in Facebook, as reported here in the SMH. FB is actually a closed system and, if you read the term and conditions, it’s very, very proscriptive. I think it would appeal to the Big M’s business sensibilities in all the right ways. Just my 2 cents.

Confession time. I just Googled the names of all my ex-boyfriends - in the name of research, of course - and none of them come up in the first page of search results. Very disappointing! How am I supposed to find out what they’re doing now and think about how much more wonderful my life is without them if they insist on being anonymous nobodies? Personally, I Google extremely well - they can all find out what I’ve been doing and how brilliant I am; I think it’s only courteous that I should be able to do likewise. This is the internet age after all - nothing’s sacred.

Phew! What a week! Bring on the weekend I say.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and signed up with the lovely people at Dreamhost. Swandives has long been hosted by this group, but I’ve been piggy backing off Justicle’s bandwidth. But it’s time to stop the leeching methinks.

I’ve also started a blog for me mum, Carol. She’s an artist and paints the most gorgeous things. It will be nice for students to be able to leave comments and so on, I think. In the meantime, have a great weekend.

Where would we be without Alan Ramsay? He has written a very interesting piece in the SMH about the pulp mill in Tasmania. Very interesting indeed. An excerpt:

Note the binding date of the length of the approval. Fifty years. Gunns Ltd now has watertight legal standing from the Australian people, courtesy of a government and a prime minister so thoroughly on the nose with voters they’re headed for imminent electoral defeat, to go on destroying, for the next half century, what remains of Tasmania’s magnificent old-growth forests for woodchipping fodder for a $2 billion pulp paper mill in the Tamar Valley, south of Launceston.

The incumbent government is not the only one at fault here either, as this piece also notes. I saw Peter Garrett toeing the party line on the news last night. It made me so sad. Midnight Oil has always been one of my favourite bands and, in a matter of about 20 seconds, he undid 20 years’ work. This is why politics is an evil profession - it forces people to compromise their ideals until there is nothing left. Sigh.

So I was doing some grocery shopping at Woolies after work today. They’ve been refurbing the store so I’ve had to wander down half a dozen aisles before I found anything - and look what I stumbled across:

Uh oh. It’s begun already. A wall of Chrissie choccies and bikkies and lollies and all the other -ies you can imagine! No escaping it now.
Christmas is less than 12 weeks away!

Oh joy! Oh rapture! The Arcade Fire, my favourite band at the moment (I’m completely besotted) is playing the Big Day Out next year. I’ve been waiting all year for them to tour Australia. I’m very excited.

A great presentation by Karl Fisch, who writes an interesting staff development blog for educators about the use of technology in schools (at least, that’s what I took from it).