ANZAC Day

I do worry about the dignity of Anzac Day.

I see young hoards descending upon Gallipoli, a killing field and a cemetery, in bright T-shirts whooping & cheering, I see breakfast TV presenters and their OB crews switching back and forth between locations, interviewing each other keenly, commentating upon proceedings, and rabbitting on about the “celebrations”. I see the whole thing becoming something of a spectacle. The tone of the day is, in places, less about respect than it ought to be.

When I was a kid, they told us about the wars and how so many, many men had gone off and not come home, many ending up simply buried and left to rot under the battlefields upon which they fell in their tens of thousands. I sat there and thanked God that it wasn’t my generation that had had to endure it, and then wondered if ever the same may come to pass for us one day. I truly came to understand the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I”, which to me has always been a central tenet of Anzac Day.

I understand that I was born a mere 26 years after the end of World War Two, and that it, and to some extent even the First World War, were still strong in living memory, and that as the generations roll over the perspective and the understanding of Anzac Day will need to evolve to survive and stay relevant, especially in view of the service and sacrifice of new generations of diggers, fighting some other incompetent diplomat’s pointless wars.

But I really feel that at its core, Anzac Day needs to be a day of quiet reflection, and, yes, profound regret, that, no matter how long ago it was now, ordinary people had to go off and be slaughtered so appallingly at the hands of forces they had no real idea about. And that it is still happening.

The only thought I have on Anzac Day is: Those Poor Bastards.

Lest We Forget.

 

Margaret Thatcher’s Wake

Reactions to Margaret Thatcher’s passing have ranged from the usual careful official public words, to each extreme end of the commemoration spectrum, from those partisan parties both for and against this woman with a most singular legacy.
As a result, side-discussion has arisen about the appropriate way to discuss so public and so divisive a figure so recently passed. Some feel that it is open season immediately on Mrs Thatcher, in open and deliberate defiance of the usual social mores in her specific case.

I for one revile, albeit understand, the dancing-on-her-grave approach taken by those who were her bitter opponents, or those who see themselves still as the victims of her politics.
The issue here though is basic decency. To assert that someone is undeserving of the basic dignity and respect generally afforded to people who have recently passed just because they have been a controversial public figure is morally bankrupt and intellectually fraudulent.

What we say about people upon their passing, particularly, I think, after a long and somewhat ignominious decline, says a lot more about us than it does about them. We need to make sure that we maintain standards about ourselves that we are happy to live with, because one day we are going to expect the benefit of the same decency. To attack viciously the recently passed is to throw out a little bit of our humanity with the bathwater.

“Don’t speak ill of the dead” does not preclude an honest and open discussion about a person’s life and legacy. Far from it. But it does caution against careless slander and ridicule. It dictates that when someone has passed, they are entitled to fair treatment and honest discourse. It does not mean that we have to universally laud them and their time among us, although some people erroneously or perhaps generously interpret it that way.

And so to Margaret Thatcher. I was too young to really understand anything about her politics; I just remember her as many will – a strong leader who shaped her corner of the world inexorably, and strode the world like a colossus (collossusess…?). One of the triumvirate of world leaders along with Reagan & Gorbachev who steered the world through the 1980s and to the blessed end of the Cold War.

A wise man (to whom I did not concede the appropriate level of credibility at the time) once told me that if one needed to hate a politician, one should hate their politics, not hate the person. At the time I was unable to make that separation. I am seeing half a world full of people with the same problem at the moment. They would all do well to remember themselves and to return to aspiring to be decent people first, and put all other considerations second.

Let us consign Baroness Thatcher to history in a way that will have our society remembered as one that it was worth her time & effort to serve, and one whose legacy it is worth the time & effort of future historians to recall.

The Alan Jones Affair – A Sign Of The Times

Not that I strive to be topical, quite the opposite, but the Alan Jones thing has certainly flooded the media today.

What Jones said was inexcusable. I never had any time for the man or his ilk beforehand anyway; they carry no credibility with me whatsoever, being professionally opinionated bigmouths. But that was bad. Bad by simple community standards of decency, leaving aside considerations of specific personalities or political juxtapositions.

That said, his myriad vocal critics then went on to dismantle their own credibility. On Twitter and elsewhere the wild vitriol was palpable, and meshed in perfectly with our burgeoning culture of outrage-as-a-passtime. One silly old bugger making one off-the-cuff comment at a private function shouldn’t be enough to cause national outrage. In any case, Jones manufactured the ammunition, but it was the reporting journalist that loaded and fired the gun, for his own selfish motives.

Increasingly, it seems that the real-time public feedback loop engendered by chiefly Twitter but other lines of communication also has fostered an atmosphere in which people go looking for things to be utterly outraged at as an exercise, where once a disapproving shake of the head would have sufficed. There seems to be evolving an open-source thought-police model whereby anyone who speaks a heresy, whose definition is broadening daily, is subject to public vitriol and alienation at the whim of what is essentially an instant bandwagon culture. This happens largely in the absence of any collective introspection. This is the most dangerous aspect of it.

Alan Jones’ critics did nothing for their own credibility during the firestorm on Twitter that erupted after the news broke, and it only got worse during the live broadcast of the press conference during which Jones apologised. The jeering masses blotted their own copybook by

- carrying on about a rambling press conference which was i) completely unedited, a genuine Tasmanian-Tiger-level rarity, so of course it looked long & ineloquent, and ii) fuelled and egged on by journalists continually angling for a killer quote/further gaffe.
- resolutely refusing to listen to anything that he actually said, and wilfully & serially misquoting him in real time.
So there was idiocy aplenty on both sides.

Social ostracism is nothing new, and snooty fools from all walks of life have been using it since time immemorial to mete out punishment to those who have transgressed society’s precious mores. But the bandwagon-full-of-dynamite-rolling-down-a-hill potential of the net in terms of its speed and sheer reach beg some new consideration along the lines of making sure that the facts are served. It’s probably a plaintive cry amidst the mob, but the fact that the mob is so big and loud, and so very very instantly and iteratively self-reinforcing of its own views, make that cry all the more important.

In short, for critics of any kind to maintain the moral and intellectual high ground, and to therefore continue to deserve any kind of audience, cold reason and adherence to the rules of fairness need to prevail at all times. As soon as the usual human mob mentality takes over and emotive garbage starts overwhelming the real conversation that should be taking place, nobody is saying anything useful, and the whole thing descends into a horrible waste of electrons.

So for future reference, all you fun-loving mob revellers out there, put away your pitchforks, listen properly, think carefully, then react rationally. By all means kick the guilty. But make damn sure that when you’re asked about it afterwards you can still defend all of your words with joined-up-reason & confidence. Otherwise you’re just noise.

An Open Letter To My Service Providers

For the attention of my Service Providers. Those to whom I subscribe for various modern facilities. The financial institutions, the power company, the insurance company, the water authority, and those various govt agencies that fit into the same category, et al.

I am quite sick to death of receiving and accumulating paper-based accostments from you.
Statements. Newsletters. Notifications. Advertising.
Week on week, year on year, this paper conveyor belt arrives in my letter box, to be largely summarily disregarded and discarded.

We are well and truly into the 21st Century here, people. And since well before it started we have had the gift of electronic communication, which has now been refined to the point where it can be used to obviate the vast majority of this archaic influx of paper.

I completely understand that for legal and practical reasons that perhaps invoices, bills, and the like may need to be delivered in hard copy. Until society’s legal framework can have equal confidence in the efficacy of electronic communication perhaps this practice may need to continue. But bills are but a very small proportion of, and do not by association excuse, the bulk of the paper that I pull from my letterbox year on year.

Whist individually these communiques are annoying, superfluous, largely unread, and somewhat wasteful; cumulatively, when everything that gets mailed out to everyone in the country is considered collectively, they are massively costly, contributing in no small part to operating costs and therefore directly to the fees that I am compelled to pay you year on year, they are also massively, hideously wasteful of resources, from the production of the paper through to the energy required for delivery. In this day and age of taking reasonable steps to reduce waste of resources, this bad corporate habit is nothing short of culpable. If this accursed Carbon Tax is to become a reality, then I advocate that you be charged $1 per piece of paper you send to us. Including the envelope.

The electronic option is entirely practical and achievable, and would save you buckets of money on raw materials and postage. You already have the technology available within your walls to convert all of this guff to PDF and to send it to us electronically, so that we can, in the same manner we manage all other communication these days, access it wherever we go, read it, print it if we really need to, and file it in searchable repository which takes up no physical space at all. The convenience value to your increasingly tech-savvy, and, i assume, valuable, customer base should not be underestimated.

I currently and will continue to favour where possible organisations that follow this strategy.

For your consideration.

The Great iTunes Conspiracy

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every runaway success there is an equal and opposite backlash.

So it is with iTunes. Despite being the structural hub of a suite of products that has, without any exaggeration, revolutionized media distribution, telecommunications, home computing, and skateboarding with headphones, there are those that revile it. Most of the complaints are quite vague, some are specific. The chief complaint I hear is that you have to have iTunes to update your Apple devices, and to copy data to and from them. This is too controlling, too restrictive. How dare they tell us how we can copy data to and from our own devices?
The same basic rhetoric spews forth from app developers complaining about the restrictions placed upon their app development.

I am not an Apple fanboy – I lost the love after Sculley ousted Jobs back in ’85. I still love everything they built prior to that – a small part of me still thinks of the Apple ][e as the most advanced thing I’ve ever seen. I look at their later creations objectively and critically. And it is in this spirit that I felt I had to step in to put a few words forward in defense of iTunes and the iDevice ecosystem.

It is quite empirically true that the Apple ecosystem is a fairly prescriptive – that is not to say restrictive – one. But to accuse Apple of maintaining tight control for the sake of that control is quite incorrect.

As anyone who has ever worked in IT support, and in particular in support of corporate desktop fleets, knows, if you don’t design well and then maintain some level of control over the fleet you’re charged with supporting, it will go to hell in a hat box in about five minutes, and then it is All Your Fault, and you are expected to fix it in half the time it took the users to wreck it.
The answer is the Standard Operating Environment, or SOE. Everything is built to a tight specification, which hopefully meets the company’s requirements, and things are locked down to maintain the standard. Support and maintenance structures are built into the background to keep things running. There is a standard way of doing most things, and if it has been built correctly, it just works. At least, that is the utopian ideal. To go into why many SOE implementations fall short would take me the lifecycles of at least a couple of laptops, and despite my accustomed in-print peregrinations, even I will not deign to digress that far.

The point is, Apple are merely doing the same thing. They have set themselves the task of producing products that Just Work(tm), that are very easy for non-technical people to use, and which are easy for them to support successfully across the world. Ultimately this benefits their customers just as much as it does Apple; it’s not some conspiracy designed to rob people of their freedom of choice. It’s this symbiosis that has made the Apple product suite a commercial leviathan and the envy of every other tech company that ever existed.

So the next time you feel like complaining about how Apple does things, you need to remember that there would be no enormous upside to the Apple product in front of you without the extremely well-thought-out supporting infrastructure, of which iTunes is a huge part, that you take completely for granted and in fact complain about. They know what they’re doing and they make it so that you don’t have to. Be grateful someone has gone to all that trouble.

Just Briefly: The ABC Chopper Crash

A lot has already been said since we heard the unassimilable news that an ABC chopper had come down near Lake Eyre and that the three men on board, the very well known Paul Lockyer among them, were feared dead. Tributes have been flowing freely.
That these three men were consummate professionals, good men, and very dear to all of their family, friends, and colleagues alike, goes without saying. But there is more to be said.

I am the first to be critical of the excesses of the national media. Some of the nonsense that spews forth, the indulgence of self-interest that is often so apparent, the abandonment of quality standards for the advancement of cynically turning a dollar, all combine to disgust me on a regular basis.

But the ABC, despite the usual background babble of its I-Feel-I-Must-Have-An-Opinion critics, has always been an oasis in the media-ethics desert I sometimes feel we are subject to. Aunty has provided us with coverage of regional, national, and international news that I for one have often clamoured to watch in preference to commercial media, not to mention often being the only friend for some people in remote parts of the country. The coverage it gives us seems natural, down-to-earth, and unaffected. A breath of fresh air at every turn. It has increased and helped us maintain our national awareness and cohesiveness, while asking nothing in return.
In short, it is a genuine national asset.

I watched the coverage of the chopper crash with a sense of loss. The men who lost their lives have been called Journalist, Pilot, Cameraman; but in my view they were not just professionals doing a job. Working for the organisation they worked for, doing the job that they were doing, whether they understood it or not, they were most definitely working in unselfish service of their country. Oh, certainly they wouldn’t have done the job if they didn’t love it, and the intrinsic rewards they derived from their careers were obviously well worth any associated privations. But I only hope that they halfway understood the way in which they made a genuine contribution to the place. Without work like this, by people like these, under the auspices of an organisation like the ABC, we would be blind to so much of our own country, its shape, its upheavals, and the people in it.

We owe Paul Lockyer, Gary Ticehurst, and John Bean a debt of gratitude. We should all of us hang our heads in a long moment’s contemplation of what this country would be like without people like them to tie it together. We are richer for having had the benefit of their brilliant work, and poorer for them having passed from among us.

All comfort to Paul, Gary, and John’s families, friends, and colleagues, and fellowship to our countrymen at the ABC at this sad time.

Living In The Future

I am not particularly old.

When I was a kid, both of my grandmothers cooked on wood stoves out in the country. One, maybe both, baked bread. My grandfathers chopped the wood for the stove. With an axe.

One of them had a party-line telephone, meaning that a handle on the phone connected to a small internal generator was wound vigorously to send a current out and ring a bell at the local switchboard, at which point you could ask the operator to connect you to those with whom you wished to speak. For incoming calls, you had to correctly identify the pattern of rings that came from the phone, otherwise you would be intercepting other peoples phonecalls. Because the party-line was effectively wired in a big local loop, everybody could listen in on everybody else’s phonecalls simply by lifting the receiver.
Even for people in the cities with normal phones, you had to dial your local exchange and ask to be put through to long-distance connections by an operator. On popular trunk lines you even had to “book” calls.

The term “Service Station” did what it said on the tin. The attendant came out and filled your tank up for you, checked your oil and water, and cleaned your windscreen.

ATMs did not exist, or at least had not reached these shores. Credit cards were mostly unheardof. Everybody dealt in cash, and people had to line up at the pay window on pay day to get a yellow envelope. When you went to the supermarket (the concept of the “super”market had not been around all that long), you put your groceries into a wooden frame on the checkout and the check-out girls had to pull it towards them (thus emptying the frame for the next customer) to start ringing them through. Manually, of course, by reading the price labels on each product and entering it into a register that looked like nothing so much as a companion piece to a beige 1946 Ford. And would probably have stood up well in a collision with one.
Shopping hours were strictly 8:30-5pm weekdays. You made sure you had enough cash, petrol, food, and anything else you needed for the whole weekend. The pubs of course were open. And the churches.
The other exception was the corner shop, which may have stocked a few necessities. Their smell of swept wooden floors, and of their groceries, their somewhat dank lighting, and their idiosyncratic shopkeepers is something we’ll not see the like of again.

Air conditioning was a rarely-experienced fantasy in the biggest shops. The concept of air conditioning in cars, homes, and schools was nothing short of laughable.

Mobile phones were strictly in the realm of ridiculous Dick Tracy and Maxwell Smart fantasy. Phones *in the home* weren’t even ubiquitous, let alone phones that you could carry around.

FM Radio…..? What’s that?? AM radios were sold with regionalised dials with the callsigns of local stations on their dials instead of numbers. And there was no such thing as AM stereo.

For state-of-the-art home entertainment, “Hi-Fi” was the standard. Big record players with big speakers and a discrete amplifier. The era of vinyl was still in full swing with no suggestion it could ever end. Kids who handled records in shops were frowned at because of their fragility. And we were never allowed to “put a record on” because of the high chance of little hands scratching the records with the needle.

In the capital cities and periphery, we were fortunate, as we had four TV stations, 0, 2, 7, and 9. In regional areas, there was only half that; the local equivalent of 2 (the government broadcaster) and a local commercial station. Of course, these were all in black and white, and they didn’t even broadcast all day, and to change between them you had to actually walk to the TV after having convinced your parents you weren’t going to break their expensive piece of relatively newfangled technology by touching it, and rotate a heavily-sprung channel dial with accompanying thunk-thunk-thunk noise. There were quite limited broadcast hours, and the “test pattern” in the intervening hours was a dreaded item of boredom.
Home VCRs did not exist. Recording one programme  off the TV whilst watching a second, and then watching the recorded show back later, was a heady dream we did not dare to have lest our little hearts burst.
If you had two TVs in a family you were rich.

Air travel was expensive. Only-taken-by-the-rich expensive. And an elitist thing to indulge in. Real people caught trains.

Seatbelts in cars were not unheardof, however they were generally  restricted to the front seat, and there were plenty of cars still on the road with none at all. Babies were brought home from the hospital in their often unrestrained mothers’ arms.
Manual cars had two- or three-on-the-tree and a front bench seat. A car radio was a rare option. The car heater for the winter months certainly existed, but the smell it emitted generally meant you were better off without it.
Japanese cars were a bit of a niche that certain people indulged in, for some reason. Nobody really took them seriously. Only rich people drove European cars.
If you had two cars in a family you were rich.

Teenagers spent their 20c pieces in pinball machines. There was nothing else. Rich households may have procured a TV-connectable game of “Tennis” which was a $300 game of pong. Thus was the harbinger of our modern times.

As I look back at all of this, it all seems very familiar. These days it probably seems as though it is the collected dim rememberings of an octogenarian trying to justify how “everything was better back then”. But I am 40. All of this stuff was the norm a bit over 30 years ago. Which no longer feels like a very long time.

Now…..tonight I sat and helped my daughter put a virtual ensemble outfit on a virtual doll in an app on the iPad, a touchscreen device that can be bent to almost any purpose, including, very easily, face-to-face communication with anyone anywhere in the world at a few moments’ notice. I can get pretty much any information, see any vision, hear any song, buy any damn thing I like, communicate with whomever I like…….watch the world……..all through moving my fingers around on a single pane of glass.

I can…..
– Fly to the other side of the country with as little as a day’s notice for a few hundred dollars;
– Get most things I could want 24 hours a day 7 days a week;
– Be contacted anywhere via pretty much any means I choose by virtue of a small device I carry around in my pocket, on which I can also take brilliant photographs and distribute them to any part of the world in a matter of seconds, get any news I like, buy anything I like, sell anything I like, read any book I like, find my way around reliably with the help of a network of satellites up in space, and do pretty much anything else I can think of;
– Watch NASA missions in space *LIVE* and in high definition (okay, not any more as such but until recently);
– Watch TV and movies in my car;
– Choose from, hell, I don’t even know how many TV channels for free, all in huge high-definition colour, and I can buy access to more TV if I want (but, honestly, why??);
– Get music and movies to enjoy at home that are crystal clear on disks that are unbreakable excepting by dint of considerable effort;
– Sit in comfort in a T-shirt regardless of the prevailing weather pretty much anywhere I choose to go;
– And, for the most part, any combination of the above.

I sometimes find reconciling the above catalogue of amenities of a world gone by (to borrow a phrase from David Brin) with my life these days difficult, and that’s coming from someone who has worked in IT for 15 years. The old-timey list of life’s realities above still feels so very familiar, and yet nary a trace of any of it is still apparent from day to day. Is the world a more fun place? Definitely, I think. Is is better? I dunno. That’s subjective.

But I do know that my generation was the last to have the experience of the old world, at least the suburbia portion of which was a fairly consistent place between 1946 and 1980, by and large. We were the last to live in the time prior to the crashing wave of the technological revolution. For those that came after us, the world of pervasive, rampaging technological advance is all that they have ever known.
We knew what was happening. We could see the revolution hitting. Even with the first wave. The pocket calculators, the VCRs, the hand-held LCD games, the portable tape players, the digital watches along with all of the other digital readouts that suddenly appeared, the ATMs. We knew what was going on, even if we couldn’t really conceive of where it would lead or that the pace of change would only and ever accelerate.
We are in fact one of few generations to bestride the change. And I wonder about the effect of that. I sometimes feel that despite the fact we have taken to the new world like fish to water, there is an element of automatic comparison to how things were “before”. Perhaps it’s as simple as nostalgia. But something in me wonders how later generations would cope if presented with things as they once were. I sometimes wonder how well *we’re* coping. The term “Future Shock” was first used in my presence probably 30 years ago in reference to a story about someone from a hundred years ago turning up in the present day. But the term can probably be applied to people living during such times as these. I wonder if it will apply to every generation from now on.

In any case, the times we live in are exciting and unique – to a much greater extent than most people realise. I for one am grateful for the opportunity to see come to pass almost everything cool that we used to think of as coming “in the future” when we were kids. Well, the future is here. All the more sobering when you consider how a society such as ours would have been thought of by, for example, the Romans with our voice-activated lighting, long-distance travel, and astounding medicine. More sobering still are the possibilities that await people another two thousand years hence. It’s quite something to consider our place on the timeline of history.

I retain a strong affection for the time before 1980 when I was a kid. Probably a lot to do with the fact that I was a kid, all play no work, kind of thing. There will always be stuff I miss about it. But also that we didn’t have everything, and not everything was easy.
Now of course, pretty much everything *is* easy. I wouldn’t trade our current advantages for anything. Living In The Future is, invariably, awesome.