Rubenerd

Our (albeit government sponsored) university fees at work (or lack thereof). Fortunately all my lecturers from this semester have continued to go above and beyond by answering my emails and returning assignments with detailed and friendly comments. I wonder if others have had less luck?

Dear Student,

You may be aware that UniSA is currently in negotiations with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) as part of the Enterprise Bargaining process regarding terms and conditions of employment for staff.

The NTEU has advised the University that, in its view, insufficient progress is being made on a number of their key claims and unfortunately they have now imposed industrial action which targets the formal transmission of student assessment results, including exams.

The University is extremely disappointed and concerned with this position. Not only is the University of the view that significant progress has been made in negotiations but, potentially, the NTEU’s bans will disadvantage our students and their families, particularly if students may be denied the opportunity to graduate and participate in ceremonies in late December, or be unable to secure employment or to commence postgraduate studies without formal transmission of results.

The interests of our students are paramount at such a crucial stage of their studies and careers, and the University considers it has an obligation to protect our students as innocent parties to a dispute that is between the University and unions. Accordingly, at the last bargaining meeting on Monday, 23 rd November, the University again formally requested that the NTEU lift its bans. Again, the NTEU refused. Subsequently, the university has put in place a number of strategies, including involving Fair Work Australia, to mitigate the impact of these bans.

I would like to reassure all students that the University is working very hard to ensure students receive their final assessment and exam results.

I will keep you informed of developments.

Kind regards
[redacted]

IT News Australia is reporting that film studios are issuing an ultimatum to Aussie ISPs to "get out of the business" if they can't stop copyright infringement. Yes, you read that right!

“They provide a facility that is able to be used for copyright infringement purposes. If they don’t like having to deal with copyright notices then they should get out of the business.

“They’re quite happy to deal with customer complaints or shaping accounts when it comes to making money, but there’s a responsibility which is a requirement of law – one of which is the Copyright Act.”

He's got a point with internet shaping; limits on downloads put Australia at a severe disadvantage to the rest of the world, though I suspect that's not the point he was making.

As to his claim that ISPs facilitate copyright infringement and therefore they should be responsible, I would also like to draw Tony Bannon's attention to these other systems and devices:

• VCRs and DVRs could be used to make illegal copies of television programmes, therefore their manufacturers should also be responsible.

• Photographic equipment manufacturers produce devices that can be used to capture visual copies of film, and therefore their manufacturers should also be responsible.

• Stationary manufacturers produce pencils that could be used to sketch and scene from a film and be sold on paper, both of which facilitate illegal duplication and therefore their manufacturers should be held responsible.

• Human beings that retain certain memories including visual and audio information from a film have unauthorised stored copies of the film in their head and therefore they should be held responsible, as well as doctors who have helped to keep that person’s brain functioning, and all that person’s ancestors who allowed that person to exist.

That legal advice wasn't free Mr Bannon, and unless you click the Buy Ruben a Coffee button on the side of my page at least three hundred times you're in violation of my copyrights by reading this material for free. Deadbeat.

When a certain subset of students (alliteration is awesome) finish their exams for a semester they celebrate by intoxicating themselves with certain fermented beverages, while other more socially awkward loser types such as myself sit back and write a blog post about how they're investigating signing up for Audible.com, then like a child on Christmas Eve because they're too excited to wait they go ahead and register for it before they've finished said investigation.

As I said previously I've been listening to Leo Laporte rave on about Audible even before they started sponsoring his TWiTTY shows, so I figure having been a listener since 2005 I may as well see what all the fuss is about. As he aptly points out it's a natural progression from listening to podcasts (sorry Leo, netcasts!) to listening to audio books.

If you listen to This Week in Tech you get a coupon code to try the Audible Platinum account which entitles you to two free books, followed by recurring payments and two more books each month. I opted instead for the MacBreak Weekly coupon code which entitled me to one free book, followed by $14 for another book each month.

An inexplicably named island called France

My choice of free book that I've been so thoroughly enjoying is perhaps a predictable one, though the absurdity of the first paragraph of this nonsensical post that perhaps could have been expressed by just saying "I got Audible!" illustrates the profound effect this tome has already started having on my mind. If for some inexplicable reason you can't see the image above, it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. When I saw it was read by none other than Stephen Fry, I felt as though I had almost no say in the matter, and what say I did have was insignificant enough as to be drowned out by my squeal of delight upon discovering it.

If you'll indulge my Ducky from NCIS urges for a moment, this reminds me of my mum who literally filled bookshelves not with paperbacks but boxes of cassettes and later CDs. As I walked to the Boatdeck Café this evening for a cup of tea and some programming (I have wild Friday nights) I started listening and Stephen Fry is brilliant. It seems my mum's genes are alive and well :).

Arthur Dent’s house being knocked down

To be fair Audible has been fun but there are a couple of negatives. Perhaps the most annoying so far is the DRM which entailed me dragging the downloaded audio book file into iTunes and then "authorising" myself by logging it, bringing back dark memories of the early days of iTunes music purchasing when I realised I'd formatted my Mac too many times and "ran out" of authorisations because I hadn't taken the care to "unauthorise" each time. Still if it becomes bothersome I suppose I can burn an audio CD to back it up if in case something goes awry.

For a complete newbie like me it also wasn't obvious how to actually get the audiobook onto my iPhone after I'd downloaded it: there wasn't an Audiobook tab in the management screen for the device. Turns out you need to drag the book over manually as you would a song, but once it's on the iPhone it appears under the Audiobooks section, and it even tells you how many minutes you've got remaining and remembers where you left off.

The Audible website itself also isn't quite as seamless and easy to use as I would have liked initially, but exploring it for a few hours I've got used to it. For one I was disappointed a technology category wasn't listed in their main sidebar, but it turns out they do stock them and you can access them by clicking "More".

Squelch squelch

I'm liking Audible so far, I just worry that perhaps I signed up for the Gold account with the MacBreak code when I should have used the TWiT code and gone Platinum. I'm already a quarter of the way through my first book and it's supposed to last me a month :). My wishlist is already full of a ton of tech, science and history books and a few novels too.

Alas that's the problem with living so close to where I study, I don't have any commute time! I imagine it'll come in really handy though for when I'm cleaning or going through stacks of old emails. That reminds me, I haven't finished that blog post about email either. There just aren't enough hours in the day :).

If you're an Audible user, what books have you listened to recently? Any recommendations?

Sorry, but have you got one with a lower ceiling?

I tell you what, having been a listener to TWiT and most of Leo's other shows since the beginning I've been hearing a lot about Audible and have finally decided to take the plunge! There's only one small problem, as an Aussie who lives in Australia and Singapore I'm not sure which of their sites to use. In their English language forms, Audible is made up of Audible.com in the United States and Audible.co.uk in the United Kingdom, neither country of which I'm a resident of.

I have lotsa concerns.

Firstly, I'm not sure whether I'm even allowed to register with either of them in the first place given I'm an international customer; Leo Laporte doesn't even seem sure when he talks about them on his podcasts. And even if were allowed to register with them, would I be limited to downloading only a subset of material?

The second concern is about content. If I'm allowed to register with either, do they stock different material? I noticed the Audible.co.uk site had links to BBC productions which made my eyes light up with delight, but would that be limited to their site and not to the American one?

Thirdly has to do with presentation. These are audio books so I'll be listening to people speaking for hours on end. I have no trouble understanding most American accents, but British accents on the whole are closer to the pronunciation of English that I'm used to in Australia and Singapore and are easier for me to understand, so if there's a book read by an American and a Briton I'd probably prefer downloading the latter, unless the author themselves are reading. Do the American and British Audible sites offer the same books but read by different people depending on which site it appears on?

Finally, and this might end up being the decisive one, as far as I can tell Leo's coupon codes only seem to work with the American one, unless there's a different way of accessing the British site.

Perhaps I'll have to email the Audible guys about this.

As of just a few hours ago, Mininova has gone the way of the Suprnova site that preceded it by starting to only serve ambiguously titled "Content Distribution Torrents", quite a shock given I'd only just been to their site this morning.

I give them a month or two before someone else clones them and we're right back to where we were before. Again.

My share ratio for at the moment is a paultry 1.14 which means I've contributed more than I've downloaded, but I'd still love to bump it up far more. Spread the FreeBSD love!

This picture was originally from my blog post about Monnie's MonnieCakes.com (which I couldn't go to because I had an exam the next day and had to study, ugh!), but it demonstrates how I use tab thingys. It'll make sense after you read this post, trust me. I hope :).

Unlike a few months ago when I was eagerly using the latest beta versions of Firefox 3.5, I've especially needed my machine for studying over the last few weeks so I haven't had the chance to check out the latest beta of Firefox 3.6.

I'm really not fussed about the ugly Personas feature that'll make your browser look like a throwaway from the 1990s, but according to Stephen Shankland Firefox 3.6 also handles tabs differently.

Specifically, when you open a link in a new tab, it appears immediately to the right of the active tab. Before, the new tabs would appear to the far right of the strip of tabs.

I've read a few people on The Twitters who abhor the feature, but as someone who's already used to it because Tree Style Tabs implemented it, I have to say that after the initial disorienting confusion subsides (a few minutes tops) you quickly become far more productive. By keeping them organised in this fashion It's easier to keep track of which tabs were opened from where which is especially useful when you start opening hundreds of them!

While we're making tabs more useful, the next step is for Firefox to have true side tab support. As far as I know Opera is the only browser that supports them natively, and while Tree Style Tabs does a fantastic job stacking tabs along the side of my browser windows which allows me to have more of them open and know where they came from, it'd be nice to have the option whenever I do a clean install.

I suppose at that point we start getting into the debate over what constitutes a feature, and what's more useful and practical having as an extension to keep the base software small. Though with the increasing bloat and sluggishness of Firefox in general that seems to be a moot point :P.

Had trouble sleeping, so took my D60 out in the middle of the night and swirled it around a bit. Don’t know why.

Merlin Mann from 42 + 1 folders once suggested in a podcast that if you want to apply yourself too some creative writing you should start typing and refuse to use the backspace key; just pretend it's not there. I'm far to obsessive compulsive to follow this advice verbatim because typos freak me out like breakfast cereal without soy milk, but that compulsion aside I'm going to give it a try.

As this evening comes to a close I'm left with a weird feeling of reflection and uncertainty, despite potentially having some direction and purpose. I'm close to finishing my exams, I only have two outstanding assignment issues and the real estate agent in charge of managing my landlord's property finally got around to inspecting the house prior to the open day on Sunday. The landlord wants to sell.

I've got FreeBSD 8.0 gleefully installing on my ThinkPad X40 next to me, my MacBook Pro is frantically compressing a bunch of disc images so I can scrape up some spare gigabytes of hard drive space, the rain outside has stopped but you can still smell it, the ceiling lights are off so the monitors are casting an almost spooky glow and long shadows across the table and down the hall, my bottle of water is empty but I'm still a little thirsty, I'm shaking a little but that's normal, and because my sister went back to Singapore before me, some pretty, quiet piano playing through the speakers and a quiet hum of computer cooling fans are the only sounds other than the cicadas I can hear.

I still find it infinitely fascinating that on some days I blog a lot, talk to people on Skype and Twitter messages like there's no tomorrow; on other days despite not having more or less work to do than the day when I was posting five hundred blog entries I can barely bring myself to write one, and when I do get around to posting that lone entry it's a rambling post with little substance, value or purpose. Hey, like this one.

Well it's been really nice talking to you, but I'd best be off to bed. I'll go ahead and sprinkle some hyperlinks through this post, then I'll hop into bed and distract worrying thoughts by weighing in the pros and cons of using the Xfce verses Gnome-Light ports.

Night.