The Official Organ of the NSW Liberal Party

Business leaders demand say in running Sydney

Clover Moore

Businesses are fed up ... Lord Mayor Clover Moore / Pic: Ella Pellegrini. Source: The Daily Telegraph

via dailytelegraph.com.au

Limited News abandons all pretense, now it's just the Official Publisher of the Liberal Party of Australia. In this ridiculous piece it quotes three "powerful players in the corporate world" who are fed up with Clover Moore's control of the City of Sydney. They fail to mention the small matter that every one of the three "captains of industry" quoted have served as Liberal Party politicians.

Nick Griener was Liberal Premier of NSW from 1988 to 1992.
Kathryn Greiner is his wife and was a Liberal councilor for the City of Sydney, that is a direct political rival of Clover.
Patricia Forsythe was a Liberal Member of the Legislative Council from 1991-2006.

All disinterested captains of industry with no political axe to grind here. Of course. Vikki Campion, I hope you don't claim your job title is "journalist".

Top Hottest 100 Australian albums of all time

Just put my votes into Triple J's Hottest 100 Australian albums of all time.  I just hope Farnsey and Barnesy don't make the top 10!

Here's my top 10, not in any order:
  • INXS  -  Kick
  • Itch-E & Scratch-E  -  Itch-E Kitch-E Koo
  • AC/DC  -  Back in Black
  • Gotye  -  Like Drawing Blood
  • Midnight Oil  -  10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1
  • Necks, The  -  Next
  • Pnau  -  Sambanova
  • PVT (aka Pivot)  -  O Soundtrack My Heart
  • Regurgitator  -  Tu-Plang
  • Severed Heads  -  Come Visit The Big Bigot

Changing jobs

I'm leaving Telstra Media this Friday for an exciting new job.  I'm going to be Head of Data at Datalicious, a company doing cool stuff at the intersection of web analytics, big data and marketing. I'm really looking forward to it!  Lots of new challenges and at a time when Australian companies seem to finally be waking up to the value of the data they're collecting.

Given next week I'll be in consultant mode, today's Savage Chickens is quite timely (as was this one when the job came up).

And no mention of consulting would be complete without a motivational poster:

Dear car sites: we're not all rev heads

Holly and I are discussing getting a bigger car. With another kid on the way, two child seats in the back of a Yaris is going to be very crowded. I need the seat all the way back to drive, and a car seat behind it would prevent that. There's also not enough cargo space with the whole back seat taken.

So we're looking around at cars. Lots of options, lots of quite good sites with reviews and comparisons. Carsguide's Buyer's Guides to used cars stand out as particularly useful round ups of individual generations of a particular model.

However, one thing that's really missing is the kind of information we need.  There's lots of sites that give really detailed information and comparisons about engine performance, torque, bore and stroke (whatever that is).  I couldn't give a shit.  My engine requirements are pretty simple: I push the pedal down, it goes.  I don't have to fill it up very often.  It doesn't break down.

What I really want is a meaningful comparison of legroom (front and rear) and storage space! This is really hard to find for used cars. The latest models on the manufacturers' sites tend to have these measurements, though I'm unclear if the basis of measurement is somehow standardised.

So lift your game car sites!  Do you really think that the kind of people who buy a Toyota Yaris care about the specifics of what's under the hood?  Not everyone is a rev head, though I suppose the majority of people building car sites are.
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The Cure

An amazing gig in an amazing venue. The Cure playing their first three albums at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. Brilliant. Over three hours of brilliance. After missing out on tickets when they sold out in about two minutes, we were lucky enough that a friend heard of some extra, last minute tickets turning up. And they were good tickets, off above the side of the stage.

Google, you're starting to give me the shits

I've been a fan of the Google keiretsu for a long time. Adwords is a brilliant piece of technology, and a brilliant piece of business: it works so well because everyone wins. More recently, they've started to hit some of the people scaling problems you see in big companies. In particular, the authentication system is seriously broken.
I've had a "Google Apps" account for a few years now. I got sick of endlessly tweaking spam detection rules, and decided it was probably time to start using a graphical email client. It's been great for that: spam detection is better than ever with less than five spams a year polluting my inbox in general, and the Gmail UI is sensational and gets better by the day.
The problems started, however, when I discovered I actually had three Google accounts. One was an old test account I'd always used for signing up to Google things. Another was my Google Apps account, which was the same as my email address.  Another was an invisibly-created, but different, one that lived behind the scenes at the same email address.  It seemed to own a few services that didn't support "Google Apps" accounts, somehow.  It wasn't normally a big deal.


Then came the new version of the whole Google Apps, which required migrating that hidden non-Apps account into the Apps account.  I kicked off the process, but now half of Google's services don't work.  I was warned that some things wouldn't, like AdWords and the like.  No problem.  What I wasn't warned of was that basic functions would stop working.  Like Google Help.  And the Google Help forums. I get a message like that above.  I'm not trying to do anything funky mind, just browsing to a link from the Help within Google Apps itself!
Worse yet, other things are broken too.  The Android Market no longer seems to let me buy anything. Google Latitude doesn't work.  And I'm constantly finding new things I can't do while logged into my Google accounts.
It's not like this is a transient problem. It's been going on for some time now. Colossal balls up is how I'd describe it.
I think it's time for Google to, at least in some parts, start behaving more like a traditional IT company. At least the bits providing services that people pay for! Time to get project managers, and test plans, and DEV/TEST/STAGE/PROD environments. Boring yes, but essential if you want things to actually work in the real world when you've got complex, interconnected services.