Bad politics. Horrible web design.

So I was browsing the Kevin07 site today. Don't know why; it must have been a slow news day on the Internet. At least Kevvy seems to be saying all the right things, for example we now know that he doesn't much like sweatshops. What a brave position to take.

Anyway, on a political blog I was reading there was a guy paying Rudd out for being too slow to get in on the whole Internet campaign thing. Okay, maybe that's a fair cop. But this guy is apparently running as an independent for the Victorian senate, and he has a web site. You need to visit it. This is the future of the Internet, people. For further hilarity, read his policies. I dare not look at his video blogs.

...actually, I'm bored. I'm going to look at his video blogs.


[09/08/07 - Edit: oh.]

A momentary diversion...

Wow! It’s been a while! There are so many things I could mention in this blog post:

I could mention the awesome Beautiful Girls concert I went to last week, but since there’s only this one dude who reads this blog - and I’m fairly sure he was at the concert - there’s little point.

I could pull a news story at random from The Australian’s web site and use it to illustrate how silly the Government and/or The Australian is. But that would be too easy, and I promised not to talk politics.

I could mention this game, but I think it’s just too addictive for you guys to handle.

I could talk about what a beautiful day it was yesterday, but when I start blogging about the weather I know it’s probably time to turn in my keyboard and join a hippy commune.

So instead of any of that I’m going to share with you the wonderful story of my first purchase over the Internet. Yes, tech savvy as I am, up until about a month ago I’d never actually bought anything online. This was mainly due to the lack of a payment facilitator, a deficiency which has now been resolved in the form of a Visa debit card.

Wanting to test out said card, I went post haste to the Achewood site, where I ordered all seven volumes of the Achewood comics in print. Transaction was effected through PayPal, and just a tip for all you non-Americans: don’t choose the ‘I want PayPal to rape me by way of their ridiculous exchange rate’ option. Choose the ‘I’ll take my credit card’s mystery rate’ option. Your card might still rape you, but at least there’s a sense of adventure about the process.

After I’d placed my order, the wait was an anxious one. Would my delivery reach Australia? Would it get through customs? Would Australia Post use it as a football in a game of parcel soccer (a sport I imagine they play in their warehouses)?

Then, on Monday, I got a note saying that the comics were waiting for me at the Post Office. Hooray! I retrieved them, took them home and read the first of the seven volumes straight away. Achewood is one of those series where the characters are really developed – it’s often hard to get the humour if you don’t have the back story. As an experiment, check out this comic, with the explanation that Lie Bot = George, and Philippe is basically a small cute child.

Achewood is gaining a lot of acceptance. One of the characters wrote an article recently for the Sydney Daily Telegraph (funny, funny shit), and they’ve been featured in Time magazine.

Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd, is also a big fan: "[n]ot satire, not parody... Achewood is my current favourite thing. My friends are divided between those who love it, and those who stare blankly at each last panel like a horse being presented with a banjo. Those latter friends are under review. Sometimes I look in their eyes and I feel I never really knew them."

So jump on the bandwagon. Read Achewood from the start. Your brain will love you.

I did this thing, so now you have to, too.

So I got an email from one of my cousins inviting me to create a Facebook profile. You may have heard of this site before. It's the usual social networking thang - think of it as a cooler, less ugly version of MySpace. It's good 'cause you can upload all your photos and people can look at them (I am aware of no other site that lets you do that.)

Anyway, I had a spare 5 minutes so I created a profile. Upon reviewing it, I found out the terrible news that I only had one friend (two if Kevin Rudd responds to my invitation to be friends). This is not ideal. So now you guys have to create facebook profiles so we can all be friendly. It's easy and fun.

Go here. Do it now.

Being wrong

(Note to Alice and others like her: While this may initially seem to be a post about politics and the internet, I promise that if you keep reading you’ll see I’m actually making a wider, hopefully less boring point).

Recently I’ve been reading up on Labor’s broadband proposal. My gut feeling was that any half-decent proposal to roll out ‘true’ broadband infrastructure is better than doing nothing (the Libs), while doing nothing is way better than handing it all to an evil, evil monopoly (Telstra). But, not knowing much of the detail of Labor’s plan, I’ve been doing the rounds on the internet (which is, rather ironically, shaped to 64kb at our work at the moment) to try and find out more.

One of my first ports of call was Joshua Gans’ blog. He’s an economist for the people, and has written some very sensible stuff about the economic impact of copyright reform, as well as creating the iTunes index. You could say I highly respect his opinion or, put another way, I think he is a ‘dude’ while concurrently he could lay claim to being ‘the shit’.

So I was somewhat perplexed to see that he’s… not really all that enthused about Labor’s plan. In fact, he doesn’t seem convinced that Australia needs better broadband at all. The limbs of Gans’ argument with which I most violently disagree are:

1) We’re so far behind most other economically developed nations in terms of broadband speed that it’s futile to even attempt to catch up.
2) Australians don’t need faster broadband to be economically competitive. Fast broadband is a luxury, used only by the rich for entertainment, so the Government shouldn’t subsidise its establishment.

On a personal level, this makes me feel extremely uneasy. What’s happening here is that Joshua Gans, someone whose opinion I respect, who ‘gets it’, and who has a great deal more knowledge and insight into the relevant subject than I do, has put forward an opinion I think is rubbish. Clearly, we can’t both be right. Either I’m wrong or he is.

On the one hand, I tend to believe that the opinion I hold is the correct one – otherwise it wouldn’t be my opinion. But objectively, I know that all other things being equal, in matters of economics Joshua Gans’ opinion is more likely to be valid than mine. Cause, y’know, it’s what he’s trained to do, it’s what he does, and I think he’s pretty good at it.

The immediate effect of all this is that I’ve come to doubt my judgement about the issue. I keep asking myself, what am I not understanding about this? But what really sucks is that no matter the outcome, I’ve made an error of judgement. Either I’m wrong about the need for fast broadband, or I was wrong in thinking that Joshua Gans was a switched on guy.

Have you guys ever had a similar experience? Has someone whose opinion you really respected ever come out with a view you totally opposed?


PS: Apparently the humble blog is dying. Perhaps that’s why no one’s been contributing lately…