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Is there a doctor in the house?

It’s official: Karen has been awarded a Ph.D! We went and checked at the thesis office on Tuesday after lunch, and it turns out the personal copy of her thesis and the award letter had been sitting there since the 9th of September! So she’d been Dr. K for two weeks without even knowing it. Anyway, this was, of course, great news. Last night we went to Thai on High in Highgate Hill (my favourite Thai restaurant) to celebrate.

I purchased a copy of the Outfoxed DVD today, which I think I mentioned in one of my previous posts. It should arrive shortly, I hope. Coincidentally, last night Dateline ran a story about this documentary. I saw the rerun today at 1pm (I’ve been a bit under the weather for the last couple of days, which is why I was watching TV in the middle of a weekday). The documentary has become far more popular than the maker thought it would be. Shameless advertisement: if you want the DVD, you can buy it at the Outfoxed website, or you can get it for free when you make a donation to the AlterNet Fight Fox Campaign. For those of you who don’t know, AlterNet is mounting a legal challenge to the "Fair and Balanced" trademark used by Fox to promote their news channel on the grounds that it is misleading, deceptive and notoriously mis-descriptive. In an unrelated case, a U.S. District Judge has already stated that Fox’s right to the trademark is not very strong, and that if it were challenged, it might well be revoked. So these AlterNet guys decided to launch a challenge. Good on them! But I fear they have a mountain to climb, especially when justice or the foiling of justice is, these days, really just a question of how deep your pockets are. Rupert’s are very deep.

I’m very happy with my Fedora Core 2 installation. Very nice. I’ve also finally got around to using apt-get and yum (but mainly apt-get) to keep my packages up to date and to install new software. I was previously doing most things by hand, or not bothering to upgrade at all. With apt-get everything is so much easier. I know many you are saying "well dah", but I’m just slow on the uptake, alright. I’ve switched to using Firefox (0.9.3, and yes, I know 1.0PR is available) as a web browser. It’s okay, but I’m positive it’s quite a bit slower than Galeon was. I’m having a bit of difficulty installing extensions, even as root. After clicking on an extension package, the package seems to download, but nothing happens. No dialog box. Nothing. What am I doing wrong? The geekiness quota has definitely been reached for this post. Moving right along, then…

My brother seems to be going on a major DVD splurge lately. I mentioned he recently bought a whole of DVDs at the Sunday market in Rocklea. Well today he bought two "classic" movies for Mum, and he bought the Star Wars Trilogy Boxed Set for himself. I’m not complaining, since I love Star Wars. He also mentioned that he gets to buy any THQ published game for an enormous discount. So no doubt he’ll be buying a few more Playstation games in the near future. So I guess he gets to choose from titles like Bob the BuilderTM: Can we fix it?, Britney’s Dance Beat (RA would like that one :), Full Spectrum Warrior (for the PC) and Summoner 2 among others. So where are my bonuses and in kind payments? Oh, that’s right, I don’t have a job yet. I’ll be needing one of those fairly soon.

I set myself a bedtime deadline of 10pm tonight. I’ve already overshot that by one and half hours. If I’m feeling very ill tomorrow, I can’t blame anyone but me. I hate that. ;-)

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Royale with cheese

This weekend I played around with a program called Cinelerra, a non-linear video editor for linux. It’s pretty cool. I’m trying to put together a shortened version of the video footage from my family’s New Zealand holiday earlier this year. It might take a while, because there’s five hours’ worth of footage to edit. Hopefully I’ll end up with something around one hour long. So far I’ve just been practicing on low resolution clips. The results are promising. Cinelerra is great, although I have to say it’s probably the most unstable linux application I’ve ever used. But whenever it crashes, you just restart it and continue from where you left off because it does automatic saves every time you do something.

I handed Jaga my analysis chapter, minus one of the sections. I’m fairly happy with my progress. Hope Jaga is happy with the content!

Spent much of the weekend with K, who is back from overseas. Still no word about her Ph.D. How long can it take for the university to write a letter (a form letter, no doubt) and send it? Anyway, today we went to the Dutch festival in Richlands, where I tried raw herring and poffertjes. I think I like poffertjes better than raw herring :).

Nigel bought a bunch of DVDs from the Brisbane market at Rocklea, including Vanilla Sky and The Bruce Willis Collection. I think the only film in The Bruce Willis Collection that is half decent is Pulp Fiction, and Nigel and I watched that tonight. There was less jumping back and forth in the timeline than I remember. Samuel L. Jackson’s character is cool, but Harvey Keitel’s character is the personification of cool.

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Steady progress

Slowly but steadily making progress on the thesis. I’m still writing the analysis chapter, but hey, I always expected this to be the chapter that takes the longest (except for the literature survey, maybe). The analysis has proven to be very helpful. The mathematical model for the ants protocol has suggested some improvements I can make that I would never have discovered if I’d just done a regular experiment with the prototype.

We hired a bunch of movies over the weekend. The pick of them was The Pianist. I can’t remember any other movie where the four of us (Mum, Dad, Nigel and I) watched a movie in absolute silence, transfixed to the television screen. As Dad commented after the film was over, the same sort of thing has been done before, but not as well. It really was a great film, and deserved the awards it received.

K is in Singapore, a little bit under the weather. Jaga should be back in Australia by now. I hope I have a thesis chapter to show her soon!

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A postcard from Britannia

A lovely postcard arrived for me from the UK today. The photos on the front show various sections of Westminster Abbey. It looks awesome. I’ve been there, but I think the last time was when I was eleven, so I can’t remember it. The photos on the front make me want to go back. I’m not religious in the least, but I have a thing for old churches and cathedrals and so on. I just like their architecture and the atmosphere within them. Some of them make you feel very small (a design feature, I’m sure :). Anyway, sounds like K is having a great time. It’s not every day you get to walk over the memorial stones of your favourite authors and preeminent physicists!

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Reviewing reviews

Since seeing The Corporation, I’ve read a few reviews to see what other people have to say about the film. The response is overwhelmingly positive; in fact I struggled to find a single negative review (they do exist if you look hard, see below), except, perhaps, this one, but then Mr Roy is notorious for bashing almost everything (Whining, not dining, indeed). But many reviews I’ve read complain that, although the documentary is, by and large, very good, it still contains a bias toward the left, whereby interviewees such as Noam Chomski and Michael Moore get a greater share of the screen time, and the people on the other side of the fence like Michael Walker and Milton Friedman only get a bit part. It’s true. But unlike some other recent docos, at least it had the courage to let the proponents of the opposing view put forward their side of the case, and the actual interviewing appeared to be non-inflammatory (compare Michael Moore’s interview of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, for example). In fact, the interviewers were mainly conspicuously kept out of site for most of the film. There was no stunt pulling, which seems to be a staple of Moore’s films. In rating a documentary, one has to compare it with the other fare on offer, and the documentaries that has preceded it. I ask you to name a single political documentary that does not have an angle or slant. I cannot think of one. Furthermore, from the outset, even before stepping into the cinema, the viewer understands the purpose of the film is to show that corporations are out to get power and money (the subtitle of the book it is based upon is The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power), and I believe it achieves its goal. If there was a shortcoming of the documentary, it was not its bias toward the left thinkers, it was its failure to properly suggest an alternative to the corporation. They advocated smaller, grass-roots type organisations, but it’s not clear how this model could achieve economies of scale (how does the local co-op build a large passenger jet at all, let alone build it as cheaply as a large corporation like Boeing?). Further investigation of these sorts of questions would have been welcomed, but the movie was already long enough. Perhaps they can do a sequel, and maybe even a sequel to the sequel. You know, Star Wars style: The Corporations Strike Back followed by Return of the Hippies.

Anyway, I suggest most reviewers (the ones with left-liberal tendencies, at least) included the mandatory it’s a bit biased line not because they thought this bias hurt the documentary, but because they want to make sure they’re not thrown into the same category as the raving leftist kooks. A case of the left bashing the left to ensure disassociation.

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Boredom relieved by anabashedly Leftist web sites

I decided to relieve a spell of thesis writing boredom today by doing a bit of web surfing. I found a few interesting sites. I liked this site. You can watch a whole bunch of anti-Bush television commercials. I also came across Outfoxed, the web site promoting a documentary that examines Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. Check ’em out.

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Forget Medicare, bring back my EPL! Please?

Don’t you just love election time? We’re offering a tea set, says one lot. We’ll see their tea set and raise them a set of steak knives, says the other lot. Will the Medicare issue ever die? I’m sure the government very recently made changes to Medicare (the so called safety net), so why weren’t these changes made back then?

For me, this upcoming election won’t be about voting somebody particular in, it will be all about voting John Howard and the Liberals out. I’ve voted Liberal in a Federal election before, but I cannot, with a clear conscience, vote for somebody who has systematically lied to the nation, committed us to an illegal war and abused the trust that we put in him and his party. This election is about something much deeper than interest rates, economics and Medicare. This election is about what is fundamentally right and wrong. I would like to believe that my fellow Australians will put those issues above economics and all the rest of it.

Our family was considering signing up for Foxtel because they have exclusive rights to the English Premier League, and will also have exclusive rights to the new Australian soccer league when it starts up in 2005. But we all decided it was far too expensive. We couldn’t justify the cost. At almost $50 a month just for the basic package, and up to $229 to get connected, it isn’t worth it. Furthermore, the "special offer" from Telstra which gives you 50 free local calls a month if your phone service is with Telstra and if you get Foxtel through them is anything but special. If you also have Bigpond Internet then you get 125 free local calls. Who the heck makes 125 local calls a month? The offer is insulting. A real offer would give you a discount on your phone bill every month, regardless of how many calls you make. Maybe free line rental or something. Whatever. As it stands, it’s a disgusting joke. Cost aside, by far the majority of reviews I’ve read about Foxtel Digital are negative. Existing Foxtel customers especially (the ones who upgraded from analogue to digital) seem to be aggrieved and complain about the customer service. Google it for yourself.

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Blog gets performance boost

In order to improve the performance of the blog, I’ve moved Tomcat over onto a faster machine. Apache is still running on an old box, though. I’m currently trying to get a newer version of Apache talking to Tomcat. When that happens, I’ll move Apache over to the faster machine as well. As it stands there is a huge performance improvement. I hope this improvement is noticeable for users on the other side of my cable modem!

We had a leisurely Sunday. It started out by giving Dad a few goodies for Father’s Day. Nigel then took Dad to see The Corporation at the Schonell Theatre. Dad thought it was great. Then we went to Fasta Pasta at Stones Corner. Pretty good. I’ll go there again sometime.

I heard from K last night. She’s enjoying herself in London. She’s seen Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament among other things. She’s off to Nottingham with Jaga today.

Tomorrow (er, today, even) is a stay at home and write thesis day. Hopefully the day after will be much the same, except that I have prac supervision first thing on Tuesday morning.

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The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

The Corporation – now there’s a good documentary. I saw this at the Schonell Theatre this evening. What a pity it’s showing at only a handful of cinemas around the country. Everyone concerned about their future should go and see this film (yes, the whole 2 hours and 20 minutes of it). This film examines the inner workings of the entity that has come to be known as the corporation. Startlingly, corporations in the US have been granted many of the same rights as human beings. Strangely, corporations assert these rights under the 14th amendment – an amendment to the US constitution intended to bestow rights upon the slaves freed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Over time, for whatever reason, corporations came to be viewed as persons, and were thus accorded the same rights as persons. Yet, corporations do not have a sense of ethics, they have no moral conscience. In fact, and as the documentary so skillfully demonstrates, corporations have the mindset of a psychopath. They have no regard for anything, except their duty to their shareholders and to the bottom line. One thing I found immensely pleasing about this documentary is that the makers were so sure of their convictions and so confident about the message they were seeking to put across that they were not afraid to interview proponents on both sides of the fence. Nobody could accuse this film of being biased. For me, this is one of the things that makes it a much better documentary than Michael Moore’s recent films (Michael Moore is interviewed in The Corporation, however, and it could be said that his comments in this film are rather more poignant than most of his commentary in his own films). In short, I cannot emphasize the importance of this film enough. Just do yourself a favour and see this film.

Meanwhile, my brother’s watching Mary Poppins. That’s a pretty long movie too. All the spoonfuls of sugar and chim chim cherees add up to three hours (including ads, too).

I wrote a little bit more of my thesis. I spent a lot of time trying to explain how I’d derived an equation which describes the way a resource description spreads through the network. I’m not sure that what I’ve written is very clear. The approach to take from now on, I think, is to just write everything down, and then come back and fix it later. Seeing the pages of writing pile up provides an incentive to keep writing, so I reckon I should just write while I’m in the mood for it, and worry about trying to improve the quality later. This policy would seem to concur with expert advice I’ve received from my thesis writing consultant. :)

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Going to London to visit the Queen

I dropped K off at the airport this morning. Everything went smoothly. At this instant she should be at Changi Airport in Singapore awaiting her connecting flight to London.

After dropping K off at the airport I came home and read through the paper I’m writing with RGW. It needs a lot of work, and it’s due this Friday. It’s going to be close. I made lots of annotations and sent the annotated version of the manuscript to RGW.