Smoking Is Addictive

Why does Australia's internet suck balls?

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:36:00 +0000

So now I'm back, from outer space. What's the first thing a self respecting nerd does when he moves into a new house? Internet of course. Followed shortly by rants about the Internet, which is what this is.

This is how it works in Australia. We pay heaps for our Internet. We have slow speeds. We have low data allowances. We get charged heaps for extra usage. Bottom line, we're getting screwed.

Here are some boring graphs from here. The first one is how much we pay on average, the second one is how much we get charged for using extra data.

The reason there are only a few countries on that second graph is that the rest of them don't have download limits. Not only does Australia have limits but we usually charge you a shitload if you exceed them.

Case in point is Telstra. I know they are the worse for value, but to be honest the other Telcos are not that far off them. They have an ADSL 2+ plan for $70/month with 600MB of data. I was a little unsure of just how long it would take to hit that limit so I did a little test. I downloaded a 600MB file. Total download time on my ADSL 2+ connection... 12 mins. That's right, I could use up my whole monthly quota in 12 minutes, after that, the other 43817 minutes in the month, I am charged 15c a megabyte.

Then you have the lock in contracts, the endless product bundles, the deceptive language. Plus this is all being repeated with the increasing use of smartphones (iPhone, 3G phones etc). The data caps and excess usage charges the Telcos apply to these is laughable. The pricing terms, conditions and jargon used make my head hurt.

What is the consequence of all this? We're fucking up Australia's future. We're sacrificing the long term progress of our country for the short term profits of a handful of Telcos.

The Internet changed our lives 10 years ago, now it's a part of our lives. There is so much content out there right now that should be easily accessible by everyone but instead we're all stuck in the mentality that the Internet is a privilege that should be used sparingly.

You might argue that Joe Average doesn't want 400 terraflips of Internet. That might be true now, but I bet anyone using the net now is not going to reduce their usage in the next year. The US has HD blue-ray movies for download at the moment, the average Japanese spends more time online on their phones than their home computers, the iTunes store has sold 200 million TV shows so far. It's clearly only going one way here.

I applaud the current government for investing in this new Broadband network they are all talking about. 100mbps speeds would be a very welcome addition to the market but it will be useless if it's packaged with the same crap that we currently have. I shudder to think what Telstra will charge once they can offer those speeds. The point is that for a large proportion of Australia we already have, or could cheaply build, sufficient infrastructure to access the Internet at close to world leading speeds.

The problem is the current paradigm is to charge and trick users for a service that should be cheap and easy. I have no doubt that ADSL 2+ speeds at $30/month unlimited data usage for 90% of the population could be achieved within the next 6 months and for less than a few hundred million dollars if the government put its might and money behind it.

Australia's future is not in the manufacturing, coal or automotive industries, it's in technology. It's in using our smarts and our privileged position to become world leaders in the new technologies that will emerge in the near future. The Internet is an undeniably vital part of that.

We're shooting ourselves in the foot here.

Terminator IV

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Wed, 13 May 2009 05:59:00 +0000

Economic crisis, recession, rising unemployment. We've been hearing these terms in the news for so long now that they have almost lost all meaning, but for somethe true scale of the situation is not revealed until it affects someone close to them, someone they care so much for and would do anything to help out. Well, you can all put yourself into that category now because I, your humble blogger have just been made redundant.

[I'll get this embarrassing matter out of the way early. You will notice a PayPal link at the bottom of this post. Please give only what you can afford]

That's right, your's truly is the latest and most important victim in the worldwide economic crisis. Looks like I'll be leaving the sunny featureless deserts of the UAE and returning to Oz. I'll have some big decisions to make in my life. Either I can sit around all day for the next six months watching TV in nothing but my jocks, or I can buy some sort of robe.

Ah unemployment. I haven't been unemployed since I finished Uni in 2001. Even then it was on purpose. I had just spend four and a half years at being a student and didn't want to rush into a nine-to-five just yet. In the end Centrelink kept threatening to make me attend job search training where, after having finished my Computer Systems Engineering degree, I was to learn Microsoft Office so I bit the bullet and got a job. But I still remember those halcyon days.

I wonder if things will be different this time around. Marijuana will be more expensive I expect, and social networking will allow me to keep you all updated with how my life is progressing.

Sam Cox said "Off to bunnings for some strong rope"

But I haven't left here just yet. My one month's notice period is up at the end of this month. At that time, in the caring tradition of the UAE, my visa will be canceled, my bank accounts frozen and I will have one month to leave the country. But it's not too bad for me. It's the expats that have outstanding car or rental loans that start making inquires into the quietest way to get into Oman at this point.

The UAE have rather simpler bankruptcy laws than Australia has. Here you simply go to jail until you can repay your debt, the assumption being presumably that it is not too difficult to get a full time job while being incarcerated.

So, while I won't be back for a little while, keep the home fires burning and tell K-Rudd I'm coming for my $900.

PayPal

Wanker - I'm flush with petrodollars remember?

Thirteen, Twenty Two, Too Many

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:09:00 +0000

Apparently we're in a worldwide financial crisis. I didn't notice at first because I'm living in a capitalist paradise earning tax-free petro-dollars but the other day I glanced at the TV and saw so many dire's, meltdown's and breaking-point's that I had to rush to Britney's twitter to make sure she was OK. Turns out she was, but the entire world's economy is apparently fucked up.

What caused it? Greedy cunts and over-empowered morons it looks like, but playing the blame game in a time where lynchings are frowned upon is not as fun as it used to be. The real question now is how do we get out of it? And here is where the crisis has really affected me. I have no idea.

For years I've been blogging about the ills of the world but I've had the power of self-righteous arrogance on my side. I had answers to all the problems you could think of. Global Warming? Turn to renewables and stop wasting energy. Refugees coming to Australia? Follow international laws, treat them like human beings and don't lock them up in the Australia desert. War in Iraq? Stop invading Iraq you bloodthirsty warmongers. Simple answers to complex-to-all-but me problems. But now I've hit a snag. Financial crisis? Well, just... fucked if I know.

I sort of know what should not have happened, but I think everyone knows that and is fairly much in agreement. Wall street and the major players in the US should not have been allowed to sell junk products by repackaging dept into deceptively attractive derivatives while the banks continued to provide fuel for these junk assets through irresponsible lending thus over-inflating the worldwide market and setting us up for a big old crash. That bit is easy, the hard part is how to fix it all.

Bail out toxic-asset riddled banks or allow them to go bankrupt? Cut down on spending or spend unprecedented amounts? Increase tariffs to protect local jobs or drop tariffs to increase global trade? Lower interest rates or higher interest rates or just right interest rates? I don't have a fucking clue, and it shits me. All the other problems of the world I had an easy answer to. Now I've got nothing.

So in the words of a CEO to the junior IT guy after the monthly reports spreadsheet has gone missing, "Just fix it!". It shames me to say but that's how I feel. Fix this fucking mess so we can all get back to normal. And by normal I mean implementing unprecedented reforms in order to save the world from global climate change and environmental poisoning destruction.

Because that's the fucked thing isn't it? Good things were just starting to happen environment-wise then the economy decided to shit itself. What CEO is going to spend millions on green initiatives when the good PR they would normally receive from it will almost certainly be overshadowed by the thousands of job losses they've just made.

We're all like a hungover college kid after a big night at the casino. 11 hours ago we were $250 up and looking forward to getting the gas reconnected, then suddenly we're not sure if getting the bus to Uni is a financially responsible move considering that the $4.30 left in our jeans represents the remaining budget for the fortnight.

What the fuck were we doing for the last 5 years? Unemployment at record lows, huge surpluses, record wages. What do we have to show for it? 8 months of stormy weather and we're hocking the engagement ring at cashies.

Basically, we needed a good slapping and we've just had it. But I really hope this nice Mr Obama fixes it all up for us so we don't all have to start learning Mandarin, most important leader of the antipodeans excepted of course.

Return of the King

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:56:00 +0000

As many of you are well aware, I have been taking experimental medication for the last three months to control my anger issues. The experiment has been a failure on many counts, with several people hospitalised and many lives ruined. The real tragedy though has been the destruction of my blogitival motivation, resulting in this being my first contact with you all in so long that if I was in a vegetative state my feeding tube would have been removed.

But unlike Terri Schiavo, I've come back from the brink of death. And starting now, I'm promising to update much more often.

To keep you interested, here's a sneak peak of some upcoming posts:

Tit shots in Underbelly 2; just right or far too infrequent?
Princess Die, a pun retrospective
Utilising your Stimulus Package - Tips for getting laid in a financial crisis
Twitter your way to rock hard abs

So stay tuned.

Blackwater, murderers for hire

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:24:00 +0000

I was recently pleased to hear that Blackwater have finally been kicked out of Iraq.

Ever heard of Blackwater? I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't, but they've had quite a hand in world affairs of late. Basically they are the people involved when you hear the phrase 'Private Contractor' in Iraq. "Private contractor killed in roadside bombing", oh dear, was he a plumber there to restore water to orphanages? No, he is a Mercenary, a gun for hire. The role of mercenaries or PMCs (Private Military Companies) in the Iraq war has been largely glossed over but they are there in huge numbers. A 2005 report puts the number at 20,000. That's almost as many troops as the US have in Afghanistan at the moment.

The term Military Industrial Complex refers to the relationship between the military and the private defence companies that are contracted to provide them with weapons and support. War is good for business and all that. The war in Iraq 'cost' a trillion dollars, but where does that money actually go? It has to be spent somewhere, and it is, it's spend on equipment, research, construction etc all carried out by private companies. Some genius decided that there was a huge sector of the War Machine that was unprofitably being run in house, namely the soldiers. So they have started privatising that. Hence the PMCs.

Why would you use PMCs instead of regular Army? Well it's basically the same reason you use contractors in any situation. They guarantee the skills and they, not you, are responsible for what they get up to. Paul Bremer, the first Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (read Governor) of Iraq was a big fan of PMCs and in the aftermath of the invasion he gave the PMCs full immunity to Iraqi laws. As immune the US military was to any sort of criticism, they were still accountable to the military judicial system. Blackwater and the other PMCs on the other hand were immune to Iraqi law and military scrutiny. So basically they were able to do whatever the hell they wanted.

A bunch of ex-special forces guys with shitloads of cash and a cowboy attitude were running around Iraq doing God knows what with no fear of recriminations for their murderous actions. And they were murderous. Google "Blackwater deaths" to get a sense of how these boys operated.

Well, thank God, they have finally been banned from operating in Iraq. What did it take to get people to focus attention on them? The murder of 17 civilians in an Iraqi market.

Prosecutors said the guards unleashed a gruesome attack on unarmed Iraqis, with the dead including young children, women, people fleeing in cars and a man whose arms were raised in surrender as he was shot in the chest.

If you want to see how these boys roll check out this video. It's not Blackwater but another PMC called Aegis. Sickening disregard for human life. Their job is to guard people, which translates into kill anyone who comes too close, be they militant or mother.

Bastards. Good riddance to Blackwater, but it's one down, hundreds to go I'm afraid.

Sport, the final frontier

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:52:00 +0000

I have a dirty secret. I've tried to hide it from my friends and family for years, but living the lie has taken its toll on my soul. I have to confess.... I hate sport. Don't like it, not interested in it, would not affect my life if all forms of organised sporting competition were stopped tomorrow.

Oh the shame I've felt when the topic arrises in the company of men. Christmas day, the males of my extended family are standing around a BBQ, beers in hand, when one of my Uncles will drop a "Kerno wasn't half bad at Subie last Sat was he?" What is he talking about? Football obviosuly, but what team? Subie? Subiaco? That's in Perth right? He's from South Australia so he wounldn't go for a Perth team, so it must be... Ah fuck it. "Yeah, wasn't he?" I mutter before downing the remainded of my beer so I have an excuse to leave.

I know what will happen if I stay. The inevitiable question. Who's your team? It was somewhat manageable when South Australia had only one team in the national competition. I obviosuly went for the Crows. No problems. Then another SA team joined up and my usual answer wasn't good enough. Now I was either a Crow's man or a Port Man, and whichever one I picked would be taken as an open invitation to a debate about the intelligence, masculinity and penis size of supporters of one team versus the other. Who cares? I think they are equally stupid, or equally awesome if you want to be positive, but I honestly have much more interest in the protocols used in creating the team's respective websites than I will ever have in the game itself.

Having my condition (I will not cheapen this post by using the suffix 'itis') can be quite debilitating sometimes. Depending on the company, I'm basically excluded from 25-75% of all male conversation. Well, not entirely excluded. I can stand there of course, and that works suprisingly well because along with actual recounting of sporting matches comes a wealth of statistics that would put the ABS to shame. This means conversations about sport can be participated in by dropping small and uncommital questions like "Is that a record for away-games?" or "who had that title before him?" which will start hours of idiot savant like recounting of sporting records while leaving everyone under the impression that I was a participant.

But this must end. I'm an expat in Dubai now and need to make expat friends. Sport is a natural medium for strangers to converse. In between shelling each other I bet even Hamas and Israel have a quick chat about Man U. So I'm going to get into sport. Rugby sport to be precise. Expats here all seem to be into football (soccer) and Rugby. Soccer seemed a little too much to bite off as a first effort so I've gone with Rugby, more specifically Rugby Sevens, which is some offshoot sect of Oxthodox Rugby.

Coming up in March in Dubai is some sort of Rugby competition and I have secured tickets. My goal between now and then is to swot up on the game to the point that I can converse sufficiently well with other spectators. Who knows, I might actually get into it. Stranger things have happened.

Play ball!

Gaza Madness II

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:34:00 +0000

The whole world has been looking at the situation in Gaza as either a tragedy or an inevitable consequence of repeated attacks, but I was recently enlightened with a different interpretation of events there. Basically I was shown the timing implications of these events and, to me, it all seems to make a lot more sense.

Hamas have been firing rockets into Israel for months, since the last cease fire broke down. According to the Israeli spokesman on CNN last night the lack of reaction from Israel was a great testament to their willingness to reduce the impact of retaliation on the Gazans but then they just reached their breaking point and had to act. Maybe, maybe not. Another theory is that they timed this offensive to coincide with the departure of the outgoing American president.

What the hell does Bush care about international conflicts right now? He's running down the clock and everyone is too busy asking him retrospective questions about his last eight years. Obama is getting in in four days and then all eyes will be on him. He will have to make a statement on the Gaza offensive and people will actually care because it's not bush.

So my theory is that the offensive will end before the 20th. Well, it's not actually my theory, it's a friend of mine's who started calling it a week ago but he doesn't have a blog and I do so I'm stealing it for my own. The Israelis have started this massacre at a time when there is no way the US president would get involved in any sort of peace mediation and as such they have a few weeks of free reign. After the new Prez gets in and people start asking him questions about it the Israelis will stop it and claim a cease-fire has been reached.

Why does this matter? Well, it takes away some legitimacy from Israel's claims that it had no choice to attack and kill all those people in Gaza because if fact they did have a choice and they chose to do it when the US would not get involved.

Maybe I'm wrong, but much like I stole this theory from my friend, so to will I return its failure to him should it prove incorrect.

Gaza Madness

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:36:00 +0000

Death Toll:

Palestinians: 800

Israelis: 13

Enough said eh?

Well, maybe not.

I know that this situation is one of the most complex and long running conflicts around and it is usually foolish to look at any event outside of a historical context but I think this is an exception. The facts here are that there are now 800 Palestinians who are dead and many times more injured as a direct result of a decision by Israel. You simply cannot justify that.

The phrase of the day is 'proportional use of force'. Israel says they will do whatever it takes to stop the rocket attacks by Hamas, but what does that mean? If they killed everyone in Gaza and bulldozed all the buildings down they would stop the attacks, but that would be considered disproportionate. There is clearly a point where the use of force is unjustified. Israel have clearly crossed that point.

The most sickening aspect in my book is the use of air strikes in such a heavily populated area. The IDF PR spokespeople can talk about 'tactical strikes' all they want but everyone knows that bombs miss and terrorists don't stand out in empty carparks waiting to get bombed. So what you get is huge numbers of civilians killed. Innocent people, living in a shithole, having little hope of a better life, get blown to pieces because their neighbour in 13A is a member of Hamas. Not right in my book. It's not right when the Yanks do it in Afghanistan and Iraq and it's not right when the Israelis do it in Gaza.

Of course what does it all matter when Israel doesn't really care what the world thinks of them. The UN Security Council can do nothing because the US has veto power and they are 100% behind Israel. So the offensive keeps on going and we get bored of it as it slips off the front pages. Gaza gets set back another 20 years as their infrastructure burns and 100,000 Gazans have a new reason to strap bombs to themselves to try and inflict at least some damage to the Military Goliath that keeps smashing them from next door.

But Hamas are terrorists. You can speak of elected governments all you like but firing rockets blindly into an area populated by civilians is pretty much the definition of terrorism. And once you are labeled the big T it's pretty much all over in terms of Western support for your cause nowadays. The US started this in Afghanistan and Iraq and it was quickly followed by other countries around the world. America set the precedent that you can do anything you want if you are trying to protect your people from terrorism. So the Israelis have the best comeback of all to world condemnation, "What would your country do if rockets were raining down on your people?". You sure as hell know what the yanks would do, and the UK and probably Australia. But that still doesn't make it right in my book. Israel are swatting flies with a sledgehammer.

And yes, the rocket attacks are like flies compared to the military might of Israel. They are unguided rockets so if they managed to his anything it is pure blind luck. I'm sure they do an excellent job of terrorising the population under fire, but so does shooting rockets from fighter jets and helicopter gunships only that method kills several orders of magnitude more people. Here is a quote from Israeli Defence Ministry in 2006 about the rockets:

"...but we need to remember that Qassams [the Hamas Rockets] are more a psychological than physical threat."

Basically, desperate people do desperate things. The Gazans are living in a hellhole of a refugee camp and are continually subject to Israeli blockades and military strikes. There comes a point where it becomes useless to talk about the rationality of certain actions. If you are continually near starvation, have no hope of a better life and are constantly victimised by a much more powerful enemy then you are not going to act in a rational way. There are two ways to look at it. Either Palestinians are inherently evil people who have no capacity to live in peace or they are desperate people who act or support those who act in violent ways because they see no other method of being heard.

I have faith in all humanity so I choose the latter.

Don't cry for me Wikipedia

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:17:00 +0000

News this week of another major disruption to the Middle East's Internet capacity.

This one might look like just an accident, but I'm still not sure. How often do ships drag their anchors over cables in other parts of the world? I'm not going to check, so lets just say never. See, never!

Even if this one was an accident, the last disruption back in Feb was as fishy as the lunch menu at Uncle Hiroki's House of Sushi.

Three cables in three days were 'damaged by ship anchors' effectively cutting off the internet for most of the region. If you had a sprinkler system installed in your front yard and three different pipes were damaged in a few days you'd probably think that someone was doing it on purpose wouldn't you? I would, and so would my dad who loves his front yard grass so much that that analogy would probably make him uncomfortable. But back to the international conspiracy to strategically disrupt the internet... well, I reckon it's an international conspiracy to strategically disrupt the internet.

Current theories are:

It's the CIA and/or Mossad testing out the robustness of the Middle East link (possibly using robotic mini-subs, possibly with lasers attached) in preparation for an attack on Iran. They will shut down phone and internet communications so that we can't hear the screams of the innocent children as the bombs rain down on their kindergartens and the blood spills over into... Ahem, you get the idea.

It's the CIA planting advanced wiretapping equipment into the lines somewhere and they needed to cut them in order to install the gear. Robotic mini-sub may have been used here too. This is either part of the US's Echelon worldwide surveillance program or it is being run in parallel to it in the hope that Obama won't be told of it and the republican's (who have controlled network surveillance since '64) will can catch him getting a blow-job and they can get the US back into an old white-man's hands again.

It's Al Qaeda testing out their capacity for literal Internet terrorism as a precursor to instigating their much pursued Islamic fundamentalist overthrow of the government of Egypt and others in the region. They need to cut the cut the internet so that bloggers can't report what is going on and the local people will only have their 500 satellite channels to bring them news and confusion will reign. There is no evidence of mini-subs, but rumours indicated Suicide Divers may have been used (sorry).

None of these are confirmed, but if they were, we would all have something to worry about.

So what is my point here? Basically that last night the speed of my internet was slightly reduced because of either ships or international conspiracies and it is not acceptable. I am one of literally hundreds of people who have no television and rely solely on the internet for AV news and entertainment. I could barely stream the BBC World News last night, let alone download Battlestar Galactica while watching redtube porn.

What ever the reason for this disruption I just want it to go away. I guess I should really hope for the second theory to be correct, because at least they would want it reconnected as soon as possible. An extended air campaign in Iran or the overthrow of the UAE government by violent Islamic extremists would probably mean an outage of months or possibly years.

It goes to show that the real victim of unrest are not the ones you see on the news, but rather the unseen ones trying in vain to watch the news... over the internet.

Drop a Coxy - Save the Planet

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:15:00 +0000

This week the Rudd Government released details of their strategy to reduce Australia's CO2 emissions by introducing a carbon trading scheme.

At first I thought Australia was going all out and announcing a 5% CO2 reduction from 1990 levels, but then I checked the scale and it's just from the 2000 levels, and doesn't include all emitters. Which is really a reduction of... fuck, these figures are hard to find. It is actually really hard to find the data for CO2 emissions for anything more than a few years, and even harder to find multiple sources to verify it. Although I'm sure the government is using rock solid data and not doing what I've been doing and searching Google.

But let's talk about this 5%. It's actually quite surprising that Rudd would have been so forthright announcing this benchmark scale when his figure was so low on it. I mean, if he had said "We are reducing our emissions by 24%... from projected 2020 levels" then it would have sounded much better.

Listening to the vox-pop on PM the other day it was clear that no-one actually knew or cared about the scale, they were just angry about the number. "Five percent is almost nothing", "Why even bother?", "Why not just do nothing?"

Well, for a start our carbon emissions are still increasing right? So doing nothing would actually be "reducing our emissions by -23%" or whatever on the scale Rudd has chosen. Lets not forget that the much loved Kyoto Protocol was not actually calling for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, but rather a reduction in the increase of carbon dioxide emissions. Baby steps.

Is it enough? Who knows. Probably not because, while both sides are not happy, the greens are much more not happy than the Chamber of Commerce are. That's your basic yardstick for judging controversial decisions. With this one, I think Rudd could have gone a little bit further, but ten percent was probably too much of a stretch and he probably likes nice neat numbers like 5.

But what is this 5% anyway? Is everyone using this scale? Does it take into account population growth? Why did we choose 2000?

I think it's confusing and I say we need a new unit to simplify thing. Luckily I just happen to have invented one and because I invented it I think I will call it the Coxy. The Coxy rating is a number between 0 and infinity that shows how well a country is doing in the battle to save the planet. It also averages out the scores a bit so you can't just go all out one year to get in the record books then ease off the gas. It is a simple formula that looks like this:

It's the average CO2 output from 20XX (whichever year you are measuring) minus 5 years until 20XX, divided by the average CO2 output from 1990 until 1995, then we plus and add stuff to get a number between 0 and a billion. 100 means you have done nothing, 0 means you no longer emit any CO2, 200 means you have doubled your output. But then we subtract the % that your country makes of the World's population and add the % of the World's CO2 your country produces. So you lose Coxys for having a big population and small CO2 output (good), gain Coxys for having a small population and large CO2 output (bad) and get no change for emitting an amount proportional to your population. Everyone wants have a Coxy rating of under 100.

So instead of Kevin Rudd getting up and saying we want a 5% reduction from 2000 levels by 2020 excluding blah blah blah, he can just say we want a Coxy2020 of 96 or something. Everyone will still complain because 96 is too close to 100 and they know 100 is doing nothing (after a worldwide Coxy education campaign) but at least we will all be on the same page. Any moronic talk-back caller will easily be able to compare Australia's CO2 reduction performance with the rest of the world. Simple

Who's with me, and better yet, who's got a good slogan?

The Ambassador

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:06:00 +0000

I've got nothing topical to write about this week so I thought I'd just write a story about life here as an expat in the UAE.

When I came here I had a few concerns about how much my liberal Aussie lifestyle would have to be modified for my new life in the Islamic Sheikdom of the UAE. I did as much research as I could about the laws and the customs and basically what would get me in trouble. Most of my research was the result of Googling "Arrested UAE OR Dubai OR Abu Dhabi" and seeing what people had been nicked for.

It was usually drink driving (jail then deportation), bouncing a cheque (jail then deportation) or drug importation (four years jail then deportation). So I thought I was pretty safe if I didn't do those things, but still I tried to be careful. After all, it is technically illegal to drink alcohol without a license, or share an apartment with a women who is not your wife or have bum sex (I have only broken one of those laws so far).

After living here for a while though I've learnt that a lot of these rules are just there to appease the Muslim neighbours and give the cops something to make sure they get you with should you do anything serious or stupid enough to get attention. For example, everyone has been talking about that British couple that got arrested for having sex on a beach in Dubai. Absolutely stupid obviously, but if you look at it closely they actually got away with murder.

Firstly they were caught by a policeman having sex (or close to it) on a public beach in broad daylight in an Islamic country... and he gave them a warning. They then got back on it because they were fucking idiots and were then confronted again, got in an altication with the cop, who most likely just wanted them to fuck off back to a hotel room and not cause him any trouble, and they were arrested.

Now they were up on the radar. They got charged with public indecency, sex outside of marriage, consuming alcohol and probably a few others. In the end though, after being out on bail for a few months, they got 3 months jail, they then appealed that (by this time the sole charge was consuming alcohol) and got off with a 1000 Dirham fine ($400 Aussie) and deportation. What's a trip back to the UK from Dubai worth nowadays? Hell of a lot more than $400 Aussie dollar. So basically they got off, for being caught shitfaced drunk having sex on a beach in the daytime in Islamic Dubai. I started to think that things here were not as strict as the government websites had led me to believe.

I've got to say though that the reason these people got off was because they are Western expats. If they had been Indian they would have gotten four years each and scimitar up the arse. The western (and by definition rich) expat gets afforded privileges that I have found extend further than priority check-in at the airport. I've previously mentioned the hierarchy that exists here, but the get-almost-out-of-jail-free status definitely ends with the Western expat. Everyone else is prison fodder.

Which leads me to my personal story. The other night an Aussie mate and I were out at one of the seedier Dubai nightspots enjoying a surprisingly good cover band and some predictably shite beer. We noticed a very drunken yank staggering around the pub seemingly trying to knock into everyone he could. In Oz he would have been out on his arse by this point but the bouncers were staying in their respective corners and not making a move on him. This tweaked my interest, specifically how much it would take to get this guy thrown out of the place. My Aussie mate, who I shall call Peter, was also interested and we started watching the bloke.

He next moved onto the dancefloor and started swaying and jumping around like a fuckwit. Still no move from the boys in black. He then moved up towards the band and started yelling alternating compliments and insults at them from a distance of a few feet. Still nothing. He seemed to get bored of the band and decided to do handstands on the dance floor, trying to bend his skyward feet over his head and rest them on the handrail. To his credit, the man must have been a gymnast because to he pulled the maneuver off while clearly being drunker than an Irishman on Christmas morning. Finally the bouncer moved in. Surely this man is about to be turfed we thought.

But no, the bouncer came over and politely asked him to restrict his dancing to non-inverted poses and was on his way, although I did notice he didn't stray too far. Drunkard seemed to appreciate the bouncers leniency and ran up to him, arms astreched, giving him a huge bear hug and trying to lift him off the ground. Surely we though, this is it, this guy is out. But no, the bouncer seemed to thank him for the gesture and stood back. Clearly this man was as interested in pushing the boundaries as we were in watching him do it because the next move he made was to grab the bouncer by the head with both hands and plant a huge kiss on his lips. This would get you easily hospitalized at most Aussie nightspots but again the bouncer did nothing but smile and leave the man to dance.

We both realised that it would probably take stabbing a barmaid to get these bouncers to take any sort of action so we turned our attention to the man of the hour. I had previously labeled him as a yank due to his dress. Sandals, shorts, muscle top and backwards baseball cap, but Peter suggested that he might not be a yank, in fact he might be an Aussie. A 100 Dirham bet was struck as only bar sessions can produce and then Peter was off to make the identification.

Catching the drunkard mid stagger he placed an arm around him to steady his gait and said "How's it going?", to which the 'yank' replied "G'day mate". He was a bogan from the Goldie.

I still call Australia home.

Hunting down Anonymous

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:12:00 +0000

P.E.

My first encounter with Anonymous happened in a grade 9 P.E gymnastics session. Half a dozen of us were lined up waiting to have a go at jumping over the horse. Just as I was making my approach some Anonymous bastard yelled out "Don't fuck up!", which made me lose my balance and crash headfirst into the horse. As I spat the dislodged foam from my mouth I turned around to face the culprit, only to see forty laughing faces looking back at me. I knew I had to track him down, but how? He had won this round, but the seeds he had unwittingly sewn would shape my life from that point on.

I had to out-think him, find his weakness. I knew the thrill of the last encounter would not be enough to quench his insatiable thirst for my humiliation so I decided to play along and bide my time. Sure enough, next appropriate gym encounter the same thing happened. I was distracted again mid maneuver and suffered the same humiliating fate but as I lay there on the floor I knew I could catch him. You see, he had used a different phrase this time. "Have a nice trip!". He was getting more confident, and I had a plan.

As a keen reader of Australian Computing and DSP World I had heard about the advances in Voice Recognition that were being made in parallel with the increasing power of the microprocessors of the day. While getting VR to the point of instantly recognising voices was years away, using the basics of frequency decomposition and Hidden Markov Model analysis it was relatively simple to create a crude voice recognition system capable of running on my home 486. Now all I needed was the input.

Using my father's Dictaphone and a lot of patience I was able to record Anonymous's gymnasium taunts as well as the roll call of the two combined P.E. classes. In less than a year I had obtained the necessary data to nail my nemesis. Revenge was my next challenge, and Pedro Lucas was my target.

Digging through the bins of the nearby newsagent I amassed a collection of hardcore homosexual fetish magazines. I then spent three months studying the handwriting of both Pedro and my uncaring, and in my eyes culpable, P.E. teacher Mr Parkinson. After writing a series of dated love letters with increasing levels of passion and explicitness I hid the forgeries and magazines in Mr Parkinson's desk and Pedro's school bag and locker.

The fuse to my wicked tinder keg of revenge was to leave a page of the explicit magazine hanging seemingly accidentally out of the locker. Recess came and within minutes a crowd had formed and was trying to prize the rest of the pages from Pedro's named locker. Teachers were called and the full force of my plan came into action.

From the perspective of the Police it was an open and shut case of homosexual infatuation and molestation. Mr Parkinson was charged with twelve counts of sexual assault. Pedro was given counseling for years due to his refusal to admit what had happened and, from the letters, the apparent ferocity of the abuse he endured. He attended a nearby school for a while but dropped out as soon as he was able. After a number of petty theft and assault charges he was kicked out by his parents and the last news I heard about what he was doing bore a surprising similarity to the acts of depravity I had forged in my letters.

The McDonald's Incident

The next tale of my battle with Anonymous brings us forward in time to 1998. I was in the third year of my degree and had taken a job at McDonald's a few years earlier to pay for my studies. By now I had risen the burger ranks to Assistant Manager and on ever increasing weeknights I had managerial control of the store. Taking my duties seriously I emptied out the suggestion box at the end of every night and read the responses, if any.

Usually the comments ranged from the constructive 'service too slow' types to the childish but harmless 'Mary on drive-thru is hot' or penis depiction types. Around March of that year though things began to change. A new note writer, an Anonymous note writer, had appeared and he was getting personal. I am paraphrasing the notes below but they give you an idea of what I encountered.

"Enjoy your McLife loser"

"Did Daddy touch you too much McLoser? Get a real job"

"Ninety percent of McDonald's managers use meth to dull the pain of their futile existence"

When I got the last one something snapped. This guy was deliberately aiming these at me. I asked around at the managers weekly meeting and no-one else had seen anything like this in their suggestion haul. It was clear he was attacking me, and in a few months it got clearer. The vitriolic attacks became more and more personal until there were comments on everything from my haircuts to my selection of badges. The rage I had not felt since high school suddenly reappeared and it was game on.

The suggestion box was located on the side wall and had openings both inside the store and in the drive-thru lane. Our camera system only covered the main areas so Anonymous was free to drop notes as he pleased. I mulled over my approach for weeks. Finally deciding that once again mathematics could come to my rescue.

Statistics more specifically. I started emptying the box three times a night and secretly copying the drive-thru order records. The notes were seemingly random in frequency but usually no more than two a week. By day I went to Uni, by night I worked and by early mornings I analysed my records. At first there was nothing, then slowly a weak pattern appeared. Banana milkshakes were 12% more likely to appear on nights a note was dropped. No pickle cheeseburgers were 26%. I was on to something, I just needed more data.

Then the unthinkable happened. The notes started dropping off. For a whole week there was nothing, then the next Monday a half hearted "You suck" appeared then nothing for another week. I started to panic. The patterns were getting clearer but my dataset was nowhere near large enough to make a positive match. Then I had an idea. I posted the following above the note slot the next night.

"Please make your comments constructive. Abusive notes are not appreciated"

It was like a red rag to a bull. The notes I was looking for reappeared, along with some other random abuse of course but by this stage I could recognise Anonymous' handwriting like it was my own. After a few months, and a few more carefully worded note-box messages, my dataset was ready.

I had worked out it was an 86% chance that if someone ordered a no-pickle cheeseburger and a Fanta between 6:30 and 8:30pm on a monday then it was my man. I was ready, now for the revenge.

Using my access to the University's medical training hospital I started collecting samples. Unfortunately, infectious pathogens are not as easy to get hold of as you may think and after two weeks I only had samples of Hepatitis C, Legionnaires' disease and Salmonella. It would have to do. Salmonella was the key here, because it would enable me to prove my selection process and determine if I had just infected an innocent person.

Monday came around and with it was an excitement I had not felt in years. My concoction of revenge was concealed in a small needleless syringe and it took every bit of my finesse not to look suspicious as I hung around the order monitors. Finally at quarter to eight the magical order came through. I spilled an unattended thick-shake on the floor and order a packer to clean it up while I dispensed the germs and handed the order to the drive-thru attendant.

It was a nervous few days while I waited to see if I had hit the right person, but sure enough, there were no notes that week. No notes the next week, and when I left a year later there was no sign of my Anonymous enemy. I sometimes wish I had looked in the window to catch a glimpse of my attacker, but I think it just makes the victory sweeter to let him remain Anonymous and beaten.

The Blogosphere

The final story brings us closer to the present. The blog age had appeared and I embraced it like a Irishman does a dawn whiskey. By 2006 I had carved out a decent niche in the political blog world and was receiving respectable praise from like minded politco-bloggers. Then he struck.

I suppose I left myself open to it by not requiring registration to post but my misguided love of free speech blinded me and I still had my un-jaded heart so I let them post. Nazis, Nationalists, Vegetarians, Christians, my blog was open to all and sundry, but then the posts from one particular commenter became less about what I had written and more an outright attack on my person.

Again the rage resurfaced. It had remained dormant for so long it was like a past life and I had almost forgotten about the lives I had ruined previously. I tried to fight my instincts, I tried to reason. It was for naught. Weeks and countless comments passed and I realised I had to act. Same old story, find Anonymous first and revenge will follow.

But I was facing a whole new medium here. This was a completely Anonymous internet commenter. How in the world could I find this man? The answer lay in patience... and the stalker's paradise that is Google. Egging the poster on I collected as many comments as I could in order to analyse the writing style. I then dropped subtle questions in order to elicit as much information as I could from Anonymous and gradually build up a profile of my attacker.

Months passed and I grew closer to my prey. A few phrases stood out and indicated this man was from the west coast of the US. Still not nearly enough to use. I then started a petty battle of insults that unwittingly tricked our man into revealing much more than he would have liked. It was the phrase "you cuntish dickwizard" that stood out the most. A quick Google turned out that it was a recent creation from a thread on the forum SomethingAwful and was posted no less than a week before he used it on my blog. I had a lead, and post style cross-matching lead me to forum user CrashTestDubya.

His profile gave me nothing but his post history lead me to a YouTube video he posted last year. The contents of the video are unimportant (a dog barking in time to Metallica) but the blurb of the video suggested this was his account, namely JacksonBollock. The user profile listed a myspace page under the name of Jack Boule. It was my man.

His myspace account was blocked to all but friends so I created an account using a suitable nerdy sexy girl pic from NerdySexyGirls.com and friended him. Knowing he was from the west coast I made my location San Francisco and wrote on his page. Soon I had his AIM and got his home city and name, then the whitepages gave me his address.

From there I accessed the sex-offender registry in his area and found some particularly nasty ex-cons who lived nearby. After finding a suitable candidate I tailored a craigslist add to the 'gentlemen's' preferences and added some photoshopped pics based on some photos from his flickr account. I then found Mr Prison-Rape's email and sent him the ad, BCC'ing Anonymous' girlfriend from his facebook. He responded immediately and within hours was on his way to Anonymous' house, a rapidly emptying bottle of tequila and a dildo the size of your forearm his reported only companions.

It was over, but something was wrong. I had spent months in my search for this man, yet, in the destruction of his relationship and possible arse virginity I had somehow lost my way. I had let it consume my life. It was almost like I had let him get to me. I vowed then and there to never take a hurtful troll seriously again. For the sake of my soul I have decided to let things go now instead of getting all worked up about them and trying to destroy others lives, because, let's face it, besides the lives of the half-dozen people I have mentioned, the only life I was really destroying was my own.

It's just not worth it.

Dust off the old 308s boys, we're being invaded

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:08:00 +0000

I heard a story this morning about the Maldives archipelago and how they will soon not exist as a country because the rising sea levels caused by global warming will render their islands paradise (which mostly stands less than a metre above sea level) nothing but annoying sandbars on the way to Sir Lanka.

So they are looking for land. Reports from the newly elected president of Maldives indicate that he is looking to squirrel away funds from the country's tourism income to buy a new homeland somewhere. He mentioned three countries, India (population 1147 million, population density 349 per km²) Sir Lanka (population 19 million, population density 319 per km²) and Australia (population 21 million, population density 2.6 km²). Hmm... wonder who he is backing?

I also heard a delightful report of about an Australian country community (possibly NSW, can't find the link) who welcomed the news and announced that their community was perfect for the soon to be homeless Maldivians. Quote from memory "We have cheap land prices and we welcome people of all nationalities." Perhaps what this kind gentleman did not realise is that the Maldivians would be wanting to purchase that land in order to annex it from Australia and create a new state of the Maldives. Bless him though.

Raises the point though. Australia has a ridiculously low population density.

The common argument is that Oz has a small number of people because most of it is desert that can't support a polulation. I used to think that, but you only have to look at the thriving country of MiddleEastestan to see that we can actually do alright in the desert.

Shit, thirty minutes drive from where I and 4 million other people are living it is pure desert sand dunes, and the only reason I can observe this from a fifty story apartment building is because some mad bastard decided to build a city here. OK, Sydney Harbour's worth of oil may have something to do with it but the point is that humans have shown their prowess at living in pretty much every conceivable climate.

Plus, while the center of Australia might be a little much for most people, we still have shitloads of good land hanging around unpopulated. The reason for this is that we had European explorers who arrived here and wanted to live somewhere that resembled their homeland for at least a few weeks of the year. If we had been colonised by Philipinos I swear the bottom half of Australia would be almost empty, save for the smallish capital of the Southern Territory where everyone was a little weird and wore jumpers all year round.

Look at Northern Queensland. There are a few million (redneck, fuckwit) people living there quite happily. There is no reason that the other side of Australia can't be the same. The Kimberly region is ripe for population explosion. To quote from Wikipedia:

It covers an area of 423,517 square kilometres (163,521 sq mi), which is about three times the size of England or comparable to the size of California or 15% larger than Japan or twice the size of Victoria or one sixth the size of Western Australia. It has a population of 38,000 est.

If the predictions of our most prominent doomsayers come to fruition then the people will come a knocking soon. How long are people of the world going to ignore that a fucking paradise is lying undisturbed over in WA just because most Aussies wont live there because you can't get channel 7?

In fact, given the vast areas, I would not be surprised to find a whole community of Maldivians already living there. I mean come on, check out our utopian wiki page. The time is right for a disinformation campaign surely?

I say fuck it. Let everyone in. We'll start a new Europe in Australia and enter into a dark age as the Neo-Maldivians battle for control of West-Kimberlia with the Sudanese (who will have surely realised they are missing out by now). We'll just fall back to WWII lines and protect South Eastern Australia. Admit it, if we lost Perth tomorrow how long would it take anyone to notice?

Adelaide is included though. Well, maybe we can let the lines fall back as far as the Coonawarra.

Need to protect our reds.

Every Saturday is father's day

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:56:00 +0000

I'm sorry I haven't been around lately. I promise I'll be more attentive from now on.

Quick rundown on what is fucked with the world:

US financial bailout:

Just like in the 20s with the lead up to the Great Depression, the powers that be have lead the greedy pigs to slaughter and now it's time to secure the Christmas ham. This was as much an accident as the 1939 invasion of Poland. The conspiracy nut in me says it was Bush's one last gift to the powers that put him in the white house, because you must admit, if you had seen this coming you would be in an amazing position to capitalise on it.

Current estimate put the losses at 1.5 trillion dollars. Losses my arse, it's just a transfer of capital. See who comes out on top after all of this, they should be first against the wall.

K-Rudd and Moneybags Turnbull:

It's funny to see the PM and the opposition leader have essentially the same opinion. I called it before, Rudd is more Liberal than most of the Libs. Kevin is a financial conservative, and Turnbull is the other side of the two headed coin. I've heard his [Turnbull's] deputies trying to get some political gain out of the financial metldown but you can see that Moneybags agrees with what the Government is doing.

God I wish so much that our political system had a 'time-out' button or something that would allow you to agree with what is being done by the PM (or opposition) without it causing you negative points. I think it would strengthen us as a nation.

US invades Syria:

In case you missed the news the US invaded the sovereign nation of Syria the other day. They flew in there with choppers, killed 10 or so Syrian nationals then kidnapped someone and buggered off. In response they said they had captured an insurgent involved in Syrian-Iraq border raids.

So there you have it, it is now legitimate to invade a sovereign nation and kill and kidnap its people so long as it is in the name of the war-on-terror, anti-terrorism or what ever the fuck you choose to call it. I say we hop over the pond and grab Richie McCaw. Only after I throw ten G's on the Wallabies that is. Fucking madness.

Ok, proper post soon I swear.

Neurosmokology

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:59:00 +0000

I'm going to start a little philosophical today and talk about the body-mind problem. The age old debate about whether the brain and the mind/soul are the same thing, where the soul is located etc.

I was thinking about this because I have just finished listening to the fascinating second half of an ABC Radio National's All in the Mind podcast about neuroplasticity, and also because I just had a personal experience that is sure to crack this field of science wide open.

We'll get to my discovery later on, firstly I'll explain that word I did not just make up in the last sentence? Neuroplasticity is what the two part podcast is about. Basically plastic-brain, that our brains are not as rigid as we once thought. It's a fascinating exploration of how the brain learns and retains things. Check it out for download here: part1, part2.

An easy example they cover is how we all know that kids are great at learning languages, whereas it's bloody hard for us. Well that's just because the thought processes and the neural pathways they create and reinforce are greedy, and if nothing else seems to be using the language part of the brain except English then English will completely take over and use up all the space. Then when Spanish comes along and tries to get in there is no room left because English is so entrenched. But, if you stop listening to English and immerse yourself in the Spanish language then the English pathways gradually get eroded enough that the Spanish pathways can start to form, then Equipo Traductor you can speak Spanish!

This is not new of course. Everyone knows that the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. What is new is the way of thinking about the brain while it is doing this. It is actually changing, and the most amazing part is that you can make it change. They go on to talk about people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and other neuroses and how those symptoms are just defective pathways that are being accidentally fired to make the person feel like their hands are dirty or whatever. They then talk a little about the therapies they are working on where they explain the defective pathways thing to the patient and get them to realign their own brain.

Voila they say, the mind is acting upon and conscious of the physical workings of the brain. Dualism proved.

Or so you might think. But this morning I disproved it.

You see this morning I decided to give up smoking again because I was feeling particularly shit in the lungal area. While ironing my shirt I started thinking about how I should go about it. It was then I discovered that there is not just the physical brain and the spiritual mind, there is also another consciousness that can form in the brain. It is the consciousness of the addicted brain, and today I had a conversation with it. Observe.

Sam's Conscious Mind: Fuck cigarettes. I'm going to quit today.

Sam's Unconscious Brain: Need nicotine!

Sam's Conscious Mind: Shit, I have too many smoke packets lying around. I'll throw them all down the garbage chute this morning then I will have no temptation when I get home from work.

Sam's Unconscious Brain: Need nicotine!

Addicted Conscious Mind: Um, yeah dude. We should totally throw them all away and not smoke for a while

Sam's Conscious Mind: Yeah, no smoking for a week. That would be a good start

Addicted Conscious Mind: Yeah, that's great. A whole week is a long time though, we should probably just have one last one right now.

Sam's Conscious Mind: Yeah, good idea, better have one now... Wait a minute!

Motherfucker almost played me. Still it did prove the Triality of the body. Pretty good feeling to shatter the conventional knowledge of a field of science before breakfast. Better than finding out you're schizophrenic or something.

Ron Jeremy, Peter North in... The Large Hardon Collider

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:18:00 +0000

I'm sure you've all heard about the Large Hadron Collider aka blackhole creating end-of-the-world machine that came online last week. A few nutjobs were claiming that it was going to destroy the planet, while most of the world's press were hailing it as being able to fill in the last word of the quantum physics crossword. It will do none of those of course, but it's still pretty awesome.

The best part of it is that it is an example of humans getting together, across borders and scientific divides, to solve a problem. Of course there are many specific problems that the various scientists are hoping to solve but the one they will most assuredly solve is what happens when you collide protons together at 99.999999% the speed of light. What this will give us I'm not sure, but it's bound to be awesome.

The wiki article I just read says that some have criticised the LHC for not focusing all this money and effort into something more important, like climate change or world hunger. Nuts to that I say. You've got to start somewhere, and I think just getting all this money and all these people together is a bloody great start.

This thing is expected to cost between 6 and 11 Billion dollars. Shitloads really. Which makes it all that more awesome. It's $6 billion spent on something that is not really expected to give any return except for, and here is the point, the benefit to mankind's knowledge of the universe. This is the kind of stuff that should be going on all the time. Pure research for research's sake.

As everyone knows, we have fucked this world up royally. Business is not going to get us out of it while there is still a profit to be made maintaining the status quo. I am a fan of market economics usually but only when they are steered/forced in the right direction by government. It just doesn't seem like it's happening with this whole global warming-global pollution thing so I fear that by the time business switch over properly it will be too late. Basically what I'm saying is we need a miracle. And where do you get miracles? Billion dollar pure-research facilities, that's where.

The other promising thing is how much the media and populations in general have gotten behind the LHC. Everyday people in the street are talking about the Higgs Boson for fuck's sake, it's bloody amazing. Short-lived I'm sure, but I can guarantee there were thousands of scientists around the world watching that and thinking "Holy shit, if we could get a fraction of that support behind our [turtle migration/algae blooming/oxide depositing/cold fusioning] research we'd be able to fund ourselves until our grandkids had PhDs!"

So that's my point. Science got us into this earthly mess we are in and, by Newton, science can get us out of it. We just need to fund it, and the LHC is a shining example of just that.

Two more LHC facts before I go:

1) All they did the other day is run some particles around the thing. They didn't actually collide any. That's not for a few more weeks. So the end of the world is still nigh.

2) Some girl in India apparently committed suicide just as the LHC was starting its test run. Premature maybe, or maybe she was just securing a good spot in heaven. Imagine the line up at the pearly gates when this thing goes live in a few weeks time.

Ok, no problem Sir

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:33:00 +0000

As I have mentioned before the UAE has a demographic that is surely unique in the world. Emiratis make up the ruling class and 20% of the population, relatively rich western expats make up maybe 10% and the rest are expats from Asia and the Subcontinent and have their own layers of class divide.

Australia is a relatively classless society. If you disagree with this statement, as I may well have before coming here, I recommend you go and live in an oil rich Middle Eastern Sheikhdom for a while and then reassess your opinion. Here class is basically broken down using nationality. Most jobs advertised in the paper here clearly state the nationality of the person they want to hire, with the salary modified accordingly.

Top of the heap are the rich as balls Emiratis, below them are the rest of the Emiratis then the Western Expats and Gulf Arabs, then the rest of the expat workers from Asia and the Subcontinent.The result of this is that if you are a bottom of the heap worker, you do what you are told. No questions, no arguments, you do what you are told. So you do this even if the following scenarios hold true; it is a stupid thing to do, it is pointless, it is unsafe, your are completely unqualified to do it, you will clearly fuck it up if you attempt it.

They do this because if they don’t do whatever retarded thing they are told to do then their boss will yell at them, or possibly fire them. Fair enough, I’d do it too. But this works on the next level too. For example;

The only reason their boss is yelling at them to move those twenty tonnes of gravel twelve metres to the left is because the boss’s boss has yelled at him because the gravel is in front of a truck, and the only reason the boss’s boss wanted the path cleared in front of the truck is because the boss’s boss’s boss yelled at him to get the truck round the front of the building, the only reason the boss’s boss’s boss yelled at him to get the truck round the front of the building is because the boss’s boss’s boss’s boss wanted a truck in some photos he was taking, which, in fact, would look much better with a pile of gravel in front of it. “Oi, move that gravel pile in front of the ....”

Officially around here things work according to best practice, protocol and common sense... but really they work according to once simple question “Who would I rather be yelled at by?” I first realised this a few months ago.

I had just gotten back from a work trip to Paris and as part of the airfare my work had arranged a car service back to my apartment. It has been booked a week in advance and I had a booking reference in my hand. I get to the team of people out the front of the airport directing cars and show them my booking number and I am assigned a place in the ‘queue’. I wait... wait... wait...

Many, many people get a car in front of me. It is 40 degrees and humid as hell and I lose my temper. I walk up to the lady running the show and I raise my voice at her “What is going on here? I’ve been waiting for an hour now and people who have arrived after me continually get into cars before I do. [In my desperation I yelled] Do you just give the next car to the person who yells at you the most?!”. “Oh no Sir”, she assured me.

I got the next car.

I clicked then just how this country works. Yell, argue and be rude to get what you want. I’ve got to say that I find this difficult because, well, I'm not a total arsehole.

This culture of fear encompasses pretty much every aspect of UAE employment. So the majority of people that you deal with are probably so used to being yelled at by their boss that they will do whatever that crazy bastard wants to avoid it. This leads to extraordinarily low levels of customer service and workmanship. Examples:

I wanted to buy a TV when I got here. A salesman saw me looking at TVs, asked me what TV I liked, talked up a certain TV, acknowledged my interest in said TV, gave me the price of said TV and when I asked to buy it he said it was not in stock. I asked what TVs were in stock and basically the entire store was empty of stock. Why would he go through that whole spiel with me if he had nothing to sell? Well because his boss would yell at him if he wasn't working, and me getting annoyed at him for wasting my time and talking for 20 minutes trying to sell something he didn’t have was a better option than the boss yelling at him.

The result, and the title of my post, is the phrase ‘Ok, no problem Sir”. This is what you hear from downtrodden salesmen, unqualified electricians, out-of-stock distributors and uncomprehending security guards. The reason you hear it is because they hope it will placate you for long enough for you to go away and stop causing them trouble and if it pisses you off that's ok because they would much rather you yell at them (in all your western pussy glory) than the hardcore BMW 745 driving Emirati bossman.

So they say “Ok, no problem Sir”. This means anything and everything from “Your dry-cleaning will be four days late“ to "I have no training but me and the boys will have a crack at installing your split-system" to “I know that sewage pipe is going to burst any minute but if I don’t get this ute back by 4:30 I’ll be deported”. It’s a catch all phrase that, on initial entry to this country filled me with confidence, but now makes me double-check where my passport is.

That and Insha'Allah.

Ramadan Breach!

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:51:00 +0000

Ramadan Kareem my fellow infidels. Unless you have been living under a rock, or perhaps living in a non-Muslim democracy, you have surely noticed that it is now the holy month of Ramadan.

I thought of doing some research and writing an in-depth post about the religious significance of Ramadan but you can all use Wikipedia for that. I’m going to talk about what Ramadan means for me, an atheist living in an Islamic country experiencing Ramadan for the first time.

First up, my limited knowledge of Ramadan; It is a holy month for Muslims in which they cannot eat, drink or smoke during daylight hours. That’s a bit simplistic though, actually they cannot do those things from morning prayer (4am ish) until the sunset prayer (6:30pm ish). The exact times of these events are based upon sightings of the moon or something.

Notice the word sighting there? That means that it is not based on the phase of the moon, or the length of the day or anything, but on when someone sights the moon. Phases etc can nowadays be predicted millennia in advance, but that doesn’t apply here due to it being a sighting. So, I’m guessing, a dust-storm could delay things for a day or so. This is why religious holidays in the UAE are just sort of pencilled in. Ramadan is scheduled for a certain period, but the ends of it can actually vary by a few days.

From talking to locals or long time residence here the basic Ramadan routine goes like this: Fast all day until the sunset prayer, then proceed to gorge yourself, smoke tonnes of sheesha and party with friends and family all through the night. Then, after the 4am prayer, you hit the sack and hope you’ve eaten enough to last until 6:30pm without dying.

The irony is that in this month of ‘fasting’ most people put on weight. They are basically turning the day upside-down and adding half a dozen feasts into the equation. There have been a lot of articles in the local rags about how to prepare healthy food for Ramadan, presumably to try and counteract this porking up (pardon my inappropriate language).

As you may well imagine, this temporary lifestyle change may affect the working life of a hard working Muslim, and it does. But most if not all businesses adopt special hours throughout Ramadan. My work has made working hours 10-3 for Muslims. It was initially thought that this applied to all of us, until my very Australian boss said the probably quite insensitive phrase ‘pigs arse it does’. So it’s normal hours for me I’m afraid.

So while 10-3 might seem pretty easy to most people, it doesn’t take into account the fact that these people are up until 4am every night. So, from what I am told, the attendance record gradually slips throughout the month and you would be a fool to rely on a Muslim to be at his desk this month should you need something done. It’s pretty much the equivalent of trying to get something done in the last week before Christmas. Most people are away and the ones that are there have clocked off mentally anyway.

What does this mean for Senor Westerner? Well since the locals are fasting during the day it is obviously insensitive for us to be scoffing down food in their presence, so we retreat to the lunchroom and try to keep the door closed. This led to the hilarious situation today where we were eating our lunch in the lunchroom and the office boy (that is his title unfortunately) who happens to be Muslim opened the door and my very loud colleague yelled “Ramadan Breach, Ramadan Breach!”

So for us it is no coffee, water or food in the office. We have to confine ourselves to the lunchroom for those guilty pleasures. Also no smoking (as I can imagine the torture of seeing someone puffing away if you were not able to) so we have to hide away when we need a quick durry.

Finally I will explain Ramadan to you through the ten year-old eyes of a colleague of mine’s son. His dad asked him what Ramadan was like for him at school and he said “It’s awesome. All the Muslim kids are really tired so I can finally kick their arse when we play soccer.”

What’s that Skip? You go well with barbeque sauce?

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:06:00 +0000

You know what we should all do? Stop eating beef and switch to kangaroo.

Bizarrely enough a recent story in the Gulf News (UAEs premier government censored news source) prompted me to think about this. The article said that Kangaroos fart and burp a hell of a lot less than cows do, and that cow farts release lots of methane which is really bad for the environment (much worse than CO2).

I’m sure this is just an AAP story doing the rounds, but I’ve been thinking and talking about the topic for a while now, so here goes my unresearched opinion.

Reasons that we should switch to roo:

Kangaroos are native to Australia, therefore the environment is used to them being around and they don’t mess it up to any great degree. Hard hoofed animals destroy the land. Two legs good, four legs bad.

Kangaroos can be wild for their whole lives, while cows have to be kept caged in. Ok, cows are stupid and probably don’t give a fuck that they are in a field because we have domesticated them to the point of being on an intellectual par with a carrot, but still, they are locked up as opposed to roaming free.

While cows generally live a pretty nice life just standing around in fields eating grass all day, they do have a pretty horrendous end. I’m pretty sure they know something is going on when they get herded into the house of screams that smells like blood and death. As much as I love my burgers, it plays on my mind that Bessy has a terrifying end.
Shooting wild kangaroos on the other hand is much better. They live their life just doing their own thing like normal, then one day a 10 gram piece of lead smashes through their skull at 1000 feet per second. Skippy doesn’t feel a thing.

The best environment for Kangaroos is natural bushland. So instead of clearing land for grazing and destroying the environment we can ‘farm’ them on natural Aussie bush. Or more realistically just knock down the fences and let the land go back to bushland.

Lastly, the roos have a sporting chance. Not much of a chance, admittedly, but at least a small chance that their super sensitive ears or super hopping will make the shooter miss. More chance than a cow in an abattior holding yard anyway.

So there you have it. You can continue to kill the environment if you want, but I’m grabbing my 308 and heading out bush. OK, I’m in the Middle East so that might be a bit hard, but I did see a few at the Dubai Zoo.

Here Skip!

Animated gif fun!

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:51:00 +0000

There is an awesome site that lets you create easy amimated gifs of yourself.

The website is here. Go there and make something stupid of yourself and post it here.

After you have made one and said saved it will say Visit your web-cam-stop-motion-thing. Click on that and it will give you the code for it. Where it says Embed this Web-cam-stop-motion-thing: just copy the code underneath it

The code thing is in it's own little window and it looks like href="http://www.piterwilson-toys.com/wcsmt/...
If you copy that and make a comment I will post it here under my ones.

Here are some stupid ones I made. It's best to do it in the daytime because webcams suck in low light.

Web 2.36 Bitches

What's the sound of one nut blogging (title change)

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:03:00 +0000

[quick edit to remove some craziness]

You know what I dislike quite a bit? Lack of freedom of speech.

I heard about the story the other day about a book publisher refusing to publish a book because it might be offensive to Muslims. Random House has reportedly refused to publish Sherry Jones’ new book called ‘The Jewel of Medina’, about the life of one of Mohammed’s wives Aisha.

From the story I heard on AM the publisher took counsel from an Islamic expert at some university who said that the book would be offensive to Muslims. That may be, but anyone with any guts shouldn’t give a fuck about that.

Anyone should be able to publish anything they want. Well, actually, Australian law prevents people publishing material that promotes violence towards a certain group of people (which is why my masterwork “Let's bash Jack Peterson because he is gay” never got past the censors) and, although it cost me a three book deal, I’m inclined to agree with that particular law.

But I see absolutely nothing wrong with talking shit about religion. By that I don’t mean that we should all talk shit about religion, but we should all be able to talk shit about religion if we want to. It’s free fucking speech for fuck’s sake.

It’s the same with those stupid cartoons of Mohammed that nutballs burned effigies and rioted over. These nutballs basically threatened the entire world into not publishing them again. Not everyone exactly, but enough to make the international media look like cowards.

Besides the pussying out of the Aussie media over the Mohammed cartoons, I think Australia has it pretty right. You can write whatever you want, unless it incites violence or defames someone, in which case you can be sued... unless they are dead. This gives perfect immunity to Jesus or Mohammed hating folk out there, barring the second coming of course.

I also heard that this new book, The Jewel of Medina, is a piece of historically inaccurate drivel wrapped up as historical fiction. Once again, who cares? As far as crap works of fiction that go against the teachings of major religions go it can’t be worse than the Divinci Code, and that sold sixty million copies! If you don’t like it then write a fucking book showing how stupid and wrong you think it is.

So let me just get this argument out in the open. If you love your God or Prophet and believe he is all that and a bag of potato chips then what do you care what anyone else says about him? For soul emcompassing matters such as these, the only reason to be so mad about it is if you are not really committed to the cause and snide remarks actually cause you to question your faith. The irony is that it’s only seventeen cross wearing Christians or Mohammed Mohammed Mohammeds who get all shitty about this. They should be the ones least affected by the heathen’s taunts.

Defensiveness is a classic sign of uncertainty.

Google Street View is in Australia!

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:27:00 +0000

Google has just released StreetView for Australia. Check it out... now! It’s fucking awesome.

For those of you who don’t know what StreetView is it’s where the Google people drive around in a van with a multi lens camera on the top taking photos of everything every twenty metres. The result is that you can look at your house on Google Maps!

Here is my last place in Brisbane. They even caught the very lovely but clearly retarded lolly-pop lady who I used to chat to every now and then.

View Larger Map

And here is 98 East St Brompton. Home of the infamous ‘Straight Outta Brompton’ and ‘Hot August Ninth’ parties.

View Larger Map

Shit, Google are even more awesome than I though. You can click and drag those pictures to have a look around.

You know, the odds are pretty high that at least one of us is in these photos. I have an experiment. Find somewhere near where you live, find a nearby newsagent, zoom in on the newspaper board, read the headline, work out the date, remember where you were that day and find yourself. Easy... maybe.

Anyway, I'm off to see who was drinking at the Exeter that day.

---------------

Quick edit: Looks like adelaide was taken around October last year. (zoom in)

View Larger Map

Requiem for a Pizza

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:48:00 +0000

The thing about drinking a lot is it gives you lots of stories. Sure, it also gives you cancer of the bowel, liver damage and bankruptcy but as you lie dying in your public hospital room you will surely have a lot of stories to tell. Here is one of mine that I was reminded of today.

The happened a few years ago when I was living in a little cottage house in Adelaide with my good mate Cam.

The house was in the south-west corner of the Adelaide city square. There were about a dozen pubs within walking distance and a bottle shop at the end of the alley out the back gate so we were in prime drinking territory. As you can image, we did not squander our fortune and were known to wet our whistles more than most.

The following took place somewhere between 1am and 4am on what was probably a Saturday night. We had been sinking piss for hours at one of the local public houses, as was the tradition of the time, and had either run out of money or hit the wall and decided to head home. On the walk back to the shack the topic of delicious pizza came up. Specifically how we should definitely order some as soon as we opened the door.

The problems with ordering pizza at 1am are twofold; there are only a few places that will deliver it, and it takes about an hour to arrive. There are two basic instincts that drive a drunken man’s brain at 1am, the first is food, and the second is sleep. Well, actually there are three but since the two of us were alone the third was obviously not an option. So basically it works like this, if the inebriated man does not find delicious pizza has materialised in front of him quickly, he will fall asleep. This had proven quite a problem for the Cam-Sam household.

My housemate had developed the habit of calling for pizza in the early hours of the morning then succumbing to his tiredness and falling asleep. This had the pleasant consequence of saving him $30 in the morning, but the unpleasant consequence of leaving the delivery guy banging in futility on the door at two in the morning and subsequently getting the household banned from the pizza house. This had happen on a few occasions recently and the thought of a complete ban from all establishments pizza must have shocked me enough that I vowed that it would not happen this night.

In the end, Cam ordered the pizza and fell asleep. This left me holding the bag, or at least the $30 in fives and coin. What to do? I was so tired but the thought of being blacklisted by our beloved San Giorgio’s was too much for me to go to bed. No, I must stay up for one hour. So I devised a plan.

As with many plans made at 1am on a gut full of Cooper’s Pale Ale this was a poor one. My plan was to sit by the door so that when the pizza guy arrived, if I had somehow fallen asleep then his knocking on the door would wake me. As I grabbed a pillow to soften the tiled floor and propped myself up besides the door I thought I had it all worked out. Wait an hour, pay pizza man, eat pizza, sleep. Simple.

...

I was woken some time later by an ambulance officer grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. As I open my bleary eyes I saw that behind him was another ambo and a policeman. A quick look around my surroundings confirmed that I was still in the hallway where I sat down, but it seemed that an Emergency Services squad had decided to conduct their yearly exercises there as well.

Behind the cop stood an equally bleary eyed Cam, freshly emerged from his nearby bedroom and wondering, quite understandably, what the fuck was going on. The ambo who didn’t have hold of me was looking urgently at Cam and shouting the phrase “What has he had?” over and over. I’ve woken up in some strange predicaments over the years but this was by far the strangest.

It seems my efforts to stay awake had not lasted as long as I had guessed and it looks like I had fallen asleep immediately. To get more comfortable I must have laid down a bit. This would have all been nobody’s business but that particular house had a frosted glass door at the front. To this day I blame that fucking door.

The sequence went like this; Pizza man comes to the door, sees me lying in a strange position in the hallway and not responding to his knocks and yells. Pizza man calls the cops. Cop shows up and sees an obvious drug overdose and call an ambulance. Ambos come while the cop jumps the back fence to get into the house. Ambo shakes me awake while the other one interrogates Cam about how much smack I’ve had.

In the end the situation worked out ok. The pizza man was still there after they woke me up so after I had explained everything to the cops and medicos I asked him how much the pizza was, paid for it and offered everyone a slice. There were no takers but no one was too angry. The pizza man was relieved I was ok and we thanked him for doing the right thing in trying to save someone’s life, the ambos were just glad they didn’t have to deal with another messy overdose and I think the cop just thought it was funny.

I woke up the next morning thinking I had had the strangest dream, but the empty pizza box never lies.

Shortest Penis Contest - Make yourself feel better

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:13:00 +0000

I know making a post about one link is a little cheap but this made me laugh like a drunken hyena so here we go.

From the consistently offensive and NWS Howard Stern radio show - The 1st Annual Small Penis Contest

I hope exposing themselves to the crudest of radio shock jock's and millions of people via the internet gave them renewed confidence, but I seriously doubt it.

This is why guys start those weird secluded cults and try to marry thirteen year olds. “Yeah baby, that’s about as big as they get, honest.”

Post Count Glory

Sam.Cox.Blog@gmail.com (Sam Cox) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:23:00 +0000

I'm on the road this week so I'm just gonna give you a quick rundown of what is currently going through my brain, aside from the duty free Johnny Walker of course.

A noun you verb

I read online the other day someone using marathon as a verb. The context was of someone spending the weekend watching entirely too much Battlestar Galactica and the quote was something like "I think I'll get a case of beer, a pizza and marathon some Battlestar". Brilliant. Fucking with our language is not just reserved for MBA paradigm breakers. Apparently using nouns as verbs like this is called Anthimeria. Betcha didn't know that.

Communism has its perks

As much as you may like democracy, there is something to be said for Communism, particularly in the way it let's the rulers do what ever the fuck they want, should the need arise. Beijing's pollution has been pretty legendary for years now and there has been a bit of concern about how this will affect the Olympics. The solution? Make people only be able to drive their cars on alternate days, effectively banning half the cars on the road. According to the BCC World News report I just watched the pollution in Beijing is now down below WHO acceptable levels. Try that one in California.

Fuck reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2020, China could do it tomorrow by introducing 'Turn on that gas heater and you lose your hand' day.

RIP Big Brother

I checked news.com.au this evening and my eye was caught by the headline "Nana nails Big Brother's final series." You can't make that shit up. Channel 10 have decided to let that abomination of a show finally die and there is no one more grateful than yours truly but to have it finish so nail-in-the-coffin-ly is, as Prince Paul would have put it, the sweetest victory of all.

I must admit though that I have watched more French Big Brother in the week I have been in Paris than I have ever seen of the Aussie version, but only because it is basically porn and the inane crap they are surely babbling is in French so I can substitute it in my head for in depth discussions of Chomsky's relevance in a post 9-11 world.

Eat, drink and miss meetings

I'm working in a French office at the moment and I just have to mention how they do lunch. God Damn, no wonder the Nazis just waltzed in here, the French army were probably all at lunch for most of 1940.

Here's the deal, eating a quick sandwich at your desk is most frowned upon. Most people head to the cafeteria where you select an entree, a main, a salad and a desert then a drink. The drinks fridge has water, juice, soft drink, beer, wine, cider and champagne in it! After a hearty lunch you'd think it would be back to work eh? No way, now it's off to the café for, well, café. These bastards do lunch in style.

If they could only start speaking English I think we could be best of friends.