Some interesting hits on my site from Google searches today. Apparently there was a US soldier in Afghanistan with a similar name to mine who was killed by a suicide bomber. Bryan Hoover. Kinda spooky.
At one point I was friends with about 18 people with the same name as me on Facebook. We had quite a good time commenting on each others statuses but it got old pretty quick and I dropped them all. One guy was pretty creepy and was the catalyst which forced me to refine my usage of privacy settings.
Image via Wikipedia
After work, I intend to immerse myself in some good old fashioned sports on TV. When I get home I’ll be watching the Fremantle Dockers v Saint Kilda AFL replay. Then I’ll flick between the Le Mans 24 hour race and the Algeria v Slovenia World Cup game.
Around midnight is when the fun starts, with the Canadian Formula 1 Grand Prix live from Montreal. I remember being in Montreal a few years ago for work during GP week, and I could hear the cars at the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve from my hotel room across the river. I wish I had the money at the time to go and watch the race. I have a Google Wave set up ready to do some live blogging so I hope some fans join in. I did one a few nights ago for the South Africa v Mexico World Cup opener and it was great.
After the Formula 1 it’s the main event, with the big Germany v Australia World Cup game. That should take me through to about 4am. Luckily I don’t have work tomorrow. But in the afternoon I will be attending my son’s Kindy class as this weeks parent helper. I hope that I can pull it off without them all knowing I had no sleep the previous night!
One thing I’m happy with is that our kids have taken a keen interest in the World Cup games. Jett even does his African dancing at times which is just hilarious to watch.
This post is also serving as a test for a new blog content manager I’m trialling called Zemanta.
Yeah, so BP has little chance of ever doing business in America again on any large scale. All the PR spin and hand wringing in the world isn’t going to salvage anything out of the current mess so they should probably cut their losses and fire a few parting shots across the bows before burning all their bridges and pulling out for good.
BP should tell the American hypocrites to DIAF. Sure, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest man-made disasters in recent years, but America is the largest consumer of oil in the world, with an insatiable demand. And yet they’re refused to do anything about global climate change of which their use of oil is a direct result, and is an ongoing man-made disaster. To keep up with the demand, the oil companies need to drill in ever more dangerous and sensitive places. There are consequences to be addicted to cheap oil. This is one of them.
BP should’t worry about it’s image by hiring PR consultants and advertising agencies to dream up ads about making love to dolphins in rain forests. It’s not going to work. They should just hire armies of lawyers to doggedly fight every claim against them and protect their shareholders. BP can easily do business with the rest of the world.
So I’m prepared for next month’s FIFA World cup!
Look here to see my first Australian Federal Budget. In a nutshell I have:
- set a flat tax rate of 25%, as opposed to a graduated tax rate. I could probably have raised company tax to 30% though.
- decreased welfare spending to about 2/3rds of last year
- delivered a $5B budget surplus as opposed to a $6B deficit
Would this work? Who knows. We can be glad it’s a game, and glad that I am not in charge of the Australian economy.
Here’s a couple photos from the Dawn Service we attended this morning. We woke up at about 4:45, got the bleary eyed kids ready and drove into the Mandurah to the Mandurah War Memorial. Kids enjoyed it, but they said there weren’t as many speeches from people as the service they’d had at school last Friday. It was all very quiet and reverent.
Hey, whoever the North Korean promoters of Earth Hour were last week they deserve a medal. It seems they convinced the whole North Korean population to turn off every single light in the entire country. The Dear Leader is, of course, above all that so the single source of light you see is probably his, which is understandable. But “bravo!” to the rest of my North Korean comrades for loving and respecting the Earth, at least for an hour. And congratulations to the rest of the world! Earth Hour was a great success, with a 0.000000001% reduction in emissions sustained for almost a whole hour, but a 25% increase in smugness which can still be measured days later.
Wow, quite a night last night. There was a mudslide at Kings Park which damaged the hotels at the foot of the hill near Jocob’s Ladder, cars had their windscreens broken from hail, and there were some areas which go quite flooded. The thumbnail shows the scene outside the office where I work on the corner of Adelaide Terrace and Victoria Avenue in Perth. Perth got hit earlier than down south which would have been right when I was leaving work so I would have had a bit of trouble getting to the train station! I feel a little bit bad that I was enjoying it so much last night.
From planetary.org, check out this image of the International Space Station taken in the X-band (not to be confused with X-ray) area of the electromagnetic spectrum as it passed in front of a German Earth observation satellite named TerraSAR-X. From the article “In contrast to optical cameras, radar does not “see” surfaces. Instead, it is much more sensitive to the edges and corners which bounce back the microwave signal it transmits” which is why we see a ghostly outline. Truly an amazing image.
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