Swandives

I was noodling about on Facebook - with the new design, you really have to go looking for your apps so it had been a while since I’d checked in on LOLcats. I took a gulp of water, clicked ‘new kitty plz’ and this one came up.

more animals

I almost sprayed my wee Macbook!

Human rights. It’s a pretty big deal. It’s one of the reasons journalists are always harping on about The Great Firewall of China, which censors internet content and (in)famously marked the moment when Google went against its corporate values and became evil.

And if the Federal Government has its way, Australia will soon have a great firewall of its own.

At the moment ACMA is trialling an ISP-level filtering system which, ostensibly, is aimed at helping parents protect kids from the more unsavoury aspects of the web. I can understand the challenges parents face in this regard - it’s a bit of a minefield if you’re not technically savvy, and kids generally have it all over mum and dad/gran and pop when it comes to Net nous. The worry, however, is the ‘ISP-level filtering’ aspect.

The problem with the plan currently on trial is what starts out as a mild-mannered idea to save the children ends up as internet policing. It’s not so big a jump to go from this level of filtering to filtering for copyright breaches, for example. It’s known in industry parlance as scope creep. Innocuous enough under normal standards. Far from it when we’re talking about our right to access the internet as an essential service. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe it will stop at saving da kiddies.

Filtering would be mandatory in homes and schools and would be based on a blacklist of prohibited content. The arguments can get quite technical but it boils down to expense, slowing everything down and the potential for sites to be incorrectly filtered.

Electronic Frontiers Australia has set up a campaign webpage at http://nocleanfeed.com. I must admit, I’ve signed the petition. And you can follow all the commentary on Twitter if you’re registered - just search for #nocleanfeed.

Found on YouTube: Footage from the Leeds festival of Adam Hills‘ (from Spicks & Specks on the ABC) standup where he sends his prosthetic leg off crowd surfing while he sits on stage and sings Footloose. Very amusing! A mild warning: the language is understandably colourful, but only if you’re very easily offended.

Sad but true. Here’s a snapshot from Akismet livestats with, gasp, 22 hours to go for the day!

* 6,375,115,334 spams caught so far
* 551,189 so far today
* 89% of all comments are spam

That’s right - 89% of all comments are spam. How awful is that?! Worse is that spam comments obviously work, else that figure wouldn’t be so high. And what I find so malignant about it all is that it drowns out the real conversations. In that respect, spam really does live up to its namesake, a la the Monty Python skit.

Akismet’s tracking shows exponential growth in spam since it began tracking in 2005 and while stats can always be argued (such as the increases in efficiency of weeding out comments since the service began, the level to which the stats are tied to Wordpress and so on), the trend is hard to ignore. Real comments (which Akismet calls ‘ham’) are also growing, but nowhere near spam levels.

I’m putting it out there, in the hope that universe will provide (or already provides, and I just need to be made aware it exists):

Please sir, I want a universal status updater.

What’s a universal status updater? Well, I don’t know if I’m having a ‘the future is now’ moment here, but it’s a little application that allows you to automatically update the status on all your social networks without having to log into each one and do it manually. I don’t even use Twitter and without even noticing, I suddenly have five statuses that need regular feeding:

• Live Messenger
• Facebook
• MediaConnect
• LinkedIn
• MySpace (ok, so I don’t use this one regularly, but it’s there nonetheless)

Wouldn’t it be good if you could just enter your status once and have it update everywhere automatically? OK, there are some issues, such as ‘do I want my FB status, which is largely social, to also appear on my professional LinkedIn profile’? But you can get around that by only using it for universal status updates, and going in for the manual update on sites if you don’t want everybody in the universe to know what you’re doing.

There must already be something like this out in the world. Whatsit called and does it work? Anyone…anyone…Bueller….

If not, we can call it USU. Sit USU sit - good dog!

UPDATE: If you do use Twitter and want to publish your Facebook status on the service, I suggest the method outlined by Jeff Sandquist from Microsoft. It’s only one way tho; you can’t use Twitter to update Facebook, from what I understand. 

UPDATE2: And the Twitter app lets you use Twitter to update FB.  I must admit, I’m a teeny bit scared of using it, coz it seems to be an all-or-nothing approach, but I’ll be brave and jump right in shall I? Of course, it’s not a USU but it’s fun to play around with.

If there was ever a laugh out loud moment on the interwebs, it was this comment from the live stream on Big Brother. Attributed to Rebecca and Bridget - I kid you not, it’s word for word. Hilarious!

Our passion is bikini modelling”

I’m sure many blokes will be stoked. And, you need a passion in life. It’s very admirable.

Been offline a bit this week - namely because we upgraded our broadband connection, triggering a cascade of technical issues. Modem wasn’t configured for new speedier connection, ISP said it was, upgraded firmware, that failed, rang technical support three times, eventually put my foot down and made ISP send us a new modem, setup tool didn’t work with our operating system so had to configure manually. Very frustrating, and I’m reasonably cluey on technical matters - I still think the level of service provided by ISPs in Australia leaves a lot to be desired. Some are good, but most are bad. It’s a sad indictment when you come to expect dodgy levels of customer service as being ‘normal’ but that’s technology for you. Also, being technically literate can be very frustrating when you call tech support - I hate it when I know more than the other person on the end of the line (largely because I know how little I actually know).

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the internet’s working and it’s way faster than anything we’ve had before - even if it’s still at the lower parametres of the accepted speed. And by far the best upshot of it all is that Joost, a program I have tried to run on various systems for at least 12 months, now works on my computer! I never thought I’d see the day. Now all my schlock TV needs have been met and I’m one very happy camper. More than 400 channels and 20,000 shows, most of which I’ll never bother watching because they’re pretty dire. But why would you bother with pay-TV, which is essentially the same thing? I have seen the future, and I like it!

So it’s the last day for voting and I head over to the YouTube awards channel. And, pretty much at random, I click on Randy Pausch’s ‘Last Lecture’ in the inspirational category. In recent times I have found I get a lot out of inspirational stories, even though in the past I may have dismissed it all as sentimental and therefore somehow unworthy of being useful. At about one and a quarter hours long, this YouTube clip is waaay above the commonly accepted two minute timeline for web video. But it’s worth every. single. minute. Randy Pausch is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, but that’s only part of the story. If ever there was a lecture that defined inspiration, this is it.

With all the hullabaloo, hand wringing and haggling surrounding Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al, it’s easy to become complacent and cynical about the social networking phenomenon.

Then something happens to remind us of the potential positive power these networks have.

Today, thousands of Australians have in their own small way helped reconciliation in this country - making a profound statement simply by updating their social network status of choice. All over Facebook, for example, individuals are saying sorry. And suddenly, it’s not just our government making an apology in parliament - it’s about Australians being part of that sentiment. Which in turn makes it more than just sentiment. Now that’s powerful.

Sometimes, being right sucks. It took Channel 9 nine weeks to completely screw up the programming for Moonlight. Actually, it took seven weeks, seeing as they managed to screen episodes eight and nine out of order. Now, instead of watching noir cute vampiry goodness, I am here venting. That’s right - three episodes of season one to go, and the show has been taken off air indefinitely. Now, I know the writers strike in the US is playing havoc with programming, but these episodes are in the bag. There is no excuse not to show them - and certainly no excuse to take the show off air for a Leonardo Di Caprio movie rerun, which is what they’ve put in its place.

As a general rule, I don’t BitTorrent television. But I will make an exception for arrogance.

And, if you think I’ve got my tits in a knot, I suggest registering with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and reading the Aussie comments on its message boards regarding this. People are mad, Channel 9. They hate you. And your current viewers are starting to shuffle off this mortal coil. That can’t be good.