Convention says that today is my 41st birthday.

It depends on how you look at it though.

Which part of “what-I-am” is really 41 years old?

My body?

My body is made of cells which are constantly replaced. Between 50 and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult. The whole body is comprised of totally new cells from 7 years ago. So my body isn’t 41 years old.

And by the way, most of the cells in this body aren’t even human.

According to researchers at the 108th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, the number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1. You might think “I am my body” but when only 10% of the cells in the body are actually even human cells…. what does that mean for your identity?

The cells themselves are made of atoms which themselves come and go from my body very rapidly. In fact, studies have shown that 98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced every year.

The human body is roughly made up of:

• 63% hydrogen;

• 24% oxygen;

• 12% carbon.

How old are these atoms?

Most of the hydrogen in the universe was created between 3 minutes and 20 minutes after the Big Bang, which makes it about 13.7 billion years old.

The oxygen and carbon are around 4.6 or 4.7 billion years old, being the remnants of one or more supernovae that occurred just before our Sun itself formed.

So… how old am I?

If I date my age from when my body was made, I’m about a year old.

But if I date myself from when my components were themselves made, then the atoms that make up my body are somewhere between 4.6 and 13.7 billion years old. Let’s take an average of 9 billion years.

All of a sudden, 41 doesn’t sound that old.

I could argue that I’m the age of my DNA. I was formed about 41 years and 9 months ago. The pattern of my DNA has been passed on from cell to cell for 41 years and 9 months, providing a recipe for creating this particular body. So my “pattern” is 41 years and 9 months old.

But we also need to think about our concept of “time” itself.

We tend to think of time as something that flows or unfolds, moment by moment. It seems to us that the future hasn’t happened yet and that the past is long gone.

Physics, however, tells us something completely different.

Einstein was the first to realise that time and space are actually the same construct – therefore we now refer to it as “spacetime”.  Time is really just another dimension that we add to the three dimensions of space. Spacetime therefore has four dimensions: height, width, length – and time. Essentially Einstein demonstrated (and subsequent experiments have extensively confirmed) that time exists as a dimension of space. As Einstein once wrote to the wife of a recently departed friend, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”

Just as all of space exists “now”, all of time also exists “now”. How we experience time is merely a matter of our relative perspective (or “relativity”, as Einstein pointed out).

Here’s how theoretical physicist Brian Greene explains it in his excellent book “The Fabric Of The Cosmos“:

In this way of thinking, events, regardless of when they happen from any particular perspective, just are. They all exist. They eternally occupy their particular point in spacetime. There is no flow. If you were having a great time at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1999, you still are, since that is just one immutable location in spacetime. It is tough to accept this description, since our worldview so forcefully distinguishes between past, present, and future. But if we stare intently at this familiar temporal scheme and confront it with the cold hard facts of modern physics, its only place of refuge seems to lie within the human mind.

So let’s summarise.

The cells in my body come and go constantly, totally replaced every seven years.

So too the atoms in my body. And the ones in my body right now are an average of 9 billion years old.

But time doesn’t really exist. All of time exists NOW. Our “path” through time is simply a persistent illusion.

My DNA is about 41 years and 9 months old, but it’s just a pattern, a recipe.

So how old am I?

On G’Day World Live this week my guest was Fi Bendall from Bendalls Group. Fi is one of Australia’s best known digital strategists who has worked with clients from MTV to Amnesty. She came on to chat about how social media is challenging corporate cultures in Australia and what needs to happen before those companies will be ready to embrace things like Twitter. You can follow Fi on Twitter.

G’Day World Live broadcasts every Tuesday evening, 8pm AEST. Join in the fun! Lately it’s been running for about four hours – I play guitar and we talk about all the things you’re not supposed to talk about in polite company – from politics to religion, sex, social media and single malt whisky.

And finally, please support TPN’s April drive! We need your support!

If you want to keep TPN on the air, please show your support. If just the listeners of this show contributed $20 a month, I could fund TPN indefinitely! Is the information and entertainment you get from TPN worth a bottle of cheap wine?

On today’s show I’m joing by Sophie Peer, China Campaign Co-ordinator for Amnesty International, Fi Bendall from the Bendall Group, and Ben Barren, social media baron, to discuss the online campaign Amnesty have run over the last 3 weeks to raise awareness of China’s human rights record. The campaign asked Australian bloggers to unite and support their Chinese counterparts who have been banned, blocked, denied and imprisoned by the Chinese government for using the Internet to express their right to freedom of speech. The destination site for the campaign was UNCENSOR.com.au. The other site they recommend on the show is Stilgherrian’s blog.

Subscribe now to the TPN update email (fill in the below box) to get a weekly list of all of the new episodes on TPN in one easy-to-read format!

The G’Day World theme music:

Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)

More On This Album

I stumbled across this company today. Apparently they make roads in Washington state! The company is owned by two guys – Jim Cameron and Mike Reilly. I’ll have to see if one of my listeners in Washington can snag me some of their company swag! I especially like the images on their website of large road signs with “Cameron” written on them. Now they could come in handy at the next MODM Block Party.

Chris Pirillo tested out bringing in Skype video onto his Ustream show today by getting me chatting about my recent Windows Vista disasters. Check out the image below. Pretty cool stuff, the way he is pulling in live video. I wish I had a way of doing that.

Hey folks! It’s been an interesting week as those of you following my Twitter feed already know. I just thought I’d give you a few updates.

I know I haven’t put out a show since last week and that’s mostly because I’ve been trying to focus on selling some advertising this month. However, I do have a few interviews in the can and I will get them up over the next week or so. They include video interviews with some folks I met at the X MEDIA LABS event in Melbourne last week (including UK film director Shekhar Kapur) and Ryan Trainor, one of Australia’s youngest serial entrepreneurs.

And over the next couple of days I’ve got interviews scheduled with Dr John Demartini, an American motivational speaker and author (who was one of the people featured in the film “The Secret”), and a special edition I am producing on the state of broadband in Australia which will feature interviews with senior executives from a number of leading Aussie ISPs.

So stick around.

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For those of you who were following my Twitter posts last night about my borked PC, I managed to fix it at 2am after FIVE HOURS working on it. It started crashing repeatedly yesterday morning after Windows Update installed somethings. I did a System Restore around midday which seemed to fix it, but then Windows Update ran again (!) and the 2nd time System Restore wouldn’t fix it. So last night I spoke to IBM support, they were clueless, and I had to nut it out myself. After five hours spent upgrading the BIOS, drivers, and everything else I could think of, I finally had a brainwave to unplug all of my USB hubs and try booting. HURRAH! It worked. Turns out, Windows was crashing due to a problem Windows Update caused with an external USB soundcard which had been working JUST FINE for the last six months thank you very much Microsoft.

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Could a couple of jets crashing into the WTC in NYC on 9/11 bring them down? No, said Frank Demartini. Who was he? Only the Manager, WTC Construction and Project Management. Watch this video interview he did in Jan 2001 where he says he thinks a couple of jets could fly into WTC and they would still stand. The great irony? Demartini died on 9/11.

So this morning I went to MSY, a wonderful el-cheapo PC components store, to get a new scanner and miniSD card. I arrived 30 minutes early, was sitting in my car listening to Ewan’s Edinburgh Fringe podcast, and twitted that I was sitting out the front of MSY in Pascoe Vale. Who should come walking past my car five minutes later but Jonathan Wrigley, to invite me over to his place for coffee. Jon lives just around the corner from MSY and saw my twitter! Keep an eye on this site – Xero - Jon’s new computer store is opening in Melbourne soon and from what he tells me this morning, it’s going to be a unique kind of concept store for Melbourne.

Some research outfit called VSS are claiming that “Internet advertising is expected to reach US$61.98 billion and become the largest ad segment in 2011, surpassing newspapers“. Sounds good to me. Hopefully a chunk of that will go to podcasting. I’ll be happy to settle for 1% of it.

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“”We are moving from a speech to a conversation.” – News Ltd Chairman John Hartigan

Welcome John. Hope your stay with us is nice.

(source)

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This has to be the next step in my career. It’s in the guidebook for aspiring media giants.

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So I finally got the new Dopod, went out and bought a battery, and I’m back on the air. In addition to forking out for the new battery, I had to buy a new screen protector and, I just found out, this Dopod takes miniSD cards. The other one took MICRO SD cards. And the two don’t fit in each other’s slots. GODDAMN!!!!!

Did I mention? 3 suck.

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This is the link to the online version of the Anthill article. Anthill have just launched the new version of their site. Now the guys have the full text of their articles online and for free! Way to go gents.

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I got a call tonight from Roy Morgan Research. Guy asks me if I will answer a survey. I ask “What’s in it for me?” He says… “well we’re Roy Morgan.” I say “Yeah, you going to pay me for my time?” He says “no”. I say “So you’re going to take my answers, sell them for money, but you won’t pay me for the content?” He says “No”. I say “Then no”. He says “well what about just two questions?” I say “ok”. The two questions are about the upcoming federal election, who I’m going to vote for, and whether or not I think the Libs are taking the country in the right direction. I bite. Get all political on his ass. Then I say “okay, you can ask me the rest.” He asks another ten questions, then I get “Did you know there is a ship which travels from Melbourne to Tasmania?”
I say “What’s that got to do with the election???” He says “nothing”. So I say “yeah I did know that”. He asks “do you know the name of it?” I say “No. What happened to the election?” He says “It’s called the Spirit of Tasmania. Had you heard that name before?” I tell him to stick the Spirit of Tasmania up his cheeky ass….

Back in SL for another Ayn Rand “Atlas Shrugged” discussion. One of the avs here is Lauren Weyland who was interviewed recently on the in-world show “The Late Show with Madelena Rossini”. Check it out for a trip.

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Tom Reynolds has uploaded some photos from MODM 4. This one is of me and the guys from the much-discussed MyLiveSearch. They are coming on the show this week for a yarn.

Paul Spoerry has some great visual aids to help us understand the motivations behind the US’s middle east policies. Like this:

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Meanwhile, you have to love the pure frakking BALLS on the Bush administration. Who else could spin the sale of $70 Billion of weapons to the Middle East as “ensuring peace”?!!! Rice sez:

“We are helping to strengthen the defensive capabilities of our partners,” Rice said in a statement. “We plan to initiate discussions with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states on a proposed package of military technologies that will help support their ability to secure peace and stability in the Gulf region.”

Let’s look at the track record of the countries they have sold weapons to over the last 20 years… Iraq. Afghanistan. Iran. Israel. Saudi Arabia. How’s the peace strategy working so far, Condi?

The amount of money that the US itself spends on weapons every year is just insane.

The world spends US$780 billion every year on maintaining its military and buying new weapons —that’s $2.1 billion every day. Dr Oscar Arias estimates that if just 5% ($40 billion) of that annual $780 billion were channeled into anti-poverty programmes over the next decade, the whole world could have basic social services. A further 5% over ten years could provide everybody on the planet with an income above the poverty line. UNICEF estimates that spending just $7 billion a year for the next decade could educate every child on Earth.

(source)

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Laurel Papworth accuses my 2Web colleagues and myself of being sexist because there aren’t any women in our 2Web group!

Hey I, for one, am a HUGE supporter of the meme that we need more women in tech/web. Lots and lots. I’m sick to death of going to tech events and being surrounded by blokes. AFAIK, the 2Web group has never turned down an application for membership from a lady. If there is passive sexism involved here, it’s you girls being too passive about getting involved! Hike up your skirts girls!

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Telstra put GPS trackers into the cars of their technicians then informed them that if they had a problem with it, “they would face a review of employment.” Classy. According to The Age:

Victoria’s Workplace Rights Advocate Tony Lawrence investigated initial reports of the tracking devices and told The Australian newspaper he had referred what he believed to be a criminal matter to police.

It puts turning off Facebook into perspective.

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The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is back on and TPN’s man on the scene, Ewan Spence, is spending the next month chatting with the performers, audience and promoters! Catch it almost-live on TPN’s EFF show!

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Just for something a little bit different, I’m a guest today on Rod’s Atomic Show. He wanted to talk to me about how the nuclear industry might be able to use new media to change the perception of nuclear with the general public, bypassing the not-always-independent mainstream media. Did anyone else see that show on Frontline last night about the nuclear industry in France and Canada? I saw some of it. Fascinating.

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John Howard and his government never cease to amaze me with how much they have become the white, straight, Christian party. Today Howard announced legislation which will overturn State legislation which allows gay couples to adopt children from overseas. We need a Bill of Rights in this country. Badly.

From the Washington Post:

… The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves “shaping” both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation.” The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.

Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you.” …

Since I know you will want to read the whole study, it is here.

More:

… In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English. …

(via Marc Andreessen)

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Richard Giles is on BoingBoing! Well done mate! With friends in high places, who needs Cam???

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More from the RAND report:

Public opinion polls suggest that much of the anti-Americanism observed in the Muslim world today is attributable to U.S. policies rather than to U.S. culture, values, or people. In a 2004 poll, for example, Zogby International found that residents of most Arab countries had positive opinions about “American services and technology,” “American freedom and democracy,” “American people,” “American education,” “American products,” and the like. But many of those same respondents held negative opinions about U.S. policies toward the Palestinian conflict and Iraq.

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Anil Dash links to a fascinating 1995 doco by Brian Springer called SPIN, about how the media was used for, and itself used, spin during the 1992 US Presidential elections. The most fascinating part for me was about 18 minutes in where they discuss a Demoractic candidate Larry Agran. For some reason Agran, although running third in the early polling, was totally ignored by the media. He was cut out of photos carried in newspapers and refused access to televised debates involving the other candidates. He was eventually imprisoned for interrupting a televised debate demanding he be heard, and was released from jail after the Democratic National Congress had already started. Another example of how you need to have access to media in order to participate in the political process and how the mainstream media interferes with politics when they want to. To suggest they just “report the facts” is a joke and a bad one at that.

It’s currently 7.50pm in Australia, 1.50am US PDT. Facebook has been down for the last ten minutes. According to an entry in the Wikipedia profile for Facebook:

IT WAS RECENTLY HACKED BY CHRIS DOHERTY ON TUESDAY 31ST JULY. MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AFFECTED, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN THE UK. CHRIS DOHERTY PROCLAIMED, “NOW PEOPLE MAY SEE THAT I AM THE TRUE CREATOR!”

I’m amused this morning that Duncan wrote up my “Telstra Bans Facebook” in TechCrunch and the rash of comments accusing him of being a Facebook shill. I often tell corporate-types when they ask about why blogging is important that I may only have a few hundred regular readers of my blog but a handful of them are people with real reach – like Duncan. Google “telstra facebook” and see what happens.

Meanwhile, some people like Allen Stern still miss the point. This isn’t about Facebook. This is about businesses feeling the need to block the use of online services because they feel their employees will waste time on them and not get the job done. I know of at least one Melbourne government agency that still blocks instant messenger! Even their online team can’t use it!

Any employee who has enough functioning brain cells to use a PC and the net should have enough to work autonomously towards a set out pre-agreed results. When companies block access to internet services, rather than change their corporate culture, all they are doing is shoring up their command and control environments. This is bad – for profits, for shareholders, for employee satisfaction, for everyone.

I’m going to be talking more about this (and Telstra’s brief banning of Facebook) in my Marketing magazine article.

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Prepping for my Vernor Vinge interview this afternoon by re-reading his classic novella “True Names” which he wrote in 1981 predicting the internet YEARS before Gibson or Stephenson. If you haven’t read it, you should. Here’s a sneak peak but buy yourself a hard copy as well, it’s an incredible piece of work.

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I chatted with a representative from Telstra’s media department today about the Facebook issue. She said that it was a “technical problem” that prevented employees from accessing Facebook last Friday and that the error was resolved later in the day. When I asked for details about the problem, she couldn’t provide any. I asked if it was true that Telstra employees are not allowed to have Instant Messenger at work and she also said she couldn’t confirm that. When I asked what Telstra’s official position is on making Facebook and other internet services available to their employees, she said they don’t ban access to anything but all employees have to abide by their guidelines which means they can only use them as a “business tool” and as part of their job function.

Do you believe the official story?

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Shoe-lovin’ Telstran CathyE has created a Twitter profile purely for announcing Melbourne tech events. Very handy. Don’t forget MODM this Thursday night! We’ve got our biggest registrations to date and a new venue.

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I’m writing an article on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 for MARKETING magazine. If anyone has any good examples of how Aussie companies are using Web2.0 in a respectable fashion, let me know so I can include them.

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Speaking of Enterprise 2.0, I had lunch today with Tony Clement, one of the guys behind AEGEON, a young Melbourne-based services company focused 100% on helping corporate clients adopt Web2.0 technologies. I’ve known Tony for a few years, he was a CTO client of mine back in my MSFT days, and it’s great to see him taking the stuff we were doing back then around web services and helping other companies adopt them. Tony ran one of the first significant Microsoft.Net-based projects in Australia back in 2001/2 and had a bold vision even back then for how to use web services in an enterprise environment to innovate and engineer value. Keep an eye on Aegeon. They are the first services firm I’ve heard of in Australia that is really throwing serious effort behind Web2.0.

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I’m back on my weight-loss regimen. Listened to The Health & Fitness Show #058 – Easily Identify Low Fat + Low Sugar + High Nutritional Value Food this morning. Lots of great tips from Beti on how to tell what you are putting into your body. I was thinking we should run a competition for G’Day World listeners to see who can lose the most about of weight over the next 90 days. Get a sponsor to put up a prize. Who’s in?

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McDonald’s just don’t get blogging, do they?

Some of you will remember the fake blog they put up in early 2005.

Now some hired PR guy in Perth is blogging on PerthNorg under the alias “cookie2″. He’s pushing the “Name the Burger” campaign that McDonald’s is running in Australia at the moment.

Cookie2 writes: “Burger naming legend Ken Thomas, renowned for his creativity in naming the Cheeseburger, Double Cheeseburger, McChicken and the Hot Apple Pie, has retired from the senior ranks of McDonald’s Australia, giving the company the opportunity to throw the job open to the Australian public.”

Unfortunately, Cookie2 (aka John Cooke a PR consultant working for McDonald’s Australia) has just broken Rule #1 of Corporate Blogging – Be Honest.

“Ken Thomas” is (perhaps obviously) a fictional character, created by advertising agency Leo Burnett.

So why can’t McDonald’s just tell the truth? Why not just start a campaign about naming a burger? Why do they have to make up some bullshit story? I don’t get the rationale. Do you? Can someone explain it to me?

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Watching this amazing “Russian Scam” video (aka “How To Take Someone’s Wallet Just By Asking Them”) by Derren Brown. Amazing.

After you’ve watched that, watch this guy’s attempt at explaining it using NLP.

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Just been watching Tanya Levin, author of a soon-to-be-released book about the very scary Hillsong Church, on Denton’s Enough Rope. My old mate Phil McCreddan has an article about Hillsong, which includes an interview with Tanya, on his Signposts blog. Interestingly, publisher Allen & Unwin were going to publish her book (“People In Glass Houses”) but pulled out of it, apparently because of a perceived risk of defamation. The book was picked up by Black Inc which is owned by Morrie Schwartz, who also published Monthly magazine. This is the church that has links to Gloria Jeans (see my earlier posts on that here and here and why I don’t drink Gloria Jeans anymore), has received a bunch of government grants, and where the founder’s father, who held senior positions in the church, but was forced to resign in 2000 following exposure of his homosexual paedophile activities whilst ministering in New Zealand some thirty years earlier.

I’m looking forward to reading her book.

What does driving a Prius *say* about you? As a person?

What a load of crap.

You aren’t defined as a person by what clothes you wear or by the car you drive. You are defined by what you *do*. Are you contributing something every day towards the betterment of the human race? Or are you merely buying things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like?

The average income per household (in real dollars) in Australia is up 300% since 1950. And yet two-thirds of the population believe they don’t have enough money to buy everything they *need* to be happy. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars a year trying to convince you that you are unhappy, incomplete, that you aren’t successful until you have one more piece of *stuff*. The Government, the media, big business and the advertising industry all want you to buy more stuff and they spend BILLIONS trying to convince you that you *need* it. Not just want it – NEED it. Advertising is all about creating new wants and then turning those wants into NEEDS. You can fill that hole inside of you, the hole that tell you that you aren’t quite right, if you just buy a new pair of shoes, flat screen tv, house, shares, iphone. Meanwhile, the factories that make the stuff, vomit out pollution into the atmosphere, use energy which is dug out of the ground, that requires us to invade other countries, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

Where does it end?

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Sitting at a cafe this morning, scanning the paper, saw lots of stories about celebrities out of control – Lohan, Richie, Spears, Hilton. All women. Girls, really. The media built them up into massive celebrities, role models for young girls, sexual fantasies for men and boys, and is now viciously tearing them down. It can’t be a coincidence. There must be an agenda. I’m trying to figure out what it is. Why are we seeing the destruction of the young female sex icon? What are they trying to tell us? That young women can’t be trusted? That our women are out of control? That behind every attractive young woman lies an alcoholic, drug-dependent kleptomaniac? That we cannot trust our fantasies? In this era of mass media controlled celebrity, we no longer have leaders. Who are our heroes? Who are the people we look up to?

Sporting stars. The media builds them into celebrities and then reveals that they are all secretly druggies, lying sex maniacs, violent misoginists.

Actors. But then we find out they are all druggies, racists, wife-beaters.

Reality TV stars. But then we find out they are all vacuous and slutty.

Business people. But then we find out they lied about stock options and profits, raped the environment, took the money and run.

What’s the common theme?

The mass media builds up non-entities into celebrities, heroes, and then tears them down in front of our eyes. They spend a couple of years telling you to admire someone, and then show you how shallow, cheap, flawed your hero is.

The message?

There is no-one to look up to. Your heroes are all shameful. Your politicians are liars, cheaters, bullshit artists, greasing their own pockets. Your sporting heroes used drugs to enhance their performance and have out of control egos.

So who do they want you to trust?

Them. The media. Trust them. They will look after you. Tell you who to trust and who not to trust. Tell you which politician to vote for. Which country to invade. Which products to buy. Which foreign leaders to fear. Which dark-skinned person to put in jail because they don’t look like you and don’t believe what you believe.

It’s an economy of lies and the biggest lies, the biggest fraud, is committed by the very people telling you what to believe and what not to believe.

The mass media.

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Speaking of things I *need* – check out this AT-ST Second Life avatar!

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I’ve created a couple of groups inside Second Life. You can now add yourself to the following groups:

If I knew how to link directly to those groups from here, I would. But I don’t. So for now you just need to search for them in-world. Or you can add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends and check out the groups I belong to.

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Apparently people DON’T need to be in Facebook to view or RSVP to an event in Facebook. That’s good news. One less reason for the spate of recent Facebook phobia I was subject to.

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Update on that Paypal fraud issue I had a week ago. Remember I ordered some products off a website, never received them, couldn’t get the site to respond to my emails, they didn’t have a listed telephone number? Well I took Fi’s advice (thanks Fi!) and made a complaint via Paypal. The process took a couple of minutes and, a couple of days later, the company refunded my money, claiming they were out of stock with the product. A good outcomes from Paypal! Obviously the company (DirectDiscount.us) takes Paypal’s emails more seriously than they do mine. A lesson for anyone out there who gets ripped off in a Paypal transaction – make a complaint.

Just went to pay the speeding fine I got leaving Bundaberg and discovered there are no online payment options?! Can’t even pay it over the phone?!? Have to send a cheque. By post. Wow. Queensland. Amazing.

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I’m fascinated this morning watching the shit-fight between Arrington and Furrier/Scoble over Podtech. Having met all three of those guys over the last couple of years, I would have figured them to be pretty tight. It does sound, though, like Podtech have been burning through their $7 million in funding. The business model for podcasting is still in the early days and I hope they make it through. People tend to forget that new business models tend to take 5 – 10 years to stabilize. The first banner ads were run in 1993, but it took nearly a decade before online advertising started to overtake radio advertising in most markets. I think the time frames will be compressed with podcasting, but it is still going to take a few more years before it’s well understood. Most ad agencies and media buyers still aren’t even considering podcasting in their spread. That’s starting to change, but we’ve got a long road ahead of us yet. The TPN model is to keep our overheads low, grow the audience and the content as much as we can, and grow the business through revenue. It’s a slower path but, hopefully, more sustainable in the long run and you don’t get crunched by investors when the journey takes longer than they would like (which seems to be what is happening to Podtech).

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TPN’s Digital Photography Show has been nominated in TWO categories at the Podcast Awards! Please click on the link below to vote for them in both the Cultural/Arts category and also nominated in the People’s Choice category! Congrats to Scott and Michael, this is just another piece of kudos for the great work they do every week on their show!

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According to this post about the CIA:

There are currently at least two criminal trials underway in Italy and Germany against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt and Jordan for torture, and causing them to “disappear” into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the U.S. without any form of due process of law.

Oh, but you think the CIA is being watched by the Oversight board set up 30 years ago to stop the bullshit they were involved in from the 50s through to the 70s? Think again.

However, on July 15, 2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post reported that, for the first five-and-a-half years of the Bush administration, the Intelligence Oversight Board did nothing — no investigations, no reports, no questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no reason to inquire into the interrogation methods Agency operatives employed at secret prisons or the transfer of captives to countries that use torture, or domestic wiretapping not warranted by a federal court. Who were the members of this non-oversight board of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys? The board now in place is led by former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It includes Don Evans, a former commerce secretary and friend of the President, former Admiral David Jeremiah, and lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse.

And whose daddy ran the CIA in the late 70s? That’s right – Dubya’s. The CIA gets $48 Billion in funding every year, yet nobody knows where it goes or how they spend it and they still haven’t been able to catch bin Laden, they didn’t want America about 9/11 and they were pretty wrong when they said they had conclusive evidence that Saddam had WMD stuffed down his undies. If you want to search for the main reason we have terrorism in our lives these days, start with looking into the activities of the CIA. Get an independent, citizen-helmed inquiry happening. Set it up so it can’t be bought or threatened out of existence. I think we’d all be amazed what it would uncover.

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As my car lease is up in a couple of months, we spent some time this afternoon test driving cars. Or a car, actually. We initially went back to the BMW dealership we bought our last car from. After standing there for 20 minutes without anyone asking if they could help us, we left and went to a Toyota dealership to test drive a Prius. I took a Prius out 3 years ago and couldn’t talk myself into it. This time, I actually quite liked driving it. Okay – it looks ugly and the interior finish just doesn’t compare to a BMW. But I like the efficiency and the tech. And it’s $25k cheaper than an equivalent Beemer. However, on the way home, the wife said to me “I’ll cry if we don’t buy another BMW. I love my BMW.” I asked her how long she’d cry for, thinking, well, I could handle a bit of crying to save the planet. “For the entire time I have to drive a Prius.” Sheesh. And she only drives the car about 30 minutes a week on average! It’s not like she’s even IN it every day. Anyway – score one for BMW’s engineering department. Nobody tell anyone at BMW marketing.

The word on Twitter is that the fine folks at Telstra have banned Facebook on the corporate network. This would be a retarded move for ANY company, let alone a company that is trying to position itself as a company that “gets” online. It reminds me of a question someone asked me at the recent Microsoft ReMix event in Melbourne. We (that is, the panel) have been talking about Twitter, Facebook, etc, and a guy asked “I’m the owner of a business, how do I stop my people from wasting their time on these sites instead of doing their work?” I explained that any half-intelligent employer in the 21st century should be measuring their employees by their OUTPUT, not by what time they punch the clock or what they are doing each minute of the day. Microsoft, to it’s credit, understood this years ago. Most enlightened managers (not that there are many left at Microsoft in Australia now that Frank has left the premises) didn’t care what time you turned up to the office, when you left, or what you did during the day. What they cared about was one thing and one thing only – did you get the outcome accomplished? If you did – great. Here’s your bonus. If you didn’t – then you’re in trouble. Isn’t that the way every employer should be? If you ban Facebook, do you also ban books? Magazines? Telephones? Talking to the person beside you about everything unrelated to work? That isn’t even taking into account what a useful took Facebook can be for getting your job done (depending on what your job is of course).
Anyway, this is just another example of how Telstra don’t really get what’s happening online.

UPDATE: According to Rich in the comments of this post, Telstra turned Facebook back on this afternoon? Anyone know the story?

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Started reading “Affluenza” by Australian authors Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss today. I’ve been meaning to get to this book for years. The book poses the question: “if the economy has been doing so well, why are we not becoming happier?”

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From the “I told ya so but you wouldn’t frakking listen” file:

“TV viewing audiences have fallen by almost 6 per cent in the past five years, with a dramatic 17 per cent drop for 16-39-year-olds, according to TV ratings group OzTAM.” (source: The Age)

And, according to Fortune:

“Newspapers are dying.”

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I took my DOPOD 838PRO into the THREE store for repairs 7 weeks ago. At the time, they told me it would take a month. I rang four weeks later, they said it was going to take another three weeks. I rang today. They said it was initially with one repair center, Teleplan, for a month then it was shipped to another repair center, Phonetec, a week ago. The Phonetec people haven’t looked at it yet and can’t give them a date when it will be fixed.

This is frakking unbelievable. I’m now on the phone to Three customer support, letting them know I want my entire contract canceled.

Okay, well that was disappointing. I spoke with four people at Three customer support. When they couldn’t provide me with any idea as to when my phone would be fixed, I gave them a choice: give me a new phone or cancel my account. The guy in the Three cancellations department I spoke to offered me a new phone, but only the Dopod 595, an inferior model to my 838Pro. So I asked him to cancel my services. Sure, he said, but it’ll cost you $900! Bullshit, I said. That’s the hardware fee and I don’t HAVE the hardware. YOU’VE got the hardware. He said it also includes a $300 “cancellation” fee. But I don’t have the goddamn phone?!! He didn’t give a shit. So I told him I’ll find another way to make my complaint heard and get a resolution.

Anyone know anyone senior at Three?

Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

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Dave Wallace (from TPN’s Extraordinary Everyday People show) has made a TPN T-shirt in Second Life! Very cool, I hope he has it in my size!

He did!

Second Life is so trippy. I can’t believe I just said to Dave “I bought a new body last night but I can’t figure out how to put it on.” Sounds like something straight out of Gibson.

Back in the chair today after the QLD trip and meeting all day yesterday. Looking forward to making some casts. Doing the next Napoleon and a GW today. Paul Montgomery is going to join me on GW. Want to talk about the IMF and WTO. Also my review of the wicked headphones the nice people at Ultimate Ears sent me today.

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Trying to get Norman Solomon, author of the book / film “War Made Easy” onto GW as a guest. Emailed his PR folks.

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You know what pisses me off? People who say they are going to do something with you, allow you to invest time and energy into the project, and then pull out with weak-ass excuses, having done squat. Where’s my elephant gun….

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When am I going to be able to run Second Life on Vista???

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w00t! I’m back in Second Life. Finally got it working on my new Vista PC. Add me as your friend so I don’t feel so frakkin dorkish. My Second Life nick is “Cameron Switchblade”.

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I’ve seen this video with Zappa (about censorship in music) before but Hugo linked to it recently so I watched it again. Zappa was a brilliant thinker. Interesting that this was on CNN (in 1986). Watching it now, you’d swear you’d were watching FOX.

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Scanning the recently-launched Global Peace Index, which ranks 121 nations according to their relative peacefulness. Fascinating stuff. Australia ranks at only #25, behind Uruguay and just ahead of Romania. I’m feeling proud. The USA comes in at #96, slightly ahead of Iran. #1 is Norway.

TPN’s latest podcast is Take Two – interviews with Australian business leaders by Leon Gettler, management and economics commentator for The Age newspaper in Melbourne Australia, and technology editor Garry Barker. Check out their interview with Justin Milne, CEO of Telstra BigPond.

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Ah… the clean country air of Bundaberg….

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David Chappelle is Black Bush. Classic.

Neet and I went to see KNOCKED UP last night in Brissy. I loved it. Terrific little film. Lots of laughs, the premise, script and cast are all first rate.

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Russell Buckley sent me a link to this video that is like an ad for atheism. Nicely done.

Sitting in Brisbane with nothing much to do…

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Saw a great 2006 German film earlier at the Dendy in George Street called “Vier Minuten” or “Four Minutes”. It’s the story of an elderly lesbian piano teacher who works at a women’s prison and accepts a violent young student with massive natural talent to deal with her guilt from allowing her young female lover to be murdered by the Nazi’s 60 years earlier. Despite the negative review on IMDB, I really enjoyed it. Watch the trailer.

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Nick Hodge sent me this article by William Lobdell who for many years has written a column on religion for the L.A. Times. When he started, he was a “serious Christian”. However, by the end of his journey covering the crimes and perversities committed, endorsed and protected by Christians in the USA, he seems to have lost his faith. It seems that, even for “serious Christians”, the more you learn about Christianity, the less there is to like about it.

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Bundaberg. Cold. Slow. No 3G. Using my mum’s PC. She’s on some bullshit BigPond DSL plan where she only gets 400Mb a month for $40!! And it’s nearly used up, so I’m moving her to Dodo this morning. Screw Telstra BigPond and their bullshit data plans. Everyone – make sure your parents are getting screwed by their ISP. Have spent the last day cleaning up mum’s PC – swapping out Norton for AVG Free, moving her data over to an external drive, implementing a backup system, installing a new DVD drive, etc. Other sons mow the lawn. Just call us the Tech Support Generation.

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 Have to drive five minutes down to Bargara Beach to find a semi-decent coffee. Ugh.

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 According to some larrikin editing my Wikipedia entry:

“Some times uses the alias “Tony Harris” to backup his own arguements.” (sic)

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Love this story on BoingBoing:

Four federal inmates were indicted Tuesday on allegations that they copyrighted their names, then demanded millions of dollars from prison officials for using the names without authorization.The inmates sent demand notices for payment to the warden of the El Reno federal prison and filed liens against his property. They then hired someone to seize his vehicles, freeze his bank accounts and change the locks on his house. Unfortunately, the person they hired turned out to be an FBI agent.

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I have been reading up on Bush’s new Executive Order where he “directed the Treasury Department to block the U.S.-based financial assets of anyone deemed to have threatened “the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq” or who “undermin(e) efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq.” The order also enables Treasury to target those individuals who prevent ”humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people”. As Bush and Friends have been responsible for 700,000+ civilian deaths in Iraq, I’m wondering if this EO means Treasury will block HIS assets.

Read the Executive Order or read an analysis of it by some experts.

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Neet and I cracked up this morning over this clip of prisoners in the Phillipines performing “Thriller”.

About 5 weeks ago I ordered some products from an Australia site called Direct Discount. I paid via Paypal. I got a confirmation email. Everything looked legit. But it’s been five weeks and still no product. I’ve tried emailing their sales support line but the emails bounce. They have a fax number on the site but no telephone number. I can’t find a listing for them in the Aussie WhitePages. Any ideas on how I track these folks down to see if I’ve done my $100 or not? They also have a US site.

UPDATE 29 July 2007: Well I took Fi’s advice (thanks Fi!) and made a complaint via Paypal. The process took a couple of minutes and, a couple of days later, the company refunded my money, claiming they were out of stock with the product. A good outcomes from Paypal! Obviously the company (DirectDiscount.us) takes Paypal’s emails more seriously than they do mine. A lesson for anyone out there who gets ripped off in a Paypal transaction – make a complaint.

Canned coffee vending machines

Originally uploaded by seanbonner

Sean Bonner is posting great photos from Japan including this one of a canned coffee vending machine. Mmmmm. And I thought Nescafe sucked!

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On The Cranky Middle Manager Episode 101, Wayne interviewed guest Anita Bruzzese, a workplace columnist who’s “On the Job” is syndicated in dozens of Gannet-run US newspapers and sometimes USAToday.com.

Anita reciprocated by writing an article on Wayne’s podcast that came out in a bunch of papers this week, this one is from the Salt Lake City Tribune.

Thanks Anita from all of us at TPN!

A great example of Christian tolerance in the US senate.

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Chris Pirillo is getting up to speed on the problems inherent in the American system of democracy and capitalism. Interesting to see someone like Chris speaking out about this. Watch the first ten minutes of the video he’s linked to. Chris has just agreed to come on GW for a chat about the issues. Can’t wait!

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We took the kids to the Pixar exhibition and to see the Fantastic four film today. The Pixar exhibition is worth the price of admission just to see the amazing zoetrope! I can’t recommend this enough. I was totally blown away by it and we were all voted it the highlight when we left.

As for the FF film…. well the kids loved it, and I got to watch Jessica Alba for a couple of hours. Can’t complain about that. But you don’t get to see Galactus???? WTF?? They talk about him, he is apparently about to devour Earth (starting with the Thames), the Silver Surfer flies out to confront him, but we don’t get to see him? Majorly disappointing. The film as a whole is as lightweight as the first one. It’s kind of weird to see Michael Chiklis appear a couple of times when Johnny sucks up Ben’s powers – we’ve just finished watching The Shield Season Three on DVD. God I love that show. Anyone out there got Season Four that you could “loan” me?

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Got this email from new listener Holden today, made my morning:

I just started listening to podcasts over the last two months or so. I just wanted to tell you that your Napoleon podcast and the G’day World podcast have been entertaining and educational as I mow lawns all summer up here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I’m very glad to learn that there are other people who care about critical thinking and reason, but don’t just stop there, who want to change the world for the better. As I’m going through all the G’day back issues I was struck by #239. You really spoke to me, and even though this is about three months late, thank-you for telling it like it is. I recently went through that sort of re-inventing time. I switched from Christian ministry to the wide undefined world of writing and have never looked back.

Thanks Holden! Great to know I’m not talking into the wind. And it’s great to know that out there, somewhere, there are Christians who are thinking and reading outside of the narrow confines of the religion.

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What’s the best way to keep a documents folder synchronized between two PCs these days? I’m going to be traveling a bit over the next month and I want to have a copy of my documents folder sitting on a portable 80GB USB hard drive to take with me. The way I see it, I have three options:

1. Move all of my documents from the hard drive they currently sit on (a bulky external USB drive attached to my Vista desktop PC) onto the small portable hard drive and just use it as my central documents storage from now on. The only concern I have is losing it while I’m on the road. Of course I can back it up locally before I leave.

2. Just before I leave, put a copy of the documents folder onto the portable drive, work from that while I’m on the road, then copy those documents back to the main drive when I get home.

3. Have some sort of solution that synchronizes the folders between the two drives every time I plug the portable drive back into the desktop. Pre-Vista I used to run Microsoft’s Foldershare but it doesn’t seem to work on Vista.

Recommendations?

UPDATE: I installed Foldershare again just to check it out an apparently it is limited to 10,000 files, so I can’t use it to synch my documents folder. I’m now trying Microsoft Synctoy which looks like it might work. I just need to remember to plug in the portable drive to the desktop when I get back from my trip to synch everything back as I can’t do it over the cloud, which would be ideal.