My cousin Greg Coker has created an eBay auction for Football cards with the proceeds going to a charity that protects animal welfare (I can’t remember the name – I’ll update this post later). He also has a bunch of other eBay auctions of football cards going which are not for charity.

The charity auction is held in association with SEN (Sports Entertainment Network – a sports talk-back AM radio station) [1]. This afternoon Greg was interviewed on SEN about football cards in general. He gave a good talk, he could probably do some professional radio work if he was interested.

Greg’s cards are from the VFL (Victorian Football League) before it became the AFL (Australian Football League) [2]. The cards used to be sold in “milk bars” (small stores that sold a variety of junk food and some essential food items including milk – most such stores are closed now as they have been replaced by petrol stations and supermarkets) and each pack of ~5 cards had some crewing gum included (which Greg often discarded because he didn’t like it – he should have given it to me, I was not so fussy). The back side of the cards had a jigsaw picture which I have never seen anyone complete (I expect that Greg has assembled at least one jigsaw as he has some sets).

Probably the way the cards were collected, traded, etc is very similar to sports based cards from other countries (such as baseball cards in the US).

On the animal front, I’ve had a mother cat and four kittens move into the shed in my back-yard. The mother cat has no collar and is not known by anyone in the area so she appears to have been dumped by her owner when she got pregnant. There are four kittens, one is ginger, one is black, and two are mottled part black and part ginger. They are all healthy and friendly and the kittens are all really cute. The kittens have become used to being patted and handled by humans so it will be easy to make them household pets.

If an owner is not found for them then they will probably all end up being put to sleep (unfortunately I can’t keep them so I’ll have to deliver them to the local council).

If anyone in Melbourne, Australia wants some free cats then I would be happy to deliver them. I’ll supply as many cats as desired. I can’t give away the mother until the kittens have been given away, so if you want the mother cat (dark coloured) then you may have to wait for a while.

Judging by the date that I first noticed them (when they were walking around, had their eyes open, and ate solid food) the kittens would have to be at least 7 weeks old. It’s recommended that kittens not be given away before they are 8 weeks old and given that it will probably take a week to organise anything I expect that anyone who reads I don’t think that there is any risk of giving them away too early.

Please let me know by email or a comment if you are in the vicinity of Melbourne, Australia and want a new pet (or several new pets).

• [1] http://www.sen.com.au/
• [2] http://www.afl.com.au/

Over the past four years every visit to a doctor or hospital has involved some time spent in a waiting room, in the case of hospital visits it has often been more than an hour waiting. Each of those waiting rooms has had a selection of bad magazines and a TV. If I ever visit a hospital after 8PM then I might have a chance of seeing something that I want to watch on TV, but otherwise it’s all awful.

Fortunately there are better things that they could do. It would not be difficult to get a basic PC and install all the content from ted.com (and possibly other sites with quality free content) and have some sort of video juke-box program running. TED not only has lectures about arts and science but also performances by musicians and dancers. The chance that a random person can find something they enjoy in TED’s archives seems significantly greater than the chance of finding something worth watching in the daytime-soap TV segment.

But TED is far from the only option available, there are quite a number of free video sites and the ones that include advertising in the video stream would probably be more than happy to have their content copied on to juke boxes.

I just read interesting blog post about Lenovo service information [1]. They have huge documents about how to service their machines as well as apparently having videos in flash format to show how to perform various tasks.

The first thing I’d like to see is other companies following this example. I clearly recall one time when I had an IBM 2RU server apart and I couldn’t work out how to get the power cable for the tape drive installed, a video of how to do so would surely have saved me some time then, I was working for a law firm and had a small outage window – not a situation where I wanted to waste any time.

The next thing I would like to see is Lenovo not using Flash for this, but instead allow download of MP4 and/or OGG video. When doing a job in a tight time window with a demanding client I would like to have all the relevant documentation (including videos) on my laptop before I visit their site.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/connections/?p=17

I was watching the British police drama show The Bill [1] and I was impressed by their use of computers.

They were analysing the evidence of a homicide and one of the tasks was to assemble a time-line of the related events. They had a projector connected to a computer which displayed the data and used what was apparently an infra-red pen (presumably similar in technology to Rusty’s infra-red pen for Wii-Mote Pong [2]) to write on the wall and the computer then performed OCR to convert it to printed text. When new evidence was discovered about the time of events they used drag and drop to move the events around to the correct time slots.

I’ve seen many horribly faked renditions of computer stuff on TV, but this seemed quite realistic. It was all technically possible, in many cases what was displayed would be quite inconvenient to fake if you didn’t have software to do it, and little touches like closing the session when the case was resolved are things that you wouldn’t bother with if faking it. The down-side to my analysis is that I had a couple of glasses of red wine so I might be more gullible than usual. ;)

Some years ago I swore off watching The Bill after a horribly stupid episode about computer crime (teenage haxor sells copies of cracked software to computer store owner for resale to the public, then computer store owner murders him for disrespect and price-gouging). I refrained from watching for almost a decade after that. But it seems that they have redeemed themself to some degree.

I wonder whether the software they were showing is really used by law enforcement, or whether it’s designed for corporations to use in tele-conferences etc.

In the same episode they showed the recordings of two security cameras on projectors side by side for comparison, they could fast-forward them independently but they couldn’t zoom in or do other silly and impossible things.

• [1] http://www.thebill.com/
• [2] http://arctanx.id.au/blog/?p=37

It is becoming increasingly apparent that this post is not going to do any good, so I have deleted the content.

Sorry to the people who were offended.

I won’t be writing about such topics again.

I just read an interesting approach to finding a life partner [1]. A summary is “There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as “shell users.” … Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix.“.

While there is a moderate amount of humour in the post (I recommend that you read it in full) it is a genuine attempt to find a partner.

One thing that has occurred to me is that part of the cause of the attitude toward women that is sometimes demonstrated in my community is the fact that there are so many guys who are single and have been single for a long time. If this problem was alleviated then I believe that some of the other social issues would be significantly improved.

The advert in question is a bit more courageous than most guys would be prepared to consider (it’s up there with the guy who paid for a giant sign to be installed beside a highway). But there are many other options.

ESR has some advice to offer [2], but the name of the URL (sextips) seems an accurate representation of the focus of the pages. One problem with ESR’s advice is that it seems to assume an ability to be extroverted (or at least fake it) which is greater than many geeks possess. Another problem is that he assumes that geeks are inherently more intelligent than average people – there is more than adequate evidence to disprove this theory. It seems more reasonable to only assume that geeks are better than average at doing geeky things.

It seems to me that the one thing that geeks really are better at is writing email! Therefore it seems logical that geeks who want good success in meeting women should try and involve the use of email in some way. Singles web sites seem an obvious way to take advantage of this. Unfortunately there is a strange cultural aversion to using such web sites which even afflicts geeks. For some reason it’s thought to be a good idea to try and meet a life partner in a place where there is inadequate light, too much background noise to talk properly, and where everyone has taken mind-altering chemicals (I am referring to drinking alcohol at a bar of night-club). Once strange cultural ideas are discarded it seems obvious that if you want to meet a potential life-partner then you should do so in a place where there is good light, an opportunity to talk, and where everyone is in a normal state of mind. Starting out with email and then talking over the phone and exchanging JPEG pictures seems to be a sensible option in this regard.

Most times that you chat to someone you meet over the net it won’t go any further than email or maybe phone-calls. But that’s still entertaining and useful practice at communicating with women.

One thing that the Craig’s List advertiser really got right is that he knows what he wants. An advantage of the singles sites on the net is that they often force people to make decisions. When a singles site demands that you enter a desired number of children that you want to have (with 0 being an acceptable answer) then you will be forced to consider the issue and make a decision. While being prepared to negotiate about such things may be desirable, I can’t imagine anyone finding it appealing when someone doesn’t know what they want or doesn’t have the confidence to say it.

Finally don’t rule out the possibility of meeting someone through your local LUG. There are a quite a few married couples who met through the Linux community. But don’t go making “pick-up” attempts on women in the community – the result will not be positive.

Via Michael Still.

• [1] http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/485967082.html
• [2] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/

Leon writes about giving a stranger $1 to help him get a train ticket.

Recently I saw something similar, a lady was giving balloons to children in the Bourke St Mall in Melbourne just after 9PM. I asked her about this (I couldn’t see a logo on the balloons and wondered how she was making money). It turned out that unlike almost everyone else who gives out balloons in shopping areas she wasn’t trying to advertise a product to parents, but her hobby was to give out balloons to children.

I regret not asking her more questions, I wonder why she was doing this after 9PM (there aren’t many children out then), whether she always hangs out at Bourke St, and what gave her the idea to start doing this.

Christmas is billed as a family occasion and a huge amount of advertising money is spent convincing people that they need to have big expensive family events. This is good for the advertisers but not good for people who have no family to meet up with (orphans, people who live in different countries to their families, and people who don’t get along with their relatives).

If any of your friends don’t have an event planned for Christmas day then it’s a good idea to invite them to your family party if possible. When I was younger there were two occasions when friends who didn’t have a possibility of attending a party with their own family attended a Christmas party with my family. Unfortunately I’m not in a position to make such an offer this year, but I encourage everyone who knows of someone with no plans to consider the possibility of inviting them to a party.

Another possibility is that Linux people who have no option of a family party could arrange a Linux community Christmas party.