Date: December 29th, 2010
Category: Travel
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Zanzibar

Tomorrow we head to the Tanzanian mainland after about 10 days on Zanzibar – an island off the coast of Dar Es Salaam which was it’s own country until the 60s when it ran out of money and decided to join forces with Tanganyika to become Tanzania.

Our first 5 nights were spent in Stone Town – an old colonial relic that has a huge amount of life. The people are lovely and life moves at a pretty relaxed pace. We spent a day out at ‘Prison Island’ just off the coast where we snorkelled and then fed a 185 year old Giant Tortoise, one of about 100 on the island. Think about that, born in 1825!

Another day we hired a car and drive the entire length of Zanzibar. The highlight was a nature reserve we went to which was littered with Red Columbus Monkeys. The drive back took us into night time which proved to be much more stressful than I’d like it to be (I was driving and it was very hard to see!).

Christmas was a blast with lots of eating and drinking in nice hotels, Swahili Carols and an endless supply of buffets.

On Boxing day we moved to a resort in Matemwe. It’s a little place right on the beech with a swimming pool and really good food. The last 5 days here could not have been more relaxing.

From tomorrow we’re well and truly on the go for the first time. Dar Es Salaam for New Years then up to Lushoto and Moshi (at the foot of Kilamanjaro). From there it is up to Arusha to begin our Safari which will take us into the Serengeti and surrounds.

Until then.

Date: December 19th, 2010
Category: Travel
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…and they’re off

Prepare your selves, dear readers. This blog is about to become a travel blog.

See you in Zanzibar!

Date: November 29th, 2010
Category: Sommelier.net.au
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Yet another Sommelier update

Last week I uploaded the latest version of Sommelier.net.au.

The biggest upgrades are those that are behind the scenes. I upgrade the site’s framework to Cakephp 1.3 (from 1.2) which was relatively smooth but a few errors I wan’t expecting popped up, about the place. For example, the pagination is slightly different now and you need to print the flash statements which used to do so automatically (although, for consistencies sake, I think this is a good move). But for the most part, it was as simple as replacing the core cake files.

I also updated to JQuery 1.4 and JQuery UI 1.8. This was also quite straight forward and will hopefully mean from performance improvements. It also means including one less Javascript file as the Autocomplete widget is now part of JQuery UI so I don’t require bassistance’s wonderful plugin (it’s now part of the standard package).

So all in all I’m quite pleased.

I also added a ‘Ready to Drink’ section to the user home page which randomly selects 10 different wines in your cellar that have a ‘try next’ year of the current year or earlier. My hope is that this will mean you don’t overlook wines that you wanted to drink.

I also rearranges some fields so that they are grouped better in forms and improved some of the documentation.

As always, please send any comments you have on the site to wine@sommelier.net.au

Date: November 7th, 2010
Category: ICT
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A List of Country Names and Codes

I’ve had the need for a list of countries lately. There are plenty around but the ones I could find in .csv format were all at least a few years out of date.

So after a fair bit of cut and paste I have pulled together a list which you, dear reader, are most welcome to.

You can down the csv of countries and country codes here | and the sql file here.

If you notice any errors, please let me know and I’ll update the files.

I’ve also pasted my list over the page.
more))

Date: October 28th, 2010
Category: ICT, Politics
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Copyright and Concentration

Today’s Age reports that Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is hurrying to defend this:

In the installation, artists and the public are invited to email works to the gallery, which are vetted, printed and displayed in a process streamed live to a website.

But the project, called myworkisintheaustraliancentreforcontemporaryart, is a promotion for Hewlett Packard, and the fine print gives the technology giant extensive copyright.

It just struck me as a great example of all that is wrong with the current Intellectual Property regime that permeates most of the globe at the moment. It typifies the loss of control over their own art that many artists are facing and the concentration of intellectual property into the hands of a shrinking number of highly litigious multi-national corporations.

To state the obvious, how does this do anything to encourage creativity or protect artists?

Date: October 28th, 2010
Category: Politics
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Girls on film

Today’s Age carried an article syndicated from the Guardian about men objecting to Pornography.

The article is based around a project set up by Matt McCormack Evans called the AntiPornMenProject but draws on a range of literature out there about the damaging effect porn has on men. Most recently it has been Gail Dines’s Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality which was published earlier in the year.

I don’t think I’m an alarmist (or prudish), but the mainstreaming of hardcore pornography does concern me. I’m quite sure most men can make the separation between the real life women they are intimate with and what they are seeing on their screen. However I also think that it is almost impossible to watch this sort of stuff without it having some sort of effect. As the article in The Age says:

One obvious problem for many porn users is the conflict between their stated belief in equality and respect for women, and the material they’re watching in private. McCormack Evans says he used to exist in a ”kind of double consciousness. For that half hour when I was watching porn I thought, ‘This is separate from my life, it won’t affect how I view the world.’ But then I realised it did.”

…

It can also leave porn consumers with sexual scripts and images they can’t forget, and can’t resist calling to mind during sex. Dines reflects on this in Pornland, in her encounter with ”Dan”, who is worried about his sexual performance with women, and tells her: ”I can’t get the pictures of anal sex out of my head when having sex, and I am not really focusing on the girl but on the last anal scene I watched … I started looking at porn before I had sex, so porn is pretty much how I learned about sex.”

It would also seem that porn getting rougher and more degrading. I brought this up with some of my male friends recently who denied it initially but did admit that they were increasingly coming across porn that they were uncomfortable with because of how degrading it was. However there was also a sense that porn was always like that – something I’m not so sure about.

One thing I’m hearing more often to justify the use of porn is “the desire to watch naked women having sex is totally natural and therefore shouldn’t be judged.” It’s an attitude that really bothers me. We judge should and do judge people that commit non-consensual and aggressive acts – sexual or otherwise. I’m certainly not implying that people that watch porn are committing such acts but the notion that you can’t judge such desires clearly does not stand the test of logic.

Whatever its effect, it’s an extremely complex issue. But the mainstreaming of porn doesn’t seem to have lead to much constructive discussion around its effect. There will always be a lucrative market for porn – that’s the side effect of all the things I love about the Internet. So what is vital is that we start talking about it; start talking about the effect this sort of imagery has on men and their attitudes towards women and sex.

I’m adding the AntiPornMenProject to my RSS feeds and I hope you do to.

Date: October 26th, 2010
Category: Goonanism Websites, ICT
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A Comparison of Free, Open-Source Content Management Systems

I’ve just returned home from the ACTU Media and Communications Conference where I delivered a presentation on free, Open-Source Content Management Systems in the context of cheaper alternatives for Union websites.

Please feel free to leave comments/questions below and note that I do freelance web development work which you can email me about hammy@goonanism.com

See over the page for my presentation.

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Date: October 21st, 2010
Category: Family, Goonanism Websites, Me, Travel
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Turning my life on its head

It’s time to come clean. A couple of weeks ago I resigned from my job at the Health and Community Services Union to go on a massively underfunded trip through Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe before settling down in the UK for a year or two.

It’s a move that is exciting, terrifying and much anticipated. It hasn’t been easy keeping to from you all this time dear readers

I leave on December 20 with a one way ticket to Tanzania where my better half and I will be greeted in Stone Town, Tanzania by my family.

I’ll then travel with my partner and family through Tanzania and Kenya for 5 weeks before leaving my family and flying with my partner to Cairo to travel through the Middle East and Eastern Europe until the money runs out and we have to fly to the UK to work (Youth Mobility Visas pending mind you – fingers crossed).

The timing is right in so many senses. In a practical sense I turn 31 in a month’s time so that’s the cut off for access to a Youth Mobility Visa for me. But I’m also getting to a stage where I feel like it’s time for a new adventure and I’ve been aching to get back to Eastern Europe for 4 or 5 years now.

My professional focus also seems like it is shifting more an more. I’m really enjoying doing a bit of freelance web development work and I’m hopeful that I can get some work while I’m travelling to keep myself afloat a little longer. I’m also hopeful that I can make a living doing freelance work once I get to the UK.

But for now I’m packing up the house I have loved and lived in for the past 2 years before moving back in with my Mum for the last month before we fly out.

There’s so much I’m going to miss and I seem to have had some really fantastic times with friends lately which is making me realise just how much I’m going to miss everyone. It’s also going to be a fucking rad!

It is still 2 months away (almost to the day) and I’ll probably have reason to blog again before I leave but be prepared for this to turn into a travel blog. And if you need any website work done at the moment, I’d love to help you out because I could really do with a bit of pocket money.

Date: October 12th, 2010
Category: Sommelier.net.au
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Sommelier.net.au Update

This morning I uploaded the latest version of Sommelier.net.au. They took a little longer to go live than I had hoped but paid work got in the way which I can hardly complain about.

Most of the updates were under the hood of the site so you shouldn’t notice them, but the ones you should notice include:

  • A new user home page so when you log in you have more direct access to the various parts of the site that require regular access as well as some stats about the wine in your cellar.
  • You can now search you cellar and your archive by variety. In the past version you could only order your cellar by variety which made things difficult if you wanted to find every bottle that contained Cabernet (for example). Previously, if you ordered your cellar by variety, Cabernet and Shiraz Cabernet would be at opposite ends of your list. Now, a search on ‘Cabernet’ will show up everything with Cabernet (Cabernet, Shiraz Cabernet, GSM etc)
  • Previously, once you added a new bottle, you couldn’t change the purchase price of the wine. This has now been changed after a few people emailed me asking for this feature.

So get in there and have a look around – I think it’s a really useful service and I hope you do to.

Date: October 12th, 2010
Category: Sport
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On Sport

I love sport. Love it. I can watch it for hours on end an my idea of luxury is spending the whole day on the couch watching the cricket.

I often find myself defending the importance of sport to me other lefty friends.

But let’s keep it in check. The current coverage of the Commonwealth Game is appalling. I’m all for revering sports people, celebrating their achievement and so on. However it is important to remember just what it is that sports people have achieved. They are really good at running, jumping, catching or what ever it is and that is fantastic, but that’s all it is.

Sally Pearson can run really fast, and that is fantastic. But all this crap about redemption, her being a role model and so on is just taking it too far.

Imagine if after all that she tested positive for performance enhancing drugs, or better still, cocaine. Then I might actually like her…

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