Civic Duty

I just scraped in. Tomorrow I become an Australian citizen and — thanks to the special provisions that allow new citizens to provisionally enrol to vote — on Saturday I’ll get to exercise my civic duty in the 2013 Australian Federal Election. I’m taking this seriously, even if I might just be in it for the sausages. I’ve studied the advice from Dennis the Election Koala, I’ve read the only real guide to the election…

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Is This Supposed To Be Aspirational?

There’s been some unfortunate sporting endorsements on the airwaves here in Australia during our big summer of sport. Inevitably England’s domination of the Ashes was never going to be entirely compatible with all those ads featuring Aussie cricketers that popped up in between overs. Just how many multivitamins does Ricky Ponting need to take, one wonders, to feel better after once more leaving the field with just a handful of runs to his name. And…

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Desperation

I think McAfee must be getting a bit desperate. Seems they *really* want me to renew my anti-virus: Subject: Subscription Renewal Price Enclosed From: subscriptions@mcafee.com Date: Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 1:06 AM Subscription length: 1 Year(s) Renew Subscription(Auto Renew) Base price (pre-tax): £ 64.99(GBP) Subject: Alert: 1 Month Remains From: subscriptions@mcafee.com Date: Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:39 AM Renew Now Save 15% 1 Year Total Protection £55.19 SAVE 15% Subject: Alert: 2 Weeks…

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Misdirection

Hey. So you know when you receive an email that isn’t spam as such but is from a real person who meant to send it to another real person that isn’t you but is probably someone with the same name as you and a very similar email address, and you read the message and think “this is sufficiently weird that it would make a great easy blog post to just stick the whole message up…

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Genius Product Ideas #247

This genius business idea is free to anyone who wants it: someone really needs to make a little tool for cleaning out the headphone socket on the iPhone. As I carry mine around in my pocket typically without the headphones plugged in, I find I’m constantly having to use the end of a paperclip to remove all the fluff and lint and crap that somehow finds its way into the headphone jack. Given that Apple…

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46 People Like This…

I’m all for social network integration and everything, but I can’t help thinking that there might be some occasions when that Facebook “like” button isn’t actually an appropriate thing to have on a news story: Really, NME? 46 people “like” the fact that a former member of ELO was killed in a freak road accident? That’s just great. In other news, 295 people just love the fact that Charles Haddon jumped to his death at…

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Survey Fail

See Film First, they of all those free movie screenings that we used to go to when we lived in London, seem to be starting up over here in Oz, which can’t be a bad thing now that Sal and I have a whopping mortgage to service and need some cheap entertainment. I’m not quite sure how I was supposed to fill in this survey they sent me, however: Luckily my three favourite arthouse films…

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So I was just booking tickets to see Brett Easton Ellis speak when he’s in town next month, and I was having a look around the other events that are happening as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. I was thinking about The Davitt Awards, but it looks like I’ll have to brush up on my Latin…

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