If you had asked me 12months ago if I ever thought I’d be doing what I am now, I would have laughed at you.

You see, approximately 12 months ago, I was sitting at home, basking in all the glory that is unemployment. No responsibilities and all the free fucking time I could handle. Life just doesn’t get any better.

However the dream was shattered one day when my housemate (Pastheus) comes home and says, in all his usual eloquence, ‘Are you going to get a fucking job or what cunt?’. The profoundness of the question made my inner ethics start to stir. The dream had to die.

That afternoon I looked through the job advertisements in the local rag. One catches my eye straight away; it’s a position for a Casino Surveillance Operator. ‘That could be interesting’, I thought to myself, ‘Should give that a whack!’.

That one fatal life decision put a halting fucking screech to my leisurely life-style. Now faced by 40 to 70 hour working weeks, serious amounts of over-time owing and more responsibility than a 3rd world leader, I look back with envy.

It’s not all Doom and Gloom (or Death and Decay perhaps?). I have recently earned my Motorbike license, bought said vehicle, on a handsome salary, respected by my peers (Pencils up-ended in a steaming pile of shit is just a sign of affection) and a bright future in international travel. It seems I’ve done a 180 from my last profession.

You see, I hated being in I.T. It’s a dead end game. Perhaps its I.T. in the Northern Territory, perhaps not. But the only way I could see myself getting ahead, was actually giving head. That’s not quite my forte; even though my boss was actually quite attractive, if not a complete back-stabbing fucking whore. *kisses*.

So what’s the point of all this dribble? I hear you ask. Well, it’s kind of a retrospective of my life over the last year. It may sound like I cut myself every night before going into a self fueled hate induced coma; but it’s not. I’m actually happy doing what I do and how often I do it. In short, life’s fucking dandy for me right now.

My next biggest hurdles include losing weight, making more friends and finding a female who has low enough standards to fuck me for a lengthy period of time (It’s Darwin, it can’t be that hard).

Tally-ho!

(and merry fucking Xmas).

And a happy New Year!

How you even being to wrap a year like that is beyond me.  If you were simply to look at tabloid headlines, this was the year that turned everything on its head.

China holds the games and Tibet, success.
They did a pretty good job really. Few billion people crammed into the rafters and yet they still managed to clear the place out, throw a set of games, put on a good show (lip-synced or otherwise) and keep everyone alive.

Monks complain about their occupation, get some publicity, China says “leave them out of this” and blacklists anything remotely connected to Tibet (again).  Moral uproar ensues, but as usual, people let the topic fade into the twilight.  Notoriety in news, after all, is a fickle thing that depends on what sells the papers – and no one wants to be on China’s bad side and miss a slice of that economical pie.

Martian lander finds water, love, and some kind of fecal matter.
So we sent technology to Mars.  Go us.  We managed to maintain a radio wave link that could control the thing from.. how far away are we again?  We landed the bastard, played with our interplanetary remote control car for a couple of months and used its Tonka truck arms to dig for stuff.  There’s some ice out there.  Nice.  Maybe, it was once even habitable.

We taught it to build blocks out of our trash, and when the aliens landed and started shooting lasers at us and stealing our last surviving plant, we made love to them – while throwing off our evil robot oppressors.

Aussie dollar plummets amid a world in financial turmoil.
But what’s to be expected really.  We don’t make anything any more.  We’ve sold all our shit to someone else, and all but closed down our manufacturing sector.  Bar a few commodities in mining and farming, we’re now a service based industry and therefore a risky capital investment.  On the plus side, we can offset that risk a little via our banking sector, which  isn’t permitted the same loose rules systemic in the US.

It’s one of the weirdest crashes you could possibly imagine.  Because the first people to suffer their fate were the people at the top.  Tall poppies, really tall ones, that actually felt the pinch.  That almost never happens.

Now, as inflation plummets and Joe-battlers enjoy their free government handouts, petrol prices are almost half their indexed price and banks have been quick to pass on the mega-low interest rates to customers. Win.

And there’s just three things.
There’s also:

A new US president, and he’s black. Woah.
There’s the almost internationally accepted need for environmental reform.  Again, woah.
Japan’s own ministers admit whaling is a dying practice.  Woah.
And many more.

But, really, however
No one wraps up a year based on headlines.  Hopefully, you’ve had a rich year with friends, family and/or loved ones close by.

Hopefully, you’ve said, done and accomplished what you set out to.  That’s the real testament to success and happiness, I think.  Having some goals, struggling to achieve them perhaps, maybe re-evaluating how long it might take you, but getting there none the less.

Stay safe on the roads.
From the dwindling days of the year 2008, we wish you all the very best over the holiday season and many, many frosty amber suds in the new year.  Peace out.

A person in the know, a technical person, an engineer perhaps even gets asked a question. They recommend that it’s a bad idea. Oh okay. Then the person asking the question asks for some numbers. 0.4% failure rate. OH THAT’S NOT SO BAD THEN. And so it goes ahead anyway.

Talking scaling, 0.4% on a sample of 50 is pretty much nothing.  However there’s a reason some companies try and maintain a six-sigma process control that considers even 3 defective parts per million opportunities a minimum. Something that NASA goes above and beyond in their stuff.  Once you’re handling something that scales up, that “oh that’s not so bad” starts to become a big number.

Looking at one end for nice numbers can look good, but until you’re looking at the other end of things and side-effects which perhaps may not be so numberly which is where things can happen down the track can get predator-face ugly.  If it was a simple as pulling a test and taking some numbers, we’d be building tanks out of glass, and have chefs being replaced by robots.

That’s why the people in the know when they’re asked a question already know that something’s a pretty bad idea in the first place, before the somewhat small numbers begin seeming insignificant.

What does a number mean when the people making the decisions don’t understand or comprehend the weight on a value?

What’s the chances that this Internet filtering thing in Australia has been brought so far based upon the misunderstanding of a few ’small’ numbers?

Apparently I do.  Or so Bernadette McMenamin, CEO of ChildWise says. She probably cooks these ideas up in between counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars she’s collected from the Government using either false or unverified statistics and facts.

Chief executive of child protection group Child Wise, Bernadette McMenamin, said most of the criticisms levelled at the internet filter scheme were founded on misinformation.

“It’s disturbing that people are getting hysterical about all the misinformation that is being spread about the internet filter,” Ms McMenamin said.

“Instead of hearing hysteria from the minority we need to hear from the Government and exactly what it intends to ban.”

Ms McMenamin was equally critical of the past weekend’s protests and the DLC’s plans for future action.

“Let the 300 people march on Canberra because it looks pathetic,” he said. “It looks pathetic and shameful because most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child p-rnography.”

Sign the petition below if you like your Internet. In fact, sign if you believe the Government is better off spending our money trying to boil the ocean.