This could very well be the greatest idea of all time: a Star Trek Voyager Christmas ornament! Not only does it look spiffy, but it can be lit up from the inside by plugging it into any standard standard string of incandescent Christmas lights!
I can already hear Tuvok telling me it would be illogical to get one of these.
Honestly, who cares about the Australia Network? I didn’t even know it existed until a few weeks back. ~ Renai LeMay, of Delimiter
In the words of Daniel Eran Dilger, I do, and here's why.
The year was 1998 and we had just settled into our English class. Our teacher turned on the television and we began taking notes from the latest episode of Behind the News, an ABC production billed as rendering the news more interesting and understandable for kids. Unlike most of our peers however, we were six thousand kilometres away and watching the programme on the Australia Network, a cable TV station offered in the same SCV package as Deutche Welle and BBC World. Well okay it was called Australia Television back then, but the point stands.
My sister and I moved to Singapore in the mid 1990s when my father's business had us transferred. My mother had also been diagnosed with cancer at the time, and Singapore's medical facilites were above and beyond anything she could have received in Australia, so the timing was nothing short of miraculous.
In a story familiar to most of the tens of thousands of Australian expats living in Singapore, when we first arrived we were desperate to cling to anything that reminded us of home. Before Cold Storage began to sell Vegemite and Tim Tams, we had relatives post us the stuff. We ate spag bowl and sausage rolls perhaps even more than we did back home! And we got the Australia Network on cable. Years later when we found ourselves in Malaysia for a two year stint, we did again.
More than "just" a rebroadcast of the ABC (as some Australian Twitterati seem to suggest it is), the Australia Network was a glimpse at home. We were able to watch news in novelty Australian accents, sports the rest of the world didn't care about (well okay we didn't, but they were there!), and all those comedies and dramas that would result in a blank face at a video store or rental place if you asked for them. During huge events like election seasons and natural disasters, their live coverage was invaluable.
In a capacity scant few Australians here realise, the Australia Network also served as a more realisitic and positive representation of Australia as compared to wave after wave of embarrasing, cliché tourism campaigns. Several Singaporeans I knew ended up studying in Australia in part because their parents watched the channel and appreciated what they saw, and many more travelled here after the myths had been dispelled that we all just hang around desert creeks in our tattered togs. One Indian friend of mine even became obsessed with The Castle!
Perhaps the need for such a station has dimished somewhat since the advent of reliable video streaming, torrents (being realistic here) and online versions of Australian newspapers, but the Australia Network is still a custodian of Australian culture in Asia, and I'd argue still plays a vital role in linking Australians overseas with their birth country.
Incidently, this was part of the reason I publically heaved a sigh of relief when Sky lost the tender to the ABC again. If they'd started broadcasting some of the commercial TV we have here, I'd be even more embarrased than those times John Howard came to Singapore and didn't even bother learning to pronounce certain words. It's a mer-lion, not a merl-eee-on, and Asia is import you trollfaced dope! But I digress.
Now all I need is a Singapore Network for here. I stream Class 95 and have my Phua Chu Kang VCDs, but not the same is it. A MediaCorp Singapore Network channel with a mix of Channel 5, 8 and CNA where I can get my Jack Neo, Gurmit Singh, Moses Lim fix would be much appreciated ^^. This reminds me of a story…
Tweet by @ParallelsMac:
Check out this great review of Parallels Desktop 7 by @Rubenerd: ow.ly/7WRTe
Aw schucks ^_^.
Best. Freebies. Ever!
So there I was sitting ay home attempting to get over my current flu thingy while staring at our amazing new Christmas tree of win, when @Jeorgina mentioned on Twitter that the Sun Herald would be giving away free LEGO figures with their Sunday paper. Hardly surprising, given the Sun Herald is the Sunday edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, though despite the name it doesn't concern a colossal ball of nuclear gases in place of Sydney. In the morning. But I digress.
UPDATE: I've been informed @emi_wong mentioned this exciting new development days before @Jeorgina. My apologies!
Mustering the little energy I had, I braved the great outdoors to head to our local newsagent, which by a cruel twist of fate had closed for the day. Fortunately, I knew our local supermarket also sold copies of the paper, so I walked slowly with the energy and pain of a hundred year old man with arthritis to pick myself up a copy. Which is to say, buy out their whole stock. All… two of them.
No sooner had I bought these copies of the paper, but our typically Melbourne Sydney weather asserted itself, and I was forced to take shelter in a nearby coffee shop. Shivering and weak and cold, I was attended to by several lovely baristas. If they were a little grossed out by this clearly diseased young gentleman, they didn't show it. I sat there for the better part of two hours, leisurely reading my Kindle I carry around with me everywhere, and chuckling at the people attempting to ford the rain outside with their inadequate rain gear and inverted umbrellas.
Fast forward to this morning. With the promotion a distant memory, I headed to the doctor to have a followup checkup to measure my progress (as what tends to happen in followup checkups), when low and behold I noticed a copy of the previous day's Sun Times on the table. I enquired to the doctor if I may relieve him of his copy for the LEGO promotion, to which he chucked and questioned whether I was too old for playing with such things. "Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional!" I retorted, with an air of sophisication I was able to maintain for a few brief moments before I started sneezing again.
Excited as a child who's about to receive LEGO (oh, wait), I made my way to our local newsagent and presented the three stubs from the Sun Heralds I'd collected, and left with three LEGO figs!
Perhaps speaking to my current health, the three I received were a Werewolf-like creature, a Frankenstein, and a little elf with a fishing line! The detail was amazing, I think Yoko in the background agrees!
Pictured next to them above in the picture avove (well, that was redundant) is a LEGO person I've had since I was 6, and whom acted on behalf of me when I used to play with LEGO every afternoon after school.
Everything is coming up Milhouse. I think I'll stop now.
I don't remember exactly when, but at some point in the early 1990s my sister and I were helping my mum and dad decorate our Christmas tree. We were so little we could barely reach half the branches, but my dad would lift us up onto his shoulders so we could reach the top. As the professional artist in the family my mum would stand behind us judging our performance and telling us where to put things, and my dad would scuttle around the base of the tree to help us get to where she wanted. The tree was so massive it lit the room at night with a warm glow, and allowed plenty of space for presents underneath!
As I'm sure is the case with many Western families, decorating the tree was always a family tradition for us that we all looked forward to almost as much as Christmas itself. Even as my mum started her decade and a half long chemotherapy treatment, she'd still make it to the loungeroom in early December to help out, even if all she could do was sit in a chair and observe. It was unspoken, but we were celebrating the fact she was still with us for another Christmas as much as we were celebrating the holiday itself.
A few days before Christmas in 2007, she left us peacefully in her sleep. We kept the tree up that year, but we never had them again.
Four years later, and we decided we were finally ready to have another tree. Again. Maybe. So we navigated the family sleigh to Big W, a reputable organisation selling plastic trees from sustainable petrochemical plantations, and bought a modest but lovely 1.8m pine.
Over the course of the afternoon, we unpacked the decorations we'd left in storage for years, and decorated the tree to the same cheesy Bing Crosby music and the same doggies looking inquisitively at us. Surprisingly, we were in good spirits for most of the time, and the tree turned out wonderfully. If she couldn't be there with us, at least we were using the decorations she largely chose and bought for us over the years, and we were thinking of her the whole time.
For you mummy. Merry Christmas, and stop mocking the way I'm dancing to Dean Martin. <3 hugs
Quote from the Blues Brothers, if you didn't catch it. I suddently have a craving for some dry white toast.
Of course, Murphy's Law provided ample cloud cover during this rare event, but for a brief moment I caught a glimpse. Kinda!
Parallels Desktop was one of the first pieces of software I discussed in detail on this blog back in 2006. Now five years later, I'm giving it another try!
When I first got my new Intel MacBook Pro in 2006, I hurriedly installed the first betas of Parallels Desktop onto it to fuel my virtualisation obsession. I appreciated that the support team were so… supportive… of someone attempting to install and use FreeBSD of all OSs on their software, and were more than happy to help me out.
Several months later though, VMware announced their Fusion product and I made the move, mostly because I already had invested time and money in their Workstation product for Windows and liked that I could move things over. Businesses I do… business… with also tend to use VMware products, ditto my university.
I've also used VirtualBox, and more recently QEMU to run my bizarre mix of FreeBSD, Windows 2000, OS/2 and PC DOS 2000. All have worked fine, but each product has different problems with one of the aforementioned systems. VMware Fusion doesn't like some of my ancient DirectX games like Train Simulator. VirtualBox has issues with upper memory managers on DOS. QEMU doesn't have 3D acceleration at all, and can't boot OS/2.
The reality is, I'll most likely be keeping all four virtualisation applications on my Macs, but one day I'd love to have one to do it all.
Installing Parallels Desktop on my Mac Pro on Thursday evening, I was struck by how much has changed. Unsurprising given the last time I used it was 2006, but the software fits right into Mac OS X Lion, complete with the dark patterned backgrounds that seem to be all the rage these days. I was a little disappointed at their icon change, but I suppose the Windows logo makes sense given its what most of their customers will use it for.
FreeBSD, Windows 2000 and PC DOS 2000 installed without incident, though I had a few issues installing the Parallels Tools in Windows 2000, a subject for a future post when I'm over this flu and am not typing blog posts at glacial speed.
The virtual machines generally felt more responsive than VMware Fusion, and substantially more so than VirtualBox. What set Parallels apart however was its ability to run all my classic DirectX games such as Midtown Madness, which VMware Fusion simply couldn't do, at least on my hardware. SimCity 3000 also ran stunningly well.
Another aspect where Parallels shone was the company's technical support. Despite being an unpaid, trial user, within hours of voicing my problems on Twitter, @ParallelsMac and @ParallelsCares had provided feedback. Others should learn from their example!
Overall, while Parallels is a different ecosystem to what I need for work and uni (which will necessitate me keeping VMware Fusion as well), for those Mac users looking for the simplest, slickest way to run virtual machines, I'm thoroughly impressed with Parallels. I'll be running out the 15 day trial, then registering a copy.
Detailed information about Telstra’s customer accounts – including usernames and passwords – has been found to be sitting on the open web for anyone to access via a Google search. ~ Sydney Morning Herald
Inexcusable. No database should be storing passwords as plaintext. If people forget their passwords, they should be reset.
No doubt we'll read a press release saying they've learned a lot from their mistake, and have changed their system. Here's hoping they do learn from it, and implement some basic security protocols. They can start by ditching their revised coloured logos and going back to their retro orange one. It looks more serious, and classy.
So my sister wants the latest Punk Goes Pop CD. I'm thinking of printing this picture on A3 and giving it to her for Christmas. Flawless plan.
In other news, too cute. I disagree with the naysayers that the K-On girls couldn't pull off punk, I think they did it pretty well ^_^.
