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.
The problem with a company of rock stars is that nobody wants to do the boring stuff. Integration, exceptions and handling edge cases is boring and glamorous, so it just doesn't get done well.
Here's an email from Google with the subject line We're here to help. Note the help "do-not-reply" email address. Why thanks.
Click on the "support team" link and I get:
Awesome support. Glad you're here to help guys.
This is caused by there being no viable mechanism to migrate Google Apps accounts, and no way to change the primary domain name. When I sold my rumble.net domain, I needed to set up a new Google Apps account with the new domain. Now I get this. Wonderful work guys.
I've been offered a sizable chunk of cash for my rumble.net domain, so everything's going to be moving. If you go to my site now, it should be redirecting. Once the domain transfers, those redirects will stop happening. Email should forward but I don't really have any recourse if that breaks, so update your emails. You'll also need to ping me again on gtalk if you want to connect.
New address is simon@simonrumble.com
Perfect error message for this Tory site.
(via
)Ha, on the coalition's "deregulation taskforce"site there's a bit of broken code that says "invalid argument supplied". deregulationtaskforce.com.au
— Bella Counihan (@Becoon) June 13, 2012
One of those brilliant crisp but sunny Autumn days. Caught the bus, then ferry. Fish and chips in the park, ice cream, then back home. Lots of fun.
The Australian Labor Party needs to grow a pair and get serious here. This is a political party whose internal bastardry is legendary, yet they can't seem to use the same kind of RealPolitik tactics outside.
The largest newspaper publisher in the country is openly hostile to them, yet they continue to talk to News Corp journalists expecting to get a fair run. They should simply refuse to speak to them, answer their questions, take their calls.
A group of mining billionaires spends millions on a campaign that brings down the party's leader and drags polls down to appalling levels. Does the party add them to a shitlist of people who never get a thing from the government in future? Nope, instead it changes immigration rules to suit the oligarchs. Does it think Clive, Twiggy and Gina are suddenly going to start supporting them?
I'm gobsmacked at how gutless these guys are, and how they're unwilling to use the same tactics the Tories are using against them. Tactics they're all familiar with from student politics and factional battles. It's just bizarre.
Last Sunday, Mother's Day no less, an organisation calling itself Doctors for the Family had their submission to the Senate Committee on Marriage Equality published with all kinds of unsubstantiated claims about gay marriage harming children. Using their clinical qualifications to justify this kind of bigotry is pretty slimy.
I think it's pretty important that any doctors working on me or my family's health base their clinical decisions on evidence and not superstition. So I've taken the list of signatories to the submission and started digging out contact details for them. There's a fair chunk of overlap with another very similar pop-up organisation, Medicine with Morality, and their submission to a Legislative Review of Human Cloning law. That's a good starting point.
Interestingly the previous submission included addresses, but this current one hides them. I think if you're going to use your professional qualifications to justify bigotry and superstition, you need to stand behind that with your full professional identification.
What I need is your help to trawl through, then double-check, the full list. Already we've discovered that one of the doctors on the list works at my family's medical practice. Scary.
To get involved, jump on Google Docs and request edit access, then start looking up details. Try to be pretty certain you've got the right doctor. Some of the East Asian names are pretty common and so we can't be too certain, so best to leave them unless you have some corroborating evidence. To be clear, we're after the professional address of these doctors, not any private address details. The aim here is to allow people to make an informed choice of doctor.
Once complete, I'll publish the full list and knock up some visualisations to map where these doctors are and definitively answer the question: Who are Doctors for the Family?