Just in case anyone is listening, I’ve decided to take my blogging a little bit more seriously (and I do mean little), so I’m moving to the more me! me! me! related dlimiter.wordpress.com where I’ll be focusing on slightly more technical content in the areas of software engineering, productivity, leadership and motivation, innovation and (to be completely honest) juggling.

I’ll leave this blog up for a while just in case anyone is getting any use out of it, but as of now, this is pretty much a dead feed.

Cheers

Dave

I’m only an amateur juggler and I don’t have a lot of props to share so I thought I’d use some millet I had lying around (ever since a mad fit of optimism when I thought that hand sewing my own juggling balls might be a neat idea) and build some cheap juggling balls that I could give away to participants.

Turns out that millet makes a really good filling for conventional juggling beanbags because the individual seeds are so close to spherical and they flow nicely without clumping. This also means that when you’re trying to trap them in a balloon there’s nothing to stop them flying straight out again as soon as your hand slips, showering you, your cat and every single surface in your kitchen in tiny little seeds. Hypothetically of course.

Anyhoo, just in case anyone is crazy stupid interested enough to try for themselves, I thought I’d include the process below. The end product isn’t nearly as nice or durable as proper juggling beanbags, but they are a good cheap alternative if you’re short on cash or it’s difficult to source anything better.

1. Get all of the things you’ll need

• Balloons
• Rice (not millet, are you crazy?)
• Old plastic water bottle (empty)
• Funnel (red, because it goes faster)
• Scales
• Scissors
• Vacuum Cleaner (just in case)

2. Measure out the seed

This will depend on the weight you want the balls to be – I went for about 100g of filling (so 105g all up). This is less than the more standard 130-150g that most beanbags weigh, but they are for beginners, so I wanted them to be a bit lighter and smaller so that they’re easier to catch and learn with. Pour the measured rice into the water bottle (using your nifty red funnel).

3. The Balloon

Blow up a balloon a little (larger than the desired ball) and place it over the neck of the bottle still inflated (it helps if you putting a slight twist in the neck before you open it). You will now be able to tip over the bottle and pour the rice into the balloon.

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Carefully remove the balloon from the now empty bottle and let the air out. The balloon will shrink until it binds in all the rice.

Cut off the stem top of the balloon. This is easy with rice, as it’s roughness and shape make it clump at the neck and you can just tip pout the excess with he rest holding together. If you were stupid interested enough to use millet you will need to carefully fold the neck over as you deflate the balloon to trap in the seed (you’ll need to keep it held down during the next step).

Cut the neck from the second balloon and put it over the top of the filled balloon (still holding down the folded over neck if you used millet) until it is completely enclosed (and so that the open hole of the first balloon is on the opposite side to hole on the second balloon.

4. Bask in the glory of your evil glorious creation

[cue crescendo of thunderous orchestral score]

The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

…

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Sometimes I wish we had politicians here in Australia that talked like this. I wouldn’t necessarily believe it, but positive cogent language would certainly go a long way in  making elections feel a little less like a minimax exercise in picking the least worst option. Or to put it another way, if you’re going to scam me, at least care enough to try and make me think you aren’t.

(Thanks to Bad Astronomy for the story)

Just as I’m approaching the  point when I need to decide if I should renew my pro account, the RTM team have enticed me further with a major interface upgrade which, amongst other things, provides the ability to create a new task by entering all of the details in a single line. I was already pretty happy with RTM and combined with keyboard shortcuts this makes task entry much faster and adds a lot of value to the tool.

And hey, it moos. There’s no bad here.

“We vehemently oppose the proposals being made and suggest that the stick is now in danger of being way out of proportion to the carrot,” the statement, quoted by The Guardian, read.

They go on to encourage the music industry to look at alternative ways of generating revenue from content.

I think that it’s very exciting that the content producers (and not just the young ones) are showing  interest in exploring new revenue models. I suspect that in the long run, the only losers will be the industries that won’t change and adapt along with the market.  When you think about it, it’s quite ironic – the music industry itself exists in it’s current form because they took advantage of changes in media technologies and culture where their predecessors could (or would) not – and yet now they are clutching their old business models in the same futile death grip as the  the dinosaurs they superseded.

The talk argues that  the traditional “carrot and stick” model of rewards and penalties work fine where tasks are simple and well defined, but are crippling to creativity and innovation. Dan proposes a new model based around the desire to do things “because they matter, because we like it, because they’re interesting, because they are part of something important” - pretty cool stuff.  As case studies, he highlights Atlassian’s FedEx Days (and recent adoption of Google style 2o Percent Time) and my personal idea of  utopia: the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE).

It is also worth noting that all of the best TED talks are available via RSS feed and are well worth the bandwidth to podcast.

The juxtaposition between almost clinical neatness and choas is intriguing. I probably fall somewhere in the middle – I find it hard to work in a messy or cluttered space, but at the same time I need texture and character as a catalyst to inspiration. Just being difficult I guess.

Apparently a much larger collection of images and interviews is in the progress of being compiled into a book. Have to keep an eye out for that one.

A senior U.S. lawmaker has said that it may be time for the government to regulate companies that provide online file-sharing services after a number of people managed to access FBI files, medical records and Social Security numbers

Really? So some halfwit who has access to confidential information accidentally shares it on LimeWire and it’s the service’s fault? This is a lot like fighting terrorism by banning liquids on planes – it ignores the actual issue, and rather focuses on just one of a potentially infinite number possible attack vectors. It is reactive, raises all kinds of civil liberty issues and it ultimately fails completely because the idiot who installed LimeWire on a computer with classified information is still out there, probably finding all sorts of  new ways to compromise data security through their ignorance.

I’m not sure which is more frightening – that some one with that kind of clearance was that stupid, or that the US Government seems to think that regulating LimeWire will magically fix the problem.

More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government’s ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems.

Of the nine participating ISPs, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect told ARN they had seen no slowdowns in Internet speeds or problems with the filtering solutions in place.

Of the remaining four ISPs, Tech2U and Highway1 were unable to respond by time of publication while Unwired and Optus refused to comment.

iPrimus Australia CEO, Ravi Bhatia, said his company’s ISP filtering trial, which must be opted into by its customers, had “probably involved a few thousand users”.

“The users have not experienced any problems, they haven’t experienced any service degradation so it’s been a pretty good experience,” he said.

So on first glance, the thing that jumps out is that it’s a bit hard to discern any actual data from this article. While there are numerous references to “no slowdowns” and “minimal speed disruptions or technology problems”, there is no detail as to:

• What constitutes minimal? 1%? 10%?
• How were slowdowns/disruptions measured and reported? Benchmarking? Subjective experience? Magic 8 ball?

And just how representative was the study? Any basic course in Statistics will tell you that in order to get a representative sample of any population, it is necessary to select randomly – and it would seem that much of the participation in the current trial was done on an opt in basis. This introduces several obvious potential skews to the results -with people opting in potentially being ideologically skewed towards supporting (or not supporting)  the the filter, and potentially less capable of measuring (or less likely to experience) the effects.

Even if you take this rather dubious announcement at face value, several major issues with the filter still have not been addressed:

• None of the results reported measurement of  the effectiveness of the filter (either in blocking unwanted content or in avoiding trivial circumvention)
• The ethics of censoring based on a secret list with no transparent mechanism of appeal, redress or checks to prevent misuse.

Despite the trial’s lack of actual objective or representative data (regarding slowdown or efficacy),  real discussion of the ethics of the situation  or any process or procedure remotely resembling science, Stephen Conroy plans to use it as a major input into governmental policy.  I’m not really surprised, just disappointed.