Stilgherrian – Page 341

25 April 200925 April 2021

Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice

Photograph of a sprig of rosemary, for remembrance

The cat vomited this morning. Again. Artemis has this habit of gorging her food and then, five minutes later, throwing up wherever she’s standing.

Today it was a projectile effort from the heights of the TV stand, a reddish-brown spatter right across the living room floor.

Remember that last time you threw up? How the acrid stomach acids burnt your throat and mouth? How it felt like it was surging up into the back of your nose? It’s just like that. Freshly warm and mixed with the reek of cheap fish.

You can’t help but get it on your hands as you wipe it up.

I’ll bet just the thought of that smell is causing tightness in your sinuses, clenching in your throat.

Wiping up cat vomit first thing in the morning is rather unpleasant, no?

If wiping up cat vomit is the worst you have to think about today, then you’re one of the luckiest bastards on this planet. It’s not a particularly demanding sacrifice to make in return for some furry companionship.

Today is, of course, Anzac Day, our national memorial for those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and that other country.

24 April 200924 April 2009

Episode 44, the slow edition

Yes, Stilgherrian Live episode 44 is now online for your viewing pleasure.

For some reason, I think it’s actually one of the best programs I’ve done. But maybe that’s just my reaction to the opening monologue. You be the judge.

You were the judge, of course, in choosing our “Cnut of the Week”. Senator Penny Wong, Australia’s Minister for Climate Change, and Tom Koutsantonis, South Australia’s disgraced ex-Minister for Road Safety — who I consistently called Tony Koutsantonis for some reason — drew for third place (17%). And in equal first place were neocon robot Karl Rove for his comments about torture and person-on-television Oprah Winfrey for something about Twitter I forget (33%). Which is weird, because I’m sure that as I closed the poll Oprah was in the lead. I blame the bees.

Bees can be blamed for most of the world’s ills.

I also spoke about Ashton Kutcher while showing a picture of Zac Efron, which actually proves my point that they’re all interchangeable muppets anyway.

As the Snarky Platypus says, “They all feel the same in the dark”.

There was a song at the end. And a duck. A duck and a dog, in fact.

23 April 200926 August 2020

The pleasure and (minor) pain of Telstra Next G

Over the last few months, I’ve been trialling Telstra’s Next G mobile broadband as part of an experimental “technology seeding program”. Despite my initial doubts, I’ve been impressed.

Previously I’d been using Vodafone 3G, tethering my MacBook Pro via Bluetooth to a Nokia N80. It worked just fine. I subsequently moved to a Nokia N96 and Virgin Mobile, which uses the Optus network under the hood. It’s terrible. I made a big mistake.

But that’s a story for another time…

Sure, Next G is the most expensive mobile broadband out there. But it’s also the best. Clearly.

On our road trip, we could use Next G almost all the way from Cowra back through Bathurst to Sydney. Yes, the signal dropped out as we drove through hilly areas, as you’d expect. But the data link automatically reconnected once it found a new cell — with the same IP address!

Seriously. Here I was in a moving car, running a ping and watching YouTube videos. The link dropped out. It reconnected. And when it did, perhaps six minutes later when the terrain sorted itself out, the video started playing from where it left off. Pings resumed with the very next packet number in the sequence — albeit with ping times of over 370 thousand milliseconds.

In another test, the data link kept the same IP address while I caught a train from Newtown across Sydney Harbour to Pymble. In CityRail’s loop under the Sydney CBD, there was no signal in the tunnels, but the link came back up within seconds of arriving at a station.

Somebody did some great network engineering. They deserve a pat on the back.

But what else?

Continue reading “The pleasure and (minor) pain of Telstra Next G”

23 April 2009

Yes, Episode 44 is tonight!

I seem to have forgotten to tell you that episode 43 of Stilgherrian Live is online for your viewing pleasure. It has been for nearly two weeks! So does that mean there’s another episode tonight? It does.

This means I need to do a number of things.

First, I need to tell you that last program’s “Cnut of the Week” finalists were: 4th Miranda Devine (18%); equal 2nd Jane Schulze and Associated Press, and The Cuffs Guy (24% each); 1st The Liberal Party Generally (34%).

Second, I need to tell you that…

Nominations are now open for this week’s “Cnut of the Week”.

Continue reading “Yes, Episode 44 is tonight!”

22 April 200926 August 2020

Why all corporate PR droids should be shot

Photographs of Michael Harte and David Thodey Imagine this. You’ve just won a contract worth a billion dollars against stiff competition. How do you feel? Thrilled? At least, you know, a little bit pleased with yourself? Apparently not.

“The Commonwealth Bank is embarking on a significant transformation project and we are delighted to be a key partner. Through Telstra’s own transformation we have invested in world class networks and services and alliances with leading partners. We look forward to bringing these advances to the partnership to offer real benefits to the group, its customers and staff,” David Thodey [pictured left], Telstra’s group managing director enterprise and government said in a statement.

What bullshit!

Australia’s biggest telco Telstra just signed a 10-year deal to provide telecommunications and managed services to Australia’s biggest bank, the Commonwealth. The deal’s worth $100M a year. There’s bound to be some fascinating details which make this all very special. If nothing else, it’s worth a shitload of money — and that’s something to get excited about.

That paragraph of meaningless management wafflespeak is the reaction? There’s not a single fucking concrete noun in the damn thing!

Got any words of thanks for the hard-working staff who helped you win this deal, David? No.

Things aren’t any better on the Commonwealth’s side.

“Our arrangement with Telstra is a partnership which is directly focused on customer satisfaction through well-defined shared goals, commitments and business outcomes. This is the first time we have struck a deal of this kind,” the Commonwealth Bank’s CIO Michael Harte [pictured right] said in a statement.

Well of course the deal is focussed on customer satisfaction! You don’t set up deals to create dissatisfied customers, do you? Why not tell us why Telstra won? I think they’d have liked that.

Now I blame neither David Thodey nor Michael Harte for this idiotic language. I assume they have highly-paid corporate communications specialists to handle this sort of thing.

Those people should be shot.

This is probably one of the biggest business deals around this week, yet they’ve managed to drain every possible speck of colour and life from it — in the process portraying their bosses as drab, emotionless cyphers.

Read the full Telstra media release [PDF] for yourself. It’s pathetic. And the Commonwealth hasn’t even managed to get its version online yet.

Dear PR Droids, if you can’t manage to communicate the excitement of a billion-dollar deal between two of the nation’s most important corporations, then piss off out of it and clear your desk for someone who can.

21 April 200923 July 2009

Rediscovering James Burke

It was my very great pleasure today to discover that James Burke‘s groundbreaking TV series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are all on YouTube.

Connections is more than 30 years old now — it was first broadcast in 1978 — and yet the way it weaves its threads through the history of science is still relevant to a contemporary audience. One thing I did notice, though, is how bleak his worries are, obviously an element of the Cold War mentality of the time.

Burke’s witty writing is a key part of the enjoyment, as this snippet from episode 2 shows:

I suppose Shakeaspeare and the travel agents have done more than anybody else to give us our Technicolor view of Elizabethan England, starring the Queen herself as a kind of swashbuckler in pearls. The fact is, about all she had time for was bookkeeping. When she took the place over in 1558, it was National Disaster Week. The money was worthless. There was no money! There was plague. The cities were packed and stinking.

Elizabeth appealed to the decent English middle class, with their healthy desire for prestige, power, fun and games, and cash. Soon, anybody who wanted to be anybody was on the make. And none more than that famous bunch of privateering seadogs led by Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins, who sailed the Atlantic looking for new American trade opportunities for England, setting up colonies, knocking off Spanish galleons — and doing it all with a kind of gutsy disregard for convention that we describe today as “criminal”.

I’ve often wanted to make programs like Burke’s. He gives hope to someone who, like him, has “a good face for radio”. I know that re-watching these old favourites will be important in many ways.