Simon Rumble’s blog

I realise I'm about a week late, but hey I've been on holidays, for the first extended break in far too long, so I've been neglecting my readers. Too bad, I needed the holiday!

So, it's a new year and all that. What have I been up to? Well, Xmas was quite fun, as we went up to Wamberal and had some family around for Xmas lunch. Then I went for a swim in the afternoon, and spent Boxing Day at Ben and Kaz's place. Very nice, very chilled.

For New Year we went up North to a site near Nimbin for a friendly and fun party with mates from BrisVegas who I've known for years. A mixture of old ausravers and related people. Great to catch up with the crew, since the last one of these parties I went to was the 2000 New Year.

We've been back since the weekend and chilling out, mostly.

Some out-of-towners have been around, as usually happens in Summer, so we've managed to catch up with quite a range of people. Julie and Jeff popped around for a BBQ before Xmas. The photo above is potatoes we pulled from the garden and chucked on the barbie. The weird speckled purple ones stay that colour through cooking! Also in town: Greta and Steve, Margaret and Cordelia, Charlie and Bridget. Martin, Jo and Max are in town too. Woody and Liz are in Australia at the moment, and we managed to catch up over New Year.

Been to a few gigs recently. Holy Fuck at the Annandale were amazing. People have been trying to do the live techno thing ever since there was techno, without much success. These guys seem to have finally nailed it, without it becoming a different style of music. Amazing!

Another Canadian band, Stars were also very good. Beautiful music, with delicious textures and heartfelt delivery. These guys really love what they do.

Coming up this month is a whole host of more gigs. This Saturday is the opening night of Sydney Festival, with lots of cool stuff around town for free. We've got tickets to the Popfrenzy night at the festival bar with Metronomy and Pivot, which sounds like loads of fun. The following weekend is All Tomorrow's Parties on the fantastic Cockatoo Island in the harbour. This used to be a working shipyard in my lifetime, so it'll be an incredible place for a music festival. Even better, it's curated by Nick Cave!

Later in the month I'll be seeing Serj Tankian, though I'm more interested in the support band, Mike Patton's Fant%C3%B4mas. Then early in February, Playground Weekender, a festival on the outskirts of Sydney with a pretty fun atmosphere, by the sound of it.

All up, it's gonna be a hectic Summer. But hey, at least it's warm this year!

Around the house there's been some activity. The garden is looking great and we've been eating a lot out of it. The potatoes were good, though they take up a lot of space when growing so I doubt I'll grow them again. We've eaten stacks of rocket, lettuce and silverbeet recently. Tonight I did a stir fry of silverbeet, bok choy and chilli from the garden, spiced with some of the herbs. Coming along well are the tomatoes, and I had the first cherry one the other day. Delicious.

In the planning list is the shed for the garden. I've contacted someone to help me with the planning process, so we'll see how that goes. There's some complications like retaining walls and the like, so if I'm going to need an engineer I might go the whole hog and put in an underground water tank. Something to keep us busy!

Someone who seemingly would like to remain anonymous (88.209.73.252 252.73.209.88.dsl.monaco.mc) has been reading my blog and getting into a froth about something or other.

I have read your Blog and for the life of me I can't see why anyone would be interested in consulting you or having you on the same planet.

You are an offensive cunt, with not a single redeamable feature which shines through in your blog. You are a sad and embitered little man.

Fuck off and die.

All I can offer is a thorough and heartfelt meh?. Feel free to continue consulting my blog. Or not.

PS: some red pen corrections: redeamable should be redeemable, embitered should be embittered.

Geo: -30.289268,153.122356 We've just arrived in Coffs Harbour after an early start. We're heading up the coast to Uki for a New Year do. We being Don, Christine, Eric, Holly and I. Rachel, Mikey, Leonie, Mark, Lee and Nick are in cars behind us.

Perl is indeed like slitting the throat of a live chicken and smearing its blood and entrails on an effigy of your enemy.

If programming languages were religions... thanks to Raz

So Rudd has announced that we're going to reduce our greenhouse emissions by a staggering five percent. How ambitious! Worse, every polluting industry and his lobbyist appear to be in line to get a handout, giving them no incentive to reduce emissions. All the while the industries that aren't carbon-intensive don't get a handout!

Note that Australia's Kyoto target was for an 8% increase in emissions on 1990 levels by 2012. We're unlikely to even make this target, despite the fact that we managed to get the "Australia clause" into the treaty, which allows us to include the extraordinary land clearing in our 1990 baseline levels.

This new soft commitment is, instead, from a baseline of our 2000 emission levels, so you can't even compare it to our Kyoto commitment, and I suppose, means we'll still be emitting more than we did in 1990 by the time we hit 2020!

What's the point? So much noise, so little impact.

Last night Holly, Todd, Pete and I went to see Canadian band Holy Fuck at The Annandale. Quite an incredible gig. For many many years, bands have been trying to do electronic music completely live, and have almost all completely failed. Some ambient bands manage to get away with it, because if you put enough delay on anything it'll sound alright if the tempo is low. This was the first time I've seen fully-live banging techno work. Brilliant!

One of the good things about working in the CBD is the Asian food. At the bottom of World Square, where I work, is an Asian supermarket. I'm enjoying finding all the weird and wacky snacks.

Today's discovery was pea flavoured Pretz. Quite a hit with the office they were, too! They're kinda pretzel textured long sticks of salty, pea-flavoured goodness. Yummy!

There were also some other wacky flavours like "roast" and "salad". Even better, it seems there's also Beer Pretz which sounds brilliant!

It seems there's a lot of people who think that images in Wikipedia can be used however they like. In fact, unless they've been released into the public domain, they have licenses that require some fairly minor, but still important, actions if you want to use them.

Below is an email I've just sent to the owner of Sydney Architecture Images: Newtown Gallery, who seems to have taken all the photos from the Wikipedia article on Newtown, without any attribution, and slapped some ads on it. I'm willing to give the person the benefit of the doubt.

Your Newtown Gallery is breaching the copyright of, it seems, all the images from Wikipedia's Newtown article:
http://www.sydneyarchitecture.com/INW/MAIN-GAL-NEWTOWN.htm

Specifically, and what made me notice, is that you are using my photo:

Images on Wikipedia are not free for you to use without restriction, unless specifically released into the public domain (for example, the Trocadero image you've used). Most of the images on Wikipedia are available under quite liberal licenses, but they do impose some requirements on you.

In the case of my photo, I have licensed it under the GNU Free Documentation License. This license has quite simple requirements, basically that you must attribute the author and license your copy of the work under the same license.

This image that you're using:

is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which has pretty similar requirements.

So in summary, you are free to use these images, but only when you follow the requirements of the license. Please amend your site accordingly.

If people want to send their kids to a school that is a social, single-gender and/or religious ghetto in an attempt for them to meet the "right" people, keep away from the "wrong" people, live out the dreams of their parents or continue some unbroken line of inherited bigotry, they should pay for it themselves.

From this opinion piece. Couldn't agree more.

Put a different way, as my public school teaching uncle said it, you don't get a rebate from the government for not using the public swimming pool when you install one in your backyard.

I remember seeing these signs all over Leicester, and just thought to look it up. Shonki Brothers real estate. How appropriate.

For the non-Australians, the word shonky means shoddy, dubious quality. For example, the Australian Consumers' Association has the annual Shonky Awards.