Well it’s been a month since my last coffee and I don’t think I’ll go back to any sort of regular intake. I’m actually quite surprised at the difference it has made. My mind feels clearer even when I’m not 100%. My tiredness levels are no worse, and best of all I no longer suffer from the buzzy heights and groggy depths of the caffeine roller-coaster - my alertness now follows a much smoother gradient....

I am sitting here writing this blog post as Rove McManus interviews Andrew Denton about his recent recent (2006) visit to the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Texas. The thought has just dawned on me that never in my adult lifetime has there been an easier time to speak openly about religion. What makes it strange is that it isn’t the usual religious content you find on a light comedy/variety show on a Sunday evening - the quick one liners poking fun at a recent religious faux pas. Instead it is a serious look at a big Christian centric event (well as serious as variety shows get) and it feels slightly misplaced because there aren’t the usual array of jokes being fired off. There has been an obvious change, and I think the catalyst for this has, in part, been due to the increasing concern about terrorism, its relationship to Islam and fundamentalism. I think its also related to a deep desire people have to feel a sense of meaning with their lives or to have some spiritual experience. Whatever the case we can no longer claim that people are unwilling to talk about what they believe in. As a Christian there are more opportunities than ever for me to be sharing what I believe. If Rove can talk about it, then I have no excuse.

While I was having a conversation with Steve our youth minister after church tonight, Sam and one of his friends came by us wrestling over a hat. Steve said “here’s trouble”, then asked what they were fighting over. Sam said that his friend wouldn’t give his hat back. His friend said that Sam wouldn’t give his hat back. At this point my brain scrolled through the list of things to say. I couldn’t take a side, because I didn’t know who’s hat it was. I didn’t want to participate in their boyish tussle either. And then somehow it clicked. I’d seen this problem solved before. So I said “I know I’ll cut the hat in half and give one half to each of you”. Sam quickly replied “yeah, do it” - oblivious to what he’d just walked into. Steve picking up on it instantly said “well we know its not your hat Sam” and he promptly let go as Steve and I lost it. I could barely believe he fell for it. I didn’t think a Solomon style comment would ever have worked. The irony was that Pippett had started the sermon earlier tonight talking about learning lessons from other people’s mistakes.

The digital age, with its intanets, computamigies and webs is now truly apart of our lives and we seem to be dealing alright with it. We do our homework on computers, we talk to friends on our mobile phones, and we cook our bread in computerised toasters. But despite our hard work digital doesn’t really fit with humans. I think this comes down to two facts: the digital age is inherently discrete (mathematically) in its representation of things - it doesn’t deal very well with fuzzy areas. e.g. when describing the weather at what temperature does it go from being ‘warm’ to being ‘cold’? it depends on software to be written thoroughly, with every possible exceptional circumstance taken into account, or failing nicely when something goes wrong - something rarely acheived. Every crash, or lost Word document is proof that this is the case Because there is this disharmony between man and machine, there exist points where things can go wrong. As the digital machines are pushed to fit into a human world, all the exceptional circumstances that we happily tolerate need to be precisely defined and programmed into the machines. But there are many exceptions, and programmers really aren’t that smart, so quite often these exceptions aren’t handled correctly everywhere. These bugs usually sit dormant, waiting for an unsuspecting person to come along and enter the piece of information that causes the beast to fail. These exceptions are fairly common. For example some years have more days than other years, some months have more days than others. Midnight in Greenwich, England is not the same time as Midnight in Sydney, Australia. Some postcodes have letters in them. Entering a zero into a form can often mean the same thing as entering nothing. They are everywhere. For the mischievous amongst us this disharmony can be exploited. One simple thing to do is to only ever subscribe to a service on the 31st day of any month that has one. The good companies will process your bill sensibly, the bad companies might behave like the monthly recurring events in iCal where they don’t appear at all in months with fewer than 31 days. You could also have fun at work and after having a meeting on the 31st of May say that you’ll have another exactly a month from today. The challenge is to find the everyday exceptions and start messing around with them. Test the boundary values. Try and break systems by feeding them seemingly normal data they cannot cope with. Stuff around a bit and break it. In the end the machines that deal with your mischief may cope as well as humans do, but every now and then you’ll hit the jackpot and make someone a little red faced.

Yesterday was great. A public holiday on a Wednesday nicely splits the working week into two easy to manage halves. It makes Monday feel like Thursday, Thursday feel like Monday, Tuesday feel like Friday and Friday feel like, well, Friday. Taking it easy and hanging with some friends was an excellent plan too. Everyone I’ve spoken to hasn’t had a bad thing to say about the Wednesday holiday. But I noticed a problem - and its all about petrol. Well the price of petrol. If you’re an Australian driver then you’ve probably noticed that the best time to buy petrol is on a Tuesday. For some reason thats probably related to the schedule of petrol tankers, the day of the week, and when people usually get paid, petrol is cheapest on that day. Monday is usually okay. Wednesday and Thursday are pretty bad. Another time you don’t buy petrol is the day school holidays start. Actually buying petrol near holidays is generally a bad idea - including public holidays. And yesterday was no exception. On Tuesday night driving home from work the price was at about AU$1.25 per litre, which was about the same as it had been over the weekend before it. On Wednesday morning when I drove past it had actually dropped to about AU$1.20 (ooh 5c). Come Wednesday evening it had jumped dramatically to AU$1.34. So there wasn’t the usual Tuesday night dip in prices that one has come to expect. Disappointing. I eventually remembered ;)

My mum carries a photo album with her pretty much all the time (hi mum!). It usually contains the latest photos of whatever has been happening - the last trip, the new granddaughter. It usually comes out when she’s meeting people she hasn’t seen for a while, or wants to show her friends what she’s been up to. I used to think this was strange, and slightly embarrassing (cause there’d often be at least one unflattering photo of yours truly in there). I also found it particularly amusing. But then something happened. I got a video iPod. I got a digital camera. I started taking photos. I started putting them on my iPod. I even started showing my friends the photos on my iPod - just like my mum! What’s worse is the iPod doesn’t just store a limited number of photos like mum’s physical album - it stores thousands of photos! It’d be like mum carrying around her entire bookcase of photo albums where ever she goes - which I’m sure she would if she could. So I’m now officially worse than my mum in this area. Update: Mum says that the technical name for her small photo album is brag book. So I hereby coin the name BragPod to refer to an iPod being used for the same purpose.

While trying to get my phone and net transferred I’ve spent a lot of time on hold to iiNet. To keep you from nodding off, iiNet provides a loop of helpful tips and self advertising while you’re on hold. One of the messages says this in an advertisement for their ‘web accelerator’1: Dial-up web accelerator is almost 5 times faster than normal dial-up. It really is the next best thing to broadband. Maybe I’m paying too much for my ADSL2+ service. 1 - a web accelerator is primarily a cache, storing a local copy of the data you need to download so you don't have to download it again. The smarter ones can also do things like filtering adverts and prefetching content. It can make it feel faster, but in reality everything comes down at the same old 56K. I reckon they're a waste of money - if you want broadband speeds, get broadband.

As our 60 day period comes to a close now begins the process of moving to our the new place. So with this post I’d like to say farewell to our old place. You we’re a great first home away from the parents. With your off white walls and carpet. With the small bedroom that I somehow managed to fit in. You had a huge open living/dining space and a balcony which we tended to neglect, except when we needed to hang out the washing, or cook a barbecue. But you made having friends over great, and you never got in the way when we needed to play the Wii. Your position amongst your peers meant that we had to climb a long stair case, but it meant we could leave our windows and balcony door open in summer, and if we needed to the shops were only a short walk away. And you did all this without asking for much in return. I am slightly jealous of your new occupants. Our new place is nice, but I feel like old friends with you. It will be sad to leave. Hmm. It will also be sad having smaller wardrobes and no internet or telephone at home for a week. But I’m sure we’ll settle in soon. Hasta la vista

With the completely uninspiring state elections, that recently took place in New South Wales, I was confronted with how difficult it is to rank the candidates when it came time to vote. For me, there were four people on the ballot who I knew I definitely didn’t want to win. But I couldn’t decide how to order the ones I didn’t mind winning. The NSW voting system demands that we give at least a number one next to person we want to win. The federal system forces us to fill in every preference. But what if I don’t care who wins? Why can’t there be a way for me to say “I don’t care who win’s just as long as it isn’t these candidates”? Well following is my proposal for such a system… ...

I read an article titled Click here to give ’em the flick on SMH. It’s an article describing some research about how teenagers are playing out their relationships more and more online. I found the following quote particularly sad. Despite desiring physical interaction teens still resort to a cheaper, unsatisfying, alternative online. While they now have “far greater access to networked publics” I think they also have greater access to the mall and movie theatres than I ever had when I was their age. Boyd also observed that technology had made it far more common for relationships to be played out in cyberspace - over instant-messaging tools and MySpace - than in the real world. “While physical interactions are deeply desired, they are typically quite rare,” she said. “Although the mall and move [sic] theater are still desired outtings [sic] for teen couples, many have far greater access to networked publics like MySpace than they do to unmediated publics.” ...