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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2006-09-18 02:13 pm

"Busy as a Blue-Arsed Fly"

Apart from a veritable mountain of webdevelopment that I have to complete this week (currently half way through a 75 page site), tonight I also have to go to Boronia to do after-hours network forensics. In the meantime, have completed a draft of Tax Reform Australia. Please feel free to read, elaborate, criticise and, if you agree, join. Also managed to do a Tetum health booklet translation for Accents Ireland. Haven't slept much in the past few days.

Software Freedom Day was a big success; the Box Hill TAFE event apparently went well, as did the Melbourne Town Hall event and the Distribution Walk was completed within an hour. For our part, the Install Fest attracted roughly thirty people all told, including a couple of total novices.

Ran Cybernoia on Sunday; player-characters had been kidnapped and shipped off to a communications dead-zone in Fjordland, New Zealand. Were approached by their old employer who babbled on about "transformation of the human species" and required them to do an "kidnapping" of a goddam alien scientist. After crashing their 'copter and blasting their way out of the Christchurch compound, they eventually made it back to base where they took a quick jet the Cairns Space Station. In other words, it was damn good fun.

"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached, speaketh the Pope. The Islamic world is unimpressed. Some seem to justify the claim. Is it part of an agenda? Or just a big whoops?

On topic, [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya and I had the misfortune of overhearing a rather aggressive Anglo-Australian telling some Lebanese youths to "shut up and speak English, you're in Australia now" etc on the tram during SFD. Not being the people to let such comments pass, we came to the defense with justly seething remarks. I reminded the twit that "English" is not an indigenous language to Australia either. This is the second time [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya in recent weeks has witnessed direct, aggressive racism on Melbourne's public transport. It is the ugly side of recent public debates about "Australian values" and insulting restrictions to citizenship rules

[identity profile] jennifergearing.livejournal.com 2006-09-21 11:25 am (UTC)(link)
I saw a couple of older Indigenous Australian women on the bus the other day, conversing in what I assume was their native dialect and one of the other people on the bus made some snide comment about how they should go home if they weren't going to speak English. One of them very calmly turned to him and said that they were speaking the language of this country, and perhaps he should go home because he wasn't speaking it.

I spent the rest of the busride grinning like a loon.

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2006-09-21 01:53 pm (UTC)(link)

*RESOUNDING APPLAUSE*

"Get ye back to Essex!"