Anniversary Service, Firefox, Workload Issues, Land Tax

[tcpip]

Gave the 152nd Anniversary Service at the Melbourne Unitarian Church yesterday. An extremely good turnout, over 80 people, with the Brigidine nun, Sister Brigid Arthur giving an address on the human face of asylum seekers. As the above link indicates, I made sure the readings and words were in a common theme. After lunch Actors for Refugees provided a troubling performance based on real interviews and experiences ("Something to Declare". Very pleased to discover that the group was actually co-founded with an old friend of mine, Kate Atkinson (Karen in SeaChange).

On Friday I attended the Melbourne launch party of Firefox which was a pleasant gathering of hackers at the Vault Bar. Is there anyone out their in el-jay land who reads this who is still using Internet Explorer? If so, why?

My workload last week, and this upcoming week, is going into overload. I now have another major website to develop, including lots of Flash, whistles and bells etc, for James Nicholson, who is an extremely competent hair stylist who won the Apprentice of the Year award in 1995, worked for Chrissie Parrot, has had his worked splashed on every major glossy in Australia and spend some time working in Paris and Tokyo.

With four major paying webdesign clients and my usual networking tasks, I'm finding time management difficult - although I have managed however to squeeze in almost daily modifications to my PhD in the quest to reduce it from 160,000 words to 95,000. Damn, I have to include footnotes in the word count. Grrrr.

One thing that I must admit is time consuming is my weekly ICT newsletter, Red Friday. The latest issue has a feature article on how to be kind to people who work in technical support, along with the second article in a series on networking and the first in a series on on maths for computer programming

I've started little nation in Jennifer Government/Nation States, just to see how the game engine works. It seems pretty limited, but unlike many, I've been trying to play the game sensibly. On other gaming related news, Ten Thousand Islands is still running surprisingly well - play be email normally has a reputation for falling apart - and my favourite old gaming magazine Different Worlds has returned - after almost twenty years!

The Age is wrong on land tax. To claim that "Soaring land tax costs jobs, investment" is utterly false. Land tax is the only tax which encourages investment in productive activity rather than speculation. Meanwhile in Australian politics, the Labor Party has lost the plot</>, as
progressive policies continue to be dumped as Labor attempts to appeal to "aspirational voters", a strategy which will effectively destroy the very existence of the Party. Meanwhile, Family First now wants
biblical creation stories taught alongside evolution.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

And thank God (moo hoo hah hah) that education remains in the hands of the states - it means that Family First's push to include tendetious gibberish and fairy tales in a science syllabus will remain still-born.

Heh. They probably haven't realized that yet.

However, this sort of nonsense is going to cost all of us in the long run. Can you imagine how far behind Australia's science and economy would fall if our education system was run by Family First? :/

[shocko.livejournal.com]

Can you imagine how far behind Australia's science and economy would fall if our education system was run by Family First?

Yes, watch as our Universities are forced to establish chairs and faculties debunking this anti-family "round earth" theory....simpletons. Not that these silly bastards care - when the world goes pear-shaped, their Imaginary Friend apparently vacuums them off the face of the Earth, finally doing us all a favour by ridding us of them.

I miss out, because I find the idea that my will is subordinate to the murderous whims of a mythical Bearded Old Man On A Cloud Who Lives With All My Dead Pets more than risible.

Oh, and please feel free to cross post any appropriate variation of the above paragraph to any website where you find yourself arguing with Islamo-fascist Jihadi scumwads - it may induce a stroke in at least one of them, which will be one less for my children to deal with.

Personally, I can't wait for the Rapture. All those suddenly empty houses. It'll be a Looteriffic Theft-o-Rama!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I find "fundamentalist" interpretations of religious texts very saddening. It raises a book to the level of a deity.

At the end of the day these people need the gentle reminder that evolution is not a theory in opposition to creation theory. It's just that creation theory doesn't have a shred of testable scientific evidence.

I think everyone should be thoroughly versed in the talk.origins archive.

[strang-er.livejournal.com]

"when the world goes pear-shaped, their Imaginary Friend apparently vacuums them off the face of the Earth, finally doing us all a favour by ridding us of them."

Mutant Star Goats anyone?