Journal de Jacques

In Australia, the annual State of Origin is a very big deal. Though it only deals with players from NSW and Queensland, it nevertheless divides the country into two camps out loud folks and probably does more to raise the profile of Rugby League in non-Rugby states than anything else.

Perhaps Rugby Union could learn from this. How bout an international series, played annually, called Sphere of Origin? Players born in the Northern hemisphere versus those in the Southern?

OK, so it might be a bit unfair that South Africa, Australia and New Zealand fall into the latter camp, but the Northern Hemisphere does get the use of the whole of European Rugby to choose from.

It could raise Rugby’s profile all over the world.

I predict that, whenever a bold prediction is issued or the matter of prediction the future discussed, at least one person will deride such efforts and say that the future is, strictly, unpredictable.

A lot of progress (and sometimes, regress) in computer science and software engineering seems to come from rejecting, modifying or otherwise modifying the “natural order”. By natural order I refer to the generally accepted, industrial paradigm of how development “is done”.

A lazy student can easily find ‘revolutionary’ projects by simply fiddling with this accepted order.

For example, take the modern imperative/object-oriented paradigm for software languages. Subtract some feature, and explore the consequences. What happens when, for instance, you cannot use getters/setters/properties? I’m not sure, but it’d be interesting to know. What happens if you subtract assignment? And so on. In a way some functional languages changed thinking by subtracting changes in state.

Another thing you can try is to move something from one phase of program life to another, or to collapse phases. Lisp, for instance, allows the programmer to have instructions run at compile-time (ie, macros), rather than simply at runtime. What else can you move out of its natural phase? Take CPU scheduling. Currently this always happens during the runtime phase, but could it be moved? Can there be load time scheduling? Compile time scheduling?

I’m sure that you can think of many other such examples.

He might be a Chester, but he’s not related to me.

One of my main guilty pleasures in life is to watch Australia’s Next Top Model. I took up the habit because of the recaps in those august blogs of humorous record, Bland Canyon and Jo Jo Blogs. The former also recaps Australian Idol, but the combination of caterwauling on-stage and teenage screaming off-stage is too much for my crusty old ears to cope with.

Australia’s Next Top Model (ANTM to fans) has two ingredients vital for entertainment success. First, it has attractive young women. Second, it has constant, unscripted, unintentional hilarity. Oddly enough, I turned up for the latter and stay for the former. Your mileage may vary.

Last season’s ANTM lends me an example of a trend in fashion that I, as a mere male, find utterly puzzling. It’s the current urge to turn beautiful women into ugly women through artful dressing, makeup and props. This strikes me as an extremely expensive way to achieve a simple goal: take an unflattering photograph. All that is really needed in such a situation is an ordinary-looking woman and their mother’s camera. This is the universally-accepted formula for taking photographs which show someone in their worst possible light.

Here’s an example. Take the gorgeous Clare Venema from ANTM’s fifth season. She’s a stunning young lady from Adelaide with what seems like more than a handful of brain cells to rub together, which is a refreshing inversion of the stereotypical model.

So here’s her in a somewhat natural sort of photograph (© Chic Management):

OK, so she’s making a very-serious-face-indeed, but that seems to be her thing. She’s actually about two godzillion times prettier when she smiles, but the fashionistae’s crusade against smiling is another rant again — and have you priced electrons lately? Yikes.

Now! Here’s Ms Venema in a recent photoshoot (© Somebody Who Deserves A Swift Kick In The Junk):

See the difference? It’s night and day. While I admire her professionalism for doing as the photographer has asked, that doesn’t let the photographer off the hook. He or she fell out of the good-taste tree and has mysteriously missed every branch on the way down.

It’s no secret that I don’t think very highly of journalists. Too many of them use lazy shortcuts dressed up as serious journalism. The most common is “two-soundbites-and-that’s-a-wrap” trick, where they just get two different people, who they’ve decided to label as rivals, to provide a soundbite each. Then they write it up and head down the pub.

Another favourite trick is to get people to respond to mangled quotes. Journalist rings with a line and asks you to respond. You’re put on the spot and “have to” say something, or they’ll exercise their divine right to accuse you of “evading”, “back flipping” etc. So you give a response to some wild, outlandish quote. Later you find out that the original person never said what the journalist quoted to you. Lovely.

In the USA The Daily Show acts as a kind of humorous Media Watch. They had a good go at CNN in their latest broadcast, which I found all too familiar.

Australia gets mentioned as a unit of measurement.

Seen on Slashdot’s front page today:

Seems that for a crime to count, it first has to hit the high and mighty.

International customers can buy Amazon Kindle ebook readers without jumping through tricksy hoops!

I am quite excited about this. I spend a lot on books shipped via Amazon. The Kindle means that I would spend less per book and eliminate shipping costs.

Edit: Though it looks like they’re only going to sell the plain Kindle, not the enlarged DX variant. Fooey.

Edit 2: You need to order at this page in order to get it shipped to Australia.

I am, at long last, within a cooee of actually having an undergraduate degree. The road to this point has been much longer than I expected back when I graduated from high school in 1999. The intervention of depression in 2001 and its aftermath through to about 2006 or so left me well and truly off course in life.

But what’s done is done. I am now in the final weeks of my final semester. And now it’s decision time.

For example, there’s the question of honours. My professors like me, are interested in some of the projects I’ve proposed, and I have the scores to qualify. But if I do it fulltime that’s another whole year of earning approximately nothing. If I do it part-time then I stretch out the stress of being a student, but at least I get to earn something.

Then there’s post-graduate study. I could, in theory, go back and finish my law degree on a post-graduate entry (which would make me, again, a student of Ken Parish). Or I could go for industry certification and training to increase my saleability. Or I could give in to the darkside of corporate advancement and get an MBA.

That last one amuses me. Melbourne Business School reckon that their MBA costs $54,000 and can be done in 16 months. A bargain in international terms, even if you ignore the cost of living.

Meanwhile, over in industry-land, a full set of IBM z-Series mainframe courses could cost as much as $61,353 if you include some database and COBOL classes. Yikes.

In any case, I’d be interested to hear what the fine folk of the internet have to say.

Not wishing to gum up the front page with a very personal post about the next stage of my life, I have instead posted it to my private blog. I’d be interested in getting Troppodillian feedback.