November 2007 Archives

We have 3 tiers of government in this country, and many political figures at all levels love to push their own agendas about which level is redundant. You never hear anyone say “Its our level, we’re just filling space here, get rid of us”.

Much like all the soon to be amalgamated local councils kicking up a stink about losing their own little fiefdoms, no one wants to legislate themselves out of a job.

I’m fed up to the back teeth with the political system that runs on conflict and belittling your opposition. There is no chance of long term planning for the countries future with all players focused on the length of their term.

Why have we set up the rules to serve us so badly?

Are we stupid or just apathetic?

In a recent informal poll I found that 99% of voting Australians are fed up with hearing about the election.

Went and checked out the Queensland Orchestra at the QPAC Concert Hall for one of the more entertaining outings I’ve experienced. The humour and personality of the conductor Guy Noble was well received by the packed house.

The only minor blemish on the event was a philistine blowing their nose 3 times during a moving clarinet solo. Perhaps they thought they were joining in.

Initially the orchestra was packed out, and for the first couple of pieces they kept shedding numbers leading me to wonder if I was watching some kind of reality show where they were voting off cast members.

There was quite a bit to watch and I derived a good deal of amusement from the interaction between the performers. The percussionists hanging out at the back included our champion “Cymbal Guy”. He used them once and then had to put them down very carefully.

When one of them was playing the snare enthusiastically, the other percussionist and timpani player were really getting into it and having a laugh. Contagious enthusiasm.

I saw one musician with a saxophone, but I never saw the poor guy use it, and the tuba player almost missed out but had at least one part before leaving.

The lead violin performed an enthusiastic solo and as he paused for a moment during a quiet movement, an audience member started clapping thinking it was the end of the piece. His shoulders stiffened slightly and I almost thought I saw the poor chaps brow furrow as he continued on.

Vivaldis’ Winter put most of the under 5’s in the to sleep, thus ending a lot of audience fidgeting.

Overall an enjoyable mornings event.

I read a huge list of free software that had a number of utils I wasn’t aware of, thought I’d better document a few here.

System Level Tools

GParted Live CD is a powerful full-featured partition management software that can create, resize, check, copy, merge, and destroy partitions, and supports multiple file systems.

Unstoppable copier will copy files/folders from disks that have physical damage and attempt to repair these. It will ignore error messages generated in the copying process and attempt to restructure the file using every readable part.

Amic Email Backup is a small, free program that can backup and restore the data associated with most major email clients, including identities, email and news messages, address book, accounts, message rules/filters, signatures, and even the blocked senders list. It works with a number of email clients including MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, PocoMail, Netscape Messenger, Opera Mail, and Incredimail.

Drivermax is a program that can backup and re-install your system’s drivers. It can also generate a report that lists all installed drivers and includes information such as version numbers and dates.

ProduKey is a free program that can display the product ID and Product Keys used in your installed copies of Windows, MS Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, and Exchange server.

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

Spyware Terminator is one of the few antispyware programs that includes automatic updates.

Comodo Firewall will keep an eye on communication in and out of your PC, requires an email address to get the download.

TweakUI has been a long term favourite for adjusting windows defaults.

XNView is my favourite image viewer.

CDBurnerXP4 is a complete CD/DVD burning solution for the creation of data CDs and DVDs, audio CDs and Video DVDs. It offers full set of features including on-the-fly disc copying, copying to and burning from ISO images, and ISO image conversion. Supports new DVD formats such as Double layer DVDs, Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.

In honour of the overcompensating comic today, here are my last 5 wikipedia searches… ;)

1. Stephen Hawking
2. Australian $10 Note
3. Batboy
4. High Contrast
5. Melbourne Shuffle