I'm sure the residents of Bambling Rd near Canungra didn't exactly expect humans rain down on them but weirder things have happened.

Ivan, one of the club's more experienced pilots had a close call yesterday. He was flying his Boomerang as usual, just a bit away from Tamborine launch when everything went pear-shaped quickly and he had to throw his reserve parachute. Which did open, and did slow him down and kept him from going splat.

I was in the air at that time, too, didn't see the events prior to the reserve opening but kept Ivan in sight after Mark had gone on the radio letting people know of the trouble.

Luckily Ivan didn't hit any powerlines, the main road or any of the houses close by as he touched down, nor did he end up in the trees - which might have been better: he hit the ground hard enough to injure his ankles somewhat.

I didn't much feel like flying yesterday anyway, so I landed shortly after he had given us an "I'm okay" on the radio. Some others did continue onwards and had nice flights; I just launched for another short flight later in the arvo.

Hours tally: 82.6hrs.

"Go to the supermarket and buy two home brew kits. ... Also buy at least a couple of bottles of Coopers Pale Ale, more if you like. Ignore the instructions. Cool and pour the Pale Ale, being careful to leave the yeast sediment behind. Drink the beer."

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sagt die Bayreuther Polizei. Gut so, das wär ja noch schöner! Meine Hochachtung für den Scheiße-verzierer; viel stinkige Arbeit aber eine schöne Idee.
Link zu einem von vielen Artikeln

I started paragliding in late December 2001, and at first didn't really get a lot of airtime unfortunately.
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...lousy chlorine taste of the Gold Coast water. The Hinze Dam is just not on par with the Eastern Austrian Alps where Vienna gets its water from.
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This is about as silly as the arguments the Content Cartel wants us to swallow.
Source: Cigarro & Cerveja

Googling for "Abu Ghraib" images returns only whitewashed crap, whereas Yahoo has the evidence in full gory beauty.

Adding "abuse" or "torture" as keywords brings forth more precise stuff at Yahoo, but zip improvement at Google.

No way Google mislaid these images accidentally. "The most comprehensive image search on the web" my ass...
Source: cursor

Medicare, the basic medical insurance for every citizen and permanent resident, doesn't cover dental stuff (except emergency procedures in a hospital), so it's PAYH.

Fortunately private health insurance isn't very expensive (yet), especially for higher income earners: you have the choice of paying an extra levy for Medicare for no extra benefits or you can take out private hospital cover.

For me, the extra levy would be about $650 p.a., and full-blown private insurance (not just hospital but also extras like dental, optical etc.) costs me about $900 p.a. Given the $200 I get for contact lenses every year and factoring in just one or two other doctor visits a year, my decision for private insurance was obvious.

Still, even private insurance leaves you with a gap between the benefits and the actual cost: for hospital stuff there's a safety net capping, but not for extras. So the visit to the dentist this week left me $50 poorer, still a lot better than paying $210.

It wasn't too painful (despite me being scared of dentists and their surprises) and didn't uncover any unexpected problems. I'll have two teeth taken out in a month but both were known candidates for 15 and 7 years respectively, so no real worries.

"A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor", published by the AMS. Contains pretty cool silly things like this:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Fermat: It did not fit on the margin on this side.

Link to the article (PDF) (via Monochrom)

...says Terry Jones, ex-Python, in this commentary in The Guardian about why the tsunami got a lot of donations and (crappy) publicity while the Iraqis suffering a fate of similar dimensions get nothing (except more opression).

Cynic that I am, I find this not baffling at all: Drowned corpses caused by mother nature look better on screen than showing the results of American hubris. Dead soldiers can be done away by statistics, dead civilians aren't counted so they don't count, and for the veneer of a conscience let's quietly publish some acknowledgement of having no clue.

After three years of imprisonment, (quite likely) torture and certainly lots of illegal shenanigans perpetrated by the governments involved, Mr Habib is finally coming home to Oz. (Where he will be under further surveillance and subject to official harassment, despite none of the scum at the top having enough evidence for any kind of real trial...)

And all the bonsai shrub had to say is:

Mr Howard said yesterday he would not apologise or offer compensation to Mr Habib, who has spent the last three years in Guantanamo Bay for suspected terrorism and will be released within two weeks. Nor had he questioned the right of the Americans to apprehend Mr Habib in the first place.

...

Asked whether it was appropriate for an Australian prime minister to allow an Australian to be locked up for three years in a foreign country without proper legal rights, Mr Howard said: "I think the process took too long and we have made that known in very plain terms to the United States."

(cartoon by Peter Nicholson)

My father asked me to put some pictures and maps on the web, so as to show the lay of the land better. Well, stitching together panoramas by hand^Wgimp sucks so I didn't find the time to do it - until today.
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Danish loonies..ahem, IT people have come up with an open-source beer. True to techie form they've added Guarana to their "beer". Gah.

The Stencilrevolution guys have beautiful galleries of stencils and their applications all over the planet. There's also a nice howto on how to do tshirts with stencils.

Somehow looking at such artful stuff tempts me to forget the stupid splashback tiles in the kitchen and try this: finish filling in the cracks, repaint with heavy white latex paint or similar and then do some stencilled spraying. Maybe some Escher icons on a sin() wave....or something like this?

I'm not a major fan of scribbly graffiti and tags, but the stuff presented there is mostly great art - and Banksy's rats are really cool.
More Banksy and non-banksy, both nasty and thus good:

Rob knows a butcher somewhere on Brisbane's south side who makes Gselchtes, Kaminwurzn, Landjäger and Speck.

A small excurse for the colonials: This is "Speck". "Speck" translates to "bacon". But the "bacon" you can buy in the supermarkets around here is not Speck - and vice versa. At most they share the species of deader. Speck is fine for consumption as it is (raw but cured and smoked). "Bacon" is good for ham & eggs - at best.

Rob also transported the good stuff in a bag befitting the Austrian/German delicacy. That piece was actually a good 3kg, and cost me $53. Not bad at all, considering that it's almost as good as the one my grandmother made herself.

Apropos the nice bag, Aldi/Hofer stores finally have made it to QLD. Yay! I just checked: the closest store is at the north end of the Gold Coast. That place is called Labrador. I'm on the mid-southern end of the GC: in Miami. Whoever came up with the suburb names here was a horrible punster.

Amazing. An aviation security guy who actually has reasonable ideas about security and how not to approach the issue. I don't find it surprising that the country in question is NZ.

Source: Bruce Scheier's blog

However, how to make Vanillekipferl is important in AU, too, even though christmas is in the middle of the warm (and this year, wet) summer.

So the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the few almost readable newspapers, ran this article with recipes today.

How about this OZ gem? An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces. That one won one of the Ignobel Prices last year.

The engineering winner, and IMHO highlight this year, is US patent 4,022,227: the comb-over baldy man hairstyle. greed and stupidity, a mind-boggling combination.

This is all very depressing, disturbing, disgusting, rotten and Wrong. I hate oppression and totalitarianism, and the news (except the mainstream bootlicker media of course) is full of stupid assholes in power - it's so depressing.

So, do I have to burn off my fingerprints now or can that wait a couple of months? Is the RF-safe wallet the next thing I'll have to buy? Or an RF-safe overall, to be worn like a decon suit over all your RFID-infested clothes? Is ThoughtCrime next on the WIPO agenda?

What a bloody lousy outlook.

Two days ago I sent the churn request. This morning there was a five hour outage, then I got my notification via SMS and email and now the new ISP does the bit-shuffling: Westnet.

As it turns out, I had to ring their support for some fine-print info; less than a minute of waiting, a reasonably competent fellow on the other end and now things just work.

Their service is pretty good; things like port blocking (mostly of MS-junk and backdoors) can be disabled via the customer care webform, their status email list allows to select plain text or HTML crud, etc.pp. Connectivity is also better than with the other provider, and I've got free PIPE access again (mainly important for mirrors and usenet).

My reverse dns request (via email, close to the end of normal business hours on a friday) got answered and fulfilled within 20 minutes.

And they even have a kickd, so I feel very much at home :-)

It was trivial (quel surprise).

Again: Dart, the ISP (mostly) providing net access at home has been bought out. The new owners are not exactly well-known for competence, and proved that prejudice very succinctly during the customer migration: they fucked it up big time, repeated outages up to 18hrs, less services, mad switching around of static-vs-dynamic IP addresses and so on.

Now they called the PIPE peering "non-viable" and terminated the peering agreement completely. No, not make the traffic cost us customers, just cut the access. Time to go somewhere else, but they were billing you $143 for service cancellation if you're within your contract period.

But, lo and behold, the public bitching, complaining and pestering of the new owner fools has helped: the cancellation fee is waived.

So I've fired the churn/rapid transfer application to WestNet yesterday; these fellows have been around a while, seem to thrive, were the other alternative last year when I selected ISPs and will cost me a few bucks less a month for a bit more service.

Some Indymedia servers had been confiscated in October, with no reason given. EFF and Indymedia filed for disclosure of the reasoning behind that, and all they got was:

• it's your gear but you lack standing to contest the seizure,
• an unnamed foreign government made us do it,
• the unnamed foreign government's rights trump the bill of rights,
• and we're waving the ever-useful "it's because of terrrrorrrism" card, so get lost.

So the US finally have joined the ranks of dictatorial banana republics. Well, I wasn't planning to go there ever again anyway.

Indymedia articles
EFF articles

Well, he's gone now. The next fashist bastard is certainly already waiting to undermine what's left of the 'murkin democracy.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said... "Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.

Link to the boingboing article

In the beginning, long time ago...dammit, I'm really a fair bit behind with blogging...when I moved in a year ago, I decided that the kitchen would have to go eventually.
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So, the murkins have decided on another four years led by the dangerous idiot. (That is, if this "election" was kosher - which it certainly wasn't everywhere but apparently mostly so.)

The int'l observers - when not barred from entering the polling stations - observed:

"The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system. "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski..."

Apropos electronic voting, Andrew Tanenbaum has this to say on his electoral vote predictor website:

"One thing that is very strange is how much the exit polls differed from the final results, especially in Ohio. Remember that Ohio uses Diebold voting machines in many areas. These machines have no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. He later regretted having said that."

Terrific.

The Propaganda Remix Project has lots and lots of brilliant reworks of old propaganda posters; they also sell stuff via cafeshops.

Very good but way too real for my mental comfort.

"Being a maintenance programmer is such a privileged joy and honor. I get to spend anywhere from eight to twelve, sometimes as many as sixteen straight hours a day locked in an eight by eight cube grinding my ass out writing code that you freaks don't appreciate."

What a beautiful rant, make sure to read this while it's still there.
Link to the rant

I like the Go Faster Wheels in particular.

This thing is a photoshopped fake, by the way.

This spam just came in via Tiscali UK. Apparently the spammers have discovered the magics of Babelfish. But true to form they botched it: the babblefish mangles (apparently) reasonable English into hilarious stuff quite totally unlike German...
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