An interesting mix of questions, and I think the results are accurate. Go on, take the test and post your results in the Comments section. You know you wanna!

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.

Since moving to our current address we’ve found the need to buy a second car, because Suzanne and the kids are simply too selfish and lazy to get out of bed before 6am and take me to the train station in the mornings.  Because I’m not in the demographic of buying European supercars I could not afford much. All I wanted was a little shitbox to get me from home the the train station in the morning and back again in the afternoon.

Coincidentally, a friend was looking to offload a car of his for cheap so I offered to buy it. It’s a Hyundai, which is a Korean make. The friend assured me it was very well looked after and maintained, and ran well. It does, and knock on wood I hope it keeps going. But there’s one little difference between our Toyota and my Hyundai which bugs me.

See, our Toyota doesn’t require you to turn the headlights off when you turn the car off. As soon as you turn the key to “off”, the headlights go out and the parking lights remain on. It’s not until you open the door that the parking lights turn off. This is pretty convenient for me because it’s just one more little thing I don’t need to remember to do. If I happen to turn the car on the next day in daylight hours and the headlights are on, no problem.

But, this behaviour gets me into trouble in my Hyundai, especially now that we’re in winter. When I leave home, it’s mostly dark. Well, dark enough that driving without headlights would be a bad idea. But when I get to the train station, it’s light enough that you can drive quite safely and legally without headlights. After I’ve parked my Hyundai and turned the key off, my instinct from years of Toyota driving leads me to grab my stuff and go, paying no attention to my headlights which are still on. I can’t tell that they’re on because the sun has already risen and I can’t see the lights reflecting off anything, and the instrumentation lights aren’t bright enough to see in daylight either. And, probably most critically, there is no friendly audible alarm found in other cars, which conveniently tells you that the boolean condition of lighted headlights and an open driver door has been met.

I’ve caught myself a couple times when I look back at my car to see that it’s parked straight, and I see an almost imperceptible red glow from the rear parking lights. D-oh! But on other occasions when I don’t second guess my parking abilities and simply lock-n-leave my car it’s not until I’m actually on the train that the doubts come: “Did I actually turn my headlights off or not?” Usually I can think back and identify that I actually did flip the switch, but one time last week I had to get Suzanne to swing by the train station car park and verify it.

So, who can I blame if I leave my lights on? Certainly not myself! But I can’t decide if I should lay blame at the feet of Toyota (and Mazda and Datsun) for making me the way I am, or blame Hyundai for not adding a feature which any other decent car manufacturer includes in any 20th century car?

• 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.

I’ve always thought of socially inept people to be dweebs. The diagram above describes dweebs as intelligent, but socially inept so I think it’s right on the money. A nerd is described in the dictionary as “an intelligent but single-minded person obsessed with a nonsocial hobby or pursuit” or “a person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept”, which I feel is accurate. Nerds and their dork cousins are usually socially excluded, the difference being that dorks are not smart enough to realise the mess their life is in.

Better definitions of geek include “a computer expert or enthusiast (a term of pride as self-reference, but often considered offensive when used by outsiders)” but truth be told you’ll find geeks in any area of interest: sports geeks, car geeks, surfing geeks are all intelligent and obsessed with their field but are usually socially articulate enough to share their obsession and have a life outside their field.

Then there’s the whole argument of what being “social” means. Is the kid who spends most his waking ours playing WoW organising his friends to perform raids (or whatever they do) being unsociable? He’s communicating with and enjoying the company (albeit digitally) of other people, or is that not enough? I’m sometimes accused of not being sociable, not talking to people enough etc because I spend more time online than I should. But I’d suggest that most of what I do is social interaction, and I talk via email or forum or whatever with many people that I’d otherwise not have a chance of talking to. But unless you do it face to face with a beer in your hand I guess it doesn’t count.