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Important information from VicRoads

My motorcycle Gilera Learners Permit arrived in the mail yesterday (hideous photo) and with it three pieces of interesting information. The fact that two have absolutely nothing to do with driving is, I suppose, offset by the fact that the cost to the government is minimal.

But wait, the infomation is really valuable…

The Deafness Foundation advises “ALL WOMEN” that Rubella “*causes deafness and blindness in the unborn child*” — thank goodness the born child can hear and see!

But it gets better…. I bet you did not know that since December 1, 1999 it has been illegal to travel in a car boot without a seat belt!

And, according to Vic Roads this is one of the most significant changes implemented by the State Government (since 1999)

And finally, what is the *Floral Emblem* of Victoria? Sorry, if you don’t know you’ll just have to wait for your licence renewal letter to find out. You should be safe since Vic Roads haven’t changed the wording on the letter for the last eight years.

p=. Gumpy old man? YOU BETCHA

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Why have we become the Half Blacks?

Maybe I’m getting old and no longer like change… Half Black, or All Black?But who was the idiot who decided that the All Blacks have suddenly become the Half Blacks? As a staumch supporter I switched on to the NZ/Scotland World Cup match this morning and thought that I had the wrong match. Once over that, the whole game was ruined as a viewing experience as it was virtually impossible to tell the difference between the teams.

At least once an All Black player couldn’t make a pass because he couldn’t tell who was on his team!

BRING BACK THE *ALL BLACKS* — We are not the Half Blacks nor are we the Half Greys!

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White Pages Insanity

The White Pages in Australia are being updated now. The publisher, Sensis, appears to think that the Internet can make them insanely rich — the cost of a listing including an email address and web site address is over $600 per year! That’s 10 times the cost of a phone number listing, and I didn’t even ask how much extra it would cost to have the listing printed in bold print.

Bear in mind that the person who looks up your phone number in the directory is already committed to contacting you. Therefore, the added value of the additional contact information has to be very close to *zero*.

The profit margin on these listing must be approaching infinity. It would be interesting to know how many small businesses are suckered into this rip-off. Unfortunately the White Pages web site doesn’t even have details of the cost of listings, let alone any statistics.

To put this in context, a small business can buy 200,000 targeted visitors to its web site for about $600

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It’s good to be a Kiwi!

For the last couple decades the America’s Cup competition has (generally) made good to be a Kiwi.

Even though I haven’t lived in NZ since I was a young boy, I have resolutely held on to my Kiwi citizenship (and passport). During the cold war I argued that this was actually a measure of self preservation as I figured that if WW3 did break out, NZ would be close to the bottom of the list of targets and I could therefore return home to comparative safety.

I also thought that, in the days when I did a lot of travelling, the NZ passport would be close to the Swiss in terms of insignificance. This proved to be wishful thinking as NZ proceeded to ignore the rest of the world opinion and play sport with South Africa, as well as antagonise the USA with an anti-nuclear policy.

Well, *we* are now within the proverbial cat’s whisker of challenging for the Cup again.

And it looks like, for the third time in a row, I will be in Auckland when the races are held. The amazing euphoria of winning. The universal, palpable, despondency of loosing, And the general feeling of pride that a nation of about 5 million souls can take on the world in a high budget contest and win will hopefully be there to be experienced when I am in Auckland later this month.

And, of course, the continued success of the All Blacks helps too!

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I’m in MySpace

Earlier this month I took a look at MySpace and created my own “MySpace”:http://myspace.com/19seven

Tonight, I was taking a look at what was there and discovered that I can post to a “blog in myspace”:http://blog.myspace.com/19seven

I’ve posted a couple of thoughts sparked by that browsing including one that concludes…

bq. I am still at a loss to understand how most of the grown up world has completely forgotten that they were themselves mere portends of the End of The World when they were young themselves!

“Take a look”:http://blog.myspace.com/19seven

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A hostile network like the wild west without a sheriff!

I am constantly amazed at the difficulty I have convincing clients/friends and others that connecting a PC to the internet is one of the most dangerous modern activities.

It seems that the most prevalent attitude is *yes, but it won’t happen to me*.

Well, the truth of the matter is *it can, it will … and it probably already has!*

Here’s a quote from a recent report on “A Current Affair”:http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=127021

bq. Michael Roggenkamp is proof it can happen to anyone – he’s an academic specialising in information technology who had over $20,000 stolen from his savings account.

This, and hundreds of thousand more, was stolen with the help of a “trojan virus”, a simple software program that installs itself on your PC, collects your passwords, and sends them to the *bad guys* who then rob you blind. In this case, they were pretty greedy, emptying bank accounts over a few days. If they, the Bad Guys that is, were a bit more patient, they could probably skim funds from many accounts over periods of months or even years!

Anyway, take note of the title *The Internet is a hostile network like the wild west without a sheriff !* which is the by-line of “http://www.firewallguide.com/”:http://www.firewallguide.com/

Check it out, and make a genuine assessment of the risk that you face each time you fire up Internet Explorer.

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Never be caught short again

Did you know that some part of your taxes are spent by our Government on maintaining a “National Public Toilet Map”:http://www.toiletmap.gov.au/default.aspx?

Yep, sure is, just click on the link and before you can cross your legs you’ll have a full color map marking the location of the nearest public toilet!

The site proudly announces that it is “A project of the National Continence Management Strategy”:http://www.health.gov.au/internet/wcms/Publishing.nsf/Content/Continence-2 which has its own web site! No doubt these two fascinating sites help our bureaucrats spend the $4.5 million dollars per year that is allocated to this “Strategy”.

!{float:left; padding: 0 10px 0 0}http://nigelball.org/files/toilets.gif! Catering to the hi-tech enabled grannies (never leave home without your Blueberry to locate the nearest “loo”) has been taken to the extreme. Granny can quickly transfer her latitude and longitude from her GPS to her Blueberry to find her nearby relief.

Better still, the organised traveller can use this invaluable site to plan a trip by joining the public toilet dots between here and there!

For the record, at last count there were 3,210 public toilets in Victoria, and as the picture shows, I am lucky enough to have a unisex (long live Ally McBeal) toilet just 612 metres South West of my home.

I’m just dying to register with the site so that I can plan a tour of Greater Melbourne with the guarantee that I’ll never be more than 15 minutes away from the next toilet stop!

Happy travelling campers..

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How Scary is This!

Anyone even remotely connected with online developments, or who wants to be seen as an expert in some field, has to start their own blog. But how intimidating is the first day…

I’ve had a couple of experimental blogs, spent some time creating the template for this blog, and here it is, nothing posted.

All the blogs that I read on a regular, or semi-regular basis have hundreds of posts, huge archive sections. But I’m writing the very first entry in 19Seven today.

But then, I plan to publish here at least once per day, perhaps even more often. So within a few months there will be over 100 posts covering all sorts of topics that interest me.

Maybe it isn’t so bad after all. Every blog started with a blank page for at least one day.

You can find out a little more about this site “here”:/about