Dear Melbourne IT Leadership Group,

I would like to send my sincere commendations to a member of your hosting support team by the name of “Sank”.

In the last week, I have been screwed around ROYALLY by several of your staff. Sank was the only one who seems to know what he’s doing.

On 30 November, I received an email regarding one of our domain names ‘nelsongoc.com’. The email advised “The following account has been deleted and is no longer accessible.” This is, I might add, a completely useless email. It tells me nothing about the situation. So I rang your support line and spoke to a gent (whose name I unfortunately didn’t write down) who advised me that our domain name was registered through to 2019 and that this email was only regarding our hosting service. I asked if allowing this hosting service to expire would affect our MX records on the domain, as they were pointing to Google Apps. He assured me that letting the hosting expire would not affect our MX records in any way. So we let it expire.

A week later, our email for this domain (which we use to run several businesses I might add) stopped working.

So I rang again last night (8 Dec) and spoke with someone else who told me the same thing as the gent on 30 Nov. I explained that our email had stopped working but he assured me it had nothing to do with the MelbourneIT side of our service.

After scratching my head for another 15 minutes, I rang back AGAIN and this time spoke with a gent called “Niz” who explained that everything I’d told had been incorrect and that I did, in fact, need your hosting service to re-direct our MX records to Google Apps. He offered to set up this service for me – at a cost of $219 p.a.! I asked him if there wasn’t another way to change the MX records – after all, every other domain name registration service we use has this functionality built into the domain service – but he assured me that there was no other option. So I agreed to proceed with setting up the new hosting service. He sent me an email with the new login for the service a few minutes later. However when I tried to login to the DNS section, I was asked for the login a second time but it wouldn’t work.

So I rang your support line for the THIRD time that day and spoke to a young lady who assured me that the DNS login was the same as the Hosting login and worked on her side. She advised me to send an email to the support department with the details of the MX records we needed changed and that they would do it for us. This was about 6pm Brisbane time last night.

This morning, around 9am Brisbane time, I rang Niz again to see if the MX records had been changed. He put me through to Sank.

Sank advised me that what Niz told me about needing the Hosting service was INCORRECT. He said there is a way to change the MX records on the backend of the domain. He then proceeded to walk me through how to set it up. He then put me back through to Niz to cancel the hosting service.

SO……. it took me FOUR calls to your technical support department before I actually got hold of someone who knew what they were talking about.

What kind of operation are you running in there?

Jason ordered a couple of iPad2s for us several weeks ago which haven’t arrived yet. Here’s the shipping notification we just received from Apple.

• May 26th – Picked up from Shenzhen
• May 27th – Arrived Singapore
• May 29th – Arrived Frankfurt
• June 3rd – Delivered in Good condition, Istanbul
• June 9th – Picked up from Istanbul
• June 18th – Arriived Shenzhen
• June 20th – Arrived Hong Kong
• June 21st – Awaiting departure to Brisbane
• 21 Jun 2011    06:22:35    Hong Kong    Shipment Received At Transit Point.
• 21 Jun 2011    09:11:33    Hong Kong    Shipment In Transit.
• 21 Jun 2011    11:21:48    Hong Kong    Shipment Received At Transit Point.
• 21 Jun 2011    17:03:56    Hong Kong    Shipment In Transit.
• 21 Jun 2011    21:00:00    Hong Kong    Shipment Lost. Recovery Action Underway.

• Could Obama Be Impeached for Waging War in Libya Without Approval of Congress? Glenn Greenwald asks in Democracy Now. Apparently he decided to ignore the views of top White House lawyers when he decided to invade LIbya. My take on this is that while he probably COULD be impeached, he won’t. The elite don’t do that to each other except under EXTREME circumstances. Oh sure, they will huff and puff about blowing his house down, but it’s all political theatre designed to keep the people distracted, sell newspapers and bump up viewership to cable news and news sites. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs will continue to rape the U.S. blind.
• The Liberty Scam – Stephen Metcalf in SLATE has written a terrific and timely article on why libertarianism fails as a political ideology. I have come to the same conclusions over the last ten years. None of us is an island, to paraphrase John Donne. If you live in a country such as Australia, you are taking advantage of the opportunities that our society offers. That doesn’t only include benefits such as public education and healthcare. It also includes people who build roads. People who collect your garbage. The people who grow your food and the people who sell it to you. It’s one big system and, because you are part of it, you are benefiting from it. If you’ve been successful and made a few bucks, you have to ask yourself the question – “Could I have done this if I had to carve my own roads, manage my own healthcare, grow and harvest my own food, dispose of my own garbage, protect yourself against burglary or enemy invaders?” Chances are you owe, in no small part, your success to the fact that many, many other people are doing the things you don’t HAVE to do, which has allowed you to focus on education or hard work. So you didn’t get to where you are all by yourself. That’s a fiction. You owe a large part of your success to the system you live in.

• Iraq hunting $17 billion missing after U.S. invasion - “The missing money was shipped to Iraq from the United States to help with reconstruction after the ouster of Saddam Hussein….. All indications are that the institutions of the United States of America committed financial corruption by stealing the money of the Iraqi people, which was allocated to develop Iraq, (and) that it was about $17 billion,” said the letter sent to the U.N. with a 50-page report.”  That’s what these wars are about, folks – theft. Plain and simple. Theft of money from the U.S. taxpayers and theft of the natural resources of the Iraqi and Afghani people. Everything else they throw at you – Saddam, Bin Laden, the Taliban, etc – is just smoke and mirrors. It’s all about the rich stealing from the poor and the gullible. It’s the oldest trick in the book, a magnificent sleight of hand even Hypnotist Kenny would be proud of.
• Another day another pedophile Catholic priest & cover-up by the Church - remembering, of course, that the key message here isn’t about the pedophiles themselves, it’s about the Catholic Church’s systematic and deliberate cover-up of the crimes to protect their cash. (See my earlier posts on the topic – GDay World 382 – Dr Wayne Chamley on Catholic Sexual Abuse in Australia, G’Day World Video – Peter Kennedy, Rebel Priest, part one, The Irish ”Child Abuse Commission”).
• WSJ has a brain aneurism when it learns the The Dalai Lama is a Marxist – “Earlier this month, the Dalai Lama told a group of Chinese students at the University of Minnesota, “I consider myself a Marxist . . . but not a Leninist.”" The author, philosopher Carlin Romano, then goes on to say “It’s an old, familiar position in Western secular intellectual life: Marxism wasn’t a God that failed, and the Soviet Union and Mao’s China don’t count against it, because Marxism was never tried—Communism perverted it.” That’s actually not the argument at all, Carlin.  The argument is that the Bolshevik’s perverted socialism. Had the Menshevik’s managed to wrest control of the Communist Party, we might have seen a very different 20th century Russia.

• “every pencil David Rees sharpens is shipped with a signed and dated certificate authenticating that it is now a dangerous object.”
• Chrissy and I had a great time catching up with @lelaissezfaire last night. If you don’t follow him on Twitter, you should start now. Read his blog, too.



• Yeah Weiner had to resign. But, as Taibbi says, it’s NOT about sexting. It’s about lying his ass off about it for a week. When you have a job like that, you have to know that if you get caught lying about shit, it’s going to mean people don’t trust you and that’s kind of a bad thing for a politician. So don’t feel sorry for him. He knew the rules when he took the job.
• As @danmc reminds me, “its also about politicians not putting themselves somewhere they can be blackmailed”. Rule #1 when you take office should be “don’t get caught doing stupid shit while you’re in office”.
• How awesome is this TARDIS prop?  It’s the opening shot from the 1964 Hartnell-era episode “The Aztecs”. 

How man people have read the entire bible, cover to cover? Well…. I have. A few times. And now I’m about to do it again. This time, however, I’m going to record it. That’s right – the entire bible. Old and new testaments.

Why? Because it’s a fascinating, confusing, humorous and scary piece of literature. And everyone, Christian or not, should know what it says. Ninety-nine percent of all of the Christians I’ve ever asked have told me that they HAVE NOT read it cover to cover, even the people who actually think it is the literal word of GOD. Pretty amazing.

So anyway – now all of you lazy people don’t have to read it, because I’m going to do it for you. And I’ll even explain it as I go.

The show will get its own website soon, this is just a preview.

UPDATE: This show now has its own site.

In case you missed the announcement, I recently launched a new TPN podcast: The Peter Ellyard Show. Peter has been a good friend and regular guest on this show for several years. We worked together on his latest book, Designing 2050: Pathways To Sustainable Prosperity On Spaceship Earth. Peter has a massive amount of experience in environmental issues and as a futurist, so I decided he needed his own show. We’ve already got two episodes out, the most recent being an interview with WeForest’s Bill Liao, while he was at COP15. I hope you’ll check out the show.

The Crafty Hedgehog sells knitted version of dissected animals. Cool. See more.

This would be him.

This track came on my iPod today and I had to watch this clip again. Classic.

I just read this fascinating report on the narcosphere (Millennium Challenge Corp. poured millions into Honduras in months leading up to putsch) that describes the activities of a US aid entity set up by Bush (the MCC) in Honduras leading up to the coup against President Zelaya.

It’s well known that aid agencies are sometimes used as a front by the CIA for spying and funding regime change activities (such as its involvement with USAID, famously documented in the “Family Jewels” documents, which details a joint USAID-OPS operation concerning training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc).

Narco raises a lot of interesting questions about the timing, motivation, recipients and utilisation of the funding that MCC sent into Honduras just prior to the coup.

Dilbert author Scott Adams has a GREAT idea for reducing health insurance premiums:

First, 80% of healthcare costs go toward chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

Second, a huge study on diet and its correlation to disease, called The China Study, found that chronic diseases, particularly the ones I just mentioned, only get triggered if you eat a plant based diet, for the most part, regardless of your genetic propensity. (CR Note: I think he meant to write "DONT get triggered if you eat a planet based diet".)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study

You might say it is unfair for the insurance company to charge a higher premium for earthquake insurance to people who actually live on a fault line. But I say that’s just good business.

What do you think? Should health insurance companies have better plans for vegetarians? And would YOU become a vegetarian if you knew your health insurance would be cut by 75%?

I was at this concert. I’ll never forget this opening number. It was TOTALLY INSANE. This video doesn’t begin to do it justice. Instead of the footage of the audience in the first 30 seconds it should have shown the stage. First thing you heard was the loud thunderous thumping. Then the top of the stage opened up and bright white lights blinded you. Then MJ marched up from inside the stage. Lights dimmed, smoke cleared, he screamed, everything exploded.

I still say it was the most amazing concert I’ve ever been to in my life. He was at his peak and – let’s face it – BAD was his last interesting album. After that he just melted down and become more freak than artist.

I was talking to Chrissy the other day, wondering who taught Michael how to dance – turns out it was a guy called Jeffrey Daniel. Check this video out:

Let’s remember though that the evidence seems to indicate that Michael was a very disturbed human being, a paedophile who only didn’t end up serving 20 years in jail because he could afford to buy his way out of trouble with $22 million of hush money.

And I don’t care that "he had a tough childhood". Yeah sure – being super rich and famous and talented must be a bitch. Guess what? Lots of people who end up committing criminal behaviour had messed up childhoods. And while we should definitely be understanding of that in our legal system, and recognize that emotional and psychological damage need to be treated responsibly, it’s not a ‘get out of jail free card’.

Unless, of course, you are someone who can spend $22 million on out-of-court settlements – like Michael Jackson – or priests in the Catholic Church.

At the moment I am still missing the following list of G’Day World episodes. This dates back to the server crash we had six months ago when we also discovered our backup system had been misconfigured. If anyone has copies of these podcasts and would be prepared to upload them for me, I would be extremely grateful.

Gdayworld shows missing from ftp:

59
68
104
106
126
141
156
163
175
180
184
195
198
199
213
214
215
216
224
225
228
229
230
231
232
234
235
247
277
278
303
304
305
306
309
311
314
331
337
338
339
340
345
346
347

Very cool!

(via Geeky Gadgets)

I usually don’t talk about my private life here, but today I have to make an exception.

My lovely girlfriend, Christine Dunaway (@fddlgrl on Twitter), is moving from Seattle, Washington to Brisbane in July! No, we didn’t meet on Twitter, we actually met on the island of Corsica last year while we were both there for the Napoleon conference. Chrissy  was there to perform at the gala dinner (she’s definitely NOT a Napoleon geek!).

Chrissy is a Suzuki violin teacher with 10 years teaching experience (she’s not as young as she looks!) and for the last year has been the Director of The Suzuki Academy at Seattle Music Center. As she’s moving to Brisbane, she will be setting up a new music school and will be looking for students to start immediately!

She will be looking for students from age 4 up to adults and from beginners to advanced in Brisbane who want violin lessons or viola lessons starting in July 2009.

Chrissy is a very popular teacher in Seattle (check out some of the testimonials from parents of students on her site) and I’m sure she’ll be just as sought after here.

So if you’ve got kids in Brisbane wanting violin or viola lessons – or even if you want to learn yourself – check out her new website for more information!

I have to thank @BrisbaneGirl for this one, she told me about it this morning over coffee.

It seem that back in January, Letterman invited the legendary Bill Hicks‘ mother onto the show to formally apologize in public for cutting Bill’s Oct 1993 stand-up routine from the show. Apparently Letterman and his producer were concerned about Bill’s jokes about Jesus. As Bill Hicks’ fans know, he died 5 months later from pancreatic cancer.

Not only did Dave apologize back in January, he played the banned stand-up routine. It’s pretty moving.

 Here it is:

Here are the first two parts of the full interview.

Part One

Part Two

David Simon, co-creator of "The Wire", the smartest TV show of all time, on Bill Maher talking about the ‘war on drugs’ and the end of newspapers. Watch it.

(all rights reserved maumeedb8)

This coming Monday (May 18th) I will be participating in a debate at QPAC on the topic “Can Your Mobile Save The Planet?”. I am taking the NO position (well I’ve been told that the position I have to take) and you know that I AM THE WORLD’S GREATEST DEBATER! I DEBATE ALL OF THE TIME. Some people have said that I’m a mass debater – but I don’t want to stroke my own… ego.

Anyway…

Details here.

There are still limited tickets available and as a special offer to the Podcast Network listeners you can get a ticket for just $25 instead of $45. Simply on the registration page click TPN Member – and use keyword “planet”. After the event is Mobile Monday Brisbane where Keith Ahern from Australia’s leading iPhone developers MoGeneration will be showcasing how to get into the App store… so if you’re interested in the latest mobile tech stuff come along to that as well.

Ajaccio. 06/07/08 6.35pm.

The somnolence of a Sunday in Ajaccio. A heavy drowsiness permeates your bones, muscles, brain, willing you to sleep, sleep.

Now, in the evening, a breeze blows in from the sea, and people come alive again, the ‘second’ wind. The heat pushes you to stop in the afternoon, but relents at dusk and invites you back out to play. People rejoice in the reprieve like death-row pardonees.

The buildings are age worn, peeling paint in faint shades of dirty white, sad yellow, betrayed pink, dying pale green. All with shutters of canary-egg blue.

I’m sitting at “Le 1er Consul”, 2 Rue Bonaparte, drinking a Pietra, a Corsican beer. I can hear the fountains, cars honking, motorcycles, the drifting voices in French, tumbling over each other like waves on the shore. Pigeon’s wings flapping behind me, cooing.

The sky is completely cloudless and blue to match the window shutters.

I love listening to people speak French. They always sound like they are sulking about something. It sounds French if you pout and say any string of noises with the vowel sounds “oo” and “oh” and “on”. “Foo on coh soo”. And the “monsieur” at the end, the drawn out “ssss” always sounds like an insult. “Foo on coh soo too mo boo, mohsssssyoooor.”

The cheese I bought at the market today was hard and crumbly and oily and eating it felt like committing an act of child rape, something of the utmost carnality and sordidness. It was heavy and indolent and arrogant in its almost lack of flavour. It almost dared you to enjoy it. It was a 20-year life sentence in a closet-sized cell that tasted of urine and stale blood. It was a peasant’s cheese, a cheese to eat out of desperation when the cupboard was bare and your ribs were poking out and you had already eaten the scraps out of the garbage. It was the last straw cheese, the end of the world cheese, the back against the wall cornered rat cheese. A cheese you wouldn’t bring home to mother, a cheese that had spent its life inside a tomb, no light or air for 10,000 years, a cheese that contained all of the curses of all of the mummies, the mold behind the closet in the house that the old, old, impossibly old woman died in six months ago and they only found her when the neighbours noticed the smell cheese.

And I loved it. Tomorrow I’ll go back for more.

Tomorrow night on the live show I will have Steve McDonald ( @stevemc1) as my guest. Steve runs a company called Transendence which specializes in using the techniques of Spiral Dynamics to create organisational and social change. I was introduced to Spiral Dynamics and to the work done by Steve by @rosshill when he was staying with me a couple of weeks ago. I’m still trying to get my head around it and Steve will be coming on to explain it to us.

As usual, I’ll be pulling out the old guitar and playing some songs before and after the show. Plan to stick around for the after party, where I’ll also be talking about:

- Why I Believe Women Run The World
- I’ll talk a bit about the interview I did with Kalle Lasn this morning and why the Internet is bad for you
- My plan for the TPN 500
- Why Ashton Kutcher is a douche… or maybe the greatest genius of our time

Oh and this week I have a sponsor for my scotch!

Find out the details of how to listen and participate LIVE in the show here.