Sam Moffatt @ Pasamio.com » Uncategorized

Banning smoking

pasamio — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 06:54:18 +0000

I had a thought the other day about smoking. The problem with banning smoking is two fold. The first problem is that you put out a large corporation that makes lots of money, pays some taxes and pays more towards your electoral campaign. It also employs people. The second problem is harder: smoking has a significant addicted population. These people vote. So not only do you have corporations with donations but people who vote.

But I feel there is a curious middle ground to be made. Each year increase the minimum age to buy cigarettes – or simpler, those born after a particular year cannot buy cigarettes. This way older smokers aren’t threatened and eventually dissipate and it is hard for newer smokers to get started. A curious example is that of slightly older members of social groups or families being able to supply cigarettes to younger people who can’t buy it yet. As the age increases, this will become increasingly hard to do and slowly this impact will dissipate. This strategy also gives the ability for those companies producing cigarettes to diversify into other areas.

The main complication with doing this is international travel. If one can reasonably travel to another part of the world and become addicted then this poses a problem. Ideally there would be a global ban like this but I don’t foresee that happening.

A simple thought on a weekend afternoon.

Centrelink Efficiency

pasamio — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:35:49 +0000

So today mum got a letter from Centrelink saying they’ll pay her money and that they’ve already paid her money which is good. However they also sent her a form which is to be returned tomorrow. Seems a bit much to hope that a letter will arrive in time, but it could be worse: it could have arrived tomorrow or even worse on Friday. Yay for Centrelink!

Problems

pasamio — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 06:23:37 +0000

It strikes me that our language around problems is confused. When someone is talking about a problem they can be talking about the cause of the problem or they can be talking about the symptom of the problem.

This leads to the obvious that the symptom is treated not the cause. Removing the symptom by statement fixes the problem if you state the problem is the symptom. But that doesn’t resolve the root cause of the problem and thus it can potentially break the workaround you’ve created to remove the symptoms.

Another curiosity for the day.

Today: 11-Mar-2010: Meeting-o-rama

pasamio — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:23:37 +0000

Busy day, at least towards the end. The morning I barely remember but it was a wash of different tasks. The afternoon became more structured and hectic. At 2pm I started on the discussion about issue tracking around the place, 2:30pm I was in the ICT Security office getting stuff reconfigured to fix this weird port issues we’ve got, 3pmish I was visiting our friendly Apple head/Audio Engineer to acquire stuff. I was supposed to finish at 4pm and headed to have a meeting with my masters supervisor about a few things. Ended up being late to all so I had left my pad with the Audio Studios, rushed to get that and to my 4pm which meant I wasn’t packed up, came back to my desk and worked for another 15 minutes or so responding to calls and emails. What the? Crazy work ethic. I was trying to reconfigure the library blogging platforms, test and production, as well throughout the day and had various issues with things. Need to file HEAT requests for getting the changes made into the public as well. Many things to do, little time!

“Write a blog post about your upgrade”

pasamio — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:53:42 +0000

So today I upgraded WordPress to its latest security release. I would have liked to use the automatic tool but somehow it forces me to use FTP for some reason unknown to me. So I did it the hard way and unlike Joomla! it asks you to delete files, copy things, make sure you don’t accidentally delete something and check that you included everything right. I always find it annoying how WordPress works however that’s the price that I pay for trying out something interesting. In other news my iBook G4 is in piece on my kitchen table whilst I try to work out how to fix it again.

Mosaic – MacOSaiX

Pasamio — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:12:35 +0000

My birthday’s gift from my girlfriend created using Mac Mosaic application

The segmentation of the Internet

Pasamio — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:30:16 +0000

More and more I see articles about how the internet is becoming more and more disjunct: firewalled and limited by sovereign nation states to prevent the flow of information. Today I saw an article on Slashdot commenting about Russia’s interest in creating their own internet similar to that of China’s (perhaps complete with firewall as well) and other parts of the world have had similar stories where the government is attempting to limit or reduce the availability of information made available from the internet.

The fact is that it reminds of something that scares me more than I realise: the Internet in is segmentation is similar to the ‘Internex’ of the Seaquest DSV world, a sci-fi tv show from 1993-1996. The Internex had some cross over into different countries (e.g. sovereign nations were still connected) however each nation was heavily gaurded from the next one, I assume to protect from cyberterrorism. The cyberterrorism threat in itself reminds me of the claimed issues of Chinese attacks with in the USA government departments. It is always interesting to see where fiction leads us to reality (or reality becomes like fiction) with so many parts of sci-fi becoming more and more a reality. But the question is, does the rest of the world predicted in these visions of the future also come with it? Or is the restriction of this information again the start of more borders as governments realise what the Internet is really capable of delivering to its users?

It makes me wonder. Where is the world headed?

A hard drive

Pasamio — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:39:07 +0000

So today I gave a business student a hard drive, a business IT student. He looked at me, he looked at the hard drive and then said “What is this?”

Some days I wonder about Business IT students, I wonder what they’re actually learning.

Obviously not what a hard drive looks like.

Two shocks for the day

Pasamio — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:21:38 +0000

I’m sitting in my Oracle prac at the moment and I’ve had two shocks: Vista actually fixed a problem with XP and my Business faculty based lecturer is heavily bagging out WebCT and hoping for Moodle to come in. I’m not quite sure where all of this support for Moodle came from in the University but it is exciting…shame it may not happen in my time. The ITS people have been suspicious of the software over WebCT and one of the reasons why WebCT is being scrapped is that it costs money for the Uni and the Uni is running out of money. Interesting times ahead, shame I probably won’t see it come to fruition.

A beginning

Pasamio — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 10:25:11 +0000

So this is my new blog. Its a WordPress site as you can probably gather. I haven’t done much to customize it though I must admit I’m a fan of the default template anyway.

Stay tuned to read some of my experiences with technology and the world.

Sam