In this disturbing and long-overdue return of The 9pm Edict podcast, you’ll hear about the legal problems with the 2008 Gay Softball World Series, face the facts about cuts to Australia’s stupidly-named Baby Bonus, and hear a bunch of people at the CBS Interactive party talk about their childhood heroes.

If you were at that party and just want to listen to yourself, fast forward to the 10 minute 40 second mark.

Yes, there are bad words. And bonus hypocrisy.

You can listen below. But if you want all of the episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission. Extracts from The Breeders song Cannonball and the movie Forbidden Planet.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, once again done fortnightly because I forgot to do it last weekend. Suffer.

Articles

• Nile’s porn excuse doesn’t hold water, for Crikey. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph alleged that various NSW politicians had been using their parliamentary computers to access pornography, and that anti-sex-industry campaigner and Christian Democrats leader Reverend Fred Nile was the worst culprit. He denied it, but as the story stood on 2 September 2010 I didn’t believe him.
• NSW Parliament’s flawed porn hunt, for Crikey. By the following day, it was clear that the “audit” of parliamentary web browsing was deeply flawed.
• What the NBN will deliver to Windsor’s mob, for Crikey. Independent MP Tony Windsor said that the National Broadband Network was a major factor in him choosing to support Labor over the Liberal-National Coalition.
• ACMA and Nine demonstrate Australia’s institutionalised racism, for ABC Unleashed. Sam Newman’s continued low-brow bigotry on The AFL Footy Show gets “punished” with a slap on the wrist. Again. It took only six comments before someone accused me of political correctness gone mad and compared Australian with North Korea. And another commenter said that I “looked like a potato that had been boiled too far”. The standard of discussion at ABC Online isn’t all that flash.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 55, “BYO computers: cloud security risk?”.
• Patch Monday episode 56, “Parliament’s poor porn probe exposed”. If ZDNet allowed longer headlines and more robust language in their stories, I’d have entitled this podcast “Pollies’ piss poor Parly porn probe exposed”. Poetry.

Media Appearances

• On Thursday 8 September 2010 I did a brief spot on ABC Radio’s Statewide NSW to chat about Stephanie Rice’s Twitterfaggotgate. Alas there is no recording.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos eventually appear on Flickr.

[Photo: Enmore Village on a Spring evening, taken from one of my favourite afternoon working spots at the Warren View Hotel, corner of Stanmore and Enmore Roads. Compare it with the photo in this post, My village really is home.]

• Steak House or Gay Bar?: Can you pick the steakhouses from the gay bars, just by their names? It’s harder than you might thing!
• Greenpeace frees ocean life from Pacific longliner | Greenpeace Australia Pacific: Greenpeace’s report on their ship Esperanza “freeing tuna, sharks, marlin and an endangered sea turtle from a Taiwanese longliner”, the Ho Tsai Fa 18. Or, as I prefer to label it, Greenpeace committing piracy and endangering the lives of mariners going about their business.
• Fish Now, Pay Later | Greenpeace Australia Pacific: Darren Smith told me the article on dolphin-safe tuna wasn’t right, that Greenpeace didn’t support any kind of industrialised fishing. Here’s what Greenpeace is currently doing in the Pacific.
• The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna | Southern Fried Science: By promoting “dolphin-safe tuna” — I prefer to spell it with a hyphen thusly — we’ve ended up with a system that’s unsafe for pretty much everything else.
• Meet my hot new stripper wife / Turns out the mid-life crisis is a cruel global phenomenon. Can it be stopped? | Mark Morford: Mark Morford is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers. In this piece from February 2008 he explains a man’s mid-life crisis rather too well. And entertainingly. I’ll never be able to listen to Justin Timberlake in the same way again.
• The Lost Seasons | ABC: More details of the Australian Aboriginal six-season cycle, including a nice explanation of the system used by the Sydney basin’s D’harawal people.
• War 2.0: Political Violence & New Media | ANU Department of International Relations: I’ve been invited to attend this 2-day symposium in Canberra on 7-8 October. Now, to figure out who’s paying for it, which will be the key factor in deciding whether I can go.
• Jimmy Carter says that tea baggers hate President Obama because he's black | The Root: The former president points out a truth so self-evident you wonder how it could possibly be controversial. But controversial it is. Has modern journalism become so timid that it can’t handle the truth?
• Understanding the Telstra d-i-v-o-r-c-e | SearchNetworking.com.au: Richard Chirgwin’s backgrounder explains just how difficult it will be to separate Telstra into separate wholesale and retail divisions.
• The next generation bends over | 37signals: The makers of Basecamp, something I use every day, reckon the sale of online accounting software Mint to Intuit, the makers of Quicken and Quickbooks, is “indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation”.
• Kid Cannabis | Rolling Stone: “How a chubby pizza-delivery boy from Idaho became a drug kingpin.” It’s just another product distribution business, just illegal.
• Rudd & Conroy Gambling On Mandatory Internet Censorship Working | broowery.com: An odd statistical analysis of the likelihood of stumbling across banned material online.
• ACMA Blacklists Iran Protest Video & Boing Boing: Another example of why the ACMA blacklist process is seemingly out of step with what the community might want. That’s not ACMA’s fault, they’re just implementing a dodgy policy.
• Why Sol Trujillo should be sued for stuffing up Telstra: Kohler | SmartCompany: There’s so many historical analyses of Telstra coming out this week, what with the government announcing its break-up and n’all. This one is marvellous.
• 2009 Menzies Lecture by John Howard (full text) | The Australian: “In the Australian context the adoption of a Charter or Bill of rights would represent the final triumph of elitism in Australian politics,” reckons our former Prime Minister. A fascinating read if only for its disingenuous use of political rhetoric and coded messages rather than rational argument.
• Oil Rocks | BLDGBLOG: Imagine a city of 5000 people built on stilts and causeways some 45km out into a lake. Well, it exists, and it’s called Oil Rocks, in the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan.
• The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong | BLDGBLOG: A fascinating look, with photos, of a mushroom farm inside a disused railway tunnel. The tunnel itself is still government property, with the farm existing on a 5-year lease.
• Death by Information Overload | HBR.org: “New research and novel techniques offer a lifeline to you and your organization,” it says.
• The Economics of Sex Work | Core Economics: Good to see an update of knowledge since I did a little research on the sex industry for ABC Radio all those years ago.
• CHART OF THE DAY: Primetime On Facebook Is Monday To Wednesday | Silicon Valley Insider: “Social media marketers, take note. The best days to spam, erm, publish wall posts on Facebook that you want your ‘fans’ to pay attention to are Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.”

People have been asking whether I’m excited about my trip to Africa. To be perfectly honest, I’m not.

Or at least not yet.

Project TOTO is still too abstract. There’s no firm dates, there’s no clear itinerary and, from a project management point of view, no clearly defined goals. Not because the project isn’t happening or doesn’t have support or isn’t being planned properly, but simply because that detailed conversation with ActionAid Australia about priorities has yet to take place.

That conversation is scheduled for this coming Friday 12 June.

Meanwhile, I’ve had many, many things on my mind. Most of them are completely unrelated to Project TOTO. But all of them have conspired to make the last three weeks extremely stressful indeed.

That’s one reason why my last video diary was back on 21 May. That’s a screenshot at the top of this post. I’m looking tired, eh? And I’ve been even more stressed since.

It’s time to catch up. So, even though this is the Queen’s Birthday holiday, here’s a rambling update. With some pictures.

What can I confirm about Project TOTO today?

• The destination country is definitely Tanzania.
• I’ll be leaving some time in the next month, probably sooner.
• I’ll be in-country for a week.
• I’ll spend some time in ActionAid’s office in Dar es Salaam, but I’ll also be visiting some of their field projects — places like those in the photos. No running water. Dodgy electricity. But, I’m told, there’s decent mobile phone coverage in 70% of these rural villages.
• My goals will include setting up a “field blogging outpost” and also reporting on my experiences along the way.

That last point is causing a bit of stress.

One media release talked about a “live video outpost in the remote region, training the local community to use it”. That’s one hell of an ask.

Live video at Ustream quality, which is what I use for Stilgherrian Live, requires a 400 kilobit per second uplink. Even here in Sydney’s inner suburbs, that’s available only if you’ve got a hard-wired ADSL2+ or cable connection (typically a 1Mb/s uplink) or Telstra’s Next G mobile broadband tuned for HSUPA (ditto). None of the other mobile broadband providers can deliver.

In Tanzania, there’s 1Mb/s DSL in Dar es Salaam, but that’ll have a maximum uplink speed of 128kb/sec. If we’re lucky. Outside the city we’re essentially at dial-up speeds or worse, either on overloaded DSL or whatever data links the mobile carriers can provide.

Even the new Thuraya satellite phones (pictured) only deliver 9.6kb/s. Thuraya does have a laptop-sized data terminal which can deliver 144kb/s — but I’m getting conflicting reports about Dar es Salaam and the south of Tanzania being in their coverage area for data.

One reason I dropped the video diaries is that a 5-minute video can be more than 40Mb of data. Imagine uploading that over dodgy dial-up!

Time is a factor here.

Once I’ve thought about what to say, recorded the video, compressed it and uploaded it, that’s an hour out of my day. Is that the best use of my time when only 124 people have watched the first episode (as of today) compared with 2000+ reading the words?

(And consider that in the same period, more than 15,000 read my article Fisting Twitter and the birth of “trend fisting” — though they may have been looking for something slightly different.)

If I’m going to produce any worthwhile media out of Tanzania, something that isn’t the usual clichés, I’ll need time to reflect.

OK, I’m stressed about other things too. But I’m conscious that ActionAid is investing significant resources (for them) and trying something new (for them). ActionAid Australia, despite four decades of experience as Austcare, is now the new kid on the block. Doubtless they’re fearful of failure. As a result, so am I.

Very fearful.

Now a typical 500-word Crikey article takes an hour or two to write, as does a post like this if I’m preparing photos. A reflective, insightful essay or feature article can take half a day. A liveblog like Gonzo Twitter 1: Saturday Evening in Newtown unfolds in real time over a couple of hours, but you have to be relaxed and “in the zone” for it to work. Unreliable Bangkok 3: Bureaucracy was based on an entire day’s experiences, and only emerged weeks later.

What if there’s so many things happening that the Muse is not with me?

That’s why TV sports coverage is so banal. The swimmer has just exerted himself to the utmost and broken the 400m record. He’s barely emerged from the pool. The adrenalin is surging through his brain. And yet we stick a microphone into his face and expect him to say something meaningful. There’s a reason the Australian Institute of Sport trains its athletes to have the clichés ready, and a reason those clichés — and only those clichés — roll out.

How will I balance the demands of producing this sort of material with, you know, “setting up a live video outpost in the remote region, training the local community to use it”?

What if I get to a remote village and discover that I’ve forgotten some key component? It’s not like I can just nip down the shop!

How will I avoid being yet another white bloke rolling into town telling the locals what to do?

There.

That’s all out of my system now. While the non-TOTO stresses have not subsided, at least I feel that I’ve accomplished something today. And now I can take a break and tackle my presentation for the SoGiKII Law, Communication Technologies and Culture Conference.

Which is tomorrow.

But starting tomorrow I’ll try to gradually shift into a regular daily pattern of posting photos and writing. Wish me luck. And perhaps ask me questions and stuff that I can answer in future posts.

[Photos: Tanzanian village photos courtesy ActionAid Australia. All rights reserved.]

Much has been said of the supposed racial element in the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. This map shows how deep the historical roots run.

The base area map shows in blue the counties which recorded a majority of votes for Obama. The overlay dot map shows US cotton production from 1860 — each dot represents 2000 bales. The similarity of the distribution is uncanny a century and half later.

It’s worth reading the comments on the original post at Strange Maps as people attempt to explain the finer details.

• Filtering Pilot and ACMA Blacklist – Not just “illegal” material | Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA): EFA’s analysis of the Australian goverment&’s policy makes it clear that it’s not just illegal material being targetted for Internet “filtering”.
• From cutlass to AK-47 | BBC News: A brief history of piracy through to the present day — the real kind of piracy, not “copyright infringement”.
• From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents | Strange Maps: There’s been plenty of discussion about how race (i.e. the fact that Barack Obama isn’t white) affected the US election. Here’s a comparison of the map of cotton production from 1860 compared with voting patterns earlier this month. The resemblance is both uncanny and scary.
• This Isn’t England | Noisy Decent Graphics: Pax Britannia! London-based graphic designer Ben Terrett notices that the UK isn’t always drawn as it should be on maps. All maps, by definition, present a distorted view of the world. But how distorted?
• How This Bear Market Compares | NYTimes.com: Once more the New York Times wins with its superb infographics. Want to compare the current stock market crash with previous ones? This interactive graphic allows you to do just that, clearly and simply.
• Introducing Recession: Simple Advice for Designers | Noisy Decent Graphics: While the blog is aimed at designers overall, this post is about the current world economic recession and includes links to some good infographics to help understand it, as well a rather nice FAIL photo.
• Digital Surveillance Event Recorder | Jaycar Electronics: There’s just got to be some cool uses for a gadget that comes with two infra-red video cameras and records a 10-second burst of low-res video every time something moves. And it costs less that AUD$300.
• Resampled Space | BLDGBLOG: Amazing but probably impossible buildings, assembled thanks to some nifty photo editing.
• Anything Looks Cooler with a NASA Logo | Flickr: Yes, even mundane things.
• Ethics & Principles of Permaculture browse | Permaculture Business Guild: Bill Mollison published these principles in 1980 in Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (Tagari Publications), but the “Principles for Functional Design” apply everywhere, I think.
• Internet filtering and censorship forum UNSW 27 November 2008 | Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre: A free forum in Sydney later this month discusses Australia’s proposals for Internet filtering / censorship. I;ll be there.
• Economics of Spam | Link: The paper “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion”, details how researchers hacked into a spam network to measure its effectiveness. This post asks whether the technique of hacking into a spam botnet was ethical.
• japanese bert | Flickr: There’s an uncanny resemblance between this chap and Australian television presenter Bert Newton.

Sometimes the very tall, lean black man is a professional basket-player.

“I thought the report was just horrific,” he said yesterday. “This is very genuine. I am distressed. It is terrible. Little children. Don’t underestimate the personal interest and commitment to this. Or Mal Brough [Howard's Minister for Indigenous Affairs]. He is quite passionate about doing something on this subject. I said to him, ‘We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to grab hold of this. The territory’s not going to do anything.’”

But once that’s out of the way, the spin begins:

“It’s just terrible. Just imagine if it was Dickson, or Brunswick or Marrickville or whatever. It’s just intolerable and you’ve just got to do something about it.

Cute choice of examples, Mr Howard. I don’t know about Dickson (are you reading this, Antony Green?), but I live in the Marrickville electorate and Brunswick is the Melbourne equivalent — both multicultural Labour-voting areas.

Howard’s choice is 100% political. Mention left-wing heartlands so those on the left take the example personally and sympathise with the pain, and those on the right are reminded that these mixed-race communities are a hotbed of sordidness. He certainly doesn’t say “Just imagine if it was Mosman or Elsternwick.”

I mean, there’s no child sexual abuse in suburbs with deciduous trees, and Howard wouldn’t risk upsetting core Liberal party voters by even suggesting it were possible.

Howard doesn’t mention that the Little Children are Sacred report is the 13th enquiry into Aboriginal child sexual abuse since he became PM — three of them federal enquiries!

He doesn’t mention that NT chief minister Clare Martin proposed an interventionist solution a year ago — which he ignored.

He doesn’t mention that federal funding to tackle this issue was cut 4 years ago.

But he does keep emphasizing that he’s taking control, that he’s in control, that once more he’s Big Strong Daddy.

And as I write that a sudden thought crosses my mind. Isn’t Big Strong Daddy the one committing most child sexual abuse?

[P.S. There's interesting comments on this issue attached to my original post. Enjoy.]

Ah, look at John Howard’s smug look now! Even though accused yesterday that his plan to combat Aboriginal child sexual abuse was racist, he’s on a roll. Taking porn from the naughty blackfellas is just the start. All bad parents will be punished. Not assisted, note, but punished.

This poster advertising share accommodation in Sydney is pretty typical of the genre — a list of features, tear-off tags with phone numbers, and the notice that you’d be the fifth person in a 3-bedroom apartment.

But there are two features worth pointing out.

1. Boasting that “Nobody sleeps in the living room!!!!!” reminds us that it’s now normal to over-crowd CBD apartments. These buildings were designed with a certain occupancy, so may the gods help them all in the event of a fire.

2. Saying “Europeans, North- and South Americans or Australian applications preferred” is just a coward’s way of saying “No blacks or Asians” — which is a bit rich for someone choosing to live in Sussex Street, right next to Sydney’s Chinatown.

Owners of mobile phones 0415 520 775 and 0403 220 688, you may well own a plasma TV and “really nice furniture”, but you’re still racist turds.

If it wasn’t for the fact that doing so might count as harassment, I’d suggest that we all phone you and say so.

But, you know, I just heard Archie Roach and Sara Storer singing his story on RockWiz. And bugger me, it turns out he’s one of the country’s most important human rights activists.

Bloody embarrassing not to know that, eh?

I mean, you’re probably more likely to remember, oh, that nigger woman on a bus, who was she again?