Haven’t been on Tumblr for a week (Budget week = no spare time). Thankfully it didn’t take me long to burn through 96 pages of stuff I’d missed, thanks to my fantastic web browser Comodo Dragon THAT SEEMS TO BE HORRIBLY OFFENDED BY THE EXPECTATION THAT IT CAN LOAD IMAGES. 

What even are dragon? I am disappoint. 

(Meanwhile, I notice Firefox 3.6 never fails to load images properly.) 

I just bought a new hard drive for the PC because my old one was full and I couldn’t install any more stuff. This means back up needed.

Back up strategy 1: Use Windows Back-Up.

Windows Back-up gets to 37% and stops working for no apparent reason.

Back up strategy 2: Reformat hard drive without backing up, hope I don’t lose anything important. 

And this is why I use a Mac. 

Take a drink at any of the following.

“Traditional Labor Values”
“Fair go”
“hard decisions”
“global financial crisis/ global recession/ etc.”
Any reference to yesterday’s Labour Day marches.
“Australian working families”
Verbal attack on billionaire mining executives.
“Commitment to delivering a surplus”
“Future generations”
“the right thing to do”

Yet another interest rates cut has been passed and so rates are back in the spotlight, yet I must express not disgust, but a feeling that appears as you turn down the road that will one day become disgust, at the tendency of more and more people to say interest rate cuts are bad because it means savings accounts earn less money.

Ross Gittens in this morning’s SMH called them “the silent majority”. This class into which most Australians fit that is so hard done by being forced to earn less money because of some pesky poor people slowing down the economy.

People with bank debt have so because their life circumstances are such that they cannot afford to pay for all the things that are a minimum requirement for participating in our society. Everyone needs a place to live, and no everyone can afford a house, nor can everyone rent one from someone else. Thankfully instead of thousands upon thousands of Australians going homeless, we can instead get a mortgage which essentially gives us a couple more decades to save up for the house all while living in it.

People with higher balance savings accounts and term deposits have so because their life circumstances are such that they can not only afford to pay for all the things that are a minimum requirement for participating in society, they have enough money left over that they can lock it away in a bank. These people are entitled to their interest, certainly. And as a business principal it is their money being lent to the others with loans, and interest is a more or less fair way of the bank compensating them for that use of their money.

But interest cutting both ways does nothing but perpetuate existing financial situations. The people with little money have to pay interest and so end up with even less. The people with lots of money get paid interest and so end up with even more. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

And this is all fair enough to an extent. Banks take on a risk every time they give someone a loan, and the interest compensates them for making that risk, just as the interest paid to customers who invest in the bank is in turn compensation for them. Of course then the bank, as a private business (as all banks in Australia now are), balances the interest and adds fees so they turn a profit to deliver to shareholders. That is a much murkier system but that isn’t what I’m talking about here.

But when we talk about interest rates going up or down, interest rates going up is the painful result, and interest rates going down is the relieving result. Rich people getting richer at a slower rate is always worth poor people getting poorer at a slower rate. This is true at any ratio of poor to rich people until such time as there are so few Australians with bank debt that the government can afford to support them individually. 

If you’ve got a term deposit and there is another interest rates cut and you want to complain because now you’re making less money stop and close your mouth. You are still getting money simply for already having some. For someone less fortunate the downward spiral of financial dependence has just slowed a little.

I’m finding it hard to decide whether I should spend more time at work or at home.

On one hand work doesn’t have Mass Effect or Starcraft.

On the other hand home doesn’t have a working toilet. 

This is a bigger dilemma than you might think. 

(Also a big dilemma is whether this counts as #firstworldproblems or #thirdworldproblems , which I suppose itself is a first world problem.)

I notice a lot of people angry at Campbell Newman because he has discontinued the Premier’s Literary Awards.

You may want to bear in mind that artists are the single group with the most say over our history. Even more so than historians and political scientists.

If you are an author and you don’t like that Campbell Newman has devalued literature in this state, include that in every story you write. Have evil dictators called Cantrell Hewson. Have short, bald engineers who are completely illiterate and hated by the whole community.

Governments last about 10 years. Art can last for centuries, even millennia. In 40 years, school children will be making their minds up about our past premiers, like Campbell Newman, not based on the short-lived policies they made only to be reversed under the next government; they won’t care about how efficiently the premier got the budget back into surplus; they’ll care how the premier is depicted in art. 

If every story written by a Queensland author for a decade contains thinly veiled insults directed at Campbell Newman, his legacy will be worse than dirt. And that’s far more damaging to him than discontinuing an award is to you.

I’ve become so obsessed with taking screenshots of cut scenes in Mass Effect that I’ve actually had to restart a mission. I was too busy taking screenshots and missed an objective and failed. :-/

Hey all, just letting you know that work will be letting up a little for a couple of weeks so I’ll hopefully have time to set up a new proper blog to replace the old Blogger one. 

In 2008 I tried a photo-a-day project and it failed when my camera died. 

In 2011 I tried a photo-a-day project and it failed when daylight saving finished and I kept forgetting to go outside to take the photo at night. 

I think the problem I’m having is that doing something every day is really hard. Unless it is an activity ground into your schedule through a lifetime of practice (meals, showering, taking medication, etc. Actually scratch meals, I forget them constantly) it is difficult to maintain an activity that regularly over a prolonged period of time. 

So maybe I’d be more successful if I were to shorten the time period. Instead of taking a photo once a day for a year, or a month, why not take a photo once an hour for a day. 

Naturally the perfect subject for such a project would be a self documentation of sorts. 

So on Monday I’m going to try it, at hour intervals (or as close as is possible) from the time I wake up on Monday to the time I go back to bed I will take a photo of whatever I am looking at at the time. 

The photos probably won’t be very good. I doubt many of them will be particularly interesting (here is my bedside table, here is my bedside table again, here is my bus speeding off without me after I slept in for 2 hours, etc.). But it will provide a photographic documentation of my typical Monday in March 2012. 

And if it is successful I might try other more interesting photo days later in the year. 

I’m writing this here because, as will become apparent in about 5 word’s time, I am shutting down Noise Boy’s Cyberhome. My trusty blog at Blogger which has been there since November 2008. It will be missed.

However, as I write pseudonymously I cannot keep a Blogger account under Google’s new privacy policy. Google will, on March 1, be merging everyone’s various identities from different Google products, which means mixing my blog with other services that I use under different names. As Google will so kindly be changing my name for me, I have no way of stopping this short of deleting my blog.

I know that in the last 2 years many people have come to know me by my real name. Just because my real identity and my online identity are, in many people’s minds, now merged does not mean I want the same thing happening in some services. (As a side point only two people have managed to link my real identity to my online one without being told.)

I must point out that Google is not all bad in this. They have given everyone a large amount of warning that this change was coming, and I’ve had plenty of time to consider my options and come to this decision. The same cannot be said of a certain other social networking giant. I also understand why Google is adopting their new policy and while I don’t like it I can respect it from their point of view.

I’ll be manually archiving all my posts from Noise Boy’s Cyberhome tomorrow and then deleting the blog, so no trace of it will remain on March 1. I’ll at some point in the future be opening a new blog with another service under the name Noise Boy’s Cyberhome. I will not be migrating my posts over to that new blog. I may drip feed some onto it as I see fit, but I want to keep a clean slate to start with. I still stand by what I’ve written in the past- as much as I can bearing in mind I’ve changed as a person since I wrote some of it.

Ultimately it all boils down to control. These are my views, my information, etc. I want control over that. I don’t mind who reads what I’ve written, I care that I can control that. In the case of my blog I’ve chosen to make it all public to the world with just the condition that my real name isn’t put to it. Google’s change in policy takes away my control over that, so I’m leaving.

I will continue to use other Google services; this is not a protest quitting. I look forward to writing again from some other service some time in the future.