So to keep things moving, I’m going to move www.gaiabb.com to run on the donated OLPCs at my home.

More details here.

I get a lot more personally addressed e-mail than most folks do, and I don’t have a chance to action every item that needs it. I know I have missed replying to at least 20% of my mail – my bad. To make amends, I will work on replying to the last three months of outstanding mail by the end of the year. But I bet there will be mail that still needs actioning that will be archived.

Action Required: If you e-mailed me, and not had a reply from me by January 1, please re-send your mail to me after January 1, and mark it REPLY NEEDED in the subject. I have an e-mail rule that flags such messages and I will reply to you.

However, I wasn’t expecting the mad monk, Tony Abbot, to gain the Liberal leadership. That was a surprise, as I bet it was to the majority of the Liberal party MPs.

With such a right wing, homophobic, anti-abortion, anti-pretty much anything we’ve achieved over the last forty years to several centuries, and top of that a truly hard core Catholic elected leader by the thinnest of margins (1 vote – a donkey vote *), the Libs will be in electoral wasteland for at least one and probably two more elections. Either the Libs will have to split into the electable bit and the unelectable’s, or they will have to try again in a few years after they get rid of Abbot.

Abbot is simply unelectable – even my wife who leans in the Libs direction doesn’t like him. Sure, Abbot will make the hard core religious and climate deniers happy, but they’re a tiny minority here – and they already vote Liberal. All the moderate swinging voters – they who elect our governments – will abandon ship once they realize just how backward Abbot is on so many things.

With Abbot being the mental giant that he is, he’s going to oppose pretty much all Government bills. I bet he opposes a really stupid little bill and that’ll be the trigger. KRudd could phone it in and win.

Bring it on – maybe enough of the disaffected voters will move to the Greens and we can get some real carbon reduction instead of the reward-the-polluters ETS.

* I bet the idiot ^H^H^H^H^H Member of Parliament who cast the deciding donkey vote (‘no’) is regretting their ineptitude tonight. The silly thing is that the vote was almost certainly cast by a moderate Liberal. That moron has ensured they stay unelected for at least another four and most likely seven years.

• My friend TJ, 43, passed away from diabetic related complications and worse than third world access to basic health care in a first world country – the USA.
• My USA credit card expired.
• This domain expired and failed to auto-renew using my USA credit card.
• Tanya had to go to hospital twice after a fall in the back room… on my birthday.

Some of these things are important, others not so much. So apologies all who might have tried to mail me and for this site to be down for more than 24 hours, but I had other things on my mind. Please re-mail anything if you haven’t heard back from me.

TJ – rest in peace mang. I just wished you could have migrated to any other first world nation and gotten the basic meds and help you needed instead of dying so, so young from completely and utterly preventable and manageable diseases. I’ll miss you and remember you.

It was an amazing achievement, one that brought all of humanity closer together.

Once you see the photo of the entire Earth from Apollo 8, national borders become irrelevant, nationalities are irrelevant, and petty politics and hateful people are irrelevant. We’re on this one small blue globe together, and we have to look after it together. Stupid shows like “Border Security” show the small minded at work. One day, and I hope it will be soon, such petty and silly concerns will be as quaint as the feudal towns who were as countries unto themselves not even 600 years ago. We breathe the same air, we’re all related together, we eat the same food. We’re all doomed if we continue to think like four year old children who refuse to share the sand pit because “it’s mine”. Nations, borders and immigration controls cannot be demolished soon enough.

However, space exploration is best left to robotic missions. They are cheaper, safer, and they can do more. The only manned moon mission that achieved decent science outcomes was Apollo 17, and that was because for the first time, they sent a geek instead of flying jocks. You can teach geeks how to fly, but you can’t teach jocks to be geeks.

The shuttle has been a total disaster. It has locked us into low earth orbit, does almost no science, costs zillions, killed two crews, and by the time it retires, it will have delivered only a very small number of scientists to a completed ISS, which will hamper ISS’s ability to do science. There’s a good chance after the shuttle retires, science at ISS will stop. This means about $1T has been wasted building a nonsensical space outpost. It has provided a large number of contractors with awesome corporate welfare for over 30 years, but that’s not an “achievement”. It doesn’t get us all thinking how great we are as a species, nor fosters good will amongst all peoples. Boondoggles are like that. We’ve squandered enough life and money on such frivolities.

Robotic missions like Pioneer, Voyager, Hubble, Galileo, Cassini, Deep Space One, SOHO, Messenger, Mariner, Viking, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity and now the new Herschel mission provide far more science for the buck. Indeed, Hubble has provided more papers than any other observatory and confirmed some of the most intriguing basic properties of the Universe.

All publicly funded space missions should be robotic missions. Let’s leave people in space to commercial interests as there’s no scientific reason for them to be there. We need to have people in space, but not by public funds. If human space exploration was funded privately, the funds required to put them there will be optimized rather than being solely about corporate welfare to the military industrial complex. Such space ventures should be regulated for sure, because we don’t want another disaster like the Shuttle killing off an exciting new path for humanity, but it should not be publicly funded. We need to dream big and think about how to get there faster. The nearest star is at least 160,000 years away travelling at Helios speeds (which is currently the fastest thing we have ever launched). That’s far too long for an interstellar mission. We’ve got so far to go, and yet we’ve wasted 30 years doing nothing of any real lasting value in low earth orbit. That has to stop. We must move on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for more space faring activities. One day we will need to get off this planet, and developing those technologies may as well start now. Just not in the failed ISS or back to the future moon missions (Orion / Ares).

I will be taking sole ownership of my forum, Aussieveedubbers, sometime this week. This means that I will have to spend a bit more non-existent personal time attending to it.

This is good and bad news:

• For UltimaBB, the underpinning forum software, it’s fabulous news. UltimaBB was never released and is now effectively a dead project. My acquisition of AVDS gives me the impetus to make the forum software as good as I can make it. Once I’m complete, as it’ll be by far the most secure PHP forum out there. Very few open source programs ever get the chance of a top to bottom code review. Once I’ve fixed all those issues, I will think about possibly adding a few flashy features and integrate it with CPanel and others, so ISPs can easily deploy it. Obviously that integration will not come cheap. Hopefully, I can start to earn a bit of income from the forum, finally.
• For OWASP, this is not good news. I have two current projects, the Developer Guide and ESAPI for PHP. I need ESAPI for PHP to be complete to help UltimaBB, so you can guess which of the two projects will get my time.
• For my personal life, I hope Tanya will forgive me making her do some basic accountancy work. I think it’ll ease her eventual way back into the workforce in a few years, as she is terrific at accountancy, and I would hate to see her lose all her skills for the want of a bit of work here or there. However, it’s not just delegating the book work to my poor suffering wife, it’s also a bit of an ask for the few hours I have to give right now.

So if you want to help with the Developer Guide, please join the mail list and let us know how much time you have, and where your interests are.

Texas’ Board of Education will be ridiculed by pretty much everyone (including me in this post). I would make more fun of them if the consequence of their gross incompetence didn’t lead directly to irreparable harm to the next ten year’s worth of students who will be unemployable in any medical, bio medical, biology, DNA testing, stem cell research, drug research, geology, paleontology, farming, animal husbandry, crop research, or pretty much any field which requires them to understand the basics – or indeed, fine detail – of evolution.

Modern medicine, to name but just one field, doesn’t make ANY sense except if evolution is true. It’s as simple as that. There’s about as much doubt regarding evolution as there is doubt the planet is round and is orbiting our sun.

In my view (and IANAL), these students have due cause to sue the asses off the Board of Education for future earnings loss. What does a specialist medical doctor make per year? Half a million? Million per year? Multiply by all the number of students in each of these fields… whoa that’s a lot of moolah.

I call on all biology text book authors to refuse to allow “updated” editions to be issued with the forthcoming Texas changes. If the schools can’t buy any books, so be it. They can use the ones they have today that have the facts, instead of sowing doubt. Scientists everywhere should make it incredibly clear to their congress critters and senators, as well as their local Boards of Education, that this decision is about as dumb as they come.

I’m actually struggling to understand how “educated” folks, charged with the incredible responsibility of educating their state’s children could be so abusive. They should be sacked immediately and this terrible position stuck down for all time.

Except … now, we’re back in Australia, and things have gone backward. Few places have EFTPOS now. It’s actually hard to pay electronically. Where I live, it’s impossible to buy coffee using EFTPOS, debit or credit cards.

I bet it is because the local Big 4 banks are cutting their noses off to spite themselves. It leads me to believe we are entering the downward spiral into luddite non-use of electronic payments. We may have seen “peak” EFTPOS rollouts, and it’s all downhill from here.

We’ll be a cash society soon, and this is incredibly bad. So many things that were once trivial to do require effort to do. It will cut economic output. Folks like me who refuse to pay the “disloyalty” fees at ATMs just will not buy at places without card machines when I run out of cash.

This is bad news for the local economy, bad news for the banks, and bad news for employment. And bad news for me because I do not get a good cup of coffee and I’m pissed off.

I had been homesick for some time, and I was glad to meet up with my family and my cat(s). Unfortunately, Greebo either did not remember me or worse, didn’t want to talk to me. Meebles was not to be found. I hope I can look after them again soon. Mackenzie is a universal hit here with everyone, which is awesome. She’s also taking well to so many new faces. 

The weather changed from being icy and snowy -5 C (20 F) to a scorching 47.9 C (118.2 F), with the worst fires on record raging about 200 km from where we now live. We’re okay – even if so many are not. My thoughts are with those affected by the fires. 

The sunsets are glorious – I’ve missed them. You can only work this out once you actually viscerally experience something old you fondly remember. The light is different here, and not just because the air is tinged with burnt ash and smoke. 

The shopping hours shortened, the online shopping options that were in Australia seemed to have disappeared. I remember far longer hours in the past, and many more options … but they’re gone. Oh well. 

I managed to drive on the correct side of the road with no real issues – still haven’t turned into the wrong lane, although shopping center car parks are still interesting. 

TV is still crap, and yet awesome. I had missed good news coverage, and weather forecasting that is within 1 degree C of the actual temperature a few days out, and now I have it back. I miss the ease of watching what I want on my Tivos, but then again, I know have a lot more time to do stuff with my family. I always found US TV a bit odd – almost everything was bleeped, but there was no diminuition in the number of bleeps. Tonight, I watched a depression special with one of the world’s best comedians, Stephen Fry, and he dropped the c word, and various other words that would be bleeped in the US. I will not miss the bleeping.

We’re well on our way to restarting our life here. Life is good.