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6 Lessons from Last Night

Last night I joined ’Pong at the launch of Mardi Gras: The Slide Show. Right now you can see some of his photos from before the Parade and during the Parade and the Mardi Gras Party projected onto the shopfront at 72 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst. While doing this I learned 6 things.

  1. Snakebean, at 85 Oxford Street, is worth checking out, since the food they provided for the party was delightful.
  2. If the smiling waiter keeps topping up your champagne you can say, with complete truthfulness, “I only had one glass.”
  3. If the café you were planning to adjourn to is closed, there’s a dive selling alcohol just around the corner. It’s open late, even on Tuesdays.
  4. If you become engrossed in a conversation about military history with the heavily-built heavily-tattooed ex-biker, you will miss the barman calling “last drinks”.
  5. If the heavily-built heavily-tattooed ex-biker has local knowledge about another pub which is still open and which is only a short walk away, you should choose not to act upon this knowledge.
  6. No, you really should.
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Polling booth maps clever, but whose map?

The NSW Electoral Commission has great interactive maps so you can find your local polling booth for 24 March. But they’re based on Google Maps. So as Richard Chirgwin points out, the mapping data is licensed in a very roundabout way.

Map of polling booths in Marrickville

The NSW Government street data is licensed to PSMA (the public sector mapping agency), which is then licensed to MapData Sciences, which is then licensed to Google Maps which is then licensed back to… the NSW Electoral Commission.

“We are surrounded by cretins,” Richard says. I tend to agree.

Though the defence is obviously that Google Maps provides a nice, convenient interface for programmers to use.

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Ruddslide? Don’t count your chickens just yet

This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald predicted that the forthcoming federal election will be a landslide for the ALP’s Kevin Rudd. But this graph — showing the pattern of Labor’s two-party preferred poll results leading up to the last elections — suggests that it might be too early to claim that.

Graph of ALP two-party preferred opinion poll results

According to the oz politics blog, the source of this graph:

Headlines proclaiming that Howard’s spoiling strategy had failed are a little premature. Howard is playing a medium term game. It is the standard two pronged game: pander to the punters and slam the opposition at every possible turn. The effectiveness of Howard’s medium term strategy cannot be judged after a few short weeks. If previous election years are any guide, It was not until the middle of the year that a recovery trend (from Howard’s perspective) was evident. Howard only achieved positive polling territory from the middle to late in the third quarter of the year.

Only time will tell…