Brave Predictions #1

2027: Shanghai becomes the gay capital of the world. This will please all the rice queens of the world.
Swinging Shanghai overtakes Sydney and San Fran for the title of the world centre of Gay culture. After decades of the one child policy creating a surplus of over one million men, many men are drawn towards being homosexual or bisexual. They will be drawn to the booming metropolis, historically the most liberal of Chinese cities.
The staggering increase in the gay demographic forces radical changes both socially and politically. It is no longer taboo to be opening gay in public. No event demonstrates this more than the annual Shanghai Gay Mardi Gras which is held simultaneously with the Sydney event.

whoo! miss universe time

yup that time of year again. time for Donald Trump to gel up the old door mat glue it to his head and get stuck into the new round of sweet young things.
for the rest of us non billionaires, we get to watch it on TV, get a group of mates together and bitch about the ones with big asses, bad nose/boob jobs and vote on which one blew the most judges. for all you girls feigning revolt, admit it, you all do it too. just for the record, our annual Miss Universe gathering/bitch session has several female regulars who get stuck in more than the boys.
Somehow, no matter how fugly Miss USA is, she'll always make the final cut. It's a darstardly ratings, adverts thing. Well with old Head-Rug running the show how can it be anything but rigged and sleazy.
Miss Japan the winner this year which is a surprise. Historically the Asian block has been pretty lean on talent, with Miss Singapore/Malaysia/Taiwan perpetual favourites for the Miss Canine Award.

Monaco Grand Prix *yawn*

I stayed up to watch the Monaco GP last night and couldn't will myself to stay up until the finish. I found myself wondering why I was up so late watching this rubbish. I used to like watching formula one but the last 3 years have been awful. Monaco being the most boring race of all. Aside from the usual glamour and beautiful people that they don't bother to show on the telecast anyway, there's not much to get excited about. Despite the hype, the Monaco GP is the least viewer friendly race. seriously it's like going to the dentist (ironically I was at the dentist on saturday). Traditionally, Monaco is the hardest circuit to pass on. Add to that the stupid aero-dynamics rules put in place 3 years ago that have made the cars less stable and now unable to take advantage of slip streams to overpass, the only excitement is the pole position qualifying. The only way drivers can pass others is in the pits after that or pray for accidents and mechanical failures.
Although I can admire the skill involved with pit stops, it's not exciting enough to be the main event.

Sunday was also the golf tournament for my esteemed alumni association. It was a shocking day for golf (showers and strong sea breeze). The course was definitely not one for the inaccurate, exposed, tight links course with no barriers to protect the public. Our team was lucky not to attract a law suit, endangering the lives of the public several times by spraying balls onto busy public roads and footpaths. I didn't win my trophy back but as the only member of the original team to show up (Kublai, thanks for piking!) it was tough going with the newbies. At least I've got 2 new *Company Name Withheld* range rocks to sacrifice to the quarry at Joondalup.

I got a mac!

I got a new macbook laptop 2 weeks ago after a "fault" with my old laptop, which turned out to be not a fault at all but an act of stupidity on my behalf. So now I have two really cool laptops.
I guess I'll have to give my 2 cents on the mac vs. PC debate. I'm not interested which one is more powerful, which can process more flops, video, floating point calcuations etc... That debate is purely academic and it seriously doesn't make a noticable difference. What's more important is the user interface and how easy it is to accomplish what you want. lets just say that some things are easier to do on Mac (eg graphic design) and others easier on PC (eg business tools like Word and Excel).
I'm still getting used to the single button mouse.
iLife is a nice interface but I wish it would integrate an option for my elgato TV tuner.
Comic life is brilliant so expect to see some comics when i can be bothered.
A few annoying bits. like mini DVI??? given the size and weight of the macbook (it's a bit of a porker for its screen size) there's no need to use a non-standard port that doesn't save that much space. mini DVI is rubbish and is just a cynical ploy by apple to suck more money out of you by having to buy their proprietary connectors. Most of the time the mac does what you want, and automatically second guesses you. except when you want to do something unusual. then it's over-simplified user interface make it impossible to get it to do what you want.
A pleasant surprise was the native UNIX terminal. vastly superior to terminal emulators on PC. makes life easy for me to connect to UNIX and LINUX servers.
They say once you try mac you can't go back. well from what I've found so far, this is a load of rubbish. mac is a great machine excellent at some things but inferior at others. for my needs, I'm not giving up a PC just yet.

what if google became EVIL?

many of you know Google's unofficial motto is "Don't be Evil". So far so good. They haven't done anything evil. They give you lots of goodies either free or as loss leaders. which brings me to my point. Their business model relies on internet advertising and marketing. This has been an unproven and not too profitable market sector. The correlation between clicks and cash is pretty low and thus correlation between userbase and revenues is also pretty weak. they've added all these services like maps, checkout, spreadsheets etc. problem is that while these are great for us users, for Google they're all free or loss making.
so they'll have to either use their advertising income to substitute them (reducing their not so spectacular profitability) or eventually turn them into profitable businesses. Do you really think google office can take on Microsoft without subsidisation? What happens in a few years time when shareholders want a better return and decide a PE of 40+ is unrealistic?
Google's core strength is its searching capabilities. given it is currently storing and OWNS zillions of Terrabytes of your personal information and data stored in gmail, Writely, Google Spreadsheets etc... will the temptation be to onsell this info to third parties for data mining? those third parties will be able to intrude into your personal life on a scale never seen before.
Even more frightening a scenario is what if google sells access to your data to Big Brother? Can you imagine life under Googlevore!
its all good now, but remember things can change in a hurry. Google's now a public company and as such subject the the same performance criteria and pressures as everyone else. If the shares don't perform, the board and management can be tossed out pretty quickly. don't think for a second that a privacy statement protects your private personal information either. That's simple to get around with creative company structuring. There are no guarantees that google won't turn. They've already started lobbying US presidential candidates. Is this the beginning?

one for all you heathans

I'm one of those individuals who fills out census forms claiming he's a Jedi Knight. Well more like a Padawan, I haven't mastered levitation or that mind control thingy yet.
anyway, no surprise i found this post on how to start your on religion by Captain Smack hillarious. praise be to Steph for pointing it out.
now to start my own religion. whats there not to like. you get groupies, offerings and you become a tax exempt entity.

Duck Confit

I made Duck Confit for Mother's Day lunch. anyway for those of you not familiar with it, Duck Confit is basically salted duck slow cooked in duck/goose fat. quite possibly the most heart attack inducing substance known to man *god bless the french*. technically confit should be left a few months to "develop" (mmm moldy old meat) but I didn't have the organisation skills to start the process in January. honestly I didn't figure what I was going to make for the mums until late friday night.
To my credit I did manage to plan for some extra duck legs and a clean jar, so I did get some proper confit out of the exercise. at the moment I'm slowly watching the duck fat congeal and thinking of my abused arteries.

Miami Vice

back in high school, miami vice was about the hottest show going around. I even did the suit and tshirt thing. embarassing as that may seem, its not quite as bad as the jacket and bike shorts look or the MC Hammer bolero jacket and parachute pants look. but my crimes against fashion are another story.
anyway i decided to check out the remake movie of Miami Vice on dvd and I gotta say... WHAT A LOAD OF STEAMING EXCREMENT! I've realised now that I only liked the old series for the ultra cool toys. what this movie needed was a bit more blatant product placement, enough Ferraris, Learjets and speedboats oh yeah and explosions can cover up a lack of plot and bad acting. then there were the chase scenes *yawn* and the hot women were totally missing. instead they cast Gong Li (who is usually a great actress) as a Latino drug queen??? WTF!!! Apart from the obvious, her Latino impersonation was as good as David Carradine's or Peter Ustinov's chinese, and don't get me started on that.
At least they gave up on the neo-nazi white supremist subplot early on in the movie. Imagine sending a black vice cop to infiltrate a neo-nazi group.