Monthly Archives: June 2012

Value for money

Venetian masks 2008
 I said I’m pleased with my new Panasonic DVR but I’m just discovering how good it is.
I put on a music CD this morning for the first time. It recognised it and played it but also put a track list up on the screen with the titles and times of all the tracks! I’ve never seen this before. It’s obvious now: all this information is encoded in the TOC (table of contents) in the inner track of a CD, but you can’t usually see it on a CD player.
Then after a minute or two, it switched the TV screen to a screen-saver display of quite good built-in photos of mountains, trees, flowers and so on. Nice! I’m sure I’ll become blase about it soon enough, but I’m impressed at the moment.
But wait, there’s more: I’ve had a DVD for a while with 24 old Sgt Bilko episodes in black and white that someone gave me (thanks Colin). They’re in .avi format, downloaded from the web. I’ve played one or two on the computer, but it wasn’t the ideal way to watch.
I just put it into the Panasonic to see what would happen. Bingo! It recognises them as playable by the DiVX decoder and lists them on screen complete with titles. Select one, press play and Ernie’s your sergeant.
Amazing.

Lese majeste

(C) PJ Croft 2008

I’ve just sent the following to Media Watch:

I couldn’t believe it. Last night’s Thames Jubilee Pageant was a once in a generation, once in a lifetime, once in 350 year never to be repeated event, but the ABC cut us off early!

I have it recorded so I’m not making this up.

I knew the event was scheduled to run from 2.00pm to 6.00pm UK time (GMT of course). No need to take my word for it, see http://www.thamespageantlive.com/  That’s 10.00pm to 02:00am WST (GMT+8hrs) and 12:00midnight to 04:00am EST (GMT+10hrs)

In fact the broadcast started at 8.30pm WST on ABC24, two hours before the official parade start, so that was good.

But at 01:00am WST (5:00pm GMT), our ABC cut us off and ended the broadcast, at least one hour before the end of the pageant!! We never got to see the fireworks from the Tower Bridge – I didn’t know about those until I saw the French news on SBS this morning.

As well, at the very moment “our ABC” ended the coverage, we were seeing a historic image – the RPO were playing The Sailors’ Hornpipe and the royal family were doing a little jig on the barge! I doubt this has ever been seen before, but we were cut off. I’m absolutely disgusted. It’s too late now – it can’t be fixed, it can’t be undone, it can’t be repeated. Historic vision, and “our ABC” cut us off.

The other atrocity is that the ABC News 24 news ticker was left on the bottom of the screen for the entire broadcast! While we were trying to see this amazing royal spectacle, the news ticker was telling us “Broncos defeat Sea Eagles in NRL thriller”, “Body parts found in bush grave”, “New domestic violence laws target emotional abuse” and other endlessly repeated bullshit, ad nauseum!

I tried to adjust my TV display size to force it off the bottom of the screen with some success but not enough. I tried to train my eyes to ignore it, with the same result. I ended up having to use a strip of gaffer tape across the bottom of the screen to block it off. I switched to the 2 hour delayed feed on ABC1 to get away from it, but that was in considerably degraded Standard Def and since it was 2hrs delayed, a waste of space.

SO I AM ANGRY. I have this recorded so I think I’m going to do some screen grabs and send them to the BBC to say, “Look how the ABC graffitied your pictures. Look how the Australian ABC made a travesty of this unrepeatable event by ending it early.”  Copy to Buckingham Palace. “Look Queenie – the ABC buggered you up.”

I can only hope some other organisation will release this in its unvandalised form on BluRay. Can’t rely on “our ABC”.

Yours in sadness and disillusionment

Ho hum

Those who fail to learn the lessons from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
George Santayana
I’ve just been reading of what it’s like to be in Greece at the moment:
It is a country where the fascists and the anarchists battle for control of the streets, where immigrants fear to go out at night and where a woman whispers “it’s like the Weimar republic” as a motorcycle cavalcade from the Golden Dawn party, devotees of Adolf Hitler, cruises past the parliament building. Graffiti says: “Foreigners get out of Greece. Greece is for the Greeks. I will vote for Golden Dawn to remove the filth from the country.”
(The Guardian, Larry Elliot, economics editor)
Greece is in such trouble because their government and financial authorities ran up huge debts, told lies to the European financial authorities, generally spent money with no regard to repaying it and the whole country avoided paying their taxes.

“Practically all the banks are bankrupt and there has been a very large redistribution of wealth in favour of the rich.”

This is the point: there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in favour of the rich, worldwide and it’s going on every day, faster and faster. That old saying about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is not only true, it’s completely, outrageously true.

There’s not a day goes by when there’s not some new item about the outrageous financial dirty dealing going on in the world. The Facebook IPO stands out – here’s everyone’s favourite web business run by a fresh faced Bill Gates lookalike who decided to let everyone get a slice of the action.
The shares were offered to the public at $38, but only a couple of weeks later they’re worth about $28 and falling. If you were a small investor, you’ve lost a lot of your money.
But:
  • the company placed shares with big Wall Street banks and institutions days before the actual day of listing;
  • the company also warned the big financial institutions weeks before the listing that profit forecasts were not looking as good as predicted;
  • that allowed the big boys to short the shares before they were listed so they still made a profit even in a falling market;
  • the head of Facebook, that cheery faced kid, sold some of his shares this week for about $1 billion;
  • as the head of the company, those shares didn’t cost him anything, so that $1 billion is pure profit for him.
If that isn’t dirty dealing, I don’t know what is. The unsophisticated investors lost their money, but the owner and the big boys won their profits from them.
What about the lessons of history? They are being repeated and it’s the little people who are being hurt.
But worse, it’s financial instability like this (the Weimar Republic referred to above) that led to WWII and other conflicts. When people get scared and desperate, they do desperate things and mistakes  spiral out of control.
Not far away from Greece is Syria, where terrible things are happening with the active support of Russia. The Russian government is supplying arms to the Syrian government forces who are shelling and murdering their own citizens. When we (the rest of the civilised world) try to stop the violence, Russia blocks us.
This is the same Russia that has threatened recently to wage war on NATO, including using nuclear weapons, if NATO installs an anti-missile shield to protect against Iran.
Iran meanwhile, has enough material to  make 5 nuclear weapons and now has missiles capable of putting a satellite into orbit. That’s why NATO wants a missile shield over Europe.
Spain and Italy, meanwhile, are tottering on the financial cliff edge too. Britain is now so poor that they are scrapping large parts of their armed forces.
Even in the  days of the Cold War, I don’t remember things being as dangerous as they are now.  WA would have to be one of the world’s safest places, we hope.

My fallout shelter