Simon Rumble's blog

Ahhh democracy

Spent the morning handing out for The Greens in Marrickville. The powers wielded by local government are quite incredible. According to one old Greek lady, since the Greens came in she's had to pay someone to empty her gutters of leaves, because a Green council likes trees or something.

And if you've been listening to nothing-dodgy-at-all-oh-no local "Independent" crypto-Tory candidates Vic Macri and Morris Hanna, the Greens policy is to have 24 hour, cycle-thru brothels and injection rooms on every street. Sounds like a nice little piece of small business, which is supposedly what those two are all about.

The genuine Tories even managed to find some local supporters to hand out for them this time around, amazingly. Will probably take their votes from zero to the dizzying tens.

Labor volunteers are generally quite nice, deluded lefties who think they belong to a left-wing party. Interesting interplay when the candidate, Sam Iskandar, visited the booth and pointedly ignored the two volunteers. Different factions or something?

Ahhh democracy. Fortunately most of the people are lovely, and it was rather pleasant once the sun rose over the church and we could thaw a bit.

Best Windows error message ever

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/276304

I particularly like how a service pack changes the number of required characters.

(via an excellent piece on interface design)

Let's put the people smugglers out of business

Clive Palmer has a knack for making statements that get him loads of publicity. This time around he's said something really sensible. ABC reports:

"If a family wishes to fly to Australia and they don't have a visa and can safely fly, the Australian government should instruct airlines to allow them to board," he said in a statement.

I say we take this even further and put them out of business by undercutting them. Allow anyone, no matter what passport they hold, to fly to Australia on payment of a $5,000 bond. If they're issued with a visa on arrival, they get their money back. Otherwise, profit!

Can Limited News at least be consistent please?

From the news organization that regularly rails against occupational safety rules as "red tape killing our small businesses".

Depressing to be an Australian at the moment

via anonymouslefty.wordpress.com

Our heartlessness has sunk to new lows. It makes me ashamed to be Australian.

And Labor, what a bunch of political halfwits. If they think adopting the Opposition's position is going to win votes, they are even dumber than I thought. Anyone who supports this is likely already voting Liberal and probably believes the Carbon Tax Ate My Baby stories the Tory media keeps running.

Wilkie and Bandt, I salute you.

In which our garden gets sorted out

When we first moved in, I built some garden beds with sleepers lying at the back of the garden. I also made the rather stupid decision to have one of the beds jutting out into the yard. That dramatically reduced the usable space we had, though it did give us a good amount of growing beds for veggies.

With the sale of my rumble.net domain, we took the plunge on professionals to sort it out. Properly built garden beds. A little patch of grass. Flat and level paving. It's brilliant and feels like a whole new garden. Looking forward to Summer when we can enjoy it. This weekend: planting out!

Fiona Campbell, Sydney council's manager of cycling strategy, spent many years as an independent cycling campaigner before joining the administration. In the UK to share Sydney's vision at the Building Cycling Cultures conference in Leicester, she admits to having been disappointed after the Games:

"Little infrastructure was actually delivered and we ended up with some sporting venues missing basic bike parking facilities. The Olympics were an opportunity to make substantial improvements and to get a shift to more sustainable transport. Sydney, unfortunately, did not take full advantage."

via guardian.co.uk

Fiona gets some love in the Grauniad.