Back to school

I’ve been to University a lot. My original undergraduate degree, and two post-graduate degrees. (A Grad cert in Management and a Masters in Communication). When I finished the last one I swore that was it – I was never going back…

Turns out – I lied.

I’ll be starting my new degree in February – a Juris Doctor at UTS. It’ll take me about 5 years, part-time but at the end I’ll be able to be admitted to the bar.

Which will make a nice change from getting thrown out of bars.

No Clean Feed

Many Australians by now are aware of Senator Stephen “Won’t someone think of the Children” Conroy’s plan for ISP filtering for anything that concerns the Australian Government.

While they started out telling us there would be an “opt out” option it now transpires it won’t be a true “opt out” as there will be some things that the government will still stop you seeing (purely for your own good of course).

That pisses me off

So – if it pisses you off here’s what you can do

Write to Senator Conroy

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

Write to your local member

Check out No Clean Feed

Talk to other people about this – get them to write to Senator Conroy.

You get the idea.

Not only does Daylight savings put the hens off the lay

It apparently also causes drought

Drought trigger clear as day

from Albury-Wodonga’s Border Mail

I’ve said it before – and no doubt I’ll say it again – I couldn’t make this stuff up.

The long tail

I’ve been thinking about gettting customised playing cards for a while for next year’s Canasta Cup. Trying to find someplace that will do them in small enough quantities has been a bit of a challenge.

Surely, I thought, I can’t be the only person who has this sort of need.

enter Moo.com a specialist short-run printer in London who ship all over the world.

Now the dilemma is – do I get myself some personal ‘blog cards‘ as well?

Programming and Communications – it’s all language.

I was thinking last night about my tinkering with programming, back in my youth.

(Seriously, I remember writing a really involved Zork-like game entirely in BASIC – I obviously had way too much time on my hands!)

For a number of reasons, now lost in the mists of time, I didn’t do IT at uni opting instead for journalism. But I realised last night my playing with programming had probably actually really improved my communication skills.

When you’re interacting with a computer it will do *exactly* what you ask it to do. It won’t second guess what you really meant, and if you don’t phrase your request in exactly the right way it won’t do anything,

Essentially the burden of communication is entirely on you. You have to figure how to phrase what you want to say in a way that is meaningful to the machine. You have to use a language it will understand. You have to make sure it has all the background knowledge it needs to understand your request.

This is largely true when communicating to a large group. You have to phrase things in ways that are meaningful to the audience. You have to make sure you use language they willunderstand. You can’t assume they have the background knowledge they may need to understand what you are telling them.

Which probably explains why nearly all the really good communicators I know are also good with technology, and why the truly great programmers I know are also pretty reasonable communicators.