I know I don't write blogs much, but since I'm bored, I might as well do one for now. Let's see, we've just had our hottest day here in Sydney since February. In my area it got up to 37.9 deg C (100.2 deg F for the Americans). It's cooling down for the rest of the week but we're just starting to get into the hot weather and there will be worse to come. Over the weekend was the Newtown Festival which was fun. They always seem to put it on the weekend just before my final exams for the year and they've got a lot of environmental and natural things there, so I go to the herbalist stand to get a ton of (legal) stuff that keeps me awake and reasonably happy without affecting my studies too much. Drinking the night before an exam is a bad idea, guys. The Japanese Film Festival is starting soon and I've got tickets to a few movies, which should be nice. Maybe I'll be writing a few more blogs soon. Once I've finished my last exam next week I've got summer break until the end of February so I'll have plenty of spare time on my hands. Music pick of the day: Eskimo Joe covering Gotye's hit "Somebody That I Used to Know". It's a great song, and it's just the kind of thing they'd do, although in a different style. The original version is -here-. Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well. Best wishes until next time!

Why must you run our lives so? Despite the Australian election coming up, with unpopular policies going out in the garbage, it's invariably the most controlling and disturbing ones that stay around. And they're the ones which get swept under the carpet.

Ranga and the Mad Monk are more than happy to bang on about (non-)issues like "boat people" and "sustainable population". Fine - but the amount of asylum seekers coming into this country are tiny (1.5% - or 0.5% if you only count the ones in boats) with regards to total immigration intake. We have to make a spectacle of ourselves by beating our chests and paying some tin-pot country like East Timor, Papua New Guinea or Nauru to look after them just so that they don't set foot on Australian soil, blowing billions of dollars in the process. And Labor thinks that we're going to reduce population growth without either reducing immigration or removing the incentives for people to have children? Weird. This morning, Mad Monk decided to chop the immigration quotas, but the problem is not so much too many people, it's that the infrastructure has been run into the ground because of state/federal bickering and underfunding which will continue regardless of who wins.

Meanwhile, the debate we're not allowed to have just keeps going on in the background without a word being uttered by the higher ups on either side of politics. The one that goes to the heart of democracy - freedom of speech.

On Wednesday, Melbourne International Film Festival had to pull one of its movies at the request of the Classification Board. Although it certainly isn't to everyone's tastes, being described by the creator as gay zombie porn", it is astounding that in this day and age we still have governments and government departments who don't seem to understand that if someone doesn't want to watch gay zombie porn, they would be sensible enough not to go to a gay zombie porn movie. Of course, the culprit is the legislation that makes the Aus film/video game classification system exist.

Material which is to be distributed or publicly screened must be passed with the Classification Board. This is not a problem in itself, as it is beneficial to warn people of things, like this, which may offend them. However, the regulations regarding the classifications put certain material outside any possible classification, meaning that the Board will refuse to classify it. This includes any video game deemed unsuitable for a 15 year old, material which "advocates or instructs" criminal activity, many types of porn involving consenting adults, and basically any stuff that the board thinks is disgusting. Despite this, apart from child pornography, this stuff is still legal to own and possess in all but one state. It's the "legal but we want you to pretend it isn't" category.

What is more insidious, though, is that the current Labor government has, since it won power in 2007, been quietly investigating plans to introduce a mandatory ISP-based internet filter which will apply to every user in the country based on a secret blacklist of material which will allegedly be refused classification. The blacklist has, in a slightly different guise, been running for a number of years on a voluntary basis for people using Net-nannies on their computers, and has leaked a number of times. It has contained websites for dentists, kennels, tour companies, videos on YouTube, anti-abortion sites, euthanasia advocacy and the list goes on - if you listened to Senator Conroy (the minister responsible), you'd be forgiven for thinking it was entirely child porn and bestiality content. Any site that proves embarrassing, such as the dentist, is fobbed off with incoherent remarks about it being hacked by "the Russian mob".

Not good enough, Conroy. If you were really serious about stopping child porn, you would axe the entirely useless filter and give the $43 million you're spending on it to the federal police agency which deals with stopping child abuse (which, incidentally, has had its budget cut by $5 million by this government).

And the same government is now thinking of logging our online browsing history. Not content in insulting our intelligence with regards to whether or not we can make up our own minds, the Attorney General's department released a consultation paper about it a few days ago. 90% of it was redacted with black pen because the information may lead to what they call "premature unnecessary debate" about the policy. Given that we're going through an election period, this is the perfect time to debate such policies, and it's certainly necessary to discuss freedoms before they're taken away.

I will be researching the stances taken by each person I am able to vote for and anyone who supports continuing this nonsense will be in a nice batch at the bottom of my preferences. I will also vote below the line. I urge any Australian users reading to do the same - if you live in Victoria, put Conroy dead last in the Senate ballot, or if you live in the electorate of Barton (the St George district of Sydney) put McClelland last for HoR.

And for readers elsewhere, please don't just ignore this. Australia has the rather unfortunate honour of being "pioneers" in these policies. One of the aspects of this is that for the filtering, Conroy and his crew cry "But Britain, New Zealand and Denmark do it!" while not mentioning the fact that the blocking is voluntary in those countries as far as ISPs are concerned and does not target such a broad range of material. The only countries which block and snoop this much at the moment are places like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Australian government doesn't want to be compared with them, but doesn't give any real explanation about the difference. I wonder why. When it's your turn, you'll be hearing "But Australia does it!" and we'll all hang our heads in shame. At least I'll try.

Just a reminder to any Australian users reading this who have turned 18 or changed addresses since the last election, if you haven't already done so, enrol or update your details NOW! They're closing the rolls on Monday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, so if you don't want to shell out the $50 fine for not voting do it now. Details and forms are at www.aec.gov.au - you can either fax, scan and email, or post the form (it needs to be postmarked on Monday, so it needs to be in the postbox before the time indicated). If you're not sure whether your enrolment is up to date, you can check it here at the AEC website. And anyone who needs to do a postal vote should send the forms in sooner rather than later.

To everyone else, sorry about wasting your time. :P

Ugh, it's impossible to get to sleep at the moment. Someone who lives nearby (I can't quite tell who) has a dog which sometimes barks, whimpers, whines and howls all night - so much so that by around midnight it sounds like it's got a sore throat and is even more annoying, while at the same time just upsetting. Not every night though. Presumably the owners aren't at home and the dog just misses them, which means that they don't even know what's going on and aren't doing anything about it.

What makes it worse, though, is that this ruckus causes all the other dogs in the area to join in, so it's not just one lonely dog keeping me up, it's a whole bunch of other dogs that want to know what's going on too. Even though I live under a flight path in an area with pretty noisy birds and can still get at least some sleep normally, I just can't stand this bloody dog.

Argh! :evil:

Hi everyone!

Just want to wish anyone who bothers to read this a great 2009 now that it's past midnight here in Sydney. Let's do our best to make it better than 2008 was!

I know I normally put up a picture of the fireworks, but they haven't been uploaded and it's a bit late. When I get an opportunity and can find one, I'll post a link.

From 2009,

LSyd

In case anyone was wondering, if you're going to try moving to another country which doesn't have a relatively open immigration system with your own, expect to be jabbed and prodded by doctors for weeks. It's not much fun being made to pee in cups and stand in front of an x-ray machine looking like you're being held at gunpoint or something. Even if you're only going there for a year.

Fortunately, that's all over for me now. I'd like to thank the nice doctor Danny who kindly put it through Medicare and made the government pay for it despite the fact that if you've got nothing wrong with you they don't want anything to do with it. The system works.

And since it rules, I might as well point everyone in the direction of the song at the top of the Japanese music charts (I've always had a thing for J-Rock). "Hakanaku mo Towa no Kanashi" by UVERworld. Enjoy.

Might as well do some blogging for a change. Haven't written one for a while, and the months ahead look like they're going to be a bit boring.

We all know what's going on in the US at the moment (and a friendly reminder to eligible US voters - go out and vote or I'll throw rotten cyber-eggs at you, it's not that hard!), but down here we've got "the race that stops the nation". At around 3:00 p.m. today (Tuesday) local time, everyone's going to sneak out of work and head to the nearest bar to watch what is probably the world's most popular horse race. Except for the Victorians, they get the whole day off. :evil:

Anyway, I've got $13 on it at the moment. If I win any reasonable amount, beer all around (or for people who don't like beer, Seppelt sparkling chardonnay). Offer does not apply to people who have not reached drinking age wherever they happen to live.

And maybe we'll have two sets of good news by the time I wake up on Wednesday. :)

First off, happy new year to everyone I haven't already said that to yet!

Just so that people don't start to wonder, I'm going to "sunny" Queensland in the morning (at least, it's sunny most of the time, but not right now when they're expecting cyclones) and will be back on the 14th if all goes well. It sort of defeats the purpose of going to the Gold Coast when it's pouring with rain, but we'll brave the weather regardless.

Maybe I'll head up to Brisbane to see what's going on up there, since it's infinitely better than trying to swim in that kind of weather (and I'll try to avoid that park in Fortitude Valley this time). I could get completely wasted on XXXX beer, which tastes ten times better north of the border. Or perhaps I'll sit around playing my DS and PSP in the hotel room. Such fun, I never would have thought about doing that in Sydney now, would I? :P

Whatever I end up doing, there is one thing I certainly will do. Bring an umbrella. Anyway, hope you all have fun without me, and I hope I find something worth doing up there.

As some of us may know, I love to make fun of the Australian ratings system to no end. They don't make my job very hard either.

Sometimes, people call up and complain about pole-dancing women in Nando's ads. Others want to destroy the great Australian tradition of driving to Canberra to load up on porn and fireworks. But there is one more thing that they want to take the fun out of.

For whatever reason, somebody has not been particularly impressed by Monty Python's Life of Brian. An old cl@ssic from the 1970s, and why it needs to have its rating altered at this point is beyond me. It got pushed up from an M rating (equivalent to PG-13 in the US) to MA15+ (equivalent to R), as we can see hereon the ratings board website with one of those ugly ratings logos they're putting on every DVD now. But look closely at what they're warning us about.

Sure, I can understand a few people maybe possibly wanting to be warned in advance about things like rude words, sex or violence. But now people need to be warned that the show they're going to watch has "satirical humour" in it. Maybe it's there just to remind the people complaining that it's a joke, maybe it's some form of government-sponsored advertising, who knows? I understand what the "problem" is, but vague wording like that just sounds stupid.

Maybe I should put this in my sig:

After all, I've used satirical humour more than the odd once or twice. Little kiddies might get warped (although they might like that shade of red, who knows?) Even if we don't need to worry about them, there are always a few people, even over the age of 15, who just need to be reminded that a joke is a joke. They're the ones who need to be accompanied to the movies.

For the last week or so, we've been prisoners in our own city. Or at least, we've been made to feel that way. Here's a nice snap I tookof what it looked like in one of the busiest tourist areas in the city on Friday (and it's with a proper camera this time):

Various leaders have been in town, and in order to "protect" them, AU$170 million has been spent on security. This has involved that awful fence (7 kilometres in total)and thousands of police officers being brought into the city to do partrols.

Even though the system was shown to be clearly quite useless in preventing terrorists (as the Chaser boys managed to prove so spectacularly), we all knew that the big reason is to keep protesters away, because they're all violent, or so the government and police have been telling us. For the last few weeks, it seems as though the police and government have been using every opportunity to use the words "protesters" and "violent" together as many times as possible.

Yet the protesters were fairly well-behaved. Only17 protesters were arrested at the big march yesterday. Two of them were because the protesters were naked. A few others because of offensive language.

But the news clips of the protest show just who really was violent (if the links work properly). Such as this where the police threw a photographer onto the ground. Notably, the officer who did so didn't seem to be wearing his badge - an increasingly common practice here for police officers who don't want to be identified for assaulting members of the public. Or this one (CAUTION: Contains blood) where the police appeared to be excessively violent on the guy they were arresting, and were very keen to stop the media from getting images of what was going on, being aggressive to the people from the media as well.

Perhaps if the government had a little faith in us, they wouldn't need to put these ridiculous measures in place. And perhaps if the government would listen to the people, there wouldn't be any protests to turn violent. Hopefully they're never going to try this sort of operation again, or else I may just go out and protest about it (without being violent).