Here's Why

New URL

I’ve been trying out the newer MoveableType at
Here’s Why with a whole bunch of new MP3 content entered. Also making use of the “multiple categories” feature. Please check it out, I’m considering making it the new home of this blog. I’m just not sure about iiNet and their servers yet.

So please point your links, update your URLS, change your blogroll or friends list, alter your RSS feed; to http://members.iinet.net.au/~iwoolf/ which is where I’ll be posting all my new entries.

PC on its last legs

The other night I thought I’d settle for sure if I could remove the loudly whining fan on my PII cpu, and thus remove a source of pain. I found that the fan is integral to the CPU housing, so no luck.

When I put everything back together and switched on, I found that there was no mouse pointer in Windows 2000. My keyboard wasn’t working, either, although the lights had flashed appropriately when the PC booted up, and hitting a key helped Windows start up.

In fact Windows was registering every single piece of hardware from the floppy disc controller on through the serial ports, as if they were all new. Then it would just sit there.

I tried a Knoppix boot disc, and it couldn’t see the keyboard. In fact the BIOS didn’t respond to the DEL key for setup.

The mouse is serial, and the keyboard PS/2. Not connected, so the failure of one shouldn’t affect the other, I thought.

However, a day later, I unplugged everything and re-plugged, and found that the keyboard was plugged into the second PS/2 port. I moved it back to the one next to it, and suddenly everything works as well as usual, including the mouse. Windows can now remember all the hardware.

Lesson: must replace this PC SOON.

Morpheus

Morpheus


?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla

Discovery to be judged

This is the list from the Community Broadcast Association of Australia’s (CBAA) Digital Delivery Network (DDN) of regional radio stations that put the Discovery Science show to air:

2BLU BLU FM 89.1 Katoomba, NSW
2BOB Taree, NSW
2HOT Cobar, NSW
2KRR Kandos, NSW
2MIA Griffith, NSW
2MCE Bathurst, NSW
2TLC Yamba, NSW
2WAR-2 Coonamble, NSW
3MBR Murrayville, Victoria
3MGB Mallacoota, Victoria
3OCR OtwayFM Colac, Victoria
4NAG Yeppoon, Queensland
4RRR Roma, Queensland
4ROK Moranbah, Queensland
5KIX Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, South Australia
5RRR Woomera, South Australia
6YCR York, Western Australia

That’s 17 stations in addition to 2SER in Sydney!
We have to re-apply this week to 2SER to be judged whether our show will fit into the new programming the station is planning.

broken computer

The noise from my computer’s CPU fan makes me physically ill, its a strain to sit in the same room. In addition, windows crashes frequently, and many applications won’t run. Its long past time for a new computer.

My apologies to those who has sent long emails and been disappointed at no reply, and to those who would have liked me to write on my blog more often. Short ones I can manage, longer ones and I have to run from the room before completing them.

Hopefully normal service can be resumed soon once I make the decision and fork out the money. Until that time, I haven’t ignored you, but I can only reply to short emails.

Leftovers labelled

I’ve occasionally had problems with leftover food in the fridge: I can’t always remember how long ago I put them there, and I’m not always sure how long they can keep safely anyway.

“When in doubt, throw it out”, has been my slogan. Not good for saving money, but safest for preserving my health.

I’ve discovered a better way, that doesn’t rely on my memory. I’ve bought a roll of white sticky labels to keep by the fridge. Now when I put leftovers into a container, I can pop a sticker on it, and write in the date.

Most leftovers are only good for three or four days at most.

According to When Good Foods go bad, my gouda cheese can last three weeks after breaking the seal and putting it in a plastic box.

I now have the equivalent of “use by” stickers for my leftovers, with no need to force my poor memory into service.

Perversion for Profit

This is from a fun film from the wonderful Prelinger Archives of archival and stock footage. Over 4000 titles from 1927 to 1987. My favourites are the 1950’s “social education” films such as “Perversion for Profit”, and “Are you Popular?”.

Lets try that again

We’ll soon be flying to Canada for 9 weeks, with time in Kelowna, Toronto, Buffalo and Georgina Island, and then returning home via a few days in Amsterdam because its cheaper that way. Once you’re leaving the Australian continent, its cheaper to buy a Round The World ticket than it is to buy a direct return ticket.

This is the last minute chance for Australian people to put in orders for Canadian stuff, and Canadian and American people to put in orders for Australian stuff. We kept our list of TimTam addicts from January…:-)

Tongue Twister

I recently discovered that Woolworths sell my childhood favourite cake: Hedgehog Slice. In North American, its like crushed cookies swirled into a coconut chocolate fudge brownie with chocolate icing.

Sadly, some baking companies also label this as “chocolate fudge”, which is a completely different confection. I faithfully followed a “chocolate fudge” recipe when I was very small, perhaps six, and was bitterly disappointed that when I finished, I didn’t end up with Hedgehog slice. Scarred me for life. My mother still teases me by buying me actual chocolate fudge occasionally…

I found a cooking free receipe at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A765948
Most of the receipies on the web wrongly instruct you to mix in some kind of nuts, which ruins the whole endeavour. Shredded coconut should be the closest any kind of nut gets to my hedgehog slice. The things that LOOK like nuts are actually biscut pieces.

This has prompted a tongue twister, which bodes well for the healing of the ciguatera poison induced damage to my speech centres:

“How many eggs would a hedgehog hog if a hedgehog could hog eggs?”

Wifi phones

In The Little Engine That Could, Robert Cringely talks about the Linksys WRT54G, a wireless Linux based router for US$70 as “disruptive technology” because it can be used to run a micro-business of wireless ISP and provide a cheap voice-over-IP alternative to mobile phones. All you do is add some free Open Source software to the linux router. Is Linux, is reconfigurable.

Matthew was talking to me about doing exactly this just a few months ago.

The Wonder Shaper sotware lets the box do smooth phone calls to wireless IP receivers.

So all you need to run a franchise is one of these wireless routers, an ADSL modem and unlimited ISP account. Plug it in, set up the software. Cringely even has the business plan for minimum effort and a lazy US$93.75 per month. If you actually put any work into it you would earn more of course.

Cringely suggests that very few people getting together with such a project would be serious competition for the mobile phone service providers. However how available are 802.11g wireless receivers? Obviously all laptops will be potential customers, especially with all the Centrino ads on TV, but what about existing mobile phones and PDAs? According toNews.com.au Motorola and others will release such phones late in 2004.

So until the wifi phones come out, the market is limited to laptops, but once they are available, this will really take off. PDA phones with P2P Itune sharing and free voice calls and GPS-equivalent, etc, etc….

No more $1 per minute nonsense! Matthew, you were right.

Outback Jack

Twelve beautiful American princesses compete for the love of one Aussie larrikan in this new reality TV show that airs in the US on June 22 2004. The twist is that the bloke is claiming to be a triathlete, trail bike racer, whitewater rafter and skydiver who has earned awards in swimming, judo, karate, grappling, football and horseback riding . Oh and he climbs mountains, too. No mention of fighting crocodiles, but I’m sure it just hasn’t come up yet.

The women will have to endure adventures in Outback Australia to win his heart.

Steve Irwin, the real “Crocodile Dundee” is already married, so they had to get this “Vadim Dale” character . Some of his mountain climbing is reported at Millenium Expedition
Here’s a picture of him from :

Centrelink Mathematics

In late 1998, I was accepted for the Disability Support Pension by Centrelink because of Epstein-Barr Virus on top of Myalgic Encephalomyalitis on top of a permanent back injury.

In July 1999, due to a massive Centrelink mistake, my pension payments were cut off altogether.

In December 2002, Centrelink admitted the mistake and restored my payments.

In October 2003, I was paid arrears for the four years of no payments. Due to a massive Centrelink mistake, the calculations were made with the wrong assumption that I pay zero rent. The insulting consequence of this was to zero out the previous four years entitlements of rent assistance:

assuming rent assistance > $10 per fortnight on average,
1999 to 2002 = 4 x 26 fortnights x rent assistance
= 104 x rent assistance
= some multiple of $1000,

The injury was that zero rent assistance also meant I had to PAY BACK the rent assistance I had already been paid in 2003 and would be paid until the end of that year. I was forced to pay a debt of $2350 to Centrelink.

one year of rent assistance = 26 fortnights x $90 = $2350

I contacted them in writing, by phone, in person, and with the assistance of the offices of Welfare Rights Australia, The Minister for Family and Community Services, and the Federal Ombudsman.

A re-calculation was requested, and I was told the numbers came out the same way when they corrected for my rent assistance to be above zero.

rent assistance > 0
5 x 26 fortnights x rent assistance = 0 !!????

I explained to Centrelink that this was arithmetically impossible unless the rent was still counted as zero. They laughed at me. I appealed, did the rounds of assistance from the Offices of Welfare Rights Australia, Centrelink Customer Relations, and the Federal Ombudsman, and nothing happened for six months. I appealed to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal, who passed it back to Centrelink, who passed it back to the same data entry guy who was repsonsible for the previous mistakes.

I received a phone call in April 2004, that the new recalculations of the mistaken rent assistance are in, and now that they are taking into consideration that I have been entitled to maximum rent assistance from 1999 up to the present day, the repayment to me is calculated to be almost $1700.

I can’t wait to see how they managed to work this one out, and tell me what happened to the rest of 2003’s rent assistance, and all of the previous four years of non-payments!

Nobody returns from Narrabri

I graduated from my Applied Physics degree with Computing Science sub-major, and applied for a job as a scientific programmer with the Ionospheric Prediction Service in Chatswood.

I knew about the 11 year sunspot cyle, so they hired me as a solar astronomer instead, as a replacement for the incumbent astronomer who was tired of the simple life in the outback. I gave up on my patent office job interview, and accepted the post. I had two weeks to move there from Sydney.

They observe the sun from the Culgoora Observatory outside of Narrabri, and make predictions about what the sunspots will do, and how they will effect the ionosphere and its ability to reflect radio waves back to Earth, and hard radiation that will be experienced by satellites and astronauts during solar storms.

In
exile at the Culgoora Solar Observatory in driest Outback Australia
during my short sojourn as an astronomer.

George W Bush explained as fantasy

Which science fiction/fantasy hero/villain is George W Bush?

A lot of information about Bush Jr packed into a very small and well-written piece.

Iain’s blog is An/Aesthetics

Emma shaved her head!

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Emma joined the World’s Greatest Shave to raise money for the Leukemia Foundation

Harsh Realms for real

Totally immersive virtual reality is being used to distract people from drug-resistant pain at the University of Washington Harborview Burn Center.

A Snow World is experienced by burns victims suffering the extcruciating pain of having their wound dressing changed and cleaned, by means of two tiny TV screens in a helmet.

In SnowWorld, patients fly through an icy canyon with a river and frigid waterfall. Patients shoot snowballs at snowmen and igloos. Since patients often report re-living their original burn experience during wound care, SnowWorld was designed to help put out the fire.

After patients in the original study and 12 other burn victims in a follow-up study, reported dramatic reductions in pain, Harborview began offering VR therapy in addition to painkillers to all its patients. The hospital said nearly all of the eligible burn patients agree to participate.

Because their brains can’t pay attention to both the action in the virtual Snow World, and to the pain in their wounds, they actually zone out of the pain feelings and barely notice their dressing being changed. Dr Hunter Huffman’s theory is that their brains simply don’t have enough processing power left over from the Snow World illusion, to interpret the pain signals. This raises intreresting implications for non-technological means of pain control by conscious effort.

Remember that science fiction TV show from 2000 where the US Military creates a simulated Earth populated with AI bots who think they’re people for soldiers to practice on?

BBC report that the first version of artificial Earth is due for release in September 2004:

“Mr Gehorsam said the world being created will not be a game but instead will be a “massively multi-user persistent environment” that will model real world physics as closely as possible.”

The emphasis in the artificial Earth will be on human interaction rather than conflicts involving lots of military hardware.

“There is planning to model the entire planet at the proper scale so it would be possible to walk across the United States if participants wanted to.”

The US military need an accurate simulation of the entire Earth and everyone on it? Thats some backup system!

Meanwhile the simulated people in the popular online computer game “The Sims”, have now been provided by fans with their own game of a simulated simulated city full of simulated simulated people , to take care of. Its called SimSlice Slice City. If the Sims are successful simulated simulated world managers, they earn money to improve their simulated lives.

The mirror of this is that real world players of Ultima, an simulated fantasy world on the internet, are now making real money in the real world, by selling simulated game items they have won in the game world to less patient players. As the Rusticators sang: “Reality aint what it used to be.”

Resources:
Artificial Earth 1.0
HarbourView Burn Center
SimSlice Slice City

Imaginary walls

The imaginary walls that we have all been relying on to seperate the air from smoking and non-smoking areas don’t work. I’ve been right for twenty years - imagine that!

ABC reports that Professor Bernard Stewart from Sydney’s South-East Area Health Service has made public the results of his research into “non-smoking zones” in restaurants, pubs and clubs today.

High levels of toxic chemicals were found throughout the clubs, regardless of air conditioners, ventilation systems or closed-in areas. In at least three of the seventeen clubs he studied, the levels of cigarette particles were actually higher in the “non-smoking” areas.

The NSW State government’s Smoke Free Environment Act 2000 currently makes it legal to smoke in any establishment that is licensed to sell liquor, as long as you are a few metres away from where food is sold. Then the imaginary wall is all that is left to protect you. Unless you travel by train.

CityRail refuses to enforce the anti-smoking legislation that was originally put in place in 1912, OR the 1983 NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act, OR the Rail Safety Act of 1999, OR the new-fangled law introduced in 2000. They made some announcements over the PA, deep underground at Town Hall station for a year, then they quietly took down all the non-smoking signs and all the staff returned to smoking on the job. No wonder so many train drivers turned out to be unfit to drive for health reasons! It was all the smoke in their workplace.

Of course they enforce the laws against litter at CityRail, but this is kind of unfair since they’ve taken away all the litter bins for reasons of “National Security”. I would have thought it was safer to make people throw their rubbish in a bin that staff can keep an eye on, than to have them be forced to leave boxes and bottles absolutely anywhere on a station platform or train. Its now harder to track potential terrorist parcels at a train station than it used to be before they removed the bins.

Resources:
The Non Smokers’ Movement of Australia
Action on Smoking and Health Australia
The Cancer Council NSW
Go Smoke Free in Pubs and Clubs
Militant Non-Smoking: A Modest Proposal by Ian Woolf from around 1988

The Assayer reviews free online books

The Assayer

Reviews and links to electronic versions of free books that people can download for their PDAs. Nice idea. Next to get my own PDA…

Asthma medication side effects help Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

I was given Ventolin (generic name “salbutamol” or “albuterol”) on the 4th January 2004 as first aid for a severe bronchitis attack on a trip to winter Canada, and had wonderful side-effects helping my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The better drug, I found, is Symbicort.

After one puff of Ventolin, I immediately heard a loud dizzying, ringing noise, and then my mind cleared.

This is wholly remarkable to someone who has suffered clouding of the brain by severe CFS or Fibromyalgia. To someone like me, who has suffered frequent attacks of mild aphasia and complete confusion for more than a year, this is like going from reading by the light of a randomly flickering LED clock, to switching on the room lights.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome researcher Dr Jay Goldstein in his book “Betrayal By The Brain” talks about there being brain systems going wrong that are helped by vaso-constricting drugs, and other brain system problems that are helped by vaso-dilators. A bronchio-dilator like ventolin dilates the bronchial tubes by vasodilator action.

I was prescribed the preventative Symbicort, which is a powder inhaler containing anti-inflammatory budesonide and brochiodilator formoterol. The brain effects were more gentle than the Ventolin, but more substantial and longer lasting. I have massively improved concentration, and my aphasic symptoms are so well controlled that I am able to sit and write for hours or sit and talk for hours. I feel more energetic, and I have a sense of well-being that I suspect comes from the reduction in inflammation.

After two weeks of Symbicort and antibiotics, my bronchitis mostly cleared up. I still had a dry cough, so I visited a doctor, and explained about how much I like the side effects of the Symbicort. He doubled my dose, and wrote a report for my doctor at home.

On the double dose, I had energy and stamina. For the first time in eighteen months, I had been able to go out on walks for pleasure, without debilitating exhaustion. My technical skills came back to me, and I was able to work on a project with my father-in-law to set up his computer to transfer his old video cassette collection to DVD to save space. I worked without tiring for several days before I finally had the familiar CFS “crash” exhaustion and had to simply rest for a few days.

We returned to Sydney via London, and my wife and I walked for six hours a day all over London to see the sights for two days. My legs hurt from simple muscle-tiredness after a good work-out, rather than from inflammation.

Since returning to Sydney, I developed the common side effect of oral thrush from the Symbicort, and my doctor switched me to Ventolin. The Ventolin gave me my voice back and let my body get rid of the thrush. I did have some stamina on the Ventolin alone, and I could still talk, but it simply wasn’t as good as the Symbicort.

I started to feel miserable, like you do with flu or CFS, and I wasn’t feeling as bright as on the Symbicort. When I started getting the Mild Aphasia symptoms like biting my mouth when I ate, I decided I had to return to the Symbicort. I compromised by halving my dose to one puff twice a day to reduce the risk of hurting my throat, and used an inhaler spacer.

I felt better within twenty minutes. I stopped having to lie down to recover from my one big day out gathering interviews for the Discovery radio show . I started writing my travel insurance claim, chasing up the money that Centrelink owe me, cleaning the flat, and registering with the
NSW Writer’s Centre .

I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) in 1992, and have suffered various insults that have worsened things since then. I have suffered severe symptoms since November 2002, suffering Mild Aphasia and losing seventeen kilograms.

I think the oral thrush that hurts my throat is only caused by the dry powder inhaler, and my google searching has shown that there exist aerosol inhalers that have the same active ingredients budesonide and formoterol, including sinus sprays.

I intend to contact AstraZeneca who make Symbicort and see if they have any information about the drug as a treatment for CFS.

My gastroenterologist early last year told me that my severe CFS symptoms and my mild Aphasia seemed to him to be caused by a micro-organism that exposed my brain to a foreign protein causing inflammation. It makes sense then, that an anti-inflammatory drug should help me.

I’m not cured; I’m still disabled by CFS, but I’m feeling much, much better. I hope that I’m not an isolated case and that these drugs can be used to help relieve some of the symptoms of CFS and Fibromyalgia sufferers around the world.

References:

http://www.pulsemed.org/cfspharm.htm
CFS/ME Society of NSW
A Companion Volume to Dr. Jay A. Goldstein’s Betrayal by the Brain: A Guide for Patients and Their Physicians

Its Kimba all over again

French children’s book author Franck Le Calve wrote Pierrot le poisson clown (Pierrot the Clown Fish) in 1995, published it with artwork by Robin Delpuech and Thierry Jagodzinski in November 2002.

At least this time Disney didn’t just change the name from Kimba to Cimba when they stole a story from outside the USA, this time they changed the name AND which parent died!

Le Calve has found that since Disney released their copycat movie, no bookshop will stock his books for fear of the wrath of Disney, so he’s suing. Its a shame to see Pixar mixed up in this.

Of course recently, Disney took their name off the new Peter Pan movie when the copyright holder Great Ormond Street Hospital for children demanded payment for use of the JM Barrie story.

I’d ask why Disney didn’t just hire their own writers if they didn’t want to pay foreign royalties, but with an attitude like this, who would willingly write for them? The pirates don’t just live in Never Never Land.

Sources:
Disney (Allegedly) Making Money off Other People’s Ideas? from ionarts
Writer sues makers of Finding Nemo from Sydney Morning Herald

Market Forces

I just finished “Market Forces” by Richard Morgan. WOW!!!
Intense, brutal, insightful. Modern globalisation politics. It really is all about the rich staying rich at the expense of the poor.

I’ll have a longer review later, but I recommend this book highly, as long as you’re warned that the central character you identify with will be performing acts of brutal violence. Its in his job description.

The CEO of a British multinational corporation speaks in this excerpt:

‘Do you really think we can afford to have the developing world develop? You think we could have survived the rise of a modern, articulated Chinese superpower twenty years ago? You think we could manage an Africa full of countries run by intelligent, uncorrupted democrats? Or a Latin America run by men like Barranco? Just imagine it for a moment. Whole populations getting educated secure, and aspirational. Women’s rights, for Christ’s sake. We can’t afford these things to happen, Chris. Who’s going to soak up our subsidised food surplus for us? Who’s going to make our shoes and shirts? Who’s going to supply us with cheap labour and cheap raw materials? Who’s going to store our nuclear waste, balance out our CO2 misdemeanours? Who’s going to buy our arms?
He gestured angrily.
‘An educated middle class doesn’t want to spend eleven hours a day bent over a stitching machine. They aren’t going to work the seaweed farms and the paddy fields ‘til their feet rot. They aren’t going to live next door to a fuel-rod dump and shut up about it. They’re going to want prosperity, Chris. Just like they’ve seen it on TV for the last hundred years. City lives and domestic appliances and electronic game platforms for their kids. And cars. And holidays, and places to go to spend their holidays. And planes to get them there. That’s development, Chris. Ring any bells? Remember what happened when we told our people they couldn’t have their cars any more? When we told them they couldn’t fly? Why do you think anybody else is going to react any differently out there?’
‘I don’t.’ Chris spread his hands.

Updated galleries

I’ve added new photos to the photo galleries
Making last use of our free Iburst broadband before we have to return our user terminal and leave for Canada.

Animated?

Photo taken in late 1997 when I was a Systems Programmer in the IT Faculty at UTS, taking staff and student photos for the database. Naturally I had to play a little and learn something new.

Its an animated GIF, which was an idea that has lost currency, your browser may turn its nose up and refuse to animate it for you. Click on the thumbnail for the larger version.

SARS found in Sydney

This is a real can of SARSparilla found on the local supermarket shelf in Sydney…
I don’t have a digital camera, so I put the can on my scanner. Not too bad a result, eh?
The picture of the SARS with its friends on our TV, is taken with David’s camera, and the last with Emma’s keychain digital camera.

Leaving on a jet plane

We leave next Wednesday! We will be available via

In keeping with the usual balance of things, I have a nasty chest cold and
laryngitis, which must be cleared up completely before we go to the world
of wet and ridiculously cold. This is ironic, because in the last two
weeks my health has otherwise improved for the first time in 12 months. I
still can’t add up the dice correctly in Settlers, but I can just kick
Emma’s ass for strategy. :-) Thanks to Iain and Llyn we have a traveller’s
edition we can play on the flight.

Homepage updated

BTW, my web page has been updated a little, the front page is now a menu
instead of a hypertext document, with my stuff on the left, and links to
other sites on the right, and a new picture. Easier to navigate links to
my radio show sound files, photo albums and writing. I have a link to
my personal TheThingsIWant wishlist for your amusement, and I’ve even
linked this blog. http://linus.it.uts.edu.au/~iwoolf/

almost pretty

Played around with adding some style sheet colours. Its not a skinnable site yet, but its a good imitation.

A blog is born

I finally put a blog live, after sifting through Moveable Type, with encouragement from my friend Matthew. I’ve put off trying to put my whole website into Moveable Type management to some other time.

I’ve given my wife Emma her own blog to play with.

We finally got Emma’s bridging visa B yesterday after much hoopla, and we’re visiting Canada VERY soon! Like in less than two weeks!!!!!!!!!

Without this piece of paper, she wouldn’t have been allowed back to Australia. It turns out the call center’s advice was wrong, and it only takes 10 minutes to get the document if you go into the office, rather than the five weeks we waited on the “quick” postal application - which was then cancelled or lost. I’m glad I offered to keep Emma company, and had my credit card handy. Emma’s wallet went missing last weekend, so she would have been stuck with only cash to pay the fee. Naturally, the office refuses to take cash.

We get to try out IBurst wireless 1Mbs broadband before we go for free, which is an excellent deal. Its very smooth and very fast. I hope the ISP they go with has an uncapped plan.