What's Doing

Morning team. The fun starts here. Whilst perusing ntk I came across a great definition of why compromising strong encryption is bad. If you didn’t understand the previous sentence, don’t worry, the chaps at ntk have taken the play school pill;

“””
One: everyone has a legitimate use for encryption: heck, every time you pay by credit card, you’re doing it. Two: if you don’t have control of your keys, you have no guarantee that your communication is safe. Three: big pile of keys at police authority implies big place to go for fun terrorist hacking party. Four: here is the set of “organisations using encryption codes legitimately” and here is the set of terrorists. Observe the intersection. There is NONE. IT IS THE NULL SET. VENN DIAGRAM THAT LOOK LIKE TWO BIG CIRCLES EQUAL BAD PUBLIC POLICY.
“””
This still won’t stop a lot of bad laws being passed but there you go. If you are interested, read last week’s ntk here.

The client I am currently working for has an IT department of 20 people. Amongst those are five highly paid professionals who focus solely on web technologies (intranet, internet, B2B, EDI, etc). They have just implemented a policy blocking the use of ‘free’ email and instant messengers via the company network. Which is their perogative. The sad thing is that when you try and access one of these services you are presented with a web page that is actually a Microsoft Word document. This company spends somewhere in the region of half a million dollars a year on internet people, hardware and software licenses and they can’t even produce an html file to serve up when inappropriate requests are made via the proxy server. Oh, and they run Microsoft Proxy server on Win2k, but that is an entirely different kettle of techie fish.

The system administration team at this particular company should really read Scoble on intranets (which I got to from Mark Pilgrim’s piece about Knowledge Management)

Happy Birthday Kevin Vaz. 21 again and absolutely no relation of the Labour member of parliament (allegedly).

Most of my thinking today revolves around the rounding of floating point numbers, but that is covered elsewhere.

Apart from that not a lot is happening around the blocks really. My joyous task for the weekend is to try and get my affairs in sufficient order to file a tax return. Wow, life on the edge.

Oh, and I am in no way going to be indulging in any kind of pre-wedding, blokes only, alcohol accompanied activities tomorrow. No sir, not me.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it blog.

For your spiritual enligthenment today, read this. Its not about me, but I know what Mark is saying and I’ve been there too. I didn’t go cold turkey from the old coffin nails, I used nicotine patches. But it is still the hardest thing that I have ever done.

Oh, and Mum, I wasn’t a dope fiend. I stuck to the legally available ciggies.

There is a definite theme running through today’s posts. I’m not sure why I am writing about smoking, it is not as if it is any particular anniversary. Oh well, I will just put it down to reading those two pieces within a couple of hours of each other.

Bugger. According to Yahoo! (as spotted by NextDraft) Swedish researchers say that people who give up smoking and then restart damage their lungs even more than people who carry on smoking. Read all about it here.

Just a good incentive not to start back on the demon weed I guess.

Now I actually own something. Scary.

I dropped off a cheque at the finance company today, the final payment on the lease of my car. I am now the proud owner of a Blue 1997 Honda Prelude Si. I might just give the car a wash to celebrate.

I crawled out of bed at some unfeasibly early hour this morning and stumbled into the bathroom. Whilst I was cleaning my teeth I glanced over at the shower cabinet and discovered that the door was in pieces. What a way to start the day.

Much swearing ensued. After some extensive construction work I managed to get it back together again and have a shower. Still, it was the perfect opportunity to take a positive approach and make sure that an early hiccup does not ruin my day.

I’ll let you know how I get on, but bear in mind that we are going through UAT at work so I reserve the right to be cranky.

Well, a good time was had by all over the weekend. Cypress Lakes was good, the weather was magnificent and the wine flowed like, well, wine.

I won’t bore you with all of the details of the weekend, except to say the my golf score wasn’t atrocious and the lagoon pool was a little chilly at first. Of course we later found out that the resort pool was heated, but we justified our choice of swimming location by saying that we were all hardy types – except Jon ‘Purse Carrying’ Palmer.

We did visit some lovely wineries though, and I will share a few with you here. On our tour on Saturday we stopped in at a couple of old favourites. First stop was McWilliams Mount Pleasant where the Semillion/Sauvignon Blanc was our favourite white wine of the day. We then moved on to Ivanhoe where the Shiraz Pressings was admired by all, as usual. The other stops on the tour were not worthy of a mention here though.

After a wine tasting free Sunday, yesterday we went out and about on our own and enjoyed the offerings from two wineries we hadn’t visited before.

Margan Family Wines is newly established in the Hunter Valley (well, four years is young in wine terms) and has some lovely wines across the range. They are available in restaurants and bottle shops across Australia so if you see one of their offerings give it a try. Remember though, with wine your opinion may differ from mine 😉

Our last stop of the weekend (and the longest) was at Saddlers Creek. Absolutely lovely chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot and shiraz. It was so good Bobo signed up for their wine club. Yum. I enjoyed several cups of water as I had to drive us home. My payoff will come as the wine ages and I get to test it from the comfort of my own comfy chair.

Happy birthday Mr Molland for yesterday. Rumour also has is that the spiv was slightly older on Monday, but I can neither confirm nor deny that one.

It was a year ago that Sydney was reverberating to the sound of joyous crowds and sporting superlatives. That’s right, I really should dig out those Olympics photos. I was going to include a link to the Olympics web site here, but it has mysteriously disappeared.

On the sporting front, it is time for the annual "Festival of the Boot". For the uninitiated, this coming weekend sees the AFL grand final played on Saturday and the NRL grand final played on Sunday. There is, of course, only one place to go for coverage of these sporting pinnacles, the home of the festival, this Sporting Life. Our intrepid hosts, Roy and HG, spare no simile in their coverage of the matches and a jolly good time is had by all. If you only listen to one radio broadcast this year, make it the Festival of the Boot this weekend on this Sporting Life. You will thank me later.

Because it is a long weekend in Australia (something to do with equinoxes and virgins running around in fields with new born lambs) the boss and I are heading out of town.
The venue for the weekend (and they had better have a radio so that I can tune into Roy and HG) is Cypress Lakes.
Life is tough.

This blog is a copy of my diary.

It probably won’t be as up to date or as comprehensive. It could be more fun though.