Well not quite. The countdown is later tonight.

What to do for New Year's Eve? It's 100 degrees outside. Not a cloud in the sky. No work today. I'm still on holidays. But it's a bit cooler down at the lake. So the eskie (ice chest) is packed.  Time to go fishin'. 

AOL finally pulled the plug on its branded version of Firefox which it amusingly calls 'Netscape'. Those of us who were a part of the real Netscape can only laugh. I haven't used the AOL browser in years and never really cared for it. But it's sort of the end of an era and I feel a bit saddened. The web browser with the 'N' is no more.

Long live Firefox.

Link 

Oh, and I'm sorry but iceweasel? What's the point?

Was just going through some of the top rated 'blogs' in the world. This was a fascinating eye-opener. The top rated blogs are all about telling people how to write top rated blogs.

I'm deliberately overlooking sites such as boingboing and laughing squid, as these aren't really personal blogs per se, but rather content compilations assembled by teams of writers. As far as personal blogs, the most prominent content featured amongst the market leaders is about blogging itself.

So if you design a site that tells folks how to use wordpress or blogger, you too could be a blogging superstar. 

Marshall McLuhan would be proud.  

I found the news of Ms. Bhutto's assassination a bit troublesome. Where does Pakistan go from here?

I think it's time for Musharref to go away. Did he have something to do with the assassination? They're currently rounding up the 'usual suspects' and doing their best to paint this as an al-Qaeda operation. It is the Musharref regime however, which by virtue of being so virulently anti-democratic - lies at the root of the incident. I seem to recall that it was a military government that first deposed and later murdered Benadir's father as his populism was a threat to their hold on power.

Deja vu?  

Today is the feast of St. Stephens, otherwise known as Boxing Day in commonwealth or former commonwealth countries. In the U.S. it's simply known as the day after Christmas.

Here it's a major holiday more or less on par with the day before.  It has its origins in British social class, where you gave gifts to equals on Christmas, but gave them to lessers on the following day. Receiving a gift on St. Stephens Day would certainly be ego-deflating, as it would mark you as a peasant or serf. 

Anyway - in Australia, it's more famous as the day the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race starts. We might go up to the top of the escarpment a bit later to watch them all sail by.  

We dropped over to the local Anglican church for the Xmas eve service - which consisted of showing a movie about the events that transpired a couple thousand years back, interspersed with Christmas carols every five minutes. 

Topped it off with the obligatory 'Silent Night' but with a twist - we got to choose whether to sing it in English or aborigine.  We had the words for both, along with a tribe from the Northern Territories leading the way.

Apologies, but there just doesn't seem to be any news over here (or anywhere that I'm plugged into) about the recent Lakota Nation dissolution of peace treaties with the U.S. Can anybody on the other side of the pond find something more informative? Reactions? Anything?

You would think that the north-central U.S. reverting to Indian ownership and cancellation of land treaties which means the loss/secession of both Dakotas and most of a couple more states; and the issuing of Lakota passports - might cause a bit of a stir. The land title issues alone could be tied up in court for another twenty years. If you've got a house or business in Lakota territory and you're not Indian, it's no longer yours; unless you're willing to take up arms to defend it.  

But no - nothing. Not even chatter. That's a bit odd. Don't you think? 

School lets out for the summer in 2 days. So tonight was the end of year awards ceremony, and also consists of a musical/dramatic production that the kids have been working on for months. The theme was a humorous look at the landing in Australia first by Captain Cook, and later by the first band of convict settlers. A great time was had by all - that is except for a little boy in the first row who had terrible stage fright and was close to tears the entire show. He's the one in the red shirt standing towards the middle of the photo. Isabella did well for remembering the words, considering she's only been at this school for a couple of months now.

As I'm ordering a beer at the pub, I notice the guy behind me in the queue looks a bit familiar. Oh yeah, that's right. The vicar.

Back for Trivia Night are you? I heard you won last week - he says; as he orders a tall lager. 

Boy, you can't keep many secrets around here... Glad I wasn't there to do any serious sinning.

 What's that? Tastes like shit.

Finally a bit of respite from the weather. Now I'll probably get accused of gloating instead of whining - but this is when I can say that it's generally nice to be here rather than there. In this case - there being the NorthEast U.S. where this picture came in from...

Let's contrast that with this typical Christmas shot from NorthEast Australia...

I know, I know - life is tough.

Seems the US scandal du jour is the waterboarding/torturing of prisoners at Guantanamo, and then having the gall to delete the videos before somebody leaked them to YouTube.

Believe I talked about what was taking place at Guantanamo almost 6 years ago.  It's taken this long for them to admit what we already knew was happening. The only reason they're whining about the videos now is because it's coming up on an election year and they'd really like to use the footage on the campaign trail.

But I got to thinking... The only reason why we can hold all these guys in violation of Geneva Convention is because we claim that technically they aren't part of an army. They're 'illegal combatants' in Cheney-speak. If Al-queda wanted to prevent us from doing things like this going forward, all they would have to do is declare themselves to be a political party operating under a government in exile from somewhere. Then they would legally be soldiers and we couldn't torture the poor buggers. In fact I'd have to say that Iraqi-born insurgents are probably legal combatants and completely entitled to POW status today. Defending one's homeland from foreign invaders is the noblest of military pursuits.

Any Syrian or Iranian combatants are on their own. 

The Australian government announced that they plan to sell off and privatize the electric grid. My American friends should find this amusing. I was in hysterical laughter listening to the talking heads talking about it.

• Privatizing the electric utilities will result in reduced costs for the consumer.
• It will lead to investment in new power generation facilities.
• It will lead to increased competition, which is good for the consumer.

Right. Let me tell you about what happened in California when they did something similar...

Prices went through the roof.

No new power generation facilities were built. This would of course increase supply, which would lower the price - which reduces profits. The primary goal of private sector companies is to maximize profits.

Existing facilities were taken offline during peak periods for 'maintenance', resulting in artificial shortages, which made rates skyrocket. At times, more than half of the generating capacity was idle when it was needed the most. As the spot-rates per kilowatt rose as a result, somebody pushed a button and allowed electricity to flow from these idle plants - at ten to thousands of times the normal cost of off-season power. 

But not before creating a shortage and widespread blackouts. This created a hostage situation where people would pay anything to turn the lights back on.   

So maybe the thing to do is invest in the stocks of the companies who buy these power generation resources?

Wrong again, although this is a good short-term play. Eventually the power companies went into receivership, but not before siphoning off all the profits and laundering them through subsidiary companies and off-shore accounts. The investors lost everything. The only folks that came out ahead were the company directors.

So you're saying there's no way for the consumer to come out ahead in this situation?

That's exactly what I'm saying.

[Though I should point out that if you're planning on buying any real estate in the near future, consider buying within two blocks of a hospital or fire station. These are the last places to lose power when the rolling blackouts occur.] 

(CNN) -- For many families, having the children help decorate the Christmas tree is a treasured tradition, starting with the strands of lights. But a CNN analysis of four common brands of Christmas lights shows levels of lead experts say are high enough to be dangerous to children.

Manufacturers do not hide the fact that lead is part of the PVC insulation that insulates Christmas light wiring. Lead is used legally to stabilize polyvinyl chloride so it does not crack or crumble with age. The lead also acts as a fire retardant.

----

Maybe they weren't hiding it, but it's the first I've heard. Lead is a PVC stabilizer? Criminy - I use PVC quite often. I handle PVC coated cables every day. Nobody told me before. Heck I used to extrude PVC - nasty stuff to breathe incidentally but I still don't remember using any lead in the products we made with it.

Course back in those days huffing hydrochloric acid and all kinds of other nasty stuff was part of the job description. We wore radiation badges - not to protect us from anything, but to tell us after the fact if we received a lethal dose and should quickly make peace with our creator.  Fishing in San Francisco Bay was not yet known to cause liver damage, though it had been doing so for a hundred years. I fished in San Francisco Bay.

So now they say you can get lead poisoning from handling electrical cables. Sigh... 

Speaking of Netscape, I laughed when I saw this picture of Al Gore with a big 'N' over his shoulder. What a ghastly image. You almost expect him to be wearing a red and black cape. Wonder if he can see his reflection in the mirror. I feel like putting some garlic round my neck or making certain I'm armed with a silver spike or three.

I was recently reflecting on my startup days at Netscape more than a decade ago. What was compelling about what we were trying to accomplish at the time was to make operating systems irrelevant.

Netscape tried to accomplish this by embedding what once were typically operating system functions into a multi-protocol window onto the world (the web browser). It had your text editor, the aforementioned web browser, a window system (aka frames) and a programming language or two (Java and JavaScript) to tie it all together and turn it into a general purpose information and communication appliance. The consensus at the time was that this would make the underlying operating system (*nix, Windows, Apple, OS/2, whatever) irrelevant. If you had this tool on your computer, you could work on any computer, any platform, and be able to do all of your information related tasks.

Needless to say, this grand idea failed. The browser is still around, but the original idea was lost along the way. New browsers don't come with the same tools we tried to provide back then. Java and calendaring in particular are now separate add-ons, as is the email package - available separately.

But does that mean Netscape lost? Well yeah, Netscape did. They're gone. But the concept of operating system irrelevance didn't. As I write this (on a Windows box), I've got windows open to Unix servers, I've got Unix command shells and utilities, I've got typical Unix programming languages and databases and web servers all running in this alien environment. It's actually impressive how far we've come. I'm currently dumping a remote Linux file system to a local (Windows) disk drive using nothing but Unix commands. ssh, tar, bash. These are all running on the Windows box using Cygwin, which comes with a couple hundred native Unix commands. I've got my familiar LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web programming environment via XAMPP; which I'm developing with emacs. Remote system monitors running via X (the Unix windowing system) and being displayed on my desktop via Cygwin/X. I've even got my mouse setup with hover-to-focus mode.  The only thing that provides solid evidence that I'm not running a Unix operating system is the IE icon on the desktop (which I never use).

And this is all running on Windows.

So the operating system is completely irrelevant. It's just something that sits in the background and allows you to launch programs. Just like we envisioned back in the '90s. OK, not exactly like we envisioned, but I'm quite comfortable with the end result.

So when do you get to be too old for one of those 25 cent kiddie-rides outside the grocery store?

I suppose it's probably about a year after you finally realize that you just don't fit in/on the thing anymore.

Note: This was the cost I grew up with. I didn't look to see what they cost here in Australia - likely 50 cents since they don't make a 25 cent piece - and the girls seemed much more interested in just sitting on the thing rather than asking for change to fire it up. 

A bit of monsoon rains off an on for the last few days (no I'm not complaining - it's actually reasonably warm outside). This morning we got a little over an inch in about 20 minutes - or about 1cm/hour. The morning drive was a nightmare. With the wipers on full speed they couldn't brush the rain away fast enough to actually see anything over a couple of meters away. Everybody was crawling along at 20km/hr on Highway 1. It was a bit flooded near the Princes Highway - about a foot deep in places. (The Princes Highway is very much like El Camino Real back in California - it's the old highway; lined with business establishments, whereas the coast highway [highway 1 or the F6] is the newer freeway.)

Apparently not HTML valid either.

I'm referring of course to Microsoft's IE homepage...

Check it out for yourself...

One of Isabella's favorite songs at the moment... 

Dashing through the bush, in a rusty Holden Ute,
Kicking up the dust, esky in the boot,
Kelpie by my side, singing Christmas songs,
It's Summer time and I am in my singlet, shorts and thongs

Oh! Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,
Christmas in Australia on a scorching summers day, Hey!
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Christmas time is beaut !,
Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden Ute.

Engine's getting hot; we dodge the kangaroos,
The swaggie climbs aboard, he is welcome too.
All the family's there, sitting by the pool,
Christmas Day the Aussie way, by the barbecue.

Oh! Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,
Christmas in Australia on a scorching summers day, Hey!
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Christmas time is beaut!,
Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden Ute.

Come the afternoon, Grandpa has a doze,
The kids and Uncle Bruce, are swimming in their clothes.
The time comes 'round to go, we take the family snap,
Pack the car and all shoot through, before the washing up.

Oh! Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,
Christmas in Australia on a scorching summers day, Hey!
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Christmas time is beaut!,
Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden ute

Colin Buchanan / Nick Bland