Another great TED talk, this one from Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International.

Her talk is well worth a watch, under five minutes, and pretty disturbing. I wouldn’t call the US a well functioning democracy, but at least it’s functioning. However with an increasingly uninformed population, and a government openly spreading propaganda, one wonders how long they’ve got.

I guess some of the blame must lie with ol’ Rupert.

Stumbled across these seriously nice looking offices the other day. I have office envy. Although perhaps the nice offices are to make up for the fact that they make marketing software, blurgh.

Eventhough I’ve never had one, it’s pretty obvious to me that private offices are the best option in terms of productivity for concentration-workers [1]. I also want a pony.

Browsing on officesnapshots.com, it seems most tech companies still don’t go for private offices. Or perhaps it’s just that the “cool”, “hip” companies are all too edgy to have private offices … man.

A special dishonorable mention for the flickr offices, cube farm without proper cubes even! Photo by mylesdgrant.

The new Mozzilla offices come a close second, saved by the fact that presumably they’re planning to fit them out a little better. RedHat aren’t really trying either, in Brazil at least.

I don’t mind the look of the Last.fm office, although it reminds me of the “lab” at Uni, which was not the most productive place in the world – although fun.

I can forgive some of the smaller companies for having grungy startup style offices where everyone’s sharing a beanbag, but for the bigger companies I just don’t get it. You’re paying all these programmers to build your products, so you pack them all in a room together where they can’t concentrate? I guess the upfront costs are too much for the accountants.

Even the companies that do make an effort, seem to focus more on gimmicky stuff, cafeterias, break-out rooms etc. The core office spaces, where you’re going to have to spend some time – face it – aren’t that special. One aspect of that is probably that “cool” stuff is better for marketing yourself to potential employees, just don’t mention that at some point they will have to do actual work.

Part of Google’s Zurich office, photo from Picasa (which has no visible copyright info?)

So I guess for a while at least, a lot of programmers and the like will continue to get their best work done in the wee hours of the morning or night, when all is quiet and the logic flows.

Or perhaps we should just all work from home, then we can all have our own personal perfect office, and  we could stop worrying about petrol too.

[1]: I just made that up. But I mean anyone whos work involves concentrating on one task for tens of minutes at a time, like for example programming

Is it just me, or is Ubuntu Hardy sucking so far?

So far I’ve got:

• Pidgin: randomly segfaults, glibc double free etc.
• Rhythmbox: randomly segfaults, no stack trace?
• F-Spot: randomly dies, it always did, but it’s more common now.
• Epiphany: dies sometimes loading flash – that’s probably flash player’s fault though.
• Metacity: vertical maximisation is broken, very annoying.
• Kernel: fails to resume more often than previously, sometimes locks up completely when undocking.

The killer is when you try to file a bug report you’re supposed to attach the info from /var/crash, but I have nothing in /var/crash!

Can I have my money back?

Another great campaign from the folks at GetUp.

It seems the honeymoon is over, and not only is Kevin Rudd means testing the Solar PV rebate, now he’s trying to derail an international treaty to ban cluster bombs! I haven’t seen anything in the news, but I guess that’s just part of the conspiracy.

So go sign the petition to ban the bombs.

I also liked part of their intro:

As one of the very last acts of the Howard Government, Brendan Nelson bought $14 million worth of cluster bombs – weapons that contain mini-bombs, some of which remain unexploded on the ground for years awaiting innocent civilians.

I wonder how many 5¢ petrol vouchers you could buy with that?

ps. everyone’s already subscribed to GetUp’s email list right?

In case you haven’t already been, get along to Hume to check out the new climbing gym. It’s run by the same folks who run the Mitchell gym, and it’s brand spanking new, no shiny worn-out holds!

There’s a bunch more routes, and they seem to be more interesting than the Mitchell ones. Although perhaps that’s just because I’ve been to Mitchell a million times. Still, there’s a bigger bouldering cave, a whacky roof section, a bouldering mezzannine, and stacks of overhanging routes.

We went along on Friday and really enjoyed the variety. I took a few shots, but they don’t really do it justice, it’s at least twice as big as it looks in any of the photos. And as you can see it’s pretty empty, so get along while there’s plenty of room!

View the photos »

Oops. I just realised I’ve been pushing the wrong photos onto the web in some instances, eg. when I edit a photo it’s been publishing the original version, not the editted one, crud!

Anyway, so if you’ve ever looked at any of my photos, now you have to look at them all again, because now they’re better.

A couple of weekends ago we spent a sunny Sunday morning out at the Cotter catchment planting trees. It was organised by the mountaineering club, and run by Greening Australia – it was sponsored, at least in part I think, by Snowgum, so we got 10% off vouchers for our efforts.

The Greening Australia guys picked out a slightly trickier than usual site for us, seeing as they figured we had all climbed Everest and all. So we were planting the side of hill, an area of old pine plantation that had been burnt out by the fires.

They kitted us out with picks and shovels, buckets of trees, a bit of water crystals and fertiliser – and little white wind guards for every second tree. We had to dig the holes, although there’d been some sort of earth ripper thing through a few months back which had dug small furrows where we dug – so it was pretty easy going.

All in all we planted somewhere around 700 trees in about three hours or so, that was with 25 odd people. Not a bad effort. And to top it all of they cooked us sausages, just about the best sausages I’ve ever eaten I reckon.

There’s plenty more trees to be planted, so hopefully we’ll find time to get out there again, if you get the chance I highly reccomend it.

View the photos »

It was Mothers’ day! Yay. There were mothers falling from the sky, left right and center. And sausages too, so we BBQ’ed some. Tops.

And not a bad spot for a BBQ either.

I made a cake, pineapple and bannana, with lemon icing (OK Meg made the icing). Yum.

View the photos »

Spent last Saturday night hanging out with The Panics at the ANU refec. They were awesome, their live sound is superb. They played a bunch of songs off the new album, as well as a few old favourites. Still with 50 odd songs just on their three albums and a few EPs, they could play all night and I would still be listening.

Both supports were really quite good – although neither did a good job of clearly stating their names – which makes it hard to plug them! It seems they were called Oh Mercy and Little Red.

We’ll see you there next time they’re in town!

(photo is copyright kairin, some rights reserved)

I won’t try and recreate any of his jokes, promise, you had to be there. There was the Canberra Theatre last weekish, and it was an excellent show. The man is damn funny, even if he would be locked up in some countries.

I particularly liked it when he called a bunch of giggling girls just near us “a pack of sluts” – not knowing they were sitting there with their mothers – at which point the crowd broke into laughter which then immediately turned into hushed mutters of disapproval. So fickle.

(photo is copyright ollyfarrell, some rights reserved)