It is actually amazing how much time it frees up by not having access to the Internet. It gives you oh so many more hours to pace up and down the loungeroom plotting the overthrow of Telstra.

When does a quote become a phrase of common usage and free from attribution? Rather naively, several weeks ago I quoted a SMH writer with a classic line about Alexander Downer, without realising that he’d himself quoted the line from where else but the 5th February 2003 Hansard, and I’m assuming probably all the popularist media as well. That must have been one of the those weeks when I was stuck in a hotel room in Canberra hacking code or something, isolated from what was happening in the world. The embarrassing thing though is that my post is now the top Google result for conga line of suck holes, so the whole world can now revel in my complete inability to do research. Lesson learnt. The quote itself of course being originally from Latham:

Mr Howard and his government are just yes-men to the United States. There they are, a conga line of suckholes on the conservative side of Australian politics. The backbench sucks up to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister sucks up to George W. […] In my book they are not Australian at all. They are just the little toriesthe little tory suckholes.

Amen brother, amen!

So we moved house, fairly successfully, and with all the crap that I cart around from place to place because I’m too sentimental to dump it all.

We’re keeping the same telephone number, but of course Telstra need to install an ADSL modem at the exchange on the new line, which according to my ISP will take up to two weeks. On top of that, it can’t be ordered through Telstra’s database until the telephone is actually switched over. So here we are, knowing we’ll be off the (Internet) air for up to two weeks, knowing which day the move will be, knowing which day Telstra will physically change the phone line over, yet not being able to warn Telstra until the new line is in place!

The irony of course is that if I was instead using that 20th century technology, a dial up modem, there would be no delay and we’d have Internet access the same day. Isn’t new technology supposed to make things easier, more flexible or cheaper? Well, ordering the change is more complex, waiting up to two weeks is not flexible, and of course we get charged by both my ISP and Telstra for the privilege.

On the day we had the telephone switched over, I had to report that the phone wasn’t actually working. So out comes the Telstra guy, late the following day of course, and finds that the Optus technician who installed the previous resident’s lines, dumped the Telstra copper under the house, before rewiring all the internal phone extensions to ride over Optus’ network instead. And of course the ADSL can’t be switched over until the line is working…

Anyway, six days without Internet access, and four days of sickening flu later, and I finally get our network set up at the new house and manage to dial in to my ISP via 56K. It aint broadband, and several machines all sharing the line isn’t very speedy, but at least I was able to download my 600 odd emails. One of which was about an expired domain name, which nobody thought to phone me about.

Telstra. Anyone who tells you that public ownership has improved Telstra, is simply full of it. Ziggy Distrust has spent the last 10 years investing in failed Internet start ups and ignoring Telstra’s core business and customer base. But of course he has, that’s what shareholders want, which sort of conflicts with their raison detre. They’re a telco for fuck’s sake, that’s what they should be concentrating on.

Public ownership of all government utilities is dumb for this very reason, even if there is a core mission statement locked up tighter than a nat’s chuff. Some utilities will be less profitable by nature of their business, which directly conflicts with the capitalist nature of stockholding. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s not right, just that they’re incompatible models.

So why am I still a customer? Good question. I’m off to ponder that one myself… making good use of the two weeks I have without an Internet connection…

I like to think that I’m fairly principled about issues I’m passionate about, and the SMH going the registration route is certainly one of those, but without sounding too hypocritical, there’s just too many good stories at the moment to ban it from my daily reading list.

For example, here’s a sarcastic piece by Peter FitzSimmons about the exciting melee that is puppetry of the puerile co-star Alexander Downer vs. Peter Garrett, titled Bad boy can do some good. Talking about Downer’s lack of independence of thought, which has obviously assisted his foreign minister role quite well, well that and the fact that there’s a suburb in Canberra named after a family member, Sir John Downer, a 19th century premier of South Australia, FitzSimmons rather brilliantly writes:

Garrett has expressed views in his songs and his public pronouncements in such roles as president of the Australian Conservation Foundation that show he is not fit to join Australia’s “conga-line of suck-holes” leading up to the presidential throne.

If you put aside the apparently significant work of our (Australian) special forces troops in Iraq, we’re still this fairly insignificant sparsely populated island at the edge of the Pacific ocean, dying to look like we’re of significant importance to the U.S. Perhaps the fact that we’re English speaking, we have our own Australian Idol (where we, like everywhere else, manufacture talent so they can regurgitate other songs written by talented song writers), and John Howard wants to make us a staunchly conservative Christian nation, makes us more than a slight blip on U.S. Inc’s RADAR. It’s all about trade of course, but I’m happy to continue the facade that we actually care about democracy in Iraq, for the sake of argument.

Anyway, you have to smile when G.W. spends time with John Howard, moaning about Mark Latham, which is a bit of a change from John Howard moaning for G.W. The SMH calls Bush’s words a “strong condemnation” of Latham, but more significantly, in a time when the U.S. should be spending more time trying to solve the Iraq problem (some would say it has a simple solution), it is amusing to think that Mark Latham, new Labor leader and yet to stake a real claim on anything locally, can get so much up G.W.’s goit.

Personally, anyone who can do that successfully, gets my vote at the next election.

British police arrest a musician in a Clash cover band who SMSed the words to The Clash’s song Tommy Gun, thinking it was a message from a terrorist, raising privacy concerns; Monty Python’s Terry Jones slams critiques G.W. in The Guardian (via lenn®, a Microsoft manager who seems to be my alter ego, or at least thinks, acts and grew up the same as me, just on opposites sides of the Pacific; Changing technologies, bags that stain near mobiles, hats that change according to mood, and jackets for the mobile phone set (via purse lip square jaw); Broadcatching, the RSS-ification of television news (via John Udell); John Kay slams corrects EMI’s David Munns that file sharing is not theft (via Lessig); a drip feed of Leonardo’s notebooks, one entry per day, the first new use of RSS since blog feeds.

I wrote that last post in a bit of a dream state, only to wake up and find that sanity has prevailed yet again in that Australian voters aren’t falling for John Howard’s selfish budget. No, they want better services, not tax cuts, and about bloody time too! Perhaps there is hope for us after all.

Jo Ito points to a list of U.S. soldiers moblogging from Iraq. Unfortunately no feeds, but worth a look, especially if you’re a pacifist militarist like myself.

The official U.S. government time site, accurate to within 0.6 seconds. Sponsored by the official world peace keeper, accurate to within 3 nations.

You gotta love the CIA’s attempt to reinvent themselves. Courtesy of the ever wonderful Boing Boing, the CIA has a web site for kids, complete with happy smiley faces of people that I assume are doing what they refer to as “intelligence work”, and at least one photo of what looks like a covert operative. How do I know? Well, they’re in a dark raincoat, with a 1950 cold war hat, under a single street lamp. I thought covert meant under cover, but of course I was unable to check the Australian Macquarie Dictionary to be sure.

Anyway, if you dig deep, you get to this classic description of “Who We Are & What We Do”.

We collect […] information from many sources: newspapers, magazines, and foreign radio or TV broadcasts, which are overt or “open.” Some sources are “covert”–that is, other people’s secrets. We persuade these people to tell us their secrets. The other way we collect information is …

Woah boy! Of course this is exactly what we need to be teaching our children, how to persuade people to tell us their secrets. You probably don’t need the definition of persuade, but here it is anyway.

To induce to undertake a course of action or embrace a point of view by means of argument, reasoning, or entreaty

Probably not exactly what the CIA uses as a primary persuation tactic, but amusing none the less.

“Look, tell me your godamn secret, or I’m going to have to continue arguing with you!”

We now turn to the page describing The People, with a lovely photo of the happy intelligence workers around the CIA logo. That’s where we learn that…

If you like to write papers, long and short, if you like to put puzzles together, solve mysteries and have the patience to go through a mound of different types of information to do all this, then the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is for you.

Yes, that’s right girls and boys! Or of course unless you’re a child between the age of about 7 and 13, in which case, school and Nancy Drew mysteries are probably best for you. When you grow up, then you can start persuading people to tell you their secrets.

Finally, here’s the U.S. secret service in action, persuading interviewing a boy about his anti-war drawings.

The secret service in Washington DC had not yet commented yesterday.

Obviously the persuading is continuing.