Cuts to welfare for parents of truants?
GetUp today has posted to its blog about the Governments plan to cut assistance to the families of truants.
My comment on the blog is the first one and I will copy it here;
Christian
August 26th, 2008
I had a relatively rough childhood. My dad left, my mum had terminal cancer and as a young teen, I was not keen on school and I just didn't go. We had truant offices come around and try to make me go, they threatened us with fines and all sorts of things. I felt stupidly guilty because I wanted to be near my mum who was really sick (and I think she wanted me there too, but would never say that - she urged me to go to school). In the end, it didn't work but surely made our lives so much more stressful. School was never understanding of our situation and I never felt I could delve into my issues with them anyway. Maybe thats what the government should look at improving? Had the government cut the piddly amount of assistance they were giving my mum, it would have been devastating. I can see this causing a lot of issues for a lot of desperate families and I daresay it will cause domestic violence in a lot of those households.
That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the plan. I think that more time, money and effort should be spent trying to give kids a more supportive environment to grow up in.
Surely it would not only cause fewer issues for families in these situations, but provide more jobs if there were to be more community centres and local hands-on assistance. Manly’s Youth Centre has (or, maybe, had) a program called HELP (Helping Early Leavers Program) which was extremely beneficial to me when I was about 14 and this type of thing needs to be more widely available and people need to be aware that these things exist. But, this is the governments response to programs like HELP.
Things need to change, and now.
More best filmclips
Ok, so I have been asked to revise my list and add two more. But, then, I figured, good clips come in three’s, so I added one more.
Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Not sure what to say about this one. If you dont know it, something is seriously wrong. This was also nominated by Brad, which is also a touch strange.
Jefferson Starship – Nothings gonna stop us now. This clip features Kim Catrall who was awesome in Porkys but sucked in Sex And The City.
And Finally. The greatest drum kit that ever appeared on stage (not to mention the greatest chaps);
Van Halen – Jump. Nothing to say about this. Audible Genius.
Protesters arrested in Sydney for annoyances.
Members of PETA have been arrested in Sydney under the new ‘anti-annoyance-of-pilgrams’ laws. Granted they were half naked, but its still a huge injustice towards civil liberties.
Big Brother Axed!
Channel 10 has confirmed the axing of Big Brother after a dwindling viewer count this season. I personally was a big fan of Big Brother until this season (I even watched evictions online when travelling in the UK and France) but this year when it was hosted by Kyle & Jackie O, it started dying for me. The final nail in the coffin was when one of the house mates was Corey Delaney (Wikipedia wont even have a page on this guy – his page redirects to the BB2008 page) and a guest house mate was Pamela Anderson. God help me, I have never seen a greater example of ‘scraping the barrel’.
There is speculation of a series return in 2010, but I’m not holding my breath. Even if it does come back, unless they get Gretel back, it’ll be shit.
Big Brother dumps Gretel Killeen.
Axe Finally Falls on Big Brother.
My first disappointment with our new Government
For years now the Japanese have been whaling in Australian waters and for a long time our government has not done anything about it. Until Now. Kevin Rudd has threatened to take the Japanese to court over whaling issues. Or should I say ‘had’.
Kevin Rudd today has announced that he and Japan’s leader, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, have “agreed to disagree” on the topic of whaling and no further action will be taken. What the hell kind of action is that?
I have to admit to you that I am not sold by economic promises by politicians. Money is not a big drive for me. But animal welfare and environmental issues do drive me and this was a campaign promise and was one of many contributing factors for me voting for the guy.
Now, before you start chuckling at me believing campaign promises, you have to admit that Kevin Rudd has seriously made a difference since coming to power. He has ratified Kyoto, he has said sorry to our indigenous people. He has made a difference. But now he has stalled.
While I am very happy about our relationship with Japan, there has been a lot of history about other countries’ relationships with japan going sour. (Not that I am expecting this to happen, just that diplomatic relationships are not all they are hyped up to be).
I know that the last Japanese whale hunt killed only two thirds of their targeted Minke whales and that the Minke Whales are not endangered, but thats only due to the direct action of some fantastic activists from Sea Shepherd (my heroes) and Greenpeace. Not because of our $1m surveillance ship that spent most of its time in port.
I think this is my first let down by our new Government. I am disappointed in you, Mr Rudd. I am sorry to say it because I do defend you a lot, but I am now afraid of what other issues you’l simply ‘agree to disagree’ on.
Astonishing advertising lengths
Wow, this blog post has a screen shot of an advertisement during a show. And I don't mean the show went to an ad break, I mean the show was 'paused' by a guy walking on the screen to plug a new show.
While TV advertising in Australia is getting *really* bad, its not quite this bad yet.
Make sure you click the link about 'stealing' broadcasting. Its worth a chuckle.
ANZ backs out of Pulp Mill funding
So, the ANZ bank has advised that it will not fund the controversial Tasmanian pulp mill. What an amazing decision for them to make. I know that there was a lot of pressure on them from GetUp and Greenpeace but this is big!
So awesome, read the article here.
Liberate your music
There are many services out there that (unlike iTunes) offer DRM (Digital Rights Management) free mp3 downloads. This is a great service to offer because the DRM encoded files that iTunes sell have limitations on how many machines they can be played on (not to mention they wont play, even from your iPod, through the Xbox 360 "iPod integration" - a very big selling point for me... ). The problem with these iTunes competitors (such as Napster, mp3.com, Amazon and many others) is that they're only available to users in the US. That leaves us Australians high and dry with no DRM-free, legal, music downloads.
Enter doubleTwist - a free music sharing utility (not a p2p, torrent app) that also strips drm-encoding from your iTunes purchased music. Its a little slow, I haven't compared it to other app's for its speed but it works well and the music files seem to retain their quality well for playback in whatever devices / applications you choose.
This helps me further myself from iTunes that one little bit further, now that I am using Rockbox on my iPod, amarok (Linux) and foobar (Windows) for playback and doubleTwist for music liberation, iTunes is only used for purchasing music.
Nice one. 
Luis Vuitton sueing danish art student
Good on her. If she gets sued, there'll be a mass of donations to pay for it. Mine included. Thumbs up from me, Nadia. I love the shirt.
Ipod’s weakness
Here's the thing. Ipod's are great for people who are content with things the way others dictate they should be. iTunes is great if you are just happy with things and will just adapt to how things are offered to you. I'm not happy with how things are offered to me and I try to change things to suit my needs. iTunes is great for buying music, even if it's DRM licensing thingo sucks. But I wouldn't let iTunes manage either my ipod or my music collection, no *freaking* way! My emphasis on making sure you know how much I hate iTunes' "management" skills is because it has completely wiped my ipod of all files on several occasions. Something I do not take lightly.
So, because of this, I started looking for an alternative to iTunes for transferring files to my ipod and I found anapod explorer. Now, while most reviews will tell you its terrible and dont touch anapod software, I found it quite good (while it still has several problems, the main one for me is crashing when I am editing my file tags). But the problem here is that it is commercial and I connect my ipod to several machines and damned if I am going to spend $20 on each machine. So, I tried Floola. Yikes. Lets just say that when I left work yesterday after using Floola, most of my music was missing and the music that wasn't missing had incorrect album art and the file names were matched to the wrong files. So Floola is up there with iTunes for trying to ruin my ipod experience.
Then I thought, hang on, why should I need software just to transfer music to my iPod? I should just be able to drag and drop music onto it. So, I bit the bullet and installed Rockbox. Any reservations about Rockbox that I had previously went out the window. It was a breeze to install, it has 100x the functionality of a normal iPod (eg editing music, tags etc on the ipod.) and it stores music in normal files in a normal structure, so you can just drag and drop music onto it. And, as a doubley good feature, it dual-boots with the standard iPod firmware, so it will still work in my Alpine integration box in my car (to play the ipod through my Alpine touch screen).
Rockbox is certainly the business and I recommend it to anybody. No more middle-man software just to use my ipod on multiple machines.
Now I just need to remove the DRM on the music I bought...