People are constantly commenting about how I’m such a nice guy and only ever have positive things to say. But, as Natalie Portman learnt in Star Wars, even the nicest guys have their dark side.

So yeah, text messaging. Text messaging is evil in many ways, such as how its DAMAGE 2 TH ENGLSH LANGGE 1S PROBLY IRAVERSSABUL (SP?). (Sidebar: every time someone types (sp?), God kills a kitten. Look it up, you lazy bastard.) But it isn’t all bad. For one thing, we like the price point.

What I particularly liked about texting was that you had a very small space to fill and a great deal of time to fill it (what with typing speed issues). This allowed and encouraged injecting as much meaning as possible into every individual sentence. Given that my texting predates my blogging, it may have influenced my writing far more than I should admit to. Perhaps it explains my penchant for short, punchy paragraphs containing at least one joke and/or at least one swearword. As we all know, you can convey volumes of meaning with a text containing just one word, if that word is MOTHERFUCKER.

Anyway, so we were saying how I was such a nice guy. I got a text from Todd the other day (grammar corrected):

This is an interesting development, how come you’re not graduating this week?

And I responded offhand:

Oh you know me, I don’t like to rush into things. A small matter of practical work reports, basically they wanted one last twist of the knife and I didn’t stab myself quickly enough. I have to admit, I’m not especially worried. Getting out of prison is far more satisfying in itself than the welcome home party.

Five minutes later I had another look at my reply. Man. I’m not, okay? Really, I’m not.

Never stick your hand in my face again bitch

Earlier this week Helen Clark put together our government for the next three years. Now, hands up who was expecting a Labour-Green coalition? Yeah, me too. I mean, it seemed the only realistic possibility. The alternative would have been some hellish combination of small “5% like us, 95% look at that 5% and scream ‘why!’” parties like United Future and New Zealand First.

In fact, that is exactly what happened. No Greens. No Maori party either. The coalition government is just Labour and the trusty 1-seat JAP party. Dunne and Peters have been roped in for confidence and supply agreements, totalling 61 votes of the 121 MPs.

Oh, but it gets worse. Winston “I won’t be part of the next government” Peters is the Minister of Foreign Affairs. That’s right: our Foreign Minister is a xenophobe. Some were predicting his demise this election, and he did lose his electorate seat; but instead he is back from the dead and stronger than ever.

Because some people never learn.

Meanwhile Dunne didn’t get so much, picking up Revenue Minister along with possible changes to company tax and the forthcoming carbon tax – you know, that thing we’re doing to control global warming? He also scored his conservative wet dream: no change to cannabis law.

So, how has this come about? Well, partly because UF and NZF both vetoed any government that included the Greens. You may remember when Peter Dunne went on his little 3-seat tirade shortly after the election, laying ultimatums before the Labour party.

Where was the common sense in that?

Apparently the problem for Labour was a 57-57 stalemate with NZ First being the deciding factor, understandably a risk they were not willing to take. But let’s take a look at that 57: National, Act, United Future and the Maori Party. Hang on! One of those parties doesn’t belong. I think National’s policies made that pretty clear.

Apparently Don Brash pretty much gave up every single one of National’s race-related election promises to attempt a deal with the Maori Party. This says a lot about Brash – but nothing we didn’t already know. I still think it is utterly absurd to suggest that the Maori Party would side with them.

Perhaps the answer lies in that Helen Clark has actually created a situation in which the government consists of just Labour and the Progressives. She has only had to make relatively minor concessions to achieve what must be a pretty desirable outcome. A coalition with the Greens may have impinged rather more greatly on her power. Of course, as remarked by the NZ Herald:

The big minus is having the huge uncertainty and risk inherent in the “Peters factor.” This will be his third stint as a minister. Twice before, prime ministers felt obliged to withdraw his warrant a year or so down the track.

One can’t help but wonder if Labour has dug itself into a hole by shafting the Greens and jumping into bed with Winnie.

Far. How did this happen? When did it all go so wrong? How to react? Only Engrish can really express it…

“Nooooooo!!!”

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde

One of the most important, and most incredible, underpinnings of the theory of capitalism is that of the “rational consumer.” It effectively suggests that, before a consumer makes any decision (purchase) they are fully aware of all the relevant information and have objectively evaluated all the alternatives. This is, of course, laughably wrong, as you will know if you have ever met a consumer. However it is one of the key ideas in a free market – don’t regulate cigarettes/gambling/fast food – the individual knows best! The currect trajectory of human consumption will, of course, effectively destroy our planet. Ah, rational.

I remember reading once that when we make a decision, we make it emotionally, then come up with reasons to justify it. This behavioural psychology sounds much more realistic. And indeed, it relates to my recent cellular phone purchase. Aware of concepts like the aforementioned, I started from the beginning with a price range of $150-500 (just as a guide, $0-1000 would have been possible) and basically just set out to find a form factor that I liked. And I found it. The price was a little hard to justify but I challenge anyone to find any limit on the human capacity for justification. In this case it was relatively easy (as opposed to, say, killing people) because it had stuff like an MP3 player, 1.3 Megapixel camera and 100 MB of memory that all supported statements like “well I can definitely see that coming in handy” and “when you think about it, for what I’m getting, it’s actually really cheap!”

This is not to say I think my decision was crap. (As opposed to the time I bought Eminem’s Encore. F-u-c-k.) Anyway, I just find the process fascinating. Human nature is fascinating. Economics, too. If I could rewind five years, I would have probably done a BA/BCom. (And CompSci 101, of course. Good times.)

Another application involving human nature is HCI. It was with great regret I discovered Samsung’s usability engineers are either greatly under-resourced, or shit. Inconsistencies, time wasters and byzantine menu structures are accessed by too many buttons (each having rather less gutter space than my fingerprint requires). For example, one of the single most important functions of a typical interface is the “back” button. On the D500, at any one time there could be two or three buttons that perform that exact same function. But at other times, you couldn’t buy a back button. It’s a kicker because my Ericsson T28 had excellent interface design (for example, there is one single button that always goes back no matter what). And I mean, that was five years ago. Hang your head in shame, Samsung.

Oh yeah, and when I type 3, 8, 2, 5 the word I am looking for is not “dual.”

It has a web browser! So, while sitting in front of a computer already running Firefox, I hooked into some GPRS. The browser was actually surprising good – it shrinks images to fit the screen, which is also large enough to display quite a bit of text. To find out how much surfing costs these days, I checked my account balance and then:

1. Rambleschmack
2. db.rambleschmack.net
3. The blog post about this phone. It would have been totally recursive! I got an “insufficient memory error.” Stink.
4. Well, what would you have done? I tried the same thing again. “Insufficient memory error.” Stink.
5. So I went to Caoine.

And then I checked my balance. Which hadn’t moved, but when I checked it again later, it had shifted by $1.90 – or about 50c per webpage. Apparently Vodafone’s charge rate is $10/Megabyte (F-u-c-k). I hope email is going to work out cheaper than that.

Anyway, perhaps the most awesome thing about this new phone is that I can associate a photo and ringtone with each of my contacts – any image, any MP3. I tell you what, this will be fun. Here’s some initial ideas we had:

• Pete: Song 34
• Hame: In Da Club
• Ivan (two): Not Many, If Any
• Bartleby: Anal Cunt
• Azrael (two) (three) (four) (five): The Magic Numbers
• Lo4d3d: I… can’t remember?
• Ray: Evanescence
• Maroon 5: I Hope You Die
• Bob: Tool
• Jeremy (two): the Transformers theme song.
• Hannah: Darude – Sandstorm.

At this point I’d like to take it to the floor. Any requests?

So we’ve had the NZ elections, and we pretty much know the result. Although Don Brash, bless him, has not given up hope. I’m sure we are all enjoying the various chatter about the possibility of a National-Maori party coalition. On what planet is that going to happen? Anyway, I for one welcome our returning overlord:

Oozing charisma as always. Can you imagine what Helen Clark would look like as a hippy? Probably something like this.

As I’ve said before, I don’t like the idea of 9 years of Clark Labour, but the alternative is easily worse:

Sieg Heil! (Not that he’s a racist, of course.)

My “worse” equates to the sentiments expressed in this post.

Now, I think in these trying times it is important to keep some perspective. As much as some of us may dislike Clark or Brash, at least we weren’t voting for this fucker:

The picture says it all. Having said that, Google puts it pretty well too.

And there’s always this guy to make you feel better about your democracy. Turns out it is easy to get elected when you own almost all your country’s media. And then you can start on the real work of passing laws to give yourself legal immunity against all those pesky court cases!

The resplendent Silvio Berlusconi. Make sure you get the t-shirt.

Finally, Robert Mugabe needs no caption.

So, while our views may differ, here in New Zealand, we’re all winners. If our not-even-realistic worst case is the Destiny Party (and I believe they pulled about 0.6%, which is not inconsiderable), then I think we’re doing alright.

I had my hair cut last week and it included this conversation:

“Have you been following the politics very much?”
“Oh. No. … I know who I’m voting for though!”

Ah, the uninformed voter. Better than apathy!

“Yeah? Who’s that?”
“National.”
“Because?”
“Tax cuts.”

Exactly how much of across-the-board tax cuts was a hairdresser going to get?

“Uh. Is it much of a difference?”
“Oh yeah!”

And she didn’t qualify it. So I went to National’s tax calculator to find out.

I have no idea how much she earns. Let’s say its $30 000. Extra pay per week: $10. Bling bling, baby!

Anyway, she reciprocated.
“So who are you voting for?”
“Probably the Greens.”

Now, some people get quite angry when I tell them that. (I don’t need to link to Azrael every time I write a post, do I? Anyway, he’s such a capitalist!) So I was a little concerned about the scissors moving swiftly around my head.

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

Because Don Brash is Satan. I reached for a more “mainstream” reason.

“Well, take oil for example. That’s just going to keep going up. We need to do something about it. Public transport, sustainability,” etc.

“Well,” she ventured, “it’s hard, isn’t it.”

Here we reached something of an impasse. When I say a problem is “hard,” I consider it to be the beginning of a very important discussion. However in this case, “it’s hard” meant well gee that sounds hard so let’s just not think about it. I scream in silence.

We managed to reignite the issue of public transport. It would be a big job to fix it. (I mention this reasonably often, but in case you are not a regular reader, let it be noted that public transport in Auckland is shit.) I mentioned the prohibitive cost involved in rolling out a world-class public transport system in Auckland.

“Well!” She declared. “We could afford it if we stopped paying all these people the dole!”

“Yes,” I grinned, and let the discussion rest. The Nebuchadnezzar could remain in dock today.

Old news now but perhaps you missed it. Some iBooks were being sold off at $50 (super cheap) because Henrico County (somewhere in America) switched from Apple to Dell for its school laptops. MacBlog:

Some people reportedly began camping out at 2 AM just for the first crack at a laptop which in all probability is caked in four years worth of school lunches and generally beat to hell, and I don’t even want to think about what else those kids have done to them. But at $50 you can’t say no. You also can’t help but stampede children and the elderly to get your hands on one, which is exactly what happened.

This is not the first time we have heard about this sort of thing. This was really the next level though. Let’s roll some quotations.

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A stroller was crushed. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone tried to drive his car through the crowd.

…

Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing forward, using a folding chair to beat back people who tried to cut in line. “I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, ‘Bam,’” the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, tapping away on the keyboard at a testing station. “They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just,” he said.

And my favourite:

Blandine Alexander, 33, said one woman in front of her was so desperate to retain her place in line that she urinated on herself.

Stories and photos at Times Dispatch and BBC News.

At the behest of communications graduate Azrael, I downloaded Skype IM recently. In my always-humble opinion, it sucked hard. Cluttered interface. Outrageously cheerful looking interface, at that. And it insists that I have “2 new events” no matter how hard I try to get rid of them. It also manages to periodically freeze my whole system for a second or so. All in all, I put it into the same repulsive heap that I put Miranda, Trillian, GAIM, and MSN. Special shout-out to GAIM for focus stealing. You bastard.

Well, guess who just released an IM client? Yeah, them again. Google have suddenly exploded from web search into email, blogging, desktop search, maps, IM… where does it end? I mean, I like that Google are raising the bar. I’m just concerned that in a few years, Google will be the entire internet.

I can tell you why it is happening, too. Existing webmail sucked. Existing IM clients are shit. Windows desktop search was pitiful. Why are Google the only company that can put out good products? (Okay, and Mozilla.) Some people shiver at the thought of where this is taking us, but the fact is we are laying down the red carpet for their world domination.

Speaking of which, I’m about to install it now. And play some wumpus.

By the way, have you seen the new Web Inspector for IE? It looks somehow familiar. I’d be careful if I was them, someone might notice.

Recently, the Graphics Group at uni showcased the best in animation with a DVD from the SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference Computer Animation Festival. It was pretty damn awesome. Particular praise must go to the Chris Harding Animation Concern for Self Defense, which admittedly didn’t have the best graphics but was flippin’ hilarious.

Also memorable:

• East End Zombies
• Fallen Art
• In the Rough
• La Dernière Minute

The Filthy Critic usually spends the preponderance of his pieces slagging off shitty films, and good on him. However we get some more genuine musings and insights in his latest – a review of Broken Flowers – and yea, it is good:

For Murray it’s the discovery of a son that cause us to stop and think about his meaning and worth. None of us sit here every day assessing the quality of our lives. That’s because there’s too much Must See TV to watch. In fact, there’s a pretty fucking lucrative business in keeping people from thinking about their loneliness and failure. A week can pass, or a month, or 20 years before we stop and add up all the wasted days, the beer cans stacked in the bay window, and all the Hummels and porcelain penguins we’ve got in our curio cabinets. For Murray it’s this son that snaps him out of his stupor. For me, it’s usually the Jehovah Witnesses knocking on the door and waking me from my carpet-bound drunken stupor that cause me to reassess my life and start crying like a God damn baby. Where the fuck did my life go? Who is this chick on the cover of Watchtower? Are there a lot of Jehovah’s Wtinesses that hot looking? But I like celebrating my birthday.

All the things we do to waste time or just get through the day don’t seem like much. But those tiny increments of time are like the sum of nickels a lonely old lady puts into a slot machine; a fortune squandered. I don’t know what the right balance of fucking around and being productive is. I know that some days I don’t do a God damn thing, and other days I can’t stand to waste time because the guilt of being uncreative is suffocating. I know I sleep better when I can be proud of something. There is a healthy balance, though, and the vast majority of us are on the wrong side of it. It’s just that it’s so Gad damned easy to be lazy in the near-term.

This thinking is sort of tangential to Broken Flowers but it’s what I took from the movie. It’s what it made me think about. And after watching it I immediately came home, sat on the futon and watched a baseball game between two teams I didn’t give a rolling fuck about.

The New Zealand Elections are approaching on the 17th September, and last night saw the first televised leaders debate on a Campbell Live special. Eight leaders were present – two more than TV3 had planned. Jim Anderton (of Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party) and Peter Dunne (of United Future) took the remarkable step of taking TV3 to court shortly before the debate, claiming their marginalisation was not in the public interest. (Both parties are polling around 1-2% and are not really expected to get in without winning an electorate seat.) The High Court agreed only hours before the show aired, and TV3 purchased two more lecterns while muttering under their breath terms like “freedom of the press” and “chilling implications.”

Like the last election three years ago, we had a live studio audience controlling “the worm,” except it is now called “the reactor.” They each have a little dial which goes from good to neutral to bad and we see the combined result in a little time-series at the bottom of the screen. Three years ago, Peter Dunne rose from obscurity to infamy when, 15 days before the election, he rode the worm to an eventual 7% party vote. How did he do it? Well, he said “common sense” a lot. No, seriously. The worm really likes that.

So you can see why he was keen to get on the show. And he did not disappoint, throwing a “common sense” into his opening statement and from there on he was pretty much off the chart. In post-debate analysis he was described as “the worm whisperer.” Other things the worm likes: “tax cuts,” “brain drain,” “family values,” “New Zealand is a great country,” you get the idea. It was awfully depressing to watch it rocket in response to such transparent political rhetoric. (A tactic not restricted to Peter Dunne, I might add.)

There were some highlights though. Winston Peters (New Zealand First, polling about 7%) bombed, discovering that politics of hatred have a very limited audience. Tariana Turia, of “The Maori Party,” bombed more than anyone, being a relative newcomer to all this. But really. You might as well call it the racist party. Being brown is not a political ideology. One quite remarkable statement was her response to the education issue: “well for a start, a lot of our young people are attending school in prison.” I mean really, who does that statement appeal to? Even if I was Maori I would be pretty bloody unimpressed. The worm, predominantly non-Maori, took a nose-dive.

The coalition talks were good too. “We’ve proven we can work well with any party,” lied Peters. Rodney Hide (Act, polling about 2%) called him on it. Peters retorted, “Well we’d love to work with you Rodney but you won’t be there!”

Jeanette Fitzsimons (Greens, 5%) also did very well. The key thing for a party of tree-huggers is to present sustainability in a positive way (efficiency, progress) rather than the negative (we will take away your evil polluting cars, you capitalist pigs!) John Campbell, the presenter, gifted her the following: “Now the Greens talk a lot about the environment and sustainability. But before the show tonight I looked through the policies of all the other parties here and it seems to be a very minor issue for you. Would one of you like to explain why this is?”

The rarest of events in a room full of politicians: deafening silence. It was beautiful. Jeanette meanwhile beamed like it was Christmas, which it effectively was. Thank you, John Campbell. Eventually Helen Clark spoke up, although I wasn’t sure why as Labour aren’t really in the environmental bad books. Later on I figured it out. Clark was “presidential” – She exuded leadership qualities. It was almost as if she had already won the election and we were just watching an amicable retrospective by the participants.

Don Brash got caught with his pants down. He promised to not sell any state assets. Clark noted that page 2 of his party policy talked about selling some of the state farming enterprise and a minority stake in the state coal company. His counter? In placating terms, “We’re talking about a small number of farms-” at which point he was cut off by the laughter. Burn, you bastard. The unholy trinity of Blair, Bush and Howard were all voted back in but I can only hope New Zealanders are not the suckers our cousins seemingly are.

In her summing up, Clark noted – in response to a recent declaration by Brash – that she “would not send our soldiers to wars that are wrong.” In case anyone is wondering, this is why I like Helen Clark. Not just because she is against the war in Iraq – anyone with a brain can figure that one – but because diplomacy be damned, she will stand up for what she believes in. She does not bow down or pander to the worm. That, my friends, is strength of character. Honesty, even. Now I don’t want to overstate the case – Clark is not without her flaws – but when she stands across from Brash, you can almost see a faint halo forming.